Harry Houdini Wanted His Wife To Try And Communicate With Him Through The Veil
Wikimedia CommonsHarry Houdini as he was about to jump off the Harvard Bridge.
Harry Houdini was many things in life: an escape artist, a body builder, an author, a magazine publisher, a film star. But one thing he could not stand was a “spiritual medium.” In fact, he spent many years working to debunk mediums, even going so far as to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing in an attempt to outlaw seances and crystal gazing.
Some say that Houdini’s obsessive disdain of mediums started when one such individual claimed to have channeled the spirit of Houdini’s mother and passed a message to her son — in English.
The problem was that Houdini’s mother was from Hungary and spoke very little English. She certainly would not have used it to speak to her son.
Thus began a long campaign to prove that all spiritual mediums were nothing more than con artists preying on the bereaved.
So, when Houdini finally died after his appendix ruptured on Halloween, 1926, his wife Bess sought to honor an agreement they had made: Whichever of them lived on after the other had passed would attempt to communicate with them beyond the veil.
They agreed upon a secret code, which Bess later said translated into “Rosabelle, Believe.” And soon enough, a series of mediums appeared, all attempting to find the coded message.
One such medium, Arthur Ford, claimed to have been successful in this endeavor, but Bess said the whole thing was nonsense and that “Rosabelle, Believe” had been a red herring she and Houdini came up with to expose any fraudsters.
Ford, meanwhile, continued to claim that he had in fact contacted the late Harry Houdini.
