MAGIC! NOWHERE ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL rules of nature defied more spectacularly than on the magician’s stage. Beautiful women are sawed in half. Men are impaled in boxes lined with razor-tipped spikes. People literally disappear! Yet, when you get right down to it, magicians are entertainers who perform tricks. Tricks don’t require extraordinary, mysterious powers; they require practice. Despite their stage names or advertising, magicians are only human and subject to the same causes of mortality as the rest of us—all too often, onstage.
Stage mentalist Washington Irving Bishop professed no special powers when it came to reading people’s minds. A leading “anti-spiritualist,” he said his “thought reading” was actually “muscle reading,” achieved through analysis of a person’s body movements. Whatever his methods, Bishop was regarded as one of the top mentalists of the late nineteenth century. He was also known for his ability to drive a horse-drawn carriage blindfolded and the trick in which he’d find a hidden object by holding the hand or wrist of the person who hid it while asking the person to think of the location.
Impressive as it sounds, that description only gives a hint of the wild, insane exhibitions that the slight, curly-bearded, cocaine-addicted forerunner to the Amazing Kreskin would careen through in front of audiences, performances like the one reported by the Kansas City Star in 1889:
During his most important tests, the “thought reader” frequently used stimulants and drugs. Hypodermic syringes filled with morphine were an invariable part of the outfit of his famous “driving” tests in which, with his eyes tightly blindfolded and his ears and nostrils plugged with cotton, he drove a team of horses through the streets in a search for a pin or other small articles previously concealed by committee.
During his regular performance he frequently drank wine and sometimes resorted to the morphine.
As for those regular performances in clubs and theaters:
While performing his feats of “thought reading,” his pulse would sometimes run up to 170 beats a minute and a condition of great physical exhaustion followed. His manager, John G. Ritchie, was accustomed to sit in the audience every evening and watch Mr. Bishop closely. At the first indication of fatigue, he would imperatively stop the performance, then and there, even in the middle of an experiment.
Manager Ritchie had good reason to stop the performance before Washington Irving Bishop was too far gone. The thirty-four-year-old performer was afflicted with catalepsy, a condition that begins with a seizure and results in a trancelike state accompanied by body rigidity, a slowing of bodily functions like breathing, and decreased sensitivity to any kind of pain. In Bishop’s case, that meant he would often suddenly seize up onstage, fall down, apparently stop breathing, and soon be stiff as a board, as if rigor mortis had set in. He would be unresponsive to kicks, tickles, or needle pokes. He would, in short, appear to be very dead or, to paraphrase John Cleese, an ex–human being. He could remain in that state for as long as fifty-two hours.
So it was wise that he carried a note in his jacket pocket, warning anyone who found him in that condition not to use electricity in an attempt to revive him and definitely not to perform an autopsy on him, because he’d probably wake up soon enough.
That brings us to Sunday, May 12, 1889. Bishop was performing in New York City at the Lambs Club, the exclusive social club for actors, songwriters, and other theater folk, located in a brownstone at 34 West Twenty-Sixth Street. Bishop was in the middle of his very hyperkinetic act when a seizure struck and he collapsed to the floor. It all seemed part of the routine. After a short spell, Bishop recovered and insisted on carrying on with the show. He returned to the thought reading, but only for a few minutes before seizing up and collapsing again.
This time, the mentalist did not rebound. He was taken to an upstairs room at the club, where he was believed to be in a coma. He remained in that state the following day.
Three doctors were called in. They examined Washington Irving Bishop and used electricity to try to revive him. At ten minutes after noon on May 13, they declared him dead. Bishop’s body was removed from the Lambs Club and taken to William Hawks’s undertakers shop at 8 Sixth Avenue.
When Bishop’s mother and wife heard the news, they rushed to the funeral home, expecting he’d soon awaken and they could take him home. So they were more than a little shocked to find out that not only had the doctors already performed an autopsy but also Washington Irving Bishop’s head had been cut open and his brain removed!
The doctors who pronounced him dead claimed they never saw the note he carried. Bishop’s mother and wife immediately went on the attack. They said Bishop obviously was in a cataleptic state and that an autopsy should never have been performed without their permission—especially an autopsy conducted while he was still alive!
J. A. Irwin, the doctor who declared Bishop dead at the Lambs Club and who led the autopsy, had known Bishop for more than a decade and had been anxious to study his brain. As the scandal kicked up, he issued a statement insisting that the mind reader “died hours before the post-mortem” but added, “The brain changes more quickly after death than any other portion of the body, and had we waited longer the benefit of the autopsy would have been lost. For the trouble I have taken in this case, I have received no thanks, but have been called murderer and other vile names.”
Bishop’s mother was not about to offer any thanks. She convinced the Manhattan district attorney to file manslaughter charges against Dr. Irwin and two others.
Despite the testimony of expert witness Dr. Edward C. Spitzka, who said he’d seen cataleptic rigidity last as long as two months in a patient, it took a jury an hour and a half to rule that Bishop was dead by coma when he was brought to the undertaker, and that the doctors acted in good faith. They did note that Dr. Irwin, “through overzealousness,” was hasty in getting the autopsy underway.
Some people regarded Joe Burrus as just another ex-con and recovering drug addict. Joe Burrus saw himself as something more—much more. “I consider myself a master of illusion and escape artist,” he said. “I believe I’m the next Houdini and greater.”
So on Halloween night in 1990, the sixty-fourth anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death, thirty-two-year-old “Amazing Joe” Burrus attempted an escape that even his hero had failed at accomplishing: being buried alive. “To me, that is what an escape artist is: to put myself in an impossible situation and get out of it,” Joe declared.
A year earlier in Salem, Oregon, Joe had escaped from a casket buried under dirt. On this night, at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California, in front of a crowd that included trick-or-treaters and his own young sons Joseph and Joshua, he’d do himself, and every other escape artist in history, one better. Amazing Joe would be handcuffed, shackled, and locked in a homemade, see-through plastic-and-glass coffin; lowered into a seven-foot-deep grave; and then covered in not only dirt but also a layer of freshly poured cement. Then he would escape from the coffin and make his way to the surface.
He’d perform this amazing escape to raise money for the Third Floor drug rehab clinic in Fresno. Joe said he saw the stunt as a metaphor for his own escape from drug addiction.
If he did manage to make the escape, Joe would actually be able to say he did Harry Houdini one better. Houdini spent years trying to master the buried-alive stunt. When he attempted the feat near Santa Ana, California, in 1915, he almost died. Houdini was buried under six feet of dirt (without a casket) and was left to dig his way out. He panicked and managed to get a hand to the surface before he called for help. He was yanked out, unconscious, by his assistants. His conclusion, as written in his diary, was “the weight of the earth is killing.” Houdini did pull off an aboveground variation of the stunt—“the Mystery of the Sphinx,” featuring a glass-fronted coffin lowered into a vault and covered in sand—just weeks before his death in Detroit.
“He wasn’t a drug addict,” Joe Burrus’s eldest son insists almost thirty years after Halloween 1990. “He was an alcoholic. The only drug he used to do was marijuana. I guess back then you were considered an addict. And he did some time in prison, and while he was there, he kind of realized, ‘I gotta do something different when I get out. I love magic. I gotta do something with this.’ And so that’s what he did.”
Joseph Burrus has vivid memories of his father. Not all of them are magical. “When I was probably five years old and my brother was three, he and my mom were going through a separation,” he tells us. “Now, they were never married, but they were going through a separation. He was a drunk, and he was abusive, so she was gonna take the kids and everything else, and he didn’t want to leave us. He ended up kidnapping us, and took us all the way to Tennessee. I remember every bit of it. I remember being on the road. I remember calling her on the phone. I remember when the police broke in and arrested him in Tennessee, and us having to stay in a foster home until my mom was able to come get us. That was basically why he was in prison, that he had kidnapped us, and he was there for a couple years. And when he got out, he said, ‘I got to change things.’”
The key to the change was magic, an art Amazing Joe had first played around with as as teen. “He loved doing magic, because he loved amazing people and seeing the look on their faces,” says Joseph. “So he did a lot of close-up magic, but he also had a lot of stage magic. And probably about five years or so before he died, he decided, ‘OK, I’ve got magic down. Now I want to get into stunts. I want to perfect that, and take my show into the big time.’ And so he did a lot of stunts. He did a stunt where he was locked into a box and the box was set on fire. And a car would come racing down the track and smash into the box—and he was the one driving the car.”
After performing the buried-alive stunt in Salem in late 1989, Joe decided to move to Fresno, where his sons and their mother now resided. “He moved back here January of 1990. He wasn’t around in my life a lot, because he was in prison, then he got out and lived in another city, so beginning in 1990, I was with him every day, and I was getting close to him and helping him plan. He pretty much had almost the entire year planning and promoting. And then when October rolled around, he was performing at one of the local pumpkin patches here. He had the coffin out there on display, and he was doing magic tricks for about a week or two before the event. And when he was out there, he would stand on the coffin to show people how strong it was.
“I think a few days before the show, the lid ended up cracking, and he didn’t have time to fix it, and he said, ‘Ah, it’ll be all right.’ And that was another factor into everything that happened.”
As showtime approached on Halloween night, more than 150 people were on hand to watch Amazing Joe’s amazing escape, which was to be videotaped, projected live on-screen, and broadcast live on radio. “We all got picked up in a limo, and then got a seat in the front row, and then the limo left, picked him up, brought him,” Joseph recalls. “The show kind of started late. I had an opportunity to go backstage and talk to him and say, ‘Hey, good luck. I love you,’ all this stuff. I chose not to, because I’ve seen my father and I’ll talk to him afterwards. My brother went back. I didn’t, and that was a huge regret on my part.”
The escape artist appeared at the burial site in a white tuxedo with a shiny purple bow tie and cummerbund, his blond mullet tied into a ponytail and his handlebar mustache pointing down toward his thick goatee, forming a simulated Vandyke beard. He looked every inch the magician—if not the escaping kind, at least one who pulls a rabbit out of a top hat. A police officer cuffed, shackled, and chained Amazing Joe’s wrists, while the escape artist provided play-by-play commentary for a bemused radio reporter holding a microphone and recorder near his face. “Through the chains, through the shackles, through the handcuffs,” Joe explained, “I’ll burrow my way through three and a half feet—” He winced in an exaggerated display of pain as the police officer tightened the cuffs and then continued, “—of dirt and get through all this before the cement hardens.”
“You realize that cement starts to harden first at the lower elevation,” the reporter warned. “So it’s going to be hard—” He gestured toward the ground.
“You mean it hardens at the lower part?” Joe looked around in feigned surprise. “I thought it starts at the top!”
“No, it hardens at the bottom!”
“No, no, no,” Joe said. “In fact, I shouldn’t even kid. This is very serious. This is no magic trick.”
The reporter had one last observation while Joe’s assistants secured his leg shackles. “You know, Houdini failed at this, and he was only using dirt.” With that, Amazing Joe climbed into the coffin. The coffin was locked, and his aides began to lower it into the seven-foot-deep grave.
Joe was about halfway down into the hole when he began knocking on the sides of the box. The assistants pulled him back to the surface. One of them was Sean Henderson, a resident of the Third Floor clinic. “He said the chain was too tight and was choking him,” Henderson would tell the Los Angeles Times. “We gave him time to slip the chain from his neck. After he got that done, he wanted the locks back on and asked us to start burying him again.”
The casket lid was locked again, and the descent once again got under way. When the casket was at the bottom of the hole, the assistants shoveled in about three feet of dirt. A cement truck backed up and poured in another three feet—seven tons—of wet cement.
“There was only supposed to be about a foot of cement at the top of the grave,” Joseph Burrus insists, “just to make it a little bit harder. And it was like three feet of cement. It was actually way too much, and I don’t know if it was an accident or if he changed it at the last minute, but I know from being with them the entire month and listening to what he was saying, there was only supposed to be a very small amount on top, just to give it that extra ‘wow factor.’”
The truck pulled away. The cement had filled the hole completely. An assistant was raking the surface, evening it out at ground level, when in an instant, the cement sank about two feet and settled. There was an audible crack, and the sound of plastic and glass shattering. It was obvious what had occurred.
“As soon as we finished and the truck pulled away, the whole thing dropped,” Henderson said. “The cement busted the coffin. It buried him alive.”
Joseph recalls, “There was a backhoe there, and he had told everybody, ‘If something goes wrong, don’t come digging right away, because you’re going to end up sinking in the grave with the vibration of the truck, and it’s gonna end up crushing me more.’ And so in a few minutes of their waiting, it just seemed like it was forever. And I already knew something happened.
“So I took off. I went to go walk around the park. I ended up over at the water slide area, and I was just sitting there crying, kind of looking up and asking God, ‘Please let everything be OK.’ And I was up there for quite a while, and then I heard my name being paged over the intercom. And when I came back down, it was just a chaotic sight. I mean, there were chairs thrown everywhere. It was people crying. There was a clown there that was doing balloon animals, and he was in the corner crying. There were just police everywhere, ambulances everywhere, and they had paged me because they were trying to make us leave before they actually brought him out of the grave.
“They didn’t want to pull him out with anybody there. So they made us leave, and we went home and pretty much turned on the TV and saw the news.”
Nearly three decades after that fateful Halloween, Joseph Burrus launched a GoFundMe campaign for a memorial to Amazing Joe at the spot where he died. “The thing was, he was actually already out of the coffin,” he says with some pride. “He’d made it out, he was already pretty much on his way up when it collapsed. So he didn’t get crushed inside the coffin. He basically suffocated, because of all the weight of the dirt and cement.”
Joseph Burrus continues: “One thing that I want to also make clear, he wasn’t just a guy who was performing a wild stunt. He was dedicated to magic. What’s made it easier to talk about over the years is because he died doing what he wanted to do, and there was no other way he would have wanted to die. And even if in his mind he knew that his trick’s not gonna work, he would have still done it, because he had already hyped it up and he had already had a crowd there, and he didn’t want to disappoint anybody.
“He had another stunt planned. He was going to jump out of an airplane with his hands tied so he couldn’t reach the ripcord. And then he was going to free himself just in time to pull the ripcord.”
All of Britain celebrated on July 29, 1981, when Charles, Prince of Wales, married the lovely, young Lady Diana Spencer. No one could have predicted the troubles that would follow in that marriage, or what would transpire that day at a Royal Wedding celebration in Portsmouth, when Trevor Revell performed.
Three thousand people crowded the square outside the Portsmouth Guildhall venue as various street performers showed off their acts. One of them was Revell, a thirty-five-year-old magician, stunt artist, and escapologist, whose exciting finale was a straitjacket escape.
Harry Houdini claimed that he came up with the escape after visiting a lunatic asylum in Canada and watching a maniac inmate struggle to break free from his restraints. The story may have been myth, but the straitjacket escape became a key part of Houdini’s act.
At first, he’d be buckled and strapped into the jacket and then wriggle his way free while hidden from view behind a curtain. Once he perfected this combination of technique and strength, he let the audience watch the process, a somewhat disturbing display in which he jerked, heaved, pulled, and gyrated like a madman in a padded cell. In years to follow, Houdini added more drama, creating huge scenes and generating news coverage by performing the stunt while suspended from tall buildings, upside down (which actually made it easier for Houdini to get his arms over his head—the key to escape).
Trevor Revell added additional pizzazz—and an element of danger—to his straitjacket escape. Like Houdini, he’d be hoisted upside down, thirty feet in the air, on a rope. But additionally the rope suspending him would be set on fire; Revell would have to free himself from the straitjacket before the flames burned through the rope and he fell to his death.
A way to avoid tragedy, one escapologist suggests, is to “gimmick” the rope—that is, to use one that will not burn through. That would not do for Trevor Revell. As he was buckled and tied into the long-sleeve garment, police handed another rope to some members of the crowd closest to the performer and asked that everyone stand behind it to give the magician room. Suitably strapped in, Revell was then raised upside down, thirty feet into the air. The rope was lit; the fire caught. Flame on.
All eyes looked up as Trevor Revell spun, swung, twisted, and turned to escape his bonds before the the rope burned to ash. He managed to get free in under a minute. Revell was about to signal the crane operator to lower him when, unfortunately, as police explained in a later statement, “the rope burnt through too quickly and he plunged head-first onto a concrete paving slab.”
A witness who was a child at the time later wrote on an Internet message board about a scene he would never forget:
He was the father of a girl I went to school with. I was at the front. I saw him hit the ground head first. I heard his skull shatter; I heard his skull crack like a boiled egg being hit with a spoon. I saw the puddle of blood and brain he left behind after they loaded his still twitching body onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.
I thought at the time that this was the most horrific thing I’d ever seen until, as the crowd dispersed, a group of rowdy skinheads who had been standing behind us pushed their way forwards and began jumping and dancing in the pool and blood and brain.
That was, and still is the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.
The police report concluded: “Revell later died in Queen Alexandra Hospital.”