If she was frightened, if she was weary, she hid it just as well as she did that night when she was first shot out of a cannon. Alexander Herrmann - died, leaving his wife responsible for a traveling company, a herd of performing animals, and a lot of debt. She’d taken over that role in Caracas, Venezuela, when their trapeze artists quit halfway through a South American tour, and she described her anxiety the first night “as a condemned man must feel as the fatal hour approaches.” But as she was loaded into the cannon, she showed no fear. She was not supposed to be a human cannonball. Her name was Adelaide Herrmann, Herrmann the Great’s wife and daring assistant. Only when she landed safely in the net and the smoke cleared did the audience break into a thunder of cheers that lasted on and on as the curtain rose and fell over the bowing Herrmann the Great and the intrepid young woman.Īlthough the 19th-century audience might not have noticed, she’d also been the evening’s levitating sleeper, the bicycle rider who carried a girl on her shoulders, and the dancer who spectrally swirled in red silk like a pillar of fire. When she had vanished from view, Herrmann the Great yelled out: “Are you ready!”
#MAGIC TRICK GOES WRONG WOMAN DIES FULL#
A net was stretched across the full width of the theater, and the audience knew that the culmination of the evening - the cannon act - had arrived.Ī young woman dressed in spangled red tights stepped into an upper stage box where the cannon waited, and was helped into the barrel. The boisterous applause for Herrmann the Great’s wondrous illusions, in which the nattily dressed magician in a black velvet suit pulled a rabbit from his hat and levitated a sleeping woman, had abruptly stopped.
In Baltimore, 1878, an eerie silence settled over the crowd in Ford’s Grand Opera House.