ST LOUIS - If you watched the new History Channel movie Houdini this month, you no doubt noticed the thrilling scenes involving the Eads Bridge here in St. Louis.
In the movie, with Oscar-winner Adrien Brody starring as the Great Houdini, there's a pivotal scene where the famous escape artist leaps off the Eads Bridge in shackles into an icy Mississippi River while a crowd of hundreds watch.
It's great cinema, but it never happened.
"Unfortunately, based on the research we've done, it probably didn't happen," said Andrew Wanko with the Missouri History Museum.
Wanko and other staffers scoured through all of the daily newspapers between the late 1890s through 1914. There's not a single account of Houdini leaping off the Eads Bridge.
"Some people think the police shut him down, other people say he looked down from the Eads Bridge and said, 'Whoa that's really far,'" Wanko said. "But the papers would have went wild with this story. This would have been a huge story. It was a great public stunt to claim this. People would get excited, they would realize he was in town. And he would make more money when people came to the theater."
But Houdini does have quite a history in St. Louis. In fact, research by the Missouri History Museum's Library and Research Center on Skinker Boulevard shows that Houdini premiered one of his most famous stunts in St. Louis.
At the Columbia Theatre in downtown St. Louis, Houdini performed, for the first time, a stunt where he escapes from shackles while he's submerged in a giant milk container.
"This stunt of his premiered at the Columbia Theater, down on 7th Street here in St. Louis and we found the program from the week he was here doing the stunt for the very first time," Wanko said.
Another interesting artifact at Library and Research Center; a challenge from Famous (before it became Famous-Barr) to Houdini to attempt to escape from a wooden box made by the department store.
"It was a great public stunt to claim this. People would get excited, they would realize he was in town. And he would make more money when people came to the theater."
