Word: houdini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...front of Monroe was a black- draped table laden with miscellaneous memorabilia: a manila envelope containing a letter from Arthur Conan Doyle, two pairs of handcuffs, a selection of lockpicks, a yellowed photograph. Monroe's task: to contact, on the 60th anniversary of his death, the ghost of Harry Houdini, master escapologist, prestidigitator and Appleton's most celebrated son. While Monroe writhed and jerked, it must be noted, a block away the sign outside the Valley Bank effortlessly blinked out the message: WELCOME HOME HARRY HOUDINI HAPPY HALLOWEEN...
When Soviet troops rolled into Auschwitz in January 1945 and liberated the camp's remaining prisoners, they found no trace of the elusive doctor. By the following year, he is said to have settled in Freiburg. Indeed, he seemed to have already developed Houdini-esque gifts as an escape artist. Last January, former U.S. Army Private Walter Kempthorne told the Wiesenthal Center that in July 1945, he ran across a red-faced, sweating German in the custody of U.S. Army soldiers at a camp near the German town of Trier. Why, Kempthorne asked, was the man being put through such...
Yasser Arafat, the Houdini of Middle East politics, appeared ready to perform yet another remarkable feat. Last year the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization managed to escape from Beirut with more than 6,000 of his commandos after the Israelis had captured a third of Lebanon and surrounded all of his positions. This year Arafat and his loyalists had held on for three weeks in the vicinity of the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli as a vastly larger force of P.L.O. rebels, strongly backed by Syria, tried to drive the Arafat faction into the sea. The chairman...
...nonsense." Not long afterward, Novelist Samuel Butler decided that "if ever a spirit-form takes to coming near me, I shall not be content with trying to grasp it, but. in the interest of science, I will shoot it." Exposes began to play the vaudeville circuit: Magician Harry Houdini showed audiences that the mysteries of spontaneously moving objects were no more than sleight of hand and, sometimes, foot. The Fox sisters, one of them by now a hopeless alcoholic, finally confessed that the strange rapping had been done by manipulating their big toes...
During weeks of sold-out preview performances, Henning bolstered the show with with more effects than he could shake a wand at. Many of them had never been seen since the days of Houdini and Blackstone; none has ever been performed so adroitly. Even fellow magicians gaped at Merlin's entrance in a five-inch bubble that mysteriously expanded to life size before the wizard emerged. The other illusions were no less astonishing. On center stage, Debby instantaneously vanished...