Paranormal record / 1929
January 8, 1929. Inwood, Manhattan. Bess Houdini, widow of the great escape artist, was ill at home as the medium Arthur Ford slipped into trance. His spirit control, Fletcher, began to speak. Ten words followed, said to come from Harry Houdini himself. Decoded with the couple's old stage cipher, they spelled a message. "Rosabelle, believe." Bess confirmed it was the message they had agreed. The next day she signed a statement saying so. Within days, the New York Evening Graphic called it a hoax. Critics noted the code had already appeared in print. Bess later repudiated it all. Decades on, Ford's own biographer weighed in. The evidence, the biographer wrote, was disquietingly strong that Ford cheated.
Harry Houdini died on Halloween 1926. In life he had exposed fraudulent mediums, among them the Boston medium known as Margery. His widow, Beatrice "Bess" Houdini, offered $10,000 for a genuine message from him. She held a séance every Halloween for ten years. The couple shared a secret: in their vaudeville days they had worked a mind-reading act built on a spoken code, in which each word, or pair of words, stood for a letter.