On October 31, 1936, on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, Bess Houdini waited for her husband for the last time in public. He had died ten years earlier to the day. When nothing came, she said, as the Associated Press reported it, “He has not come… I turn out the light.”
Harry Houdini has not come through in the hundred years since, by any test that holds. The one message ever accepted, “Rosabelle, believe,” came from the medium Arthur Ford in January 1929, in a code already printed in a biography the year before. And the best-known picture of Houdini beside a ghost is a Lincoln trick photograph he had made himself.
The photograph he had made
It is a lantern slide, rounded at the corners for the projector. Houdini sits at the left, a heavy book open on his knees. At the right, in a carved armchair, sits Abraham Lincoln, hand raised to his chin.
Look at Lincoln’s coat, not his face. The creases of the drape behind him run straight through it, and his legs thin into the dark cloth. Houdini is solid from collar to shoe. That is a figure on one layer and a room on another, a double exposure or a combination print; which one is not documented.
The Library of Congress record is plain about it: “Demonstrating the company he could keep if the right technique were employed, Houdini had himself photographed with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.” Its note ties the picture to Harry Price’s 1922 exposé of faked spirit photographs.
The choice of ghost was deliberate. Lincoln had been the stock visitor of spirit photography since William Mumler posed a translucent president behind Mary Todd Lincoln in the early 1870s, and A Magician Among the Spirits gives a chapter to Mumler’s 1869 fraud trial. The slide itself is not in the book, whatever gets repeated. The technique has changed since; the tells of an AI ghost photo are today’s version of the drape showing through the coat.
“Rosabelle, believe”
Houdini went to séances as a hostile witness. In February 1926 he told Congress that Spiritualism was “a fraud from start to finish,” though he never said survival was impossible, only that he had found no evidence.
So he and Bess agreed on a test. By her account in the Times, the code and its key were locked in a safe deposit box. It came from their old stage mind-reading act: ten words that, deciphered, spelled “believe.”
On January 8, 1929, Arthur Ford, minister of the First Spiritualist Church in New York, went into trance at Bess’s home and delivered it. She had been hurt in a fall on New Year’s Day, and the Times reported that “at times she had been delirious.” That night she told reporters she was “absolutely convinced that my husband talked to me and that there is life beyond the grave.”
Doubt arrived the next day. The magician Joseph Dunninger said Bess admitted the code had been published a year earlier; the researcher Gordon Stein later pointed to page 105 of Harold Kellock’s Houdini: His Life-Story (1928). On January 24, Ford was expelled from the Manhattan group of the United Spiritualist League.
Bess did not recant at once; the legend skips this part. On January 15 she still insisted no one could have known the code. On March 18, 1930, she told the AP that no medium had “presented the clue.” Her will of April 29, 1940, reads: “I do not now nor did I at any time believe in spirit communication or spirit messages.”
The legend and the record
| The legend | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| At the 1936 séance Bess said, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.” | The AP report from the roof has “He has not come… I turn out the light.” The “ten years” line is from an AP interview of February 4, 1943. |
| A punch killed him. | A McGill student struck him backstage in Montreal, on October 19, 20 or 22 depending on the source. The doctors blamed the blow; the insurer’s investigator found no evidence of it; Bess revived the story with affidavits to claim double indemnity (NYT, November 1 and December 23, 1926; February 26, 1927). |
| Bess endorsed Ford, then denounced him. | She withdrew in stages, from 1929 to 1940. |
Why the séances never stopped
After 1936 the annual séance passed to Houdini’s brother, who performed as Hardeen, then to Sidney H. Radner, who trademarked “Official Houdini Séance.” His son Bill Radner runs it now; in 2025 a set of Houdini’s handcuffs sat on the table. The Houdini Museum in Scranton has held one every Halloween since the 1970s, the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, since 1978.
Where the centenary séances are
Confirmed as of September 30, 2026.
| Date (2026) | Place | Event | Organizer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 3 – Nov 2 | Salem, MA | “Harry Houdini in Salem”; magic show and curator talk Oct 31 | Peabody Essex Museum |
| Oct 26 | Hippodrome Casino, London | “Houdini Halloween 100,” live biopic by Paul Zenon | The Magic Circle |
| Oct 29 – Nov 1 | Budapest, his birthplace | HOUDINI100 centenary program; circus-theatre show at the Budapest Circus | House of Houdini Budapest |
| Oct 31, 1:26, 6:30, 9:30 pm | 278 W 113th St, New York, his house | “The 100-Year Houdini Séance,” three sittings of 13 guests | Houdini’s House |
| Oct 31, time not announced | Marshall, MI | 100th Anniversary Houdini Séance | American Museum of Magic |
| Oct 31, 10 pm | American Oddities Museum, Alton, IL | “Houdini Séance! 100th anniversary” | Troy Taylor, American Hauntings |
| Oct 31, 6–10 pm | Loft 84, Riverside, CA | “Houdini in Riverside: A Century of Secrets Unlocked” | Not confirmed; Wild About Harry listing |
| Oct 31 | Magic Castle, Hollywood | “Houdini Returns,” centennial auction | Potter & Potter Auctions |
| Not announced | Scranton, PA | “Séance Centennial 1926–2026” | Houdini Museum |
| Oct 31, place not announced | Not announced | The Official Houdini Séance | Bill Radner |
On screen
Houdini put himself on film: The Grim Game (1919), Terror Island (1920), shot in part at the Mission Inn in Riverside, and The Man from Beyond (1922), about a man frozen in arctic ice and brought back to life. That last one came out the year of the Atlantic City séance, where Lady Doyle’s automatic writing gave him a message from his mother in fluent English. She, he wrote, “could not speak, read nor write English.”
Dramatizations kept the séances. George Marshall’s Houdini (1953), with Tony Curtis, has him expose a fake medium and invents a death in the water torture cell. The TV film The Great Houdinis (1976) cast Bill Bixby as Arthur Ford. The 2014 miniseries Houdini, with Adrien Brody, brings in Margery Crandon and Ford. The older stage tricks behind them all are in how ghosts got on screen.
- 1922 Atlantic City séance with the Doyles.
- 1924 A Magician Among the Spirits; sittings with the medium “Margery.”
- 1926 Testimony to Congress; death in Detroit, October 31.
- 1929 Arthur Ford delivers “Rosabelle, believe.”
- 1936 The final séance on the Knickerbocker roof.
- 1943 Bess’s “ten years” interview; she dies a week later.
- 1940s onward Annual séances under Hardeen, then Sidney H. Radner.
- 2026 The centenary.
The table on October 31
The On Camera section examines pictures that claim to show a ghost; this one was made to show how the claim is manufactured. The code has been in print since 1928, so the words alone can prove nothing now. The handcuffs go on the table anyway, and someone asks, again, whether Harry is there.