The Strange Request Harry Houdini Made Before He Died

On October 31, 1936, Beatrice "Bess" Houdini, the widow of the famed magician Harry Houdini, sat in a high-backed chair on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles seated near a table. She was not alone. At the table sat a judge, two journalists, a couple of magicians, and two spiritualists. There were also nearly 300 invited guests sitting in bleachers looking on. There was an array of items before her and the small group, including a pistol loaded with blanks, handcuffs, and a tambourine. They were attempting to contact Houdini from beyond the grave and hoped he'd use these various items to prove his spirit had come. Across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, there were 20 other seances being held that night also attempting the same thing as the one in LA.

"This last personal attempt to contact the spirit of Houdini has aroused interest throughout the world and to that extent will the findings here tonight be publicly recorded," Edward Saint, the event's moderator, told the crowd (via the Internet Archive). Before Harry Houdini, died at age 52, of peritonitis brought on by a burst appendix exactly 10 years earlier, he and Bess had made a sacred pact. If he died before she did, he wanted her to attempt to contact his spirit every year on his death date. If Bess had not received Houdini's coded message after a decade, she was to quit trying. This was her final attempt. 

Erich Weisz, better known by his stage name Harry Houdini, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1874, and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. As a young magician, he would perform seances as a way to make money, but eventually stopped. "At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed," Houdini wrote in his 1924 book "A Magician Among the Spirits."

It was the death of his beloved mother in 1913 that helped push him to begin a crusade to debunk fake mediums. Even as Houdini exposed countless fraudulent spiritualists, he still held out hope for the possibility of communication from beyond the grave. He wrote that every time he stepped into a seance room he kept an open mind and hoped that one of these spirit mediums would actually prove that speaking with the dead was possible. Instead, in every single instance, Houdini found them to be charlatans. His ultimate test of the hypothesis of communication from beyond the grave would come after his own tragic death.

The secret code Harry Houdini and his wife Bess came up with involved a series of words his spirit would deliver to her: "Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray, answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell" (via the Summit Daily). "Rosabelle," which came from a popular song of the era, was engraved on Bess's wedding ring. The other words were from a code the couple used during their old mind-reading act. According to a November 23, 1926 Times Colonist story, Houdini also shared the secret code with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated creator of "Sherlock Holmes." Houdini and Doyle had been friends but had a falling out after the magician exposed the author's wife, a self-proclaimed medium, as a fake. Soon after Houdini's death scores of mediums claimed to have received messages from him, but none of them had the correct message.

After that final seance in LA was a bust — Houdini's spirit was a no-show — his widow announced that she had given up any hope of communicating with her late husband or that spirits existed at all. "It is now my personal and positive belief that spirit communication in any form is impossible," she said after the seance. "I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist ... It is finished. Good night, Harry." But that wasn't the end. While Bess may have given up hope, others continued to try to communicate with the famed magician's spirit on Halloween night. The tradition continues to this day.