I Got Locked in Chains With 200 Magicians in the Rain

It was raining in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin. I was standing in the middle of a public plaza with a chain wrapped around my wrists and a padlock holding it shut, and so were more than two hundred other magicians.

Nobody moved. We were all waiting for one signal.

Why Appleton

Harry Houdini died on Halloween of 1926, which makes this year the hundredth commemorative year of his passing. Appleton is where he spent his childhood, so when the Society of American Magicians chose it for the 2026 National Convention, it was not a coincidence. It was a pilgrimage.

The city marked the occasion officially. Mayor Jake Woodford proclaimed it Harry Houdini Day in Appleton.

I drove over from the Twin Cities along with several other Minnesota magicians. Over 300 of us came in from all over the country, and the convention took over the heart of downtown, working hand in hand with the city itself.

The city made it official, too. Mayor Jacob A. Woodford proclaimed July 2, 2026 as Houdini Day in Appleton, encouraging residents to celebrate the life and legacy of the kid who grew up there.

A lot of a magic convention is what you would expect. You learn from people who are better than you at things you thought you were already good at. You catch up with friends you only ever see once a year. You find out what is new in the industry, and you buy more of it than you meant to (I invested in an awesome new performance table for my act!)

And then there was the part I will be telling people about for the rest of my career.

The escape

The Siberian Chain Escape was one of Houdini’s own. Chain, padlock, and no way out that anybody watching can see.

The goal was to have the largest group of magicians ever perform it at the same time, and to get out fast. We practiced. Then on the morning of July 2nd, over two hundred of us lined up across Houdini Plaza in the rain, got locked in, and waited.

Sixty seconds later it was done. All of us, at once.

I have escaped in front of plenty of audiences in my younger days. I had never done it shoulder to shoulder with two hundred people who love this art form as much as I do, in the town where the man who invented the moment grew up, while the sky opened up on all of us. The rain honestly made it better. Nobody left.

We weren’t the only ones working that day. There was a milk can escape, straight out of Houdini’s own act, and a straitjacket escape performed by an escape artist suspended four stories above the plaza. Appleton went all in.

Houdini Plaza

If you have never been, Houdini Plaza sits right in the middle of downtown Appleton, and it is a genuinely beautiful tribute. Not just to Houdini the performer, but to Bess, to his family, and to everything he left behind for the rest of us who do this for a living.

That is me at the dedication plaque, umbrella finally folded up. The marker notes that this site was the childhood home of Ehrich Weiss, which was his name long before it was Houdini. He was a kid in this neighborhood first. Everything else came after.

Standing there in chains, a hundred years after he died, was not lost on a single person in that plaza.

The Society issued every participant an official certificate. Mine is above. It is going on the wall.

The event drew a fair amount of press, including Fox 11’s coverage from the plaza.

The kid in the mail bag

That is me, sometime near the start of all this, locked into Houdini’s Mail Bag Escape in a bow tie I almost certainly did not tie myself (it was a clip-on!).

Escapes were a lot of what I did back then. I kept the straitjacket in the act into my twenties. I do not perform escapes anymore, and my shows now are mentalism, comedy, and audience participation. But that kid is the reason I got in the car and drove to Appleton.

Forty years apart, same chains, same guy who put them there in the first place.

What I took home

Two hundred strangers. One year of planning. One signal, and sixty seconds.

That is not so different from what I do for a living. When a corporate event goes well, it looks effortless, and the reason it looks effortless is that somebody sweated every detail in advance. Houdini understood that better than anyone. The escape is the part people see. The preparation is the whole job.

David Farr is a professional magician and mentalist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, performing interactive magic, mentalism, and comedy for corporate and private events throughout Minnesota and the Upper Midwest since 1987.