On 31 October 1936, Beatrice Bess Houdini, the widow of the famed magician Harry Houdini, sat in a high backed chair on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles seated near a table. She was not alone. At the table sat a judge, two journalists a couple of magicians, and two spiritualists. There were also nearly 300 invited guests sitting in bleachers looking on. There was an array of items before her and the small group including a pistol loaded with blanks, handcuffs and a tambourine. They were attempting to contact Houdini from beyond the grave and hoped he'd use these various items to prove his spirit had come. Across the US, Canada and Europe, there were other seances being held that night also attempting the same thing as the one in LA. Houdini crusaded against fake mediums, but hoped for the real thing. Erich Weisz better known by his stage name Harry Houdini was born in Budapest Hungary in 1874, and immigrated to the US as a child. As a young magician, he would perform seances as a way to make money, but eventually stopped. At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed, Houdini wrote in his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits. It was the death of his beloved mother in 1913 that helped push him to begin a crusade to debunk fake mediums. Even as Houdini exposed countless fraudulent spiritualists, he still held out hope for the possibility of communication from beyond the grave. He wrote that every time he stepped into a seance room he kept an open mind and hoped that one of these spirit mediums would actually prove that speaking with the dead was possible. Instead, in every single instance, Houdini found them to be charlatans. His ultimate test of the hypothesis of communication from beyond the grave would come after his own tragic death.
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