America’s favorite magician died on Halloween. On October 31st, 1926, Harry Houdini, the most popular escape artist of the 20th century, died of peritonitis in Detroit. Twelve days before his death, Houdini was at a school talking to a few students in Montreal. He told the students about the immense strength of his stomach muscles, and one of them unexpectedly punched Houdini several times in his stomach. Houdini was caught off guard by this, so his appendix was ruptured. He became ill on the train ride to Detroit but was able to perform one last time before he was sent to the hospital. Doctors tried to save him by operating on him, but nothing worked. His burst appendix poisoned him, and he died that night.

In 1908, Houdini began to perform more dangerous and dramatic escapes. In one of his favorite acts, he would be locked in an iron-bound chest after being restrained. He was then thrown off of a boat into a water tank. In another one of his acts, he was heavily bound and suspended upside down in a glass-walled water tank. More tricks featured Houdini being hung from a skyscraper in a straitjacket, or him being bound and buried—without a coffin—under six feet of dirt.

In his later years, Houdini campaigned against mediums, mind readers, fakirs, and others who claimed to have supernatural talents but really depended on tricks. At the same time, he was deeply interested in spiritualism and made a pact with his wife and friends that the first to die was to try and communicate to the real world from the spirit world. Then, on Halloween in 1926, Houdini passed away at the age of 52. His wife waited for a sign from the spirit world but it never came. She declared the experiment a failure shortly before her death in 1943.