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Bess gazes lovingly at her husband, who appears suspended someplace between – and this could be the result of my own sick mind – pleasure and self-satisfaction. – Houdini.” Harry Houdini with his mother and wife 1907Īt the time this photograph was taken, Bess and Harry would have been married for 13 years. A note scrawled in the top left corner reads, “My two Sweethearts. His mother looks directly at the camera lens, cold and unamused. I was struck by a 1907 photograph of Houdini, his arms draped over his wife, a young Beatrice (Bess) Rahner Houdini, on his left, and a stern-faced Cecilia Weiss on his right. It’s a statement that would not have seemed out of character for Norman Bates in Psycho. On June 17, 1913, after learning of Cecilia Weiss’s death from a stroke, her son, the famed magician Harry Houdini, said, “If God in his greatness ever sent an angel on Earth in human form, it was my mother.”
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After he died, his wife held annual séances to try to contact him. The Harry Houdini Séances: The world-famous magician was fixated on trying to contact his dead mother.
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