For Ten Years Tried to Hear from Him from Spirit World

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 11 (U.P.)–Mrs. Harry Houdini, widow of the magician, died tonight aboard a train taking her to New York. Her age was 67. The frail, white-haired former partner of Houdini in his stage performances died aboard the Sante Fe Chief at Needles, Calif., Dr. U.L. Ghilini said. “Her death was not unexpected,” he said.

Mrs. Houdini had been hospitalized here for some time with a heart ailment that brought here perilously close to death several times before she determined to make the trip to her home. On several occasions only an oxygen mask kept the spark of life burning.

In what she realized was probably her last interview, Mrs. Houdini last week said she had tried vainly for ten years to establish contact with her late husband, and now was convinced that communication between the living and dead was impossible.

“I love to think I will meet Harry in Heaven,” she said. “That’s the way we were taught, but we never know.”

The body will go on to New York.

“I would like very much,” she said a few days ago, “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 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 in Hollywood 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 enough to wait for any man,” she remarked a few days before she started her trip East.

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