“Rahman Bey was an Egyptian who came to this country and started a tour of Loew’s vaudeville circuit in 1926. He supported large rocks on his chest while they were smashed to bits with sledge hammers. He stuck hatpins and daggers through his cheeks and arms with nonchalant impunity. And he performed an abridged version of the burial-alive feat by having himself covered for eight minutes with a mound of sand.
“He opened in Boston, then came here to Loew’s State. The press department, deciding that a little publicity would be a welcome thing, called in the reporters for a special performance. Rahman popped into his trance, then into a watertight coffin which medical men admitted could not contain enough air to sustain life for more than two or three minutes after being hermetically sealed. But Rahman stayed in for twenty-one minutes while it was submerged in a swimming pool. He surprised the doctor in attendance by coming out alive, smiling, and without showing any signs of the carbon dioxide poisoning that is the first stage of asphyxia. He claimed that his cataleptic trance obviated the necessity for any breathing at all. This, naturally, got him the desired free newspaper space in gratifying quantities, and also that press agent’s dream — a controversy. One, at that, with a man whose name insured the story page-one position.
“Harry Houdini, because Rahman claimed supernatural rather than merely extra-normal powers, stated flatly that none of Rahman’s stunts were the least bit unusual. He called attention to the fact that they were old and quite standard side-show acts, feats that almost anyone could duplicate after a little practice — and without any trance. The side-show performers who did the same things never seemed to require one as Rahman did, but depended on the use of little-known but quite ordinary scientific principles.
“Houdini made no especial mention of the burial stunt, and, since this wasn’t exactly a run-of-the-mine side-show exhibit, Rahman challenged him to duplicate it. Just to make it harder, he promptly repeated the underwater burial, in the Dalton Hotel pool on West 59th Street, this time staying down for a full hour and getting bigger and blacker headlines than ever. When anyone challenged Houdini in his own bailiwick, that was news. What’s more, the physician in attendance declared that the self-induced cataleptic trance was genuine.
“Houdini had to put up or shut up. He put up. Two weeks later, August 5, he was sealed in a galvanized iron casket and lowered beneath the surface of the Hotel Shelton pool. If he used any trance, it was a conscious one because his assistant, James Collins, was in constant telephonic communication with him, checking every few minutes on his state of health. He smashed Rahman’s record into smithereens, bettering it by a full half-hour for a total time of one hour and thirty-one minutes.
“He announced then that he had used nothing any more occult than a technique he termed ‘shallow breathing.’ This consisted in lying perfectly still, using a minimum amount of energy, a great deal of will power, determination, and nerve, breathing as slowly and infrequently as possible so that the air in the coffin lasted many times longer than any of the theoretical experts had thought possible. Houdini Bey, the papers headlined, Puts Fakir on Ice.
“The reporters naturally went after Rahman, caught up with him out in Wilkes-Barre where his tour had taken him by now, and asked him what about it. His claim that he could exist for an hour without breathing at all had been pretty thoroughly deflated and his cataleptic trance, in spite of the doctor’s seal of approval, looked like excess baggage. Rahman promptly countered by offering to stay thirty minutes in a coffin which was not airtight, but something worse — one that would have an intake attached to a motor-car exhaust supplying a steady inflow of carbon monoxide! Provided, of course, that Houdini would do the same. It sounds like something Rahman’s press agent thought up. In any event I’ve not heard that he’s ever tried such a stunt. Collins and Hardeen, Houdini’s brother, say that Houdini never received this challenge, but that his answer would have been, ‘Okay Rahman, but you do it first.’
“And there, just as the death-defying game of follow the leader began to get really interesting, it stopped. Rahman had no reason to carry it further — and probably good reason not to. The publicity he’d received prior to Houdini’s burial had secured him a $1500-a-week contract.”
Merlini showed no sign of stopping now that he’d got well under way, and Flint cut in. “So what?” He pointed to the grave. “This guy wasn’t in any coffin at all, and he was four feet underground. There’s one hell of a lot of difference.”
“Yes,” Merlini said. “But not the sort you think. I’m coming to that. Two months later Houdini died. The following January, the demand for fakirs on the Loew circuit apparently exceeding the immediate supply, another was shipped in from Egypt. A twenty-four-year-old young man named Hamid Bey — no relation; Bey is a title. He was introduced as Rahman’s tutor and the master fakir of them all. He was booked into the State and, the day before he opened, he went over to Englewood, New Jersey, popped off into the much debated trance, and was buried, without coffin, five feet down before a crowd of two hundred witnesses, including a full quota of reporters. And, if you think I’m still spinning old wives’ yarns, all you need to do is look in the New York papers for January 21, 1927. It’s all there, complete with pictures that include cheesecake shots of a Spanish dancer, courtesy of Loew’s booking office, who relieved the tedium of the wait and gave the cameramen something to do by dancing a tango on the grave.”[3]
“Okay,” the lieutenant growled. “I’ll bite. How long did this groundhog stay under?”
After the build-up he’d given it, Merlini wasn’t going to miss this chance for a nicely timed dramatic pause. He flipped his shiny half dollar into the air once, caught it, and smiled quizzically at his hand as it slowly opened to show that the fifty-cent piece had melted in its customary mysterious manner into the very thinnest of air.
“Two hours and forty-five minutes!”[4]
Flint didn’t say anything audible, but he seemed to be muttering under his breath. The impression I got was one of profanity. Merlini continued.
“According to some of the papers, when Hamid had been disinterred and while he was still coming out of his trance, he smiled faintly and in a satisfied whisper said something that sounded like ‘Houdini.’ The controversy was wide open again, and, though some of the papers, more cautious than at first, had fun with picture captions like Hamid’s in de Cold Cold Groun’, they weren’t noticeably ready with explanations. The doctors present offered none either, and Houdini, who had been appearing nightly at half the spirit séances in the country (sometimes in two or more at once), was so strangely silent that even some of the spiritualists began to suspect it might be two other guys.”
The lieutenant shook his head stubbornly. “No,” he said. “It’s no sale. If you’re going to try to get me to believe that Hamid’s catalepsy was the real McCoy because Houdini’s hour-and-a-half record is the limit for shallow breathing—” Flint’s voice trailed off and he turned to Doctor Haggard as if just remembering his presence. He looked at him for a moment, then said slowly, “Self-induced catalepsy. Well, let’s have it.” There was a note of warning in his voice as he added, “And I don’t think I need to tell you that your opinion had better check with the others I’m going to collect.”
3
For accounts of Rahmar’s one-hour burial see New York papers for July 28, 1926. For Houdini’s Shelton pool experiment see August 6 papers.
4
The “contest or record-breaking” type of burial in which the customers paid so much a head for a look down a glass-covered shaft at the buried man was something else again, and always, since they ran up from weeks to a month or more depending on the ticket sale, phony. In some cases the performer knocked off work each night, made a surreptitious exit, and returned just before the first showing the next day. In others he remained underground the full time, receiving food and water through the observation shaft. Sometimes he pretended to be in a trance. The visitors, looking down, saw half the man’s face and a closed eye; the other out of sight was engaged in reading the latest edition of the daily paper!