A Magician Among the Spirits

In the 1920s, America was obsessed with talking to the dead. Harry Houdini was having none of it. This is the legendary escapologist's furious, meticulously researched takedown of the spiritualist movement that had duped millions. Armed with his professional knowledge of illusion and misdirection, Houdini traveled the country challenging mediums to produce genuine supernatural phenomena he couldn't replicate through "magical chicanery." They never could. The book chronicles his investigations into spirit photography, slate writing, ectoplasm, and the era's most famous fraudulent mediums, including the notorious Boston medium Margery and the Davenport Brothers. But the heart of the narrative is Houdini's famous falling-out with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes who had become genuinely convinced spiritualism was real. Their public debate captured the nation's attention. A revelatory document from a master of deception explaining exactly how the deception works, and why rationality matters.