Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel

The Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel still stands at 1714 Ivar Avenue, an 11-story Spanish Colonial building that's senior apartments now. On its roof, on Halloween night 1936, Harry Houdini's widow tried to reach him one last time.

Bess Houdini and Harry had a pact. Whoever died first would try to send a coded message back from the other side — the secret word "Rosabelle," after a song from her old stage act, followed by a spelled-out phrase only the two of them knew. Harry died on Halloween 1926. For ten years, every Halloween, Bess held a séance and waited for the word.

The tenth one was on the Knickerbocker roof. Her partner and manager Edward Saint set it up as a spectacle. Roughly 300 invited guests and reporters sat under the open sky, the accounts say. On the table lay a spirit trumpet, a tambourine, a piece of chalk, and a pair of locked handcuffs on a silk pillow. A red bulb burned over Houdini's portrait.

The word never came. Bess put out the light.

"Houdini did not come through," she said. "My last hope is gone... I now reverently turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry."

The part that made the night a legend isn't in any weather record, but it's the part everyone repeats: as she finished, rain fell from a clear California sky, soaked the crowd, and stopped. Later, asked why she'd quit, she said only, "Ten years is long enough to wait for any man."

The hotel collected other deaths. Director D.W. Griffith spent his last year here and died of a stroke in 1948 — the most-cited account says he collapsed in the lobby, though papers disagreed on whether it was the lobby or his room. Costume designer Irene Lentz checked in under a false name in 1962 and jumped from an upper window.

The roof that held the séance now sits above retirees' apartments. The word never came.