Ripley Entertainment Inc.'s Blog, page 175
November 5, 2020
Unlocking The Life Of The King Of Handcuffs, Harry Houdini
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Harry Houdini is considered one of the world’s foremost illusionists and magicians. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1874, he started to perfect his craft from an early age, going on to perform feats so unbelievable that some have still gone unexplained to this day.
Fans are familiar with his miraculous escapes and illusions, many of which he invented and devised himself. From being buried alive to escaping from straitjackets and other increasingly elaborate stunts, there was seemingly nothing this master of magic couldn’t do.
Even more astonishingly, this is just scratching the surface of his story. From his feats in the field of aviation to his work in the field of spiritualism, here are some of the most fascinating and unbelievable facts about Harry Houdini’s extraordinary life.
Harry Houdini was first known as “The King Of Handcuffs.”
Born Erik Weisz, Harry Houdini went by a different stage name in the early stages of his remarkable career. At the close of the 19th century, he was struggling to support himself as a performer and almost decided to open a school of magic instead. It was then that he was sent on a European and United States tour by Martin Beck, a big industry name. While in Europe, he practiced refining his skills as an escape artist. Word spread, crowds grew, and he came to be known as “The King of Handcuffs!”
Houdini’s brother was also an accomplished magician.
Many today consider Houdini to be the very last word in magic and illusions. However, there was actually another accomplished and respected magician in Houdini’s very own family
Ferenc Dezső Weisz, Houdini’s younger brother, had performed with his superstar sibling earlier in his career. As the “King of Handcuffs” gained fame, he and his brother, then known as Hardeen, continued to work on illusions, maintaining the belief that the pair were vicious rivals to keep the interest in both of their acts. As Hardeen once stated, “We made no secret of the fact that we were brothers… but we did keep secret not only the fact that we were good friends but that Harry had set me up in business!”
Houdini bequeathed his magical paraphernalia to his brother on his death, which Hardeen continued to use.
Houdini almost became the first man to perform a controlled flight over Australia.
Another of the great passions of Houdini’s life was aviation, and as fame and fortune came his way, he was sure not to forget it. He purchased an airplane in 1909—his first. Being ambitious and determined as ever, he wanted to become the first person to perform a controlled flight over Australia. And, the very next year, he succeeded!
Unfortunately for him, though, it seems he was the second person to achieve this. Captain Colin Defries is believed to have done so just before Houdini, in December 1909.
Harry Houdini (in white trench coat) preparing his Voisin biplane for flight at Diggers Rest, Victoria, NSW on 18 March, 1910. Photo attributed to George Bell.
Houdini practiced spiritualism with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Being a titan in his field, Houdini made several very famous acquaintances over the course of his colorful life. One notable person he associated with was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed creator of fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes.
Houdini developed a keen fascination with spiritualism after the death of his beloved mother, Cecília Steiner, in 1913. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shared this interest, having tragically lost his son in the First World War.
Houdini soon grew doubtful of the practice and his literary friend’s commitment to it, which caused the pair to split apart. However, the concept of communicating with the dead remained with Houdini for the rest of his life…and beyond!
Houdini and his wife made a pact to try to contact each other after their respective deaths.
Houdini was a great illusionist, but he had no patience for tricksters. In magic and in spiritualism, he was very skeptical, never hesitating to debunk or deride the work of those he considered fraudulent. In fact, this was one main reason for the rift that formed between Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini. The former was a staunch believer in the abilities of Mina “Margery” Crandon, one of the best-known mediums of the day, while Houdini made his doubts about her very clear.
Nevertheless, it seemed that the famed magician still held out some hope for making contact with the dead. He and his wife, Bess Houdini, made a promise to each other that they would try to contact each other from beyond the grave following their deaths. Bess, who lived for another 17 years after Houdini’s death in 1926, would later assert that nothing came of this. Nevertheless, Scranton, Pennsylvania’s Houdini Museum continues to hold an annual séance hoping to hear from him (and others).
Houdini with his mother and wife, c. 1907
Houdini is said to have given Buster Keaton his nickname.
Another famous name with whom Houdini associated was Buster Keaton, a legendary actor and comic performer who made his name with hilarious stunts in silent films.
Both men went on to become huge stars, but they share quite a humble link. Houdini owned the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, a touring show, with Keaton’s father. Where did Joseph Frank Keaton get the iconic nickname Buster? According to a possibly tall tale, Houdini gave it to him!
The story goes that Joseph Frank Keaton had a bad fall at only six months old, though was luckily unhurt. In response to the accident, Houdini remarked, “That was a real buster!” This old-fashioned word, Keaton later stated, meant an accident that really could’ve been serious. As with all good nicknames, it stuck.
Houdini hid lockpicks in his hair to help him perform his illusions.
As an escape artist, lockpicks and such were the tools of Houdini’s trade. Though he was frequently searched for anything he may have on his person prior to an act, often insisting on this himself as a point of pride, he had ways of secreting little tools away.
In Ruth Brandon’s The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, the author discusses some of Houdini’s shows in which he was strip-searched and his sets and props examined prior to performing. Brandon writes, “Houdini’s skill as a magician, which meant he could palm, misdirect attention, and hide his [lockpicks] in unlikely places, came in useful here. A favoured hiding place was his thick, wiry hair. When he had to strip naked, he sometimes hid a small pick in the thick skin on the sole of a foot—not a spot that would ordinarily be searched.”
Houdini named himself after another great magician.
As was supposedly the case with Buster Keaton, the greatest stage names always tend to come from somewhere. In Erik Weisz’s case, the inspiration for the name ‘Harry Houdini’ was clear.
As he worked at his career and practiced his art, he was naturally inspired by one of the giants in his field: Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. This French magician and performer established and popularized many of the traditions and styles that the young Weisz studied so hard growing up. And, they had a tremendous effect on his career.
Robert-Houdin’s own stage name, Houdini, became Weisz’s. While the French icon was a true role model for Harry Houdini, his once-idol wasn’t immune to his criticism. Houdini later wrote a scathing book about him, titled The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin!
Houdini began performing at the age of 9.
How old was the youthful escape artist when he started to perform for others? Just nine years old! Around this time, he would show his proficiency as a developing magician with an extraordinary feat: collecting pins from a surface using just his eyelashes! For such a performance, he was paid a princely 35 cents.
He certainly knew how to put on a show right from the start. As a trapeze artist, he was known as “Ehrich, The Prince of the Air.” And, in another memorable performance, the young entertainer made his escape from the corpse of a whale!
Houdini’s ball and chain performance in San Francisco helped save his career.
The 24-year-old Houdini had been struggling to launch his career for years. But, during one fateful visit to San Francisco, his floundering talents were saved when a hospital clerk took a chance on him. Indulging the clerk’s peculiar request to be laced into a straitjacket, Houdini’s legendary escape trick was born.
In August 1907, Houdini performed his now-famous act at a San Francisco theater. While there, he also put on one of the most daring shows of his life: leaping into the perilous waters of San Francisco Bay, home to the now-defunct Alcatraz prison, shackled to a ball and chain. An imitator later tried the same stunt and was saved by passers-by, but Houdini emerged unharmed as always.
Houdini taught sinking ship escape seminars to American soldiers.
As secretive as he was with the ins and outs of his spectacular illusions, he saw fit to share some of his talents for the good of his beloved country. His own assistants knew only of the crucial details of his feats, but during World War I, Houdini shared his secrets in seminars for American soldiers. What did he teach them? How to escape sinking ships, and how to free themselves from all sorts of bindings!
When the United States joined the conflict in 1917, he even put his successful career on hold for a time to dedicate himself to this effort.
The infamous stomach punch probably didn’t kill him.
The gravesite of Harry Houdini in the Machpelah Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, New York || CC: Anthony22 via Wikimedia Commons
One ‘fact’ many people know about Harry Houdini is that he was killed by a punch to the stomach. This didn’t happen in a brawl, but was the result of Houdini’s insistence, claiming that he wouldn’t be harmed. The spectacle of this trick was that he could brace his abs against the impact, but he was caught unprepared by this blow and died of his injuries.
While he did indeed die of a ruptured appendix (peritonitis) just days after this event, on the last day of October 1926, there’s a bit more at work here. Prior to this hit, Houdini had been suffering for some time, but continued to perform, with appendicitis.
Whether the inadvertent attack worsened his symptoms or not remains unknown, but there was a medical basis for his sad demise at the age of just 52. How like Houdini and the exact cause and circumstances of his tragic death remain a bit of a mystery!
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON!
Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!
Source: Unlocking The Life Of The King Of Handcuffs, Harry Houdini
November 4, 2020
Deadly Dentures Created By The Megalo Dentist
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Tooth be told, we’re always looking for additions to our collection of the odd and unusual. One of our latest exhibit acquisitions comes from a dentist in Tampa, Florida. However, Dr. Michael Foley isn’t your typical practiced, licensed dentist. Aside from fillings and cleanings, Dr. Foley creates dentures from shark teeth.
Michael Foley has collected shark teeth since he was six years old. Now at 33, he decided to combine his two passions of dentistry and sharks. He created a pair of dentures using two rows of razor-sharp fossil shark teeth!
Perhaps the most interesting part of Dr. Foley’s collection comes from a toothy creature who lived millions of years ago—the Megalodon! The Megalodon sported a full set of pearly whites, each between four and seven inches long! In fact, some reconstructions of the Megalodon’s jaw suggest that each tooth may have been up to seven feet across. Like other shark species, the Megalodon lost its teeth quite often, which is why avid collectors, like Dr. Foley, can still find and create dentures out of their pearly whites.
Check out the Megalo Dentist and his sinister sets of chompers on Instagram and inside the pages of Ripley’s latest annual, Mind Blown!
November 3, 2020
November 2, 2020
The Camel-Riding Robot Jockeys Of The U.A.E.
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Sports across the globe have always been an all-consuming, big money fascination. Multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals are made all the time, and the superstars continue raking in staggering sums of money and contract deals. In fact, Christiano Ronaldo, the iconic Italian soccer player, is reported to have become the world’s first player to top $1 billion in career earnings!
Meanwhile, in the U.A.E., a different type of sport has kept fans spellbound for centuries: camel racing! Early fans of the sport would be amazed to see the progression of camel races of today, from the spectacle’s popularity to the latest in robot jockeys.
Camels have always held a very special place in the society and history of the region. For the Bedouin, life in the seemingly inhospitable deserts would simply not have been possible without the aid of these magnificent creatures. They provided protective clothing, sustenance, transportation through the sands, and so much more. Today, camels remain invaluable, attracting tourists, as well as retaining their traditional roles.
Camels are so loved, respected, and honored in the Abu Dhabi region. Every December, 20,000 camels are gathered in the area for the Al Dhafra Festival. It’s one of the biggest beauty pageants in the world, exclusively for camel contestants!
Speaking of competitive camels, the creatures have raced for entertainment and profit for centuries. They’re surprisingly swift, reaching running speeds of around 40 mph. But, the races began in an unceremonious fashion. Before racetracks were built and the sport organized, the Emirates competed against each other in makeshift races across a specified distance.
Near the close of the twentieth century, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, arranged for the construction of purpose-built racetracks. With this change, camel racing attracted more of a following, as well as more money and higher stakes for the races. Eventually, camels were be trained over a period of several months from the age of three or so—not to mention fed a strict diet of oats, milk, dates, and bran in preparation for increasingly-high-stake races!
CC: Lars Plougmann from London, United Kingdom
Camel racing has also become the main attraction in other areas of the world, such as Australia. There, the Boulia Camel Races—deemed “the Melbourne Cup of camel races”—attracts a huge following, and similarly, high sums of money are at stake. However, the earlier days of the activity as a sport were highly controversial as a result of the frequent use of child jockeys.
Thousands of children, some as young as two years old, were brought up as jockeys in facilities known as Ousbah. Naturally, injuries and accidents were tragically common, but the outcry grew and the practice was outlawed in the U.A.E. in 2002. With the camels’ reluctance to race without jockeys, solutions had to be found.
Increasingly, then, robot jockeys have been the way forward for the sport. These machines began to appear around this time, though the first models were far from elegant or effective. Initially, they were quite weighty, weren’t quite fit for the purpose, and didn’t agree well with the animals themselves.
In the years since, robots have become more easily accessible, and are far better made, produced locally to boot. Those with a large investment in camel racing can buy robotic jockeys that are as light as a feather, as well as a range of sometimes rather luxurious accessories for them. From a distance, they’re all but indistinguishable from tiny human riders!
Bodies are constructed of a mix of parts from walkie talkies, power drills, plastic, cotton, and aluminum, with a whip to encourage the camel to run faster without causing it any pain through its thick hide. The jockey is secured in place to the camel’s saddle, but naturally, this artificial intelligence cannot guide or steer the camel itself. For that, the trainer speaks to the camel through the jockey, while following its progress around the track in a car.
Camel and robot jockey at Al Shahaniya camel racetrack, Qatar. || CC: Alex Sergeev (www.asergeev.com)
The key to a robotic jockey is being lightweight, simple, and effective. Packing too much weight or technology into these small riders would prove counterproductive. Instead of full-sized jockeys, the camel riders onboard are glorified power drills, wrapped in cloths bearing the racer’s colors and logos, running around the track, while the human ‘riders’ follow in cars! Of course, all while huge amounts of money are on the line.
By Chris Littlechild, contributor for Ripleys.com
EXPLORE THE ODD IN PERSON!
Discover hundreds of strange and unusual artifacts and get hands-on with unbelievable interactives when you visit a Ripley’s Odditorium!
November 1, 2020
October 31, 2020
October 30, 2020
Archaeologists Bewitched By Medieval Markings
Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
[October 26-November 1, 2020] Flying candy, mutant crayfish, and the origins of life on Earth—all round-up in this week’s weird news from Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Florida Man Was Not Ready for This Jelly
Anatoli Smirnov, of Naples, Florida, was taking a casual jog down Vanderbilt Beach when he stumbled upon a giant surprise: a 4-foot-wide jellyfish! Though Smirnov joked that he “almost got eaten by a giant jellyfish,” it turns out the rare “pink meanies” are actually less harmful than their smaller relatives.
Florida Gulf Coast University marine biologist, James Douglass, said that a person would be more likely to get stung by the moon jellyfish that inhabit the shores at this time of year and that being stung by a jellyfish of this size would “feel like mosquito bites.” In fact, the abundance of moon jellyfish in the area is likely the reason this pink meanie was sighted at all, as they feed on their smaller cousins, the moon jelly.
A giant jellyfish stopped a Florida man in his tracks while he was going for a jog along a Naples beach https://t.co/8P4lhaP1rZ
— NBC 6 South Florida (@nbc6) October 26, 2020
Flying Candy Coming Your Way
It’s safe to say 2020 has been a rough year for the kiddos, but one Pennsylvania family has created a secret weapon to keep some normalcy going this Halloween. The Mak family has created a “Candypult” to keep trick-or-treating alive and safe in their York County neighborhood. Vince Mak and his family took some time to develop a way to throw Halloween candy at kids from a distance. “With everything going on, everyone just needs to feel happy and find something to laugh at,” said Mak. The result is a “Candypult,” which will hurl Snickers and peanut butter cups across the yard, straight into a candy sack— if the kids try hard enough! Neighborhood kids are sure to flock to the Mak house this weekend to get in on the candy-catching action. “I guess we’ll have to get extra candy this year,” Mak said.
This just in on #TyTracksTheNews! a Pennsylvania family built a CANDYPULT for socially distanced trick-or-treating. So I had to play FIRE AWAY by @ChrisStapleton! What song would YOU have picked to soundtrack this news story?? @AppleMusic #TheTyBentliShow https://t.co/UfTArkWYiG
— Ty Bentli (@TyBentli) October 27, 2020
Belgian Cemetery is Going Cray-fish
A Belgian cemetery has a mutant infestation on its graves after a self-cloning crayfish took up residence on the cemetery grounds! The single marbled crayfish, which was seemingly released into a local canal by a home aquarium owner, has since duplicated itself into hundreds of crustaceans that have taken over the waterways of the Schoonselhof Cemetery in Antwerp.
These crafty crustaceans can dig up to a meter deep and are extremely difficult to corral. According to Kevin Scheers of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research, “It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble.” Adding to the debacle, they can travel by land and water, eat anything they can find, and reproduce rapidly.
12-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Offers Insight to Life on Earth
It’s been two years since a walnut-sized fragment of a 12-billion-year-old meteorite landed on Strawberry Lake in Hamburg, Michigan. On Tuesday, researchers released a study in the Meteoritics & Journal Planetary Science detailing how 2,600 organic compounds found on the tiny piece of space rock have given them insight on how life on Earth came to be. This remarkable recovery granted researchers from over 24 international institutions the opportunity to study the rare piece of space not yet contaminated by Earth’s elements.
Phillip Heck, lead study author and curator at the Field Museum, noted the importance of this early discovery, saying, “This meteorite is special because it fell onto a frozen lake and was recovered quickly. It was very pristine. We could see the minerals weren’t much altered and later found that it contained a rich inventory of extraterrestrial organic compounds.” The meteorite hasn’t changed much in 4.5 billion years, suggesting that the compounds it contains are similar, if not the same, ones that other meteorites brought to Earth during its early years. “Meteorites fell to our planet throughout Earth’s history also before life formed and possibly delivered some of the building blocks for life onto Earth,” said Heck.
The finding can help shed light on the origin of life on Earth, which might have been spurred in part by the delivery of organic compounds inside meteorites like Hamburg. https://t.co/NWgXsRFz0X
— VICE (@VICE) October 28, 2020
Archaeologists Bewitched by Medieval Markings
Earlier this week, archaeologists making way for the United Kingdom’s new high-speed rail service, HS2, discovered mysterious graffiti during the excavation of St. Mary’s Church in Stoke Mandeville, England. The spooky carvings are believed to be “witches’ marks,” meant to ward off evil spirits! Though the medieval church was previously demolished in the 1970s, the HS2 team found a few walls and flooring still intact. It is there that they discovered two stones engraved with spoke-like lines stemming from a central hole. While there is debate about whether the carvings are witches’ marks or timekeeping devices, historical evidence points to the former.
Built as a private chapel in 1070, St. Mary’s became a communal place of worship by 1340, an era when ritualistic symbols were commonly used to keep evil from entering houses, barns, caves, and churches. Historic environment manager, Andrew Harris, stated, “The levels of preservation of some of the features of the church are surprising given its age, and we look forward to continuing this work and being able to share our discoveries with the local communities.”
Image courtesy of HS2
By Meghan Yani, contributor for Ripleys.com
THE STRANGEST STORIES OF THE YEAR
Now that you’ve read the strangest stories of the week, how about the strangest stories of the year? Ripley’s all-new annual is an all-true collection of incredible facts, unexpected stories, and stunning photography!
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