![]() ![]() To this day, Linnell remembers those séances extremely well, describing the events with elaborate attention to detail. And Bill would play that as part of the seance.” “A lot of us helped with the séances over the years, including Dan Hess, who created this fantastic slideshow about the life of Harry Houdini. “Oh, yeah, Bill was a first-rate delegator,” confirmed Linnell. To date, however, the ghostly guest of honor has never conclusively graced any of these gatherings with his otherworldly presence. Even magicians Penn & Teller have taken up the practice. But the eerie annual event had become famous, and ever since, all around the world, on the 31st of October, people have gathered to try to contact the ghost of Harry Houdini. For the next 10 years, every time the anniversary came around, his widow held a séance to give Houdini’s spirit every possible opportunity to communicate from the land of the dead.Įventually, she declared that 10 years was long enough to wait for any man, and ceased the yearly seances. As an experiment, Houdini and his wife Beatrice created a secret password, promising that whoever died first would try to reach out from beyond, using that secret code as proof of their spectral identity. For years previous to his death, Houdini had set out to debunk spiritualists’ claims of being able to contact the dead, exposing countless mediums and psychics as frauds. Harry Houdini, at the age of 54, died in Chicago of a burst appendix. Perhaps a little context will put this eccentric Petaluma activity into perspective. “Bill had a great sense of humor, and loved a good practical joke,“ Linnell added, ”but when it came to the Houdini séances, he was dead serious, so to speak. "Bill’s annual Houdini séances were always the big event of the Halloween season in Petaluma,“ recalled Bill Linnell, a Petaluma actor, longtime friend of Soberanes and a frequent Houdini séance participant. Houdini’s death, it turns out, was not enough to stop Soberanes from trying to meet the famous magician and escape artist anyway. But one celebrity he never made the acquaintance of was Harry Houdini, who died in 1926, just five years after Soberanes was born. ![]() Break the circle of hands and extinguish the candles.Over the course of Bill Soberanes’ life, the gregarious local newspaperman met thousands of famous people. ![]()
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