Bruce MacNab is the authour of The Metamorphosis: The Apprenticeship of Harry Houdini. He tells Tide News the great escape artist came to Saint John as a young man and stayed here for a period of eleven days.
Houdini and his wife, Bessie, were traveling with the Marco Magic Company and stayed in what is now the Admiral Beatty in 1896. According to McNab, it was here in Saint John at the city's Lunatic Asylum that Harry Houdini first encountered the straight jacket which was later incorporated into his most famous escape routine. Houdini challenged the Saint John Police Force to find a device that could restrain him. He managed to escape from a special leather restraint known as the Dreaded Saint John Maniac Cuff, although it took him several minutes.
Houdini also traveled extensively throughout Nova Scotia in the same period.
He died 86 years ago this week, on Halloween 1926.
Bruce MacNab's book on his early life in Atlantic Canada is available from Goose Lane editions here, at the New Brunswick Museum in Market Square, and select local bookstores
