When Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, died on Oct. 31, 1926, he left his wife Bess (pictured above with Houdini and his mom) a secret phrase that he promised he would use if she was ever able to successfully contact him beyond the grave. Houdini had spent his last decades debunking spirit writing, table rapping, spirit manifestations, spirit photographs, levitation and seances, and this was his last effort. On the anniversary of his death, each Halloween for a decade, she held seances without reaching her late husband, so she gave up. “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man,” she is reported to have said.
But magicians, including Houdini’s brother who performed under the name Hardeen, continued the tradition. And this Halloween night, in honor of Sidney Radner of Holyoke, Massachusetts, who died last June at age 91, the 85th annual seance will be held at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, by invitation only. (Pictured above: 1948 Houdini seance held in New York City, with Radner third from right.)
“In attendance will be members of the Inner Circle of The Official Houdini Séance and special guest, world reknowned magician, Teller, of Penn and Teller fame. This year’s medium will be Kandisa Calhoun,” the organizers’ website explains. “Bill Radner will be presenting a special tribute to his late father.”
Sidney Radner (pictured above at the 2005 Houdini seance in Newton, Massachusetts) had performed as a professional magician while running his family’s Holyoke rug store. In the Army in World War II, he began debunking crooked gambling and later wrote books on the subject. But he’s perhaps best known as a major collector of Houdini’s props and, since the 1940s, was the organizer of the annual Halloween Houdini seance.
The seance is a curious or at least impish way to remember a man who spent decades of his life debunking them. But it seems Houdini began outing fraudulent spiritualists after the death of his mother prompted him to earnestly seek contact with the dead. “I too would have parted gladly with a large share of my earthly possessions for the solace of one word from my loved departed,” Houdini wrote in his 1924 book “A Magician Among the Spirits.” “[So I] became deeply interested to discover if there was a possible reality to the return, by Spirit, of one who had passed over the border and ever since have devoted to this effort my heart and soul and what brain power I possess.”
Houdini reported that “I have made compacts with fourteen different persons that whichever of us died first would communicate with the other if it were possible, but I have never received a word. The first of these compacts was made more than twenty-five years ago and I am certain that if any one of the persons could have reached me he would have done so.”
“If there had been any real unalloyed demonstration to work on, one that did not reek of fraud, one that could not be produced by earthly powers, then there would be something for a foundation,” Houdini wrote, “but up to the present time everything that I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.”
But the magicians continue. “One time the medium asked for Houdini to make his presence known, and a gal standing around, her beads broke and fell on the floor,” Radner told NPR in October 2010. “Another time, a book fell down off a shelf. We had some strange things happen.” But nothing that seemed proof of the ability to reach out to spirits beyond the grave.
“If I can’t contact Houdini, and I’ve been trying for many, many years, maybe it can’t be done,” Radner told NPR. “But if it does come, I want to be there, believe me.”
Pictured above: Houdini’s grave in Queens, New York.
