The Houdini Séance at 100: The Secret Code, a Century of Halloween Vigils, and What It Teaches About Any Medium Reading

The short answer. Harry Houdini died at 1:26 p.m. on October 31, 1926, and he and his wife Bess had agreed that if anyone could come back, he would. To make sure no medium could fake it, they chose a coded message only they knew: “Rosabelle – answer – tell – pray answer – look – tell – answer answer – tell,” which decodes to “Rosabelle, believe.” Bess waited ten years. On Halloween 1936 she held a “Final Séance” on a Hollywood hotel roof, then put out the candle she had kept by his photograph. Others have kept the vigil every Halloween since. Tomorrow, October 31, 2026, is the hundredth. This is the full story, and what a century of trying teaches anyone who hopes to hear from someone they love.

There is no more famous attempt to reach someone after death than the Houdini séance, and none more carefully designed. Houdini spent his last years as the world’s best-known investigator of mediums. He was not trying to prove that contact was impossible. He wanted it to be real, especially after his mother died in 1913, and he wanted to know what real would look like. The code was his answer.

That makes the Houdini story unusually useful today. It is a grief story, a love story and the first great piece of evidence design in mediumship. Every good tip for judging a medium reading in 2026 is already in it.

How Houdini Died on Halloween

Houdini was 52 and on tour. In Montreal in October 1926, a student asked whether it was true he could take any punch to the stomach and struck him several times before he had braced himself. He played on in pain for days, collapsed in Detroit and was found to have acute appendicitis. He died of peritonitis in Detroit’s Grace Hospital at 1:26 p.m. on Halloween, October 31, 1926. Whether the punches caused the rupture or simply masked it is still debated.

That he died on Halloween, the night most associated in the popular imagination with the dead, is the accident of timing that turned his pact with Bess into an annual ritual.

The Pact and the Code

Houdini made similar pacts with several friends, but the one that mattered was with Bess, his wife of 32 years and his stage partner. They chose a message that could not be guessed and could not be produced by cold reading, because it came in a code from their old mind-reading act.

In the act, Bess (or Harry) would signal letters and numbers to the other with innocent-sounding words. Each cue word stood for a number, and the number stood for a letter of the alphabet.

Cue word	Number	Letter
Pray	1	A
Answer	2	B
Say	3	C
Now	4	D
Tell	5	E
Please	6	F
Speak	7	G
Quickly	8	H
Look	9	I
Be quick	10 (or 0)	J

Pairs of cue words made two-digit numbers. So the message decodes like this:

Message	Number	Letter
Answer	2	B
Tell	5	E
Pray, answer	1 + 2 = 12	L
Look	9	I
Tell	5	E
Answer, answer	2 + 2 = 22	V
Tell	5	E

BELIEVE. The first word, Rosabelle, was the song Bess was singing when they met, and it was engraved inside her wedding ring. The whole message was “Rosabelle, believe”: a private name and a single instruction, wrapped in a code that only two people alive had used.

As a test, it was nearly perfect. It was specific, private, impossible to stumble onto by chance and easy to verify. It had one weakness, and it took only two years to show.

1929: The Séance That Seemed to Crack It

After Houdini’s death Bess offered a reward to any medium who could deliver the message, and she sat with many. In 1928 the medium Arthur Ford, speaking through his spirit guide “Fletcher,” passed on what he said was a message from Houdini’s mother. In early January 1929 he went further, delivering, word for word, the full ten-word code. Bess, ill and grieving, signed a statement that it was correct.

It was a sensation, and then it unravelled. Bess soon repudiated it. The investigators who looked closer found the problem: the code was no longer secret. It had been printed in Harold Kellock’s 1928 biography, Houdini: His Life Story, written with Bess’s cooperation, so anyone who had read the book could know it. A journalist later claimed Ford had admitted getting it from Bess herself, which Ford denied. After Ford’s death in 1971, his biographer Allen Spraggett and Rev. William V. Rauscher reported finding files of clippings and obituaries they believed he had used to research sitters, and they concluded the Houdini séance had been staged.

The lesson is not that the code failed. The code worked exactly as designed until it was published. Its weakness was the one every private sign shares: once it is written somewhere others can read, it stops being evidence.

1936: The Final Séance on the Knickerbocker Roof

Bess moved to Hollywood, and with her manager and companion Edward Saint she kept trying, every year on the anniversary. On Halloween 1936, ten years after Houdini’s death, they held the “Final Houdini Séance” on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, broadcast by radio, with magicians, friends and reporters gathered around a circle. Saint called on Houdini again and again.

No message came. At the end, beside a photograph of Houdini, Bess put out the candle she had kept burning for him for ten years. Years later she is reported to have said that ten years was long enough to wait for any man. She died in 1943.

It is easy to read 1936 as a failure. It reads better as a decade of faithful love, and as the moment a private grief ritual became a public one.

Who Keeps the Vigil Now

Bess asked Houdini’s friend Walter B. Gibson, creator of The Shadow and Houdini’s ghostwriter, to carry on the yearly tribute. He held Halloween séances in New York for many years and passed the tradition to the magician Dorothy Dietrich. A second long-running séance, billed as the Official Houdini Séance, is directed today by William Radner with a circle of magic historians and members of Houdini’s family. Magic clubs across America hold their own. A hundred Halloweens on, the séance is less about expecting a voice than about keeping a promise.

Houdini centenary séances, October 30–31, 2026

Event	Where	When	Who can attend
The Official Houdini Séance	The Magic Castle, Hollywood, CA	Oct 31, 5 p.m. PT; medium Rob Zabrecky	Members and invited guests
The 100-Year Houdini Séance	Houdini’s former house, 278 W 113th St, New York	Oct 31, 1:26 p.m. (Dorothy Dietrich), 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. (Jessica Jane Peterson)	Ticketed, 13 guests per séance
100th Anniversary Séance	American Museum of Magic, Marshall, MI	Oct 31	Invitation-only circle
Houdini’s Centennial Séance	Center for Inquiry, Amherst, NY	Oct 31	Public, family-friendly
Petaluma’s Houdini Séance	Petaluma Museum, CA	Oct 30, the eve of the anniversary	Ticketed

Compiled from event announcements and the Houdini historian John Cox’s centenary rundown at Wild About Harry. Times are local; check each venue before travelling.

The Houdini Returns centennial auction of Houdini memorabilia is also held at the Magic Castle on October 31, before the séance.

Houdini, Conan Doyle and the Letter That Started It All

The best way to see why Houdini cared so much about a code is the episode that ended his friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a devoted Spiritualist. In 1922, in Atlantic City, Lady Jean Doyle held an automatic-writing session for Houdini and produced pages of loving messages from his late mother.

Houdini was moved, and then troubled. The message was written in fluent English, a language his Hungarian-born mother had barely spoken. It was headed with a cross, though she was the wife of a rabbi. It said nothing a stranger could not have said. Houdini concluded that Lady Doyle was sincere but that the words were her own, and the two men never recovered their friendship. He set out his investigations in A Magician Among the Spirits (1924).

What he took from that day was not cynicism. It was a standard: if a message is really from her, it will sound like her. Specific, private, in her own idiom. That standard is the one good mediums hold themselves to today.

Five Lessons From a Century of Trying

The Houdini séance is often told as a debunking story. It is more useful as a guide to doing this well.

1. Agree on a sign while you still can

The most practical lesson of all, and a quietly beautiful one: Harry and Bess talked about it. Many families now do the same, choosing a word, a song, a bird or an object that will mean “it’s me.” If there is someone you love who is old or ill, it is a conversation worth having. People who have done it say it brings comfort long before it is ever needed.

2. Keep it off the page

Houdini’s code was broken by a book. Yours would be broken by a group chat, a memorial post or a letter in a drawer. A private sign has to stay private: never typed, never posted, ideally never written down at all. If you must record it, seal it with someone you trust.

3. For someone already gone, write a sealed list first

If you never agreed on a sign, do what researchers do: before a reading, write down a handful of private, specific facts about the person (a nickname, a habit, an in-joke, a detail of the house) that appear nowhere online. Seal it. Afterwards, compare. My guide to whether mediums are real has the full home protocol and a scoring sheet, and questions to ask a medium has 40 questions that invite specific answers.

4. Judge the reading by its specifics, not its drama

The Ford séance was dramatic: a trance, a spirit guide, a famous name. Lady Doyle’s pages were heartfelt. Neither was specific in the way that mattered. The readings people treasure for years are usually quieter: a pet name no one else used, the brand of cigarettes, the joke about the kitchen table. Those are what to listen for, and what the best evidential mediums work to bring through. The mediums I rate for evidence and the evidential mediums for a passed spouse are chosen on exactly that basis.

5. The vigil itself is part of healing

Bess lit a candle for ten years, held a séance every October and kept a promise. Grief researchers would recognise this as a continuing bond: an ongoing, living relationship with someone who has died, which modern grief research treats as healthy rather than as a failure to let go. Whether or not a message ever comes, a yearly ritual of remembrance (a candle on the anniversary, a meal, a visit, a reading) is one of the most human things we do. Halloween, and the All Souls’ and Día de los Muertos days that follow it, exist partly for this. Many people find that the signs they notice from loved ones cluster around exactly these dates.

How to Mark the Centenary Yourself

You don’t need a ticket to the Magic Castle to take part.

• At 1:26 p.m. on October 31 (Eastern Time, or your own time zone), light a candle for Houdini, or for someone of your own. It is the hour the centenary séances begin.
• Have the “sign” conversation with someone you love. Pick something only the two of you will ever know.
• Write your sealed list if you plan to see a medium this season, and keep it somewhere private. My Halloween psychic reading guide covers how to book a medium on Halloween night.
• Read the history. Houdini’s own A Magician Among the Spirits is in the public domain, as is Burns’s Halloween poem, for a very different side of the night; my Halloween tarot spreads turn its fortune games into layouts.
• Read why Halloween is linked with the dead in the first place: is the veil thinner on Halloween?

FAQ

What was Houdini’s secret code to Bess?

“Rosabelle – answer – tell – pray answer – look – tell – answer answer – tell.” Rosabelle was their song and was engraved in Bess’s ring; the other words, from their mentalism act’s spelling code, decode to BELIEVE. The full message is “Rosabelle, believe.”

Did anyone ever crack the Houdini code in a séance?

Arthur Ford delivered it in January 1929 and Bess first confirmed it, then repudiated it. The code had already been printed in Harold Kellock’s 1928 biography, so it was no longer secret, and later researchers concluded the séance was staged.

When is the Houdini séance in 2026?

Saturday, October 31, 2026, the hundredth anniversary. The Official Houdini Séance is at the Magic Castle in Hollywood at 5 p.m. Pacific (members and invited guests). Other centenary séances run at Houdini’s former New York house, the American Museum of Magic in Michigan and magic venues across the US.

What time did Houdini die?

At 1:26 p.m. on October 31, 1926, in Detroit, from peritonitis after a ruptured appendix. He was 52.

What was the Final Houdini Séance?

Bess Houdini’s séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood on Halloween 1936, broadcast by radio. No message came, and Bess put out the candle she had kept burning for ten years. The tradition was carried on by others.

How can I set up a secret sign with a loved one?

Choose something specific and private, agree on it out loud, and never write it anywhere others could read. For someone who has already passed, write a sealed list of private facts before a reading and compare afterwards.

Sources

1. Cox, J. “The Official Houdini Séance 2026 to be held at The Magic Castle” and “A rundown of October Houdini events.” Wild About Harry, October 2026. wildabouthoudini.com
2. The 100-Year Houdini Séance at Houdini’s House, 278 West 113th Street, New York. houdini.nyc
3. Press Democrat. “The Houdini Séance, once a Petaluma tradition, rises from the grave,” October 19, 2026. pressdemocrat.com
4. Kellock, H. (1928). Houdini: His Life Story. Harcourt, Brace (the code’s first appearance in print).
5. Polidoro, M. “The Day Houdini (Almost) Came Back from the Dead.” Skeptical Inquirer, 36(2), 2012. Center for Inquiry
6. Polidoro, M. (2001). Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle. Prometheus Books.
7. Houdini, H. (1924). A Magician Among the Spirits. Harper and Brothers. Internet Archive
8. Klass, D., Silverman, P. R. and Nickman, S. L. (eds.) (1996). Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Taylor and Francis.