Bess Houdini
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Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner (1876-1943), known as Bess, was the stage assistant and wife of Harry Houdini. They had no children.
Bess Houdini held yearly séances on Halloween for ten years after Houdini's death, but Houdini never appeared. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death, later (1943) saying, "ten years is long enough to wait for any man." The tradition of holding a séance for Houdini continues by magicians throughout the world to this day and is currently organized by Sidney H. Radner [1] and others, including Dorothy Dietrich [2] at the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Bess Houdini died in 1943, 17 years after her husband. She was not permitted to be interred with her late husband at the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York because she was a gentile. She is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
