But ice-water never has had any terrors for me, and a hole was cut in the ice just below the bridge and everybody, including a crowd of several thousand of persons, arrived on time. Nature was unkind, however, and when the day came the river had been frozen over to a depth of seven inches, which, as a matter of fact, wasn't surprising, as it was midwinter. During and engagement there it had been advertised that on a certain day I should be handcuffed and chained and placed in a box and dropped into the river from a bridge. My Battery predicament, however, wasn't quite as terrifying as a situation in which I found myself in Pittsburgh several years ago. It's fascinating to hear the version as told by Houdini himself: Recently I discovered a telling of this story in Houdini's own words in a biographical article he wrote for Hearst's in 1919 called 'Nearly Dying for a Living.' Here the location is Pittsburgh and, interestingly, it's not a handcuffed bridge jump, but an overboard box escape, just like in the Tony Curtis movie. But newspaper accounts of Houdini's bridge jump that day makes no mention of a frozen river (although it was cold enough for snow flurries). The location most often cited is the Belle Isle Bridge in Detroit on November 27, 1906. There is no supporting evidence for it ever having happened, such as a newspaper account, and Houdini tended to change the location and details, as if to misdirect.

It was memorably dramatized in the 1953 film Houdini, and there is evidence that this year's Houdini miniseries with Adrien Brody will also feature the famous incident.Įven though Houdini himself told this story, it's now considered to be a fiction. The story of Houdini trapped under the ice of a frozen river is a powerful part of Houdini lore.

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