Houdini Museum

Houdini swore he'd come back. His wife held ten séances. Scranton's museum keeps the ritual going every Halloween.

Harry Houdini spent his final years trying to prove mediums were frauds. He attended séances in disguise, caught the tricks, and wrote up the exposures. Before he died on Halloween 1926 from a burst appendix, he told his wife Bess that if anything could reach back through the curtain, he would. They agreed on a code word: Rosabelle, from a song she sang in their vaudeville act.

Bess held an annual séance on Halloween for ten years. Houdini never came through. She extinguished the candle in 1936 and said, "Ten years is long enough to wait for any man."

The Houdini Museum in Scranton is run by Dick Brookz and Dorothy Dietrich, two professional magicians who have kept Bess's ritual going since the 1990s. Dietrich is best known as the first woman to catch a bullet in her teeth, which is a thing you can say about almost no one. Their museum at 1433 North Main Avenue holds what they claim is the largest collection of Houdini artifacts open to the public, including the handcuff Houdini was wearing when he gave his final performance in Detroit.

Whether Houdini himself haunts the Scranton building is a question the museum's owners answer carefully. Houdini performed in Scranton at least twice, at the Poli Theatre in 1906 and again in 1916. He was not born here, did not die here, and had no residence in the area. The museum's ghost story, such as it is, rests on séance work and reported phenomena during the annual Halloween rituals rather than on a traditional haunting.

The more interesting claim, which Brookz has made in multiple interviews with the Scranton Times-Tribune, is that objects in the collection move between locked display cases overnight. A pair of leg irons once turned up in a case that had been sealed since morning. A small photograph of Bess was found facing the wrong direction. Skeptics in the Houdini fan community treat these reports with the same eye Houdini would have turned on them, which feels appropriate.

The Halloween séance continues every October 31. Brookz and Dietrich set out a chair for Harry, speak the code word, and wait. Nothing has ever come through, which is either proof that Houdini was right about the afterlife or proof that he's just very stubborn about crossing back.

The museum does not oversell any of this. The tours are mostly about Houdini's actual life, his rivalry with spiritualist mediums, and the mechanics of his escapes. The ghost story is presented as a question Houdini himself never got to answer, which is the most honest framing a magic museum could offer.