Magician’s Widow Spent Years Trying to Hear from Him

HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 4 (AP)–Mrs. Beatrice Houdini, who spent ten years trying to reach her husband, Harry Houdini, in the spirit world, renounced today her long-cherished faith in communication after death, and added that she was skeptical about any form of life hereafter.

Long gravely ill, Mrs. Houdini was cheerful beneath an oxygen tent as she talked with newsmen at a rest home.

“I would like very much,” she said, “to believe that I was again to see Harry, and my mother. But I am skeptical. No one has been able to prove there is a hereafter.”

Before Houdini, the magician, died in 1926 he made a compact with his wife that he would attempt to reach her from the spirit world. For ten years she kept a light burning over his picture in her home here and on every anniversary of his death she would hold a séance in an attempt to communicate with him. The last séance was held in 1936.

“Ten years is long enough to wait for any man,” she remarked today.

Mrs. Houdini disclosed that she planned to return to her New York home, leaving by train Wednesday, accompanied by a physician.

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