Terrifying & True | Harry Houdini's Final Halloween: Death, Seances & the Secret Code

Harry Houdini spent years exposing psychic mediums who claimed they could speak with the dead. Then, on Halloween 1926, the world's greatest escape artist died and left his wife with a secret code designed to expose any fake messages from beyond. Ten years later, Bess Houdini gathered for one final seance, could Harry escape death?

What you are about to hear is believed to be real. Based on witness accounts, testimonies, and public record, this is Terrifying and True.

Harry Houdini built his legend by escaping handcuffs, prison cells, chains, and locked boxes. Anything designed to hold him. But in the final years of his life, he turned his attention to a different kind of escape. The claim that the dead could return. He challenged mediums, confronted spiritualists, and devised a private code with his wife Bess that would expose any false message after his death. Then, on October 31st, Halloween 1926, Houdini died in Detroit. What followed was a decade of seances, disputed messages, and one final Halloween test.

If the world's greatest escape artist could truly defeat the last lock of all, Bess would know. No chance of trickery, no concern of a cold reader making a guess. Something almost scientific happened. Because if death couldn't hold Houdini, he would gladly send the code back. We're telling that story tonight, so make sure you're subscribed on your favorite podcast app for even more terrifying and true every Monday and something scary to enjoy every day of the week. Happy Halloween.

Halloween night, 1936. On the roof of the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, Beatrice Houdini sat before a crowd that had come to witness an ending. She was 60 years old, small beneath the lights and cameras, and 10 years removed from the afternoon her husband had died in Detroit, Michigan. Around her were reporters, magicians, public figures, invited witnesses, and hundreds of spectators.

A table held Harry Houdini's photograph, handcuffs, writing materials, and other objects that a spirit might supposedly be able to move. Beyond the roof stood the illuminated Hollywood Land sign. At 8.30pm, Edward Saint, Bess's manager and companion, began calling into the silence. He invited Houdini to rap on the table, lift it, move an object, make himself known in any verifiable way.

This was not the first attempt. It was the last one that Bess intended to make. The ceremony was deliberately public. Newspapers had promoted it. Recordings and reports would carry the event far beyond the roof itself. The witnesses were not asked merely to feel a presence. They were given practical signs to watch for, and a verbal key that should have been unmistakable. If Houdini returned, this was meant to create a record, not a private consolation that could change shape in memory. For years after Houdini's death, she had taken part in attempts to reach him. The date itself seemed designed for legend. October 31st, the night when folklore places the living and the dead unusually close together. Yet

the test before her was not supposed to depend on atmosphere, faith, or a medium's interpretation. Houdini had left a secret code. A correct message would have to contain a precise sequence known to Bess and rooted in the private language of their old stage act. That sequence had already caused one of the most disputed episodes in the history of spiritualism.

A celebrated medium had claimed to receive it. Bess had publicly authenticated what he had said. Then came accusations, denials, and evidence that the supposedly secret system was no longer secret at all. Now in 1936, the code remained unused in the only way that would have satisfied Houdini. Under conditions strong enough to eliminate ordinary access, suggestion, and fraud.

To understand why Harry and Bess built such an exacting test, we have to go back to the man Houdini had constructed long before the world. tried to summon his ghost. He was born Eric Wise in Budapest in 1874 and grew up in an immigrant Jewish family that struggled financially in the United States. In public, he remade even those beginnings.

He preferred the Americanized Eric Weiss and sometimes claimed Appleton, Wisconsin as his birthplace. As a young performer, he borrowed his professional surname from the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert Houdini. Herrick Weiss became Harry Houdini. The transformation was more than a name. Houdini learned to manufacture a public event around himself.

He challenged police departments to lock him in their strongest cells. He escaped from handcuffs, chains, packing cases, straitjackets, and water-filled containers. He arranged newspaper demonstrations in which the authorities became part of the spectacle, and every lock became an advertisement. The act promised an apparent impossibility, then invited witnesses to inspect the conditions. A recording from 1914 lets us hear Houdini rehearsing an introduction to his water torture cell.

The water torture cell, although there is nothing supernatural about it, I am willing to profit the sum of $ 1, 000 to anyone who can prove that it is possible to obtain air inside of the torture cell when I'm locked up in it in the regulation manner after it has been filled with water.

Houdini's publicity was disciplined rather than accidental. Challenges were negotiated in advance... Locks were examined, photographers were positioned. When a newspaper or police department supplied restraints, the institution lending its authority to the test also became part of his advertisement. He was not a neutral laboratory researcher, and self-promotion never left his work. But he understood one principle with unusual clarity.

The conditions of a test determine what its result can prove. That distinction would later become significant. central to his war on mediums. Houdini deceived an audience, but he announced that deception as entertainment. The mystery was real. The supernatural claim, not so much. A spectator bought a ticket knowing that a magician intended to fool the eye. In 1894, Houdini married Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, Bess, and she became his partner, on stage and off. Their early act included a version of Second Sight. Harry could receive information from Bess through ordinary-sounding words that carried... hidden numerical values. The method belonged to a long tradition of coded stage telepathy. To an audience,

the answers appeared impossible. Between the performers, they were signals learned through rehearsal. In a coded mind-reading routine, the secret was rarely a single magical word. It was a vocabulary, a question, Command or change in phrasing could identify a number, an object, or a letter while sounding natural to everyone else.

Such systems demanded memory, rhythm, and trust between partners. Harry and Bess had spent years turning that concealed cooperation into apparent telepathy. They also knew exactly how impressive a correct answer could look when an audience did not know how the information had traveled. Their career grew far beyond that routine, but the code belonged to the foundation of their marriage and partnership. Years later, the same language would become a safeguard against a far more serious deception. Houdini's conflict with spiritualism is often presented as a simple battle between a rational magician and foolish believers. The history is far more human than that. Modern spiritualism had begun decades before the

First World War, but the scale of bereavement after the war and the influenza pandemic gave its promise renewed urgency. Millions of families had experienced sudden death, often without a final conversation or even a grave they could visit. A seance offered more than spectacle. It offered continuity. A voice in the dark might say that a son had survived death, that a husband was safe, that a mother still knew her child. Many people who entered seance rooms were not gullible caricatures. They were grieving. Some mediums were sincere believers, but others used methods that magicians recognized immediately. Concealed information, coded accomplices, muscle reading, ventriloquism, luminous paint, prepared slates, hidden devices,

and the freedoms. provided by darkness. Houdini knew those methods because he had studied them and early in his career had performed imitations of spirit phenomena himself. He also knew grief. His mother, Cecilia, died in 1913. Houdini's devotion to her had been intense and her death affected him profoundly. He later described searching for a genuine medium who could bring him one authentic word. Scholars disagree over whether his loss truly began the campaign. His interest in fraudulent mediumship was older, but the loss gave the search a personal edge. He did not begin declaring that communication with the dead was impossible.

He said he wanted evidence. He attended seances, compared methods, and waited for something a trained conjurer could not reproduce. What he repeatedly found was information that could have been learned in advance, messages vague enough to fit many lives, or physical manifestations that disappeared when controls became strict. His position still left room for belief Houdini spoke of God and an afterlife, and he did not claim that a magician could settle every religious question. His demand was narrower.

When someone charged money and said a particular dead person was speaking, that claim entered the world of evidence. Names, private facts, and physical manifestations could all be tested. Faith might remain private. A commercial seance making factual promises could not ask to be protected from examination. This placed him on a collision course with one of the most famous writers alive. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created Sherlock Holmes, literature's emblem of cold deductions. Conan Doyle himself became one of spiritualism's most influential advocates. His belief was bound to bereavement, including the death of his son Kingsley after wartime service.

To him, spirit communication was not a parlor diversion. It was evidence that death had not ended the people he loved. In a later filmed interview, Conan Doyle described just how certain he had become.

When I talk on this subject, I'm not talking about what I believe. I'm not talking about what I think. I'm talking about what I know. There's an enormous difference, believe me, between believing a thing and knowing a thing. I'm talking about things that I've handled, that I've seen, that I've heard with my own ears. And I always mind doing the presence of witnesses.

Houdini and Conan Doyle became friends around 1920. They admired one another's drive and celebrity, but they approached evidence from opposite directions. Conan Doyle believed Houdini possessed psychic powers, even when Houdini insisted that his escapes were accomplished through preparation and technique. Houdini, meanwhile, found Conan Doyle so willing to believe that explanations sometimes strengthened the author's conviction instead of weakening it. Their friendship reached its decisive test on June 17, 1922, at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. The date was Cecilia Weiss's birthday. Conan Doyle's wife, Jean, proposed using automatic writing to receive a message from Houdini's mother. Lady Doyle

entered the exercise and produced page after page of writing, about 15 sheets in the best documented account. Houdini sat quietly. He did not denounce his hosts or interrupt the session, but the document gave him reasons for doubt that were painfully specific. It began with a Christian cross. Cecilia had been the wife of a rabbi. The message also came in fluent English, a language she had barely spoken in life.

It did not acknowledge that the seance was taking place on her birthday. The personality in the writing did not sound to Houdini like the woman he had known. He left. without confronting the Doyles. Courtesy delayed the argument, but it couldn't prevent it. Conan Doyle became convinced that the communication was genuine. Houdini became more certain that sincere belief could make an intelligent observer accept weak evidence. Their private disagreement moved into letters, lectures, and newspapers. By 1923, the friendship was effectively broken. The split had hardened Houdini's public identity.

In 1924, he published A Magician Among the Spirits, combining historical research with accounts of the methods he had encountered. His full evening stage show later ended with an act called Do the Dead Come Back? He reproduced seance effects before an audience and then explained the machinery behind them.

The crusade had become both investigation and theater, an attempt to inoculate spectators by letting them feel the deception before showing them how it worked. Houdini's campaign intensified. He did not merely sit in seance rooms and announce that he had seen a trick. He built investigations. He attended mediums in disguise. He worked with reporters and police. He carried tools that allowed him to expose prepared slates and false manifestations.

He demonstrated how a spirit trumpet could direct a whisper through darkness, how a message could appear on a slate that had supposedly been clean, and how a medium could gather information before a sitter ever entered the room. One of his most important investigators was Rose Mackenberg. She traveled ahead of Houdini's shows, adopted false names and personal histories, and visited local mediums as an ordinary client. Her reports gave Houdini details he later used in public exposures or to turn over to authorities. Mackenberg documented techniques of cold reading and information gathering, but she also found conduct far more damaging than stage trickery. Sexual exploitation, financial schemes and

instructions supposedly delivered by the dead. Mackenberg's value was that she could enter rooms where Houdini's famous face simply couldn't. During the Washington investigation, she testified that Spiritualist leader Jane Coates had told her that senators were interested in the subject and that seances had occurred at the White House.

The testimony created sensational headlines, although the claims about national leaders were not independently established. More important were the repeatable patterns Mackenberg had recorded. Invented relatives accepted as real. leading questions disguised as revelation and advice that could steer a client's money or private life. The campaign was not directed at grief itself. Its target was the conversion of grief into leverage. In 1924, the conflict acquired a formidable central figure, Mina Crandon of Boston, known in seances as Marjorie. Crandon was the wife of a prominent surgeon. Her supposed spirit guide was her deceased brother, Walter. Sitters reported voices, touches, moving furniture and an electric bell that rang inside a

box while her hands and feet appeared controlled. Scientific American had offered a $ 2, 500 prize for conclusive psychic manifestations Under test conditions, a committee of respected investigators examined Marjorie, and Houdini joined it as the member most familiar with practical deception. He believed some colleagues were too friendly with the Crandons and too willing to accept observations made in darkness. Houdini introduced tighter controls, He watched how Marjorie positioned her body and concluded that she could reach the bell apparatus simply with her foot while preserving the appearance that her ankle remained held. He designed a cabinet intended to restrict movement.

He published his own pamphlet before the committee completed its work, an act that critics saw as self-promotion and supporters saw as necessary. the committee ultimately refused to award the prize. That result did not end the controversy. Marjorie retained defenders including Conan Doyle, and Houdini's aggressive methods made the dispute personal.

Yet the episode illustrated the principle he kept returning to. An extraordinary claim could not be established by a performance that succeeded only when the conditions left room for ordinary manipulation. The Marjorie case also exposed a problem larger than one medium. Scientists trained to measure physical phenomena were not necessarily trained to watch a practical deceiver control attention. Houdini could be abrasive, and his certainty sometimes outran the committee's patience. But His professional experience addressed a genuine weakness in the tests. Darkness, loosened controls, and friendly familiarity with a subject created opportunities that instruments and academic credentials did not remove. By 1926,

Houdini took the fight to Congress. House Bill 8999 sought to prohibit paid fortune-telling. in the District of Columbia, including the business of pretending to reveal the future or, quote, unite the separated. Houdini supported it as a consumer protection. Spiritualists and other opponents argued that the language threatened religious practice and protected belief. That objection was not frivolous. A law broad enough to punish fraud could also become a weapon against unpopular faith. The proposed penalties reached as high as a $ 250 fine and six months in jail, a princely sum at the time. That made the wording consequential.

Houdini wanted the law to reach people selling false contact with the dead. Opponents saw language capable of criminalizing prayer, prophecy, or a recognized religious service The hearing therefore joined two real dangers, exploitation of vulnerable clients and government power broad enough to police belief. The hearings stretched across dates in February and May. They became crowded, theatrical, and bitter. Houdini demonstrated spirit devices and challenged claimants to prove their powers.

Rose Mackenberg described what she had found while working undercover in Washington. Mediums disputed her testimony. Lawmakers questioned whether Congress could or should criminalize these practices. Houdini tried to separate religion from the commercial claims he opposed. In the hearing transcript, he insisted that his target was mediumship presented as factual communication.

which he called, quote, a fraud from start to finish. The distinction did not calm the room. Arguments became personal. Police were summoned when confrontations threatened to become physical. Anti-Semitic remarks entered the proceedings. Houdini was accused of attacking religion. He accused paid mediums of hiding fraud behind religious liberty.

The bill died. in committee. He had not persuaded Congress, but he had made enemies in public. Threats and predictions of his death circulated around the campaign. Those facts would later become raw material for a murder legend. While they are evidence of hostility, they are not evidence that anyone arranged his death. In the autumn of 1926, Houdini began what would be his final tour. It was physically punishing from the start. Bess became ill with food poisoning. During a water torture cell performance in Albany, Houdini fractured his ankle.

He kept on traveling and performing. In Montreal, he gave a lecture at McGill University. on fraudulent spirit practices while appearing at the Princess Theatre. By Thursday, October 21st, he was already feeling unwell. That detail is vital. It appears in later reconstructions based on witness statements and records. Abdominal illness did not begin cleanly after the famous blows. On Friday morning, October 22nd, three students were in or around Houdini's dressing room. Sam Smilovitz, also remembered as Sam Smiley, had come to sketch him. Jacques Price accompanied him. J.

Gordon Whitehead joined the visit. Houdini was reclining because of his injured ankle. The surviving accounts agree on the central event, but differ in the details. Whitehead asked about Houdini's strength and whether he could withstand blows to the abdomen. There was also discussion of biblical miracles. Then Whitehead struck him Some early reports described two blows. Later testimony described several, perhaps four or five, delivered rapidly before Houdini had properly braced himself. The witnesses remembered him stopping Whitehead and explaining that he had not been prepared. Whitehead later gave his own sworn version, and the statements do not align perfectly on the force of sequence or permission involved. That uncertainty

is a reason to reject the polished, popular scene in which one clearly defined punch instantly ruptures Houdini's appendix. History gives us an encounter, multiple blows and an injured man, and conflicting recollections, not a medically observed moment of fatal damage. Even the chronology entered public record in competing forms. Early newspaper coverage placed the blows on a different day and sometimes described a reception rather than the dressing room visit preserved in later depositions. Houdini's manager, the students, doctors, and insurers each recorded the story for different purposes. The broad sequence is secure. It's fine detail. Not so much. Any narration that makes every gesture certain is choosing legend over

the surviving evidence. Houdini continued performing in Montreal on Friday and Saturday. His pain worsened. After the Saturday night show, he struggled to change clothes, but he still boarded the overnight train for Detroit. His next engagement was at the Garrick Theatre. On Sunday, October 24th, a physician examined him in his dressing room. Houdini had severe abdominal pain and a fever recorded in one well-sourced account at 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

The doctor suspected acute appendicitis and advised immediate hospitalization. Houdini chose to perform. Later retellings have added heroic dialogue and dramatic collapses. Those details are not consistent enough to present as fact. What is supported is grim enough. He went on stage seriously ill, made it through the program with difficulty, and still did not go directly to a hospital when the show had ended. He returned to his hotel, The house physician called a surgeon who examined him in the early hours and again urged him to go to the hospital.

Houdini telephoned his doctor in New York for a second opinion. By the time he entered Grace Hospital and underwent surgery on Monday, October 25th, the opportunity for an uncomplicated appendectomy had passed. The surgeons found a ruptured appendix and widespread infection throughout the abdominal cavity. Diffused peritonitis. Today, antibiotics, imaging, and modern intensive care can change the odds, but in 1926, once intestinal bacteria had spread so extensively, surgery had limited power to reverse the process. Houdini survived. Six more days.

Contemporary newspapers followed his condition and repeated the stomach punch story, while doctors attempted to control the infection. A second operation didn't save him. On Sunday, October 31st, 1926, Harry Houdini died at Grace Hospital. He was 52 years old. No securely documented last sentence belongs in this story. Later accounts supply words of exhaustion or surrender, but their provenance is not strong enough to treat them as a final declaration.

What the medical record establishes is the cause recorded at the time, diffuse peritonitis resulting from a ruptured appendix. His death produced one final, documented reversal of a planned escape. Houdini had commissioned a heavy bronze casket for an endurance stunt in which he intended to demonstrate survival while sealed away. Instead, that casket carried his body back to New York. On November 4th, more than 2,000 mourners attended his funeral. the Society of American Magicians performed its broken wand ceremony, marking the death of a member whose name had become almost interchangeable with magic itself. The question is what, if anything, the blows had to do with it. Doctors and insurers in 1926 accepted the connection. The witnesses were questioned and

Houdini's accidental death coverage was paid on the theory that the dressing room incident had contributed to his death. Contemporary reporting therefore helped seal the sequence into public memory. Student strikes magician, appendix ruptures magician, dies. Modern analysis makes that simple chain very doubtful. Appendicitis is an inflammatory disease whose precise trigger is not always identifiable. Medical literature contains rare case reports in which appendicitis follows blunt abdominal trauma, and recent reviews continue to debate whether trauma can sometimes obstruct, injure, or accelerate disease in an appendix. The strongest advocates describe it as possible but exceptionally uncommon, with much of the

reported evidence involving children and significant impact. Other surgeons argue that the association may be an illusion created by coincidence. Appendicitis and minor trauma are both common enough that some cases will occur close together by chance. A 2023 statistical analysis shows found that random overlap could account for the small global case literature without requiring trauma as the cause.

A 2026 review, by contrast, collected more than a century of reported cases and treated a causal mechanism as plausible in carefully selected circumstances. The field is not perfectly settled. Houdini's individual case, however, has facts that weigh heavily against the legendary explanation. He was reportedly ill before Whitehead had struck him. His appendix was not examined until three days later, and if the blows had immediately ruptured it on Friday, surviving until the following Sunday would be extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with the course of diffuse peritonitis in 1926. The safest conclusion is narrower than either extreme. Houdini died from peritonitis after a ruptured appendix. The evidence does not establish

that Whitehead's blows caused the appendicitis or directly burst the organ. Trauma could conceivably have intensified pain, confused the interpretation of his symptoms, or affected an already diseased abdomen. but the record cannot measure those possibilities. The clearest avoidable factor was delay.

He continued traveling and performing after serious symptoms and after doctors had told him to seek immediate care. That ordinary medical catastrophe did not remain ordinary for long. Houdini died on Halloween, He had spent months confronting spiritualists in theaters, newspapers, and the halls of Congress. Mediums had predicted his downfall.

The student who struck him had questioned him about biblical miracles. There had been no autopsy designed to test for poison. Decades later, writers assembled these details into theories that spiritualists had hired Whitehead or arranged for Houdini to be poisoned. No persuasive evidence supports those claims. No documented link has been established between Whitehead and a spiritualist plot. No contemporaneous medical evidence points to poisoning. Requests made many years later to exhume Houdini could not transform suspicion into proof. The murder story survives because it gives intention to coincidence and makes Halloween feel like a ghastly appointment. It should be told only as mythology that grew around a documented death.

Houdini himself had anticipated a different kind of story. He and Bass agreed that whichever of them died first would attempt to communicate. This wasn't a promise that the dead certainly could return. It was a test. If a medium claimed to reach Houdini, the message would need to use the coded language Harry and Bess had once employed on stage.

The code assigned common words to numbers and letters. Pray meant one or A. Answer meant 2 or B. Say meant 3 or C. Now meant 4 or D. Tell meant 5 or E. Please meant 6 or F. Speak meant 7 or G. Quickly meant 8 or H. Look meant 9 or I. Be quick represented 10 or 0. and J letters beyond J were formed by combining number words.

The private recognition phrase began with Rosabelle, the title of a song associated with Bess and their courtship. What followed had to spell a word through the code. After Houdini's death, purported messages arrived quickly. None met the test. Then, Arthur Ford, a minister and medium in New York, presented a claim more difficult to dismiss. Ford said that in February of 1928, his spirit guide, Fletcher, relayed a message from Houdini's mother.

The key word was forgive. Bess acknowledged that the word carried personal meaning, and said the message had an appearance of truth. But the clue was compromised. A newspaper interview with Bess had already published Forgive as a word an authentic communication might contain. Ford had not produced inaccessible knowledge.

In January of 1929, Ford announced that he had received Houdini's full coded message. A seance was held at Bess's home while she was ill and recovering from a fall. Ford, speaking through Fletcher and then, supposedly, in Houdini's voice, delivered the following. Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell. Decoded, the words after Rosabelle spelled Believe. Answer gave B. Tell gave E. Pray answer combined 1 and 2 to give the 12th letter, L. Look gave I. Tell gave E.

Answer answer made 22, V. Tell completed with the final E. Bess signed a statement declaring that Ford had delivered the, quote, correct message prearranged between Mr. Houdini and myself. Newspapers treated it as the return Houdini had promised. Conan Doyle accepted the result and argued that knowing the cipher was not the same as knowing the particular word Houdini would choose.

The claim had a serious problem. The code system had appeared the previous year in Harold Kellogg's authorized biography, a book built from Bess's recollections and documents. Rosabelle and its importance were also public knowledge. Anyone with access to those materials could construct a grammatical message that decoded into a dramatic word. That doesn't prove Bess secretly supplied Ford with Believe, a scandal newspaper alleged collusion and a planned publicity venture, but allegation is not demonstration. Bess forcefully denied betraying Houdini's trust or giving Ford the code. What can be said is that the test had lost the protection that made it valuable. The method was published. The clues were circulating.

The seance was not conducted under controls that excluded prior access. Bess was grieving and physically unwell. Publicity began before the evidentiary questions were resolved. Her own position also became contradictory. At first, she defended the message and its meaning. In correspondence with her lawyer, she later distinguished between recognizing the expected words and believing that they came through spiritualism. She said she had never accepted Ford's message as genuine spirit communication.

By March of 1930, a statement issued for her said that no medium had produced the identifying clue by which she would recognize a legitimate message. So it is inaccurate to say that Nobody ever delivered Houdini's code. Arthur Ford delivered a sequence that decoded correctly, and Bess authenticated it in public. It is equally inaccurate to say that Houdini proved survival after death. The information Ford supplied was obtainable by ordinary means. The conditions were uncontrolled, and Bess's later statements withdrew the supernatural interpretations. The episode remains fascinating because it merely turned Houdini's safeguard into the very thing it was designed to prevent. A performance persuasive enough to become

belief without evidence strong enough to rule out the normal world. Bess eventually stopped trying. Magicians did not. In later years, different societies, performers, and admirers continued Halloween seances in Houdini's name. Some treated them solemnly, others as memorial theater, but the ritual endured because the date and the man fit too perfectly from a PR standpoint. On October 31st, 2026, A full century separates us from Houdini's death. The evidence allows several firm conclusions. He died from diffuse peritonitis after his appendix ruptured. The blows in Montreal became part of the medical and insurance account, but their precise biological role can not be proven. And the evidence that he was already

ill makes the familiar obvious. fatal punch story deeply, deeply suspect. There is no reliable evidence that spiritualists murdered him. Arthur Ford produced the coded words, but not under conditions that met Houdini's standard. Houdini built his career by making escape look impossible, then showing that human skill could defeat the lock his final test reversed that arrangement anyone could claim a miracle the burden was to close every ordinary exit through which the information might have escaped no message ever did the code remained among the living But to hear what that final test meant to Bess, we have to return to the roof. On Halloween night in 1936, the calls on the Knickerbocker roof had gone unanswered for more

than an hour. No verified wrap came from the table. The handcuffs remained closed. No writing appeared. The code was not spoken. The surviving record features Edward Saint and Bess. It may have been recreated in a studio afterwards, so we can't be certain. We're hearing the rooftop ceremony itself. On that record, Saint asks Bess for her final decision.

And after what Houdini was attempting to do, fighting con artists willing to harm the grief-stricken, I think it's only appropriate that we let this show be completed with the words of the bereaved.

Mrs.

Houdini, the zero hour has passed.

The ten years are up. Have you reached a decision?

Yes.

Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me or to anyone. After faithfully following through the ten-year Houdini Compact, using every type, medium, and seance, it is now my personal and positive belief that spirit communication in any form is impossible. I do not believe that ghosts or spirits exist. The Houdini Shrine has burned for ten years.

I now reverently turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Barry.

Terrifying and True is narrated by Enrique Couto. It's executive produced by Rob Fields and bobbletopia.com and produced by Dan Wilder with original theme music by Ray Mattis. If you have a story you think we should cover on Terrifying and True, send us an email at weeklyspooky at gmail.com. And if you want to support us for as little as $ 1 a month, go to weeklyspooky.com slash join. Your support for as little as $ 1 a month keeps.

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Terrifying & True | Harry Houdini's Final Halloween: Death, Seances & the Secret Code

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