You see (and this is my favorite part of his life story), toward the end of his life, Houdini took up the cause of protecting the public by Scooby-Dooing the masks off charlatan mediums and psychics who were using the tricks of magicians to fool the bereaved. As of the writing of this article, plans are being bandied to exhume him. In a refreshing change of events here at O.T.I.S., visiting Houdini’s grave is actually timely right now. Which is both funny and terrifying to me for some reason. You can tell because the grave artisans left Bess’s death year incomplete.although they assumed the “19” part of it. Houdini’s grave is officially mislabeled. However, because Houdini had planned for her to be buried there anyway, her name adorns Houdini’s marker. Gentile bodies just don’t seem to decay right in Jewish hallowed ground. Speaking of which, Houdini’s lifelong wife, Bess, is not buried in Machpelah because of the lack of Jew in her genetics. Just above the seal is a place for a bust of Houdini, but that’s been stolen enough times that people just gave up on that bit, so his grave is headless.ĭirectly in front of the bench are a few cement decorations and a series of long cement grave markers that denote the exact resting places of Houdini and his immediate family, which reminds me how much large grave plots always seem like exclusive clubs to me. Part bench, part sculpture, part monument, it’s a nice little oasis.Ī life-size statue of a grieving women throws herself on the long, semicircular bench and dais of the grave.The large, colorful seal of the Society of American Magicians, of which Houdini was a president for a while, adorns it prominently. The good news is that Houdini’s grandiose bit of real estate sticks out from those bleak surroundings, and can be found just inside Machpelah’s front gates. Also, even though it’s Vulcan mind-melded with another cemetery, the whole is still tiny, cramped, woebegone and dismal (in a bad way.not the cool woebegone and dismal cemetery kind of way). From some angles, you can’t even see any ground. More industrial park-like than, well, the nice kind of park-like, the headstones are so close together the place seems more like storage for a headstone factory than an actual cemetery. The cemetery itself made me sadder than the fact that I was walking six feet above dead people. However, I found that entering through the gate of an adjoining cemetery around the corner ended me up in basically the same place, although driving a car in there wasn't too practical. When I arrived, only half of Machpelah’s front gate was open, which didn’t allow enough room to fit my car inside. It's surrounded by a cluster of cemeteries the borders of which seem to overlap in places. Houdini’s grave can be found in Machpelah Cemetery, a Jewish corpse repository located in the Queens borough of New York City. His aforementioned death on a Halloween morning fourscore years ago is more important to the topic at hand because without it, he wouldn’t have a grave. Sometimes I confuse the two.īut all that’s only relevant to Houdini’s life. In between he made a name by becoming more magician than magician and elevating himself to the level of greatest escape artist the world has ever known. He died Harry Houdini in 1926 in Detroit by a freak punch to his malformed appendix. Houdini was born more or less Erich Weiss in 1874 in Hungary. And all he had to do to seep deep into the bones of human culture was to mystify audiences with feats astounding enough to make their ears pop as if they were adjusting to a new reality (the best magic does that to a person). He was just way more successful at avoiding it than any one of us will ever be. JanuHarry Houdini, like most of us, was desperate not to be forgotten.
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