The Indian rope trick: the famous trick that was never performed
How a hoax newspaper story from 1890 turned the Indian rope trick into a world-famous trick that nobody ever performed.
By The Online Magic Store
· 6 min read
In this story 8 sections
The Indian rope trick, where a rope rises into the air, a boy climbs it and vanishes, is a world-famous legend, yet the full version was never performed. Historians Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman traced the legend in the West to a made-up story in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1890, which the paper admitted was a hoax four months later. Big rewards for a real open-air performance were offered for decades, and nobody ever claimed one with the full version.
What is the Indian rope trick supposed to be?
The “classic” version, as Lamont and Wiseman summarise it, goes like this. A performer makes a coiled rope rise into the air. A boy climbs it and disappears at the top. The performer climbs after him and vanishes too. Pieces of the boy then fall to the ground, the performer comes back down and puts them in a basket, and the boy jumps out, whole again.
The key detail in every serious challenge was the setting: outdoors, in daylight, with no stage, curtains or overhead rigging. A stage version in a theatre is a different (and solvable) problem. Here we stick to the history and what witnesses said they saw.
Where did the story really start?
In 1890 the Chicago Daily Tribune ran a story, under the name Fred S. Ellmore, about an American visitor to India who had watched a juggler make a rope rise, send a boy up it and bring him back to life after his limbs fell to the ground. The twist was the explanation: the whole crowd had been hypnotised, and photographs taken during the show supposedly showed nothing happening at all.
The real author was John Elbert Wilkie, then a young reporter at the paper, who later spent 14 years as director of the US Secret Service. About four months after the story ran, the Tribune admitted it was fiction. The retraction got far less attention than the original, and the story kept travelling.
One magician spotted the hoax almost at once. In The Supernatural? (1891), John Nevil Maskelyne described a recent “ingenious little story” about jugglers, hypnotism and a camera, and wrote: “This clever story, pure fiction as it is, has been repeated again and again as a matter of absolute fact.” He added that it was “going the round of the Continental press” (printed pages 161 to 162).
Weren’t there older accounts?
There are older stories with rising cords and chains, and later writers often presented them as early rope tricks. Two that come up most:
- Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century traveller, described a trick with a rising cord in China, not India.
- Emperor Jahangir, the Mughal ruler, wrote of a chain thrown into the air that stayed fixed while animals climbed it and vanished at the top.
Maskelyne had little patience for Jahangir. In the same 1891 book he called him the winner among “all the Munchausens” who wrote on Eastern jugglery, and traced the rising-chain story to him (printed pages 164 to 165). Lamont and Wiseman point out that this was a chain trick among many other wonders, and that it differs a lot from the rope trick as later told.
The more telling clue is what the old books don’t say. Maskelyne named the basket trick and the mango tree as “the two great tricks” mentioned by nearly every writer on Indian magic (printed page 174), with no rope trick at all. The basket trick is well documented on Western stages too: the English edition of Robert-Houdin’s The Secrets of Stage Conjuring (1881) says Colonel Stodare showed it in London in 1865 (chapter VII). Lamont and Wiseman argue that the rope trick seems to have been unheard of in the West until the 1890s.
Did anyone ever win the rewards?
No one ever collected for the full, open-air version. Here are the best-documented moments.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1890 | The Chicago Daily Tribune hoax, then its retraction four months later |
| 1891 | Maskelyne calls the hypnotism story “pure fiction” in The Supernatural? |
| 1934 | The Magic Circle’s Occult Committee reviews the evidence and offers 500 guineas to anyone who can perform the trick |
| Mid-1930s | An English magician calling himself Karachi tries for the reward. His son climbs a stiffened rope, but nobody vanishes, and the Magic Circle refuses to pay |
| 1996 | Wiseman and Lamont publish a study of eyewitness accounts in Nature |
The Magic Circle’s point in the Karachi row was a good one: his act may have been a rope trick, but it wasn’t the rope trick.
Why did so many people say they saw it?
This is the most interesting part, and it’s about memory rather than magic. Wiseman and Lamont collected eyewitness accounts and compared how impressive each one was with how long the witness waited before telling it. The gaps ran from two to fifty years, and the longer the wait, the more amazing the trick became. A rope that a boy simply climbed up and down turned, in the later tellings, into vanishing boys and reappearances.
They also found accounts that seem to blend in the basket trick, which witnesses really could have seen. Maskelyne had guessed at something similar back in 1891, listing “a lapse of time with the corresponding lapse of memory” and “a little harmless exaggeration” among the reasons Eastern wonders grew in the telling (printed page 160).
What can a magician learn from it?
- A story can be stronger than a trick. The rope trick became world famous without ever being done. Our post on how to write patter is about using that power honestly.
- Audiences remember the effect, not the details. That’s one reason a clean, simple plot travels so well.
- Be careful with “ancient” claims. Plenty of magic history, including this one, turns out to be newer than its legend.
For another legend-sized stage image, read our history of sawing a woman in half.
Want to read and perform more?
- The Supernatural? (free ebook): Lionel A. Weatherly and J. N. Maskelyne, 1891. A doctor and a conjurer explain the supernatural, with Maskelyne covering Eastern magic, spiritualism and theosophy from a magician’s point of view. The pages quoted above are in it.
- The Secrets of Stage Conjuring (free ebook): Robert-Houdin’s stage illusions and second sight, translated by Professor Hoffmann (1881), including the Indian basket trick chapter.
- Stiff Rope by Mr. Magic: its description says it will remind you of the famous Indian rope trick. You stretch a rope between your hands, let go of one end and it stays rigid like a stick, then falls limp when you blow on it. It’s about 30 inches long, and the description is honest that it can’t stand fully vertical.
- Self Working Rope Magic by Karl Fulves: a paperback of 70 self-working rope tricks with over 400 step-by-step illustrations, for novices and veterans.
Browse more in our stage and large-audience magic collection.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Indian rope trick real?
Not in its famous form. Historians Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman found that the legend spread in the West from a hoax story in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1890, and no one ever claimed the large rewards offered for a real open-air performance of the full trick.
Who started the Indian rope trick story?
John Elbert Wilkie, a young Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, wrote the 1890 story under the name Fred S. Ellmore. The paper admitted about four months later that it was fiction. Wilkie later became director of the US Secret Service.
Did the Magic Circle offer a reward for the Indian rope trick?
Yes. In 1934 the Magic Circle’s Occult Committee offered 500 guineas to anyone who could perform it. A magician calling himself Karachi tried, but his son only climbed a stiffened rope and did not vanish, so the reward was not paid.
Why did people claim to have seen the Indian rope trick?
A 1996 study by Wiseman and Lamont found that the longer witnesses waited before describing what they saw, the more impressive their accounts became. Some accounts also seem to mix in the Indian basket trick.
