On Saturday, March 23, 1918, tragedy struck on stage as famed magician Chung Ling Soo performed his bullet catch trick—and was shot in front of his audience. He’d performed the trick many times, but on this occasion, something went awry and when the gun was shot, the bullet left the chamber and struck Soo.

“After the bullets were fired Soo usually staggered, and when he fell we thought it was the usual performance,” his stage manager told reporters. “He then called out, ‘Oh, my God!’ and on going to him we found that the bullet had passed right through him.”

The story of Soo, who was really William Ellsworth Robinson, has been well told in Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception (2005) and Will Dexter’s The Riddle of Chung Ling Soo (1955).

Soo, however, wasn’t the first magician to die from the bullet catch. In fact, there were many, as detailed in Dexter’s book. One of them occurred on November 10, 1820, in Arnstadt, Germany. Polish magician De Linsky and his wife had been summoned by Prince Schwartzburgh Sondershauser for a performance. The prestidigitator saw it as an opportunity to broaden his tour of Europe afterward and command greater fees. So the show had to be good.

“On the way, they have been arguing,” Dexter wrote. “He has had a brilliant idea: they will do the bullet-catching trick, and the Prince’s bodyguard shall be the marksmen!”     

Madame de Linsky protested the idea. “We must first teach the soldiers what they are to do, and who knows whether they will understand us? Remember—they may be foreign mercenaries. They may not understand our German. Please, Auguste. … I am afraid!”

She had also just lost a child and was pregnant with another. So risking a bullet catch in another country with the trigger being pulled by a stranger wasn’t her idea of a great show. But the magician insisted and assured her that nothing could possibly go wrong.

Then, of course, it did.

Despite the conjuror’s instructions, once they were on stage a soldier who did not follow directions properly pulled the trigger. It passed right through Madame DeLinsky.

“For a moment after the firing she remained standing upright, but the next moment she sunk down saying, ‘Dear husband, I am shot,’” a newspaper reported. “The unfortunate woman never spoke another word, and died on the second day after she received the wound.”

Many in the audience fainted, and DeLinsky suffered greatly at the shock of it.

As the newspaper concluded: “It is to be hoped that this event will serve as a warning to all conjurors, as well as the spectators of their tricks, who usually show too inconsiderate a confidence in the art of the performer, not only with respect to cases of risk of life, but to other practices of a dangerous nature.”

Soo, as you know, didn’t heed the warning. Nor did several of history’s other magicians who suffered the same fate from their own versions of the bullet catch.

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