The magician revealed that he was a former minister and introduced Bradbury to some of the other sideshow performers. Afterward, he returned to the circus, where he met with Mr.

The next day, Bradbury attended his uncle’s funeral. When he came to me, he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. Then, Bradbury wrote, he stood and “brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fire. Zapped with somewhere between 50,000 and 10 billion volts of electricity (the number changes depending on the retelling), his hair stood on end, and sparks leapt between his teeth. Electrico, who was traveling the country with a visiting circus.Īccording to a 1980 essay by Bradbury, the magician sat with a sword in hand on an electric chair. As the young Bradbury grappled with his own mortality, he was drawn to a Chicago-area performance by Mr. Electrico with changing his life.īradbury was 12 years old when his uncle, Lester Moberg, was murdered during a robbery gone wrong in October 1932.

The only evidence of the performer’s existence was a memory shared by the acclaimed science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who credited a strange, seemingly mystical encounter with Mr. Electrico disappeared into the American heartland. In 1932, a sideshow magician known only as Mr.

Houdini the untold story