The magician and escape artist Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926:
Houdini spent the final years of his life relentlessly exposing the trickery of spirit mediums who claimed they could contact the dead.
“He told the Los Angeles Times in 1924 that it takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer,” said [Jewish Museum curator Brook Kamin] Rapaport. “And he folded aspects of his anti-spiritualist crusade into his theater performances.”
Which is what made his deathbed pact with his wife so strange. He didn’t die the way it happened in the old Tony Curtis movie, in his water torture cell, but from a ruptured appendix in a Detroit hospital.
“Houdini died on Halloween in 1926,” said Rapaport. “Bess Houdini, his beloved wife, and he had an agreement that for a decade after his death, if in fact there was an ability to reach the other side, that he would communicate with Bess through a secret code.”
Every Halloween for ten years, she held a séance. But he didn’t come back.
Audio recording of the official final Houdini seance, which took place on Saturday, October 31, 1936 at 8:30 p.m., on the rooftop of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, California. Harry Houdini Wikipidia entry. At the Jewish Museum in New York City, Houdini: Art and Magic exhibit.