The Hidden Room Stages the Spiritual Showdown of Houdini vs. Doyle

One hundred years ago this Halloween, the world got a little less mysterious. Harry Houdini, master magician, died. Now, a century past the occasion, the Hidden Room marks the infamous event with Houdini Speaks to the Living, an encore presentation that gets more eerily relevant as time goes by.

Hidden Room’s Master of Company Beth Burns began work on Houdini Speaks to the Living in 2015, when the Ransom Center wanted a theatrical tie-in for their upcoming Houdini exhibit. Burns pored over the Ransom’s Houdini collection, finding show posters, newspaper clippings, and even intimate love letters. But what caught her eye were unearthed snippets of conversation between Houdini and the master of mystery himself, Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “I started finding all of these fights between the two that were happening often between them in letters to the editors of major newspapers,” says Burns.

The two were actually friends, Burns clarified. They met in 1920 and remained cordial until Doyle’s spiritualist wife claimed to contact Houdini’s dead mother. Her bumbling attempt proved what Houdini had already deduced: spiritualism was a fraud. But, like a modern-day Fox Mulder, Doyle still believed. The father of rational thought was even a card-carrying member of London’s Society for Psychical Research, according to Cambridge records. And Houdini, illusionist extraordinaire, used his magic to discredit fraudulent spiritualists.

That bone of contention becomes the drive behind Houdini Speaks to the Living, an imagined lecture series/argument where Doyle (portrayed by Hidden Room company member Robert Matney) tries to indubitably prove spiritualism exists. Meanwhile, Houdini (actor/filmmaker/magician Patrick Terry) debunks him at every turn. Since its 2016 debut, the show has occasionally been resurrected, with bonus showings tied into exhibits at New York City’s Public Library for the Performing Arts, an award-winning run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and now an epic anniversary show.

It’s a testament that the more things change, the more they stay the same. When Burns first wrote Houdini Speaks to the Living, fighting misinformation was a noble, but niche, cause. But as actor Matney says, “Beth is reliably good at seeing around the corner.” Houdini’s quest to bring down tricksters who preyed on vulnerable mourners feels even more urgent now than it did a decade ago. In a world where people constantly get suckered by the latest Facebook post, how do we know what’s true? “Certainty is a helluva drug,” Matney says.

The core of Houdini Speaks to the Living is “how beliefs can be weapons,” agrees Terry. As a magician himself, he brings re-creations of Houdini’s work to the stage, reproducing every paranormal happening Doyle believed in front of audience eyes. It adds that seed of doubt into what’s real, a strange juxtaposition as the mystical things we’re witnessing are instead proof that occult occurrences didn’t happen. 

In Hidden Room’s work, these essential questions of absolute truth craftily lurk under a highly entertaining surface. “We have all of this wonderment through these fantastic illusions. At the same time we have all of this logical debate between two highly logical men,” says Burns. “And then at the end of it all we offer the audience the question: Have you ever been in touch with your dead?” Because who among us hasn’t felt … something? There are things unknown, things that are sure, and sometimes those are the same. In Houdini Speaks to the Living, seeing isn’t necessarily believing.

This article appears in October 23 • 2026.