From Cautionary Tales: Harry Houdini's Spiritualist Journey

The Last Archive

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Harry Houdini is known for his daring escapes and illusions, but he also had an obsession with debunking spiritualist frauds.

Today, we’re bringing you the first of a three-part series from another Pushkin podcast, Cautionary Tales, about Houdini’s crusade to expose phony mediums, an undertaking that would lead him to the courtroom and put him on a collision course with his close friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Host Tim Harford stops by The Last Archive for a conversation with Ben Naddaff-Hafrey about Tim’s fondness for historical morality tales, the concept of invisible worlds, and the root of Houdini’s anti-spiritualism. You can listen to the rest of the series on Cautionary Tales.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:10.7	Hey guys, it's Ben.
0:14.6	Today, we're sharing a special episode from another Pushkin show, I suspect many of you already know in love.
0:20.4	Cautionary Tales.
0:21.7	They're putting out a three-episode series on Houdini's quest to unmask spiritualist
0:26.3	frauds and figure out if you really can communicate with people from beyond the grave.
0:31.3	It's a really beautiful series, and we've got the first episode here now.
0:35.1	But first, Cautionary Tales host, Tim Harford, stopped
0:39.0	by The Last Archive to talk about the project.
0:42.1	Here's our conversation.
0:43.7	Listen afterwards for the episode itself.
0:47.0	I'm very excited to have you on The Last Archive because I feel like Cautionary Tales
0:53.5	is sort of the Last Arch archive's sister, brother,
0:57.2	sibling show at Pushkin, as you also have a fondness, perhaps self-defeatingly for
1:02.7	reenactments and historical tales with a moral. I was wondering if you could tell me, and anyone who hasn't heard the show, the sort of basic premise of cautionary tales and what your selection principle is for them.
1:19.4	Cautionary tales are true stories about things going wrong and sometimes they are hilarious mishaps, and sometimes they're disasters.
1:31.7	So one week it might be an art fraud, one week it might be a train crash. We covered the,
1:40.5	that time they gave the Oscar to the wrong movie, and we explored why they gave the Oscar to the wrong movie and we explored why they gave the Oscar to the wrong movie.
1:46.5	We had a whole short series about COVID.
1:49.8	The point is things go wrong all the time and those mistakes are instructive.
1:54.9	So the idea is the story should be true, should be carefully researched.
1:59.4	It should be an exciting story. We often have actors. We have an amazing sound designer. But also the story should teach us something. So stories with a moral.
	...

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