HOUDINI SEANCES

Opening

Harry Houdini died in Grace Hospital, Detroit, on 31 October 1926, Halloween, aged 52. He had spent his last years exposing spirit mediums as frauds. Before he died, he and his wife Bess agreed a test: whichever of them died first would try to reach the other, using a secret code that only the two of them knew.

For ten years Bess held a séance for him every Halloween. The last, on the roof of a Hollywood hotel in 1936, was attended by about 300 invited guests and ended with her putting out the light. Magicians have held a séance for Houdini on Halloween ever since. Halloween 2026 is the hundredth since he died.

Timeline

1913Houdini's mother, Cecilia Weisz, dies while he is touring in Europe. He is devastated, and he later goes to mediums hoping to hear from her. What he finds there, he says, is trickery.

June 1922In Atlantic City, his friend Arthur Conan Doyle's wife, Jean, holds a séance for him and produces pages of automatic writing said to come from his mother. The writing is in English, a language his mother barely spoke, and begins with a cross, though she was Jewish. The friendship with Doyle never recovers.

1924Houdini sits on a Scientific American committee testing mediums for a cash prize, and exposes the Boston medium Mina Crandon, known as "Margery". He publishes A Magician Among the Spirits the same year.

22 October 1926In his dressing room at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a student named J. Gordon Whitehead punches him several times in the stomach before he is ready. He goes on performing in pain.

24 October 1926He gives his last performance, at the Garrick Theater in Detroit, with a fever of about 102°F, then is taken to hospital with a burst appendix.

31 October 1926He dies of peritonitis. His insurer later pays out double indemnity for accidental death after taking statements from the witnesses in Montreal.

1927 to 1935Bess holds a séance every Halloween. In 1929 the medium Arthur Ford claims to have received the code. Bess later says the episode was faked.

31 October 1936, 8 pmThe "final" séance, on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, run by Bess's manager Edward Saint. More than 20 linked séances are held across the country, and the end of the session goes out on radio. Bess announces that Houdini did not come through.

1943Bess says that ten years is long enough to wait for any man. She dies on 11 February that year.

Key figures

Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, was the most famous escape artist in the world and the best-known sceptic of spirit mediums of his day. He knew their methods because many of them were the methods of his own trade.

Bess Houdini, born Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, was his stage partner from 1894. The code came from the mind-reading act the two of them performed in their early years.

Edward Saint, a former carnival showman, ran the 1936 séance. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a committed spiritualist who believed until his death that Houdini had real psychic powers and used them to escape.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is good. The 1936 séance was recorded, and a copy circulates. The Library of Congress holds the radio script for the event, which shows that the séance was written out in advance, and a press photograph of Bess and Saint at the table. Houdini's book on mediums and his files on the Margery case survive. The code itself is known: the word "Rosabelle", from the song Bess sang when they met, followed by a phrase in the couple's stage code that spelled "believe".

Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone.

Things you might not know

• There was a second test. Besides the code, Houdini promised to try to open a pair of locked silver handcuffs from the other side.
• The candle burned for ten years. Bess kept a light burning beside his photograph from 1926 and put it out after the 1936 séance.
• The Hollywood sign watched. The rooftop séance had the HOLLYWOODLAND sign in the background.
• A judge sat in. Among the guests at the 1936 séance was Charles Fricke, a California judge.
• They are not buried together. Houdini lies in Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. Bess was Catholic and was buried elsewhere.
• The bust was stolen. A stone bust added to his grave in 1927 was destroyed by vandals in 1975. A permanent replacement went up in 2011.

Competing explanations

No message, because there was no one to send it. The plain reading of ten years of silence, and the one Bess herself reached in 1936.

No message, because the conditions were wrong. Spiritualists have argued that a showy, sceptical, scripted séance is the least likely setting for contact. Some believe Ford's 1929 message was real.

Ford's message as a trick. The view of Bess's later statement and of most historians. The code was a stage code, and enough about the couple's act had been published or talked about for it to be worked out. Ford's biographer found evidence pointing that way after Ford died in 1971.

Later life of the case

Magicians took over the Halloween séance, and it is now held every year in several places, including a long-running one organised by the Society of American Magicians in Chicago. Houdini's challenge has never been met: no medium has produced the full code and opened the handcuffs.

Finding

This is the best-run test of life after death that a famous sceptic ever set up: a private code, a set date, a trusted witness, and a hundred years of trying. In all that time no message has been accepted, and the one claimed success was disowned by the only person who could judge it.

What still will not resolve: what Houdini himself expected to happen. He spent his life exposing fake contact with the dead, and still left Bess a way to hear from him.