Houdini Museum

Every Halloween, a small museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania sits a group of people around a table laid with Harry Houdini's possessions, lights an antique candelabra, and tries to reach a man who has been dead since 1926. This is the official Houdini séance, and the Houdini Museum on North Main Avenue is the only place left that still performs it.

The waiting started with Houdini himself. He spent his last years exposing fraudulent mediums, and he and his wife Bess agreed on a secret coded message before he died, so that if anyone really could reach back, he could prove it was him. The cipher from their old mind-reading act decoded to two words: "Rosabelle, believe." Rosabelle was the song Bess sang when they met.

Houdini died on Halloween, 1926, of a ruptured appendix. Bess held a séance every October 31 for ten years, speaking into the dark for the code word. It never came. After a decade she ended her own séances; she is said to have remarked that ten years was long enough to wait for any man.

The rite didn't stop. It passed from Bess to the writer Walter B. Gibson, who created The Shadow and performed the séance in New York until his death in 1985. From Gibson it passed to Dorothy Dietrich, a professional magician and the first woman to catch a bullet in her mouth. She brought it to Scranton.

Dietrich and Dick Brookz founded the collection in 1983 and opened in Scranton in 1988, in a building well over a century old, billed as the only one in the world devoted entirely to Houdini. Scranton has its own claim on him: he spent two full seasons touring northeast Pennsylvania with the Welsh Brothers Circus, his longest single engagement, and performed in the city during his touring years. Every Halloween, Dietrich sits as the medium at the same table and speaks the same code word.

The pair have kept Houdini's memory in other ways too. For decades his grave in Queens stood without its bronze bust, smashed by vandals. In 2011 a group from the museum funded a reproduction and quietly restored it; magicians around the world paid for the roughly ten-thousand-dollar repair, with James Randi alone giving two thousand.

There is no apparition here, no resident ghost, no wandering figure in the halls. Houdini was never born, never lived, never died in this building. The haunting is only the question he set himself, and the answer he promised to send. The candles get lit. The code word gets spoken into the dark. And for nearly a hundred years, the man who swore he would answer hasn't.