A century after Houdini’s death, the séances go on

Harry Houdini died on Halloween 1926, and this Halloween was the hundredth anniversary. Museums and magicians marked it with séances, an odd tribute to a man who spent his last years exposing fake mediums. Here is what the record says about his death, how the legend of a promised message began, and what this year’s séances produced.

The death, according to the record

Houdini died in Room 401 of Grace Hospital in Detroit on October 31, 1926. He was 52, according to ClickOnDetroit’s report, which says his death certificate is held by the Archives of Michigan. Michiganology, the state history site, which republishes an article from Michigan History Magazine, gives the time as 1:26 p.m. and the cause on the certificate as “diffuse peritonitis, contributory cause ruptured appendicitis.”

The usual account runs like this. On October 22, 1926, in Montreal, a student challenged Houdini’s boast that he could take a punch to the stomach, and struck him. Michiganology says the student was from McGill University; WDET calls him a college wrestler who punched Houdini several times. WDET says he was hit several times; Michiganology says only that he was struck before he could tighten his muscles. None of the sources names the student. He reached Detroit with a fever of 104 degrees. Jeremy Dimick, the Detroit Historical Museum’s director of collections and curatorial, relayed to ClickOnDetroit a touring nurse’s account that she had to help him put on his makeup and that he collapsed on a couch backstage at intermission. His last performance was at the Garrick Theatre on October 24. Doctors then found a ruptured appendix and peritonitis.

Detroit’s lost Houdini sites

WDET reports that the Garrick, his hotel and Grace Hospital are all gone. The funeral home that embalmed him, the William R. Hamilton Funeral Home on Cass Avenue, is vacant now, ClickOnDetroit says; WDET adds that the building later housed a girls’ art school that closed. On a 2004 tour, Juanita Hammond, then head of the school, led visitors to a locked storage area where, she said, Houdini’s body had been laid out. “Some say, ‘I’m not going back to the kitchen because I might see Houdini,’” she said. It is an anecdote, not a documented haunting.

The pact, the code and the 1936 séance

The idea that Houdini would send a message comes from a pact with his wife, Bess. According to a Library of Congress blog post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the first of them to die would try to contact the survivor, and if nothing came through in ten years the pact would be broken. Houdini promised a coded message, which began with the word “Rosabelle” and spelled “Believe” in the couple’s stage shorthand.

The tenth attempt was held on Halloween 1936 on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. The library says 300 invited guests sat in bleachers while moderator Edward Saint, Bess’s business manager and a former carnival showman, called out to the spirit. Part of it was broadcast on radio, and more than 20 other séances ran nationwide that night. Bess announced the result: “Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me or to anyone.” She added that she did not believe ghosts or spirits exist.

The library is blunt about the show itself. The surviving documents, including the radio script, are full of stage directions such as “Pause. Speak slowly,” and Dimunation concludes the séance was scripted and that nobody on the stage thought Houdini would come through. The post lists other claims of contact, such as a ghost writing a letter in Kansas City and drinking tea in New Zealand, but none gave the coded message.

A lifelong critic of mediums

Houdini’s own view was never in doubt. The Library of Congress says he attended séances hoping to reach his dead mother, found them to be nonsense, and challenged mediums to produce any phenomenon he could not reproduce as a magician. In 1922 Scientific American launched a $5,000 contest for scientific proof of ghosts, with Houdini sitting on the five-member panel of judges alongside two scientists and two psychic investigators. Houdini dismissed the Boston medium Mina Crandon, who worked under the name “Margery,” as “all fraud.” The magazine’s 2020 retrospective says the committee came to agree with him after sitting through nearly 100 of her séances, and in 1925 the magazine declared the Margery case over. It kept the contest open and by 1941 had raised the prize to $15,000. For modern research on why people sense a presence that is not there, see our report on felt presence.

This year’s attempts

FOX 17 reported that the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, would hold a sold-out Halloween séance led by magician Phillip Haggerty. “He was a skeptic, and I’m afraid so are we,” the museum’s John Sherwood said, “but we want to take that scientific approach and give Houdini every possible chance to amaze us one more time.” WDET described Sherwood banging on a milk can from Houdini’s workshop and said earlier séances had put a lox and bagel sandwich in it for the spirit. By WDET’s account, those attempts were not successful.

I’ve always said that the greatest publicity stunt that Harry Houdini ever pulled off was dying on Halloween.

John Sherwood, American Museum of Magic, to WDET

WSLS in Virginia reported a séance recreation in Rockbridge County tied to the anniversary, but its short preview, which says only that it would take place on Friday, names no venue and reports no results. We found no report of a séance this year producing a sign. WDET noted conspiracy theories about whether Houdini’s death certificate was altered to put his death on Halloween, and whether the wrestler was sent by angry psychics, and offered no evidence for either. The certificate is preserved in the Archives of Michigan.

In 1943, near the end of her life, Bess said she was not sorry she had stopped. “10 years is long enough to wait for any man,” she said, according to the Library of Congress.