The spookiest time of the year was upon us once more last week. Our attention turned to jack-o-lanterns, black cats and things that go boo in the night.

It was also the time when the widow of one of the most famous entertainers of the 20^th Century tried to communicate with the departed. Here’s how it happened.

Wilhemina Beatrice Rahner (called Bess by her friends) was in a song and dance act on New York’s Coney Island in the 1890s. She started dating a fellow performer, a young magician. But she quickly fell in love with his big brother, Harry Weiss. He took notice of her, too.

Like his kid brother, Harry was also a magician and an escape artist. He felt Weiss lacked panache, and so changed his last name to Houdini, a tribute to earlier pioneering French magician Jean Eugene Robert Houdin. At first, Bess joined him as a magician’s assistant. His feats improved, audiences grew bigger and by the early 1900s, he had developed the stage illusion that put him on the map, where he escaped from a locked box.

Known for his ability to wriggle out of handcuffs, he threw in feats of daring, like escaping from them while hanging upside down, sometimes even while suspended from skyscrapers.

He had perfected his act just in time for the Roaring 20s, when gimmicks were all the rage. Silliness was in style. There were flagpole sitters, gold fish swallowers, dance marathon contests and more.

And Harry Houdini was one of the biggest stars of the era, until Fate had a trick of its own for him.

During a break between shows in Montreal, Canada, a college student visiting in his dressing room asked if it was true that Houdini could withstand any punch in the gut. Houdini said it was. Without warning, the young man repeatedly delivered powerful blows to the star’s abdomen.

Houdini’s appendix was seriously injured. True to the entertainer’s maxim that the show must go on, Houdini went right on performing until he eventually collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital and died exactly one week later on Halloween Day, 1926.

Bess was devastated. Theirs was a genuine love story. But she held out hopes of hearing from him in the Hereafter.

Years before, the couple had agreed that after one of them died, they would try to contact the other. They even established an elaborate ritual to confirm their identity, complete with secret code words known only to the two of them to guard against fraudsters. Harry was supposed to signal “Rosabelle,” a song Bess had sung in her early days on stage. 

Over the years, she attended multiple seances on Halloween nights trying to reach Harry.

Nothing.

In the early 1930s, she took up with Edward Saint, a former carnival showman who partnered with her to keep Houdini’s legacy alive. Although they lived together, she was careful not to remarry and thus lose the right to call herself “Mrs. Harry Houdini.”

Finally, as Halloween 1936 approached, they decided to not only end the annual ritual, but to go out with a bang. It was the 10th anniversary of Harry’s passing, and they turned it into a media spectacle.

They billed it as “the Final Houdini Séance,” and staged it on the rooftop of the Knickerbocker Hotel in—where else?—Hollywood. In fact, the iconic “Hollywoodland” hilltop sign appeared in the distance (the “land” wouldn’t be dropped until 1949).

Carried on live radio, attendance was by invitation only, with the ceremony starting promptly at 8 p.m. Bess sat in a giant throne-like chair in front of a table that held Harry’s photo and a candle she claimed had been burning since his 1926 passing. A pair of locked handcuffs, his trademark, rested on a silk pillow.

“The zero hour of the 10^th anniversary of our departed friend is fast nearing the end,” Saint intoned melodramatically.

He then launched into a 10-minute appropriately eloquent diatribe that ended with this flourish: “We have waited, Houdini, oh so long… now is the night of nights; SPEAK HARRY!”

At that point, a recording of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the same tune the magician as used for his stage entrance, was played. The audience waited.

And waited. And waited.

Finally, Bess announced, “My last hope is gone… I do not believe Houdini can come back to me … I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist. The Houdini shrine has burned for 10 years. I now reverently put it out.” She blew out the candle flame and concluded with a simple, “It is finished. Goodnight, Harry.”

And that was that.

Asked shortly before her own death in 1943 why she had stopped holding the seances, her answer was straight to the point: “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.”   

Have comments, questions or suggestions you’d like to share with Mark? Message him at jmp.press@gmail.com.