Message #2649

[Bianca]

                                                                                                                 continued



That one word FORGIVE was not the whole of the mother's message to her
daughter-in-law, but the rest was of an intimate family nature which concern-
ed Mrs. Houdini and her husband's relatives.

In that first seance the last thing Fletcher had reported about Houdini's mother was simply, "She is going now, and she says that since this message has come
through it will open the channel for the other."  The other to which she referred
to was a pact Houdini had made with his wife.  He had sworn to get a message through to her if such a thing as survival should prove real.  The message was
to be based upon a ten-word code which they had used in one of their early shows and which no one but himself and his wife had ever known.  The press had given
considerable coverage to their agreement.  In the months following his death in-
terested persons in various part of the world were constantly purporting to have
received the message from Houdini.  And just as regularly Mrs. Houdinin dis-
claimed the messages.  It was a poor month when there was no newspaper men-
tion of Houdini and his code.

After the message from Houdini's mother, no further word came for several months.  To be sure, no one made any attempt to follow up.  Then in November,
1928, the first word of Houdin's own message came through in a sitting for a
group, none of whom had known Houdini.  The spelling out of the entire message
took a portion of eight separate sittings covering a period of two and one half
months.  Four of the sittings were with groups of friends and four with indivi-
duals, one a New York physician, Dr. John Tanner, and another, Mr. Hamilton
Emmons, of England, then visiting in this country.