Houdini's Afterlife Experiment - Did It Work?

[Richard]

Essay by Tom Razzeto    © 2006 Tom Razzeto

There are conflicting claims about whether Harry Houdini, after his death, was successful in passing a secret coded message to his wife through Arthur Ford, a psychic medium. I will say much more about that in a minute but right now, here’s a little background.

Houdini, the world famous escape artist and magician, died in 1926 at the age of 52 from a ruptured appendix nine days after he was punched in the stomach. He claimed he could take punches from anyone, yet this time, he was caught off guard and was not able to firm up his muscles.

Here is what his attending doctor said: “It is the only case of traumatic appendicitis I had ever seen in my lifetime, but the logic of the thing seems to indicate that Mr. Houdini died of appendicitis, the direct result of the injury.” If he had received timely medical attention, his appendix would have been removed before it burst and he would have lived.

Yet he put on 5 shows between the time of the injury and his death. After all, the show must go on! And so it did, as we shall see, in an unexpected way.

Let’s go back to 1913 when his beloved mother died and Houdini became quite depressed. He started to explore Spiritualism to see if he could get in touch with her. With his skills as a magician, it was immediately obvious to him that all the mediums that he visited were frauds taking advantage of grieving people. This upset him and he started to put a lot of time and effort into exposing these frauds. He duplicated their tricks on stage and wrote books on the subject. The general public was well aware that Harry Houdini did not believe in spirit communication.

In 1920, he met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes novels and a Spiritualist himself. Mrs Doyle was a medium and gave Houdini a general message from his mother. Harry was emotionally moved but did not consider it proof since it did not contain the key word his mother had previously agreed to try to send to Harry. That word was, “Forgive”.

On his deathbed, Houdini told his doctor that, even though he did not believe in spirit communication, he would still try to send a prearranged message.

It was not until after his death, or so it seems, that he boldly reversed his position. As we shall see later, Houdini wanted his wife Beatrice, whom he called “Bess”, to spread the news that life continues after the death of the body.

By the way, Harry and Bess used written coded messages during his early stage acts as part of a mind reading trick. They used this same method for the afterlife experiment.

To decode the messages, they used the following list of ten words and phrases:

1 Pray
2 Answer
3 Say
4 Now
5 Tell
6 Please
7 Speak
8 Quickly
9 Look
10 Be Quick

This list always remained the same. It’s the heart of the decoding process. They probably had the list memorized.

Here is how it worked. Let’s say Harry wanted to say, “Hi”. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet and I is the ninth. So he would send a message consisting of two words, the eighth word on the list and the ninth word on the list (8*9): Quickly * Look.

Now suppose he wanted to say, “Up”. U is the 21st letter in the alphabet. This is handled by using a pair of words on the list. Since he wants to make the number 21, he would use the second word on the list paired with the first word on the list: “Answer Pray”.

The P is handled the same way. It is the 16th letter in the alphabet so he would use the first word on the list paired with the sixth word on the list. “Pray Please”. So the “Up” message would read (21*16):

Answer Pray * Pray Please

He put a star to show how to break up the words into separate words or word pairs.

Here is the list of words received by Arthur Ford channeling his regular spirit guide, Fletcher, who claimed to be with the spirit of Houdini:

Answer * Tell * Pray Answer * Look * Tell * Answer Answer * Tell

Remember, if you do not already have the decoding method and the list of the ten words, you may never figure it out.

Since we know them both, we can quickly tell that it’s a 7-letter word that starts with a B and has three Es in it. Two of the letters are represented by word pairs. Let’s look at them.

The first pair is: Pray Answer. This is 1 and 2 or 12. L is the 12th letter in the alphabet. So the third letter is L.

The second pair is: Answer Answer. This is 2 and 2 or 22. V is the 22nd letter in the alphabet so the sixth letter is V.

Putting it all together, we have:

B E L I E V E

Harry’s message to his wife was to believe! What an amazing message and a very creative way to be extremely convincing about the continuation of consciousness after death!

The message also had another part, one word that was not encoded: Rosabelle. Rosabelle is the name of a short love song that Bess sang for Harry in their very first show together.

So the full message was: Rosabelle, believe!

Ford and Fletcher not only brought forth the entire message, they also explained the decoding method with the list of ten words and went through the detailed steps of decoding the message. This, they claimed, was only possible because of the direct help of Houdini and his mother, who were present with them in spirit form.

Immediately upon receiving the message, Beatrice affirmed in front of several witnesses that it was correct. Later, on Jan 9th, 1929, she even signed a short document, which appears to be on Houdini letterhead, to that effect:



Here is what the document says:

“Regardless of any statements made to the contrary, I wish to declare that the message, in its entirety, and in the agreed upon sequence, given to me by Arthur Ford, is the correct message prearranged between Mr Houdini and myself.” (Signed) Beatrice Houdini

It is also signed by three witnesses: Mr H R Zander, a representative of United Press, Mrs Minnie Chester, a life-long friend of Mrs Houdini and John W Stafford, associate editor of Scientific American.

So why did the mainstream choose not to believe? Ah, a very good question, indeed. Let’s talk more about that.

From the beyond, Harry predicted that if the experiment was successfully, Bess would come under attack and be pressured to invalidate the results. These social pressures are very real and come in many forms.

Remember, Harry and Bess did not believe in this while he was alive and their social circles probably had few supporters of spirit communication. If you believed in it, you were considered a “nut”. This is a very serious demotion in the eyes of society. It is not an easy thing to shift from being held in high regard to being demoted to a nut. Almost everyone will do anything to avoid becoming an outcast.

As it happened, shortly after the successful seance, Beatrice did, indeed, muddy the waters by saying that she did not believe that the message came from Harry and that the coded message could have been known by others. This is a very interesting way to invalidate the results. It does not say that the message is wrong; it only offers a way for it to be correct without spirit communication.

It is also stated by others that she admitted that she accidentally leaked it to the press one year earlier while some claim that Ford got it from a book published in 1927.

I personally find this very hard to believe. How could anyone accidentally discus something so complex? Sure, it’s possible that she could leak the short message, “Rosabelle, believe!” but that is not enough. She would have to leak the entire coded message, the decoding method and the list of ten words. It is too much for me to believe that she accidentally leaked all that to the press.

Did she leak it intentionally? This and other scenarios are complex and I will leave them for another time. Let’s just say that I consider them extremely unlikely.

Did Ford get it out of a book? If so, which book? We should all be able to see the entire complex system laid out in this book. And where did the author get it? Or did Ford get it all just by being lucky? I don’t think so.

I am also very curious about the fact that she continued to have seances on the anniversary of Harry’s death. None of them were successful.

At the last seance in 1936, Beatrice concluded the radio broadcast by saying, “Yes, Houdini did not come through. My last hope is gone. I do not believe that Houdini can come back to me - or to anyone. The Houdini shrine has burned for ten years. I now, reverently... turn out the light. It is finished. Good night, Harry!”

Later, she also proclaimed, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.”

But why would she have them at all if the message was known to everyone after 1929? It was in the newspapers. Sure, it might be possible to still have a chat with Houdini about other things besides the secret message but it would be difficult to prove anything.

So it seems to me that she was acting in a suspicious way. Was this to allow her to continue to publicly state that she had no reason to believe in spirit communication while still appearing open minded? Perhaps she did not want to become a “nut” and lose her social standing.

Beatrice even told her friends that if a medium ever claimed to have a message from her after she died, it would not be true. "When I go," she said, "I'll be gone for good. I won't ever try to come back."

My opinion is that perhaps she was never able to truly reconcile the experience of receiving the genuine communication and her desire to not be seen as a “nut” by most of society. So she intentionally prevented the clear validation of the experiment and her place in society was preserved.

Another interesting aspect of the story comes from Arthur Ford himself. He first enters this story on Feb 8th, 1928 when he received a short message from Houdini’s mother plus the word, “Forgive”. This message came through when Ford was giving a reading for a regular client. Houdini’s mother asked for the message to be sent in a letter to Bess. Bess was the only living person who knew that Harry, while he was alive, was looking for a medium that could deliver that word to him from his mother.

Bess responded to Ford with a letter that validated the message. Thus Bess signed two documents affirming two messages from the beyond, not just one.

This initial contact between Ford and Bess allowed for the subsequent message from Houdini to get to Bess.

So if you want to believe the experiment was a success, you can quote Mrs Houdini. And if you want to believe that it didn’t worked, you can quote Mrs Houdini. Whichever way you want it, you can find your justification!

In conclusion, I would like to paraphrase the final words of Harry Houdini as brought forth by Fletcher and Ford at the end of that successful session:

“Tell the whole world that Harry Houdini still lives and will prove it a thousand times and more. In my life, I was perfectly honest and sincere in trying to disprove the survival of consciousness, and I resorted to tricks to prove my point for the simple reason that I did not believe communication was possible. I am now sincere in my desire to undo this mistake. Tell all those who lost faith because of my mistake to lay hold again of hope, and to live with the knowledge that life is continuous. That is my message to the world, through my wife and through this psychic medium.”

I would like to also add this:

Harry Houdini, the world famous escape artist, escaped death itself. And so will all of us!

Thanks for reading my essay!

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