In the past month, an effort has been launched to exhume the remains of the world-renowned escape artist, whose body allegedly lies in Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, N.Y.

I say "allegedly" because, as you may recall, Houdini promised to return from the dead, so there's a chance that an exhumation may find his casket to be as empty as Al Capone's vault.

Or Geraldo Rivera's head.

Nevertheless, the latest Houdini brouhaha is all the buzz in magic circles, which is why I've been engaged in serious conversations with "The Great Normando."

His real name is Norman Bigelow and he currently makes his home in the little town of Pike (population: 446) and I believe I am on safe journalistic turf when I describe the 62-year-old escape artist as one of the premier Houdini scholars in New Hampshire.

"When I was eight or nine, I found a book about Houdini's magic and his escapes," he said. "Like a lot of kids, I was simply fascinated by him. My grandfather and my father had seen him at the vaudeville houses in Boston. They used to tell me stories and I taught myself all the tricks."

By the time he was 16, Norman had the magic bug bad.

"I got my parents to take me to meet Frank X. Renaud, an escape artist who performed under the stage name 'The Great Reno,'" he said. "Reno knew Houdini and his brother, Hardeen, and while he taught me a lot about escapes, he was the first one who ever spoke to me about Houdini being murdered."

That notion stuck with Norm.

His fascination with Houdini has endured as well, and down through the years, even as he honed his own skills as an escape artist, no thrill was greater than to hear himself compared to Houdini.

The comparisons are understandable.

I'll wager there are still people up in Colebrook who can tell you about the time that Norm -- billed then as "Bigelow, The Escape King" -- literally stopped traffic on the Columbia Bridge. It was back in August of 1966, and here's how it was reported in the Colebrook News and Sentinel:

"Handcuffed, with his hands behind his back, and in a straitjacket, he was pushed by Colebrook policeman Allen Bates from an opening eight feet above the bridge. The distance to the swirling waters of the Connecticut River below was about 65 feet, and within 30 seconds, Bigelow rose to the surface, freed of all manacles, and swam ashore."

Not impressed?

How about the trick he pulled off at Boston College, the one where he freed himself from six sets of handcuffs, six padlocks with chains and a straitjacket while suspended from a crane -- upside down -- 100 feet in the air?

And how about the trick he designed for David Copperfield called "The 10-Story Tomb," in which the artist was handcuffed and shackled by police, then placed inside a safe which was lowered into a tomb in the basement of a 10-story building that was wired to implode three minutes after he was locked in place?

Fortunately, Norm uses his powers for good.

No cuffs can contain him and no cell can hold him, and clearly, that would be a problem had he embarked upon a life of crime. Instead, he has worked on righteous causes, like the time officials asked him to crack a gigantic safe at the town hall in Lunenberg, Mass.

It hadn't been opened in 22 years -- somebody lost the combination -- and using nothing more than a stethoscope, Norm popped that sucker in an hour and a half.

Cracking a safe is one thing.

Can "The Great Normando" crack the Houdini case?

He has a long-held theory, and he committed it to paper way back in 1983 when he wrote a lengthy manuscript called "Death Blow: Was Houdini Murdered?"

The short answer?

"Yes," he said. "There is no doubt in my mind that there was a massive cover-up and that somehow, somewhere, Houdini was murdered upon command of fraudulent mediums.

"A lot of magicians don't believe that he was murdered," he added, "but that might be an ego thing. We magicians tend to have a god complex -- we think we can unravel anything -- so how could the murder of the great Houdini go undetected?"

An autopsy might put the question to rest, but there are some who question the authenticity of the request to exhume Houdini's body. It was announced at a press conference in New York last month -- with Houdini's grand-nephew, George Hardeen, chiming in by speaker phone -- but that media event was arranged by two authors, William Kulash and Larry Sloman.

As chance would have it, their latest book is called "The Secret Life of Harry Houdini."

Although sales were brisk when the book was released back in October, it has fallen off the public radar and some observers -- like Dan Segal from The Washington Post -- have called the autopsy request "a bold campaign to exhume a dead book."

Norm Bigelow is heading for the neutral corner.

"Personally, I would like to see it done, but if it doesn't happen, I have no problem with it. For a lot of followers, Houdini was like a god and they're very much against the idea of digging him up. If it happens? Wonderful. Perhaps we'll get some answers, but no matter which side of the issue I come down on, half of the magic community will be mad at me. I'm staying in the background."

Think of it as "The Great Normando's" vanishing act.