The Complete Account of Houdini's Visit to Salem, Massachusetts

The city of Salem is synonymous with magic and witchcraft. We are a city that prides itself on our spooky Halloween spectacular, “Haunted Happenings,” and the entire month of October is a celebration of the eerie and unexplained. In April of 1906, long after the Witchcraft Trials of 1691/2, Salem played host to a man that revolutionized the world of magic in an entirely different way. A man named Erik Weisz, who became known as “Harry Houdini, The Handcuff King” visited our fair city to perform his daring escapes.

Having just finished an extremely successful run in Boston, where he had been for seven weeks, he promised a full 6 shows at the Salem Theatre, located at 259 1/2 Essex Street in 1906. The highlights of his show in Boston had been an escape from a seemingly impenetrable case made by the Seigel Company, a dramatic extrication from double confinement in the “Boston Tombs” (the City Jail), and the frightening, and peculiarly named, “Salem Witches Chair,” purportedly a Puritan torture device, but in reality a much more modern invention, having been built and patented in Oakland, Maine by Sanford J. Baker in 1896 for public humiliation of vagrants and hobos. There are two of these chairs currently on display in Maine, one in its home town of Oakland, one which was used in an escape by Houdini’s brother, Hardeen, in Bangor, Maine in 1912, with one missing from The Samoset Resort in Rockland where it used to be prominently displayed. Hardeen and Houdini are the only people to have ever escaped from these horrific devices. While the description of Houdini’s performances in Salem do not include the “Witches Chair,” it is not far-fetched to think that he may have brought it with him and his entourage.