A decades-old Halloween tradition that once drew crowds into Bennett Valley living rooms and reportedly haunted Sonoma County buildings is coming back to life in downtown Petaluma. The Petaluma Historical Library and Museum will revive the Harry Houdini séance for Halloween weekend, staging what it calls a centennial gathering on October 30 inside its historic 1906 building at 20 4th St., running from 7 to 9 p.m.
The timing is deliberate: Harry Houdini died in Detroit, Michigan, on October 31, 1926, making this year's October 30 event the eve of the 100th anniversary; according to the seed facts reported by The Press Democrat, he died of a ruptured appendix while performing shows there in October 1926. Museum executive director Stacey Atchley said the community has shown sustained interest in reviving the Houdini séance, according to the same report. Leading this year's attempt to reach beyond the grave is Jenessa Wyatt, a Sonoma County psychic and professional medium, who will lead the séance.
A Petaluma Tradition That Began in 1964
The roots of this ritual run deep in local history. Petaluma Argus-Courier columnist Bill Soberanes, together with local magicians Nahman Nissen and Fred Daniels, organized the original séance attempting to contact Houdini's spirit in Petaluma in 1964, as the Press Democrat's retrospective on Sonoma County Halloween history recounts. That first séance was held in a Bennett Valley home, drawing about 40 attendees, with thirteen people forming an inner circle seated around a table set with candles and props — a pistol, ouija board, handcuffs, and Houdini's own magic wand, per the same account.
The annual séances continued for nearly four decades, moving among locations throughout Sonoma County — private homes, old buildings rumored to be haunted, even, according to petalumanews.com's account of the tradition's 50th anniversary, a cemetery and the Chamber of Horrors at the San Francisco Wax Museum. Some years brought reports of unexplained chills and mysterious noises. A 1983 gathering at J.M. Rosen's restaurant in Santa Rosa reportedly ended when a knife inexplicably flew through the air and lodged under a door, the Press Democrat's retrospective notes, while attendees of a 1973 séance in a supposedly haunted Sebastopol mansion described sudden shifts in temperature and tremendous vibrations. Houdini himself, notably, appeared at none of the annual séances.
The Tradition Fades, Then Flickers Back
The ritual's run came to an end around the time of Soberanes's death in 2003; the Press Democrat's retrospective identifies a flyer for the annual séance in October 2003 and says the tradition ended that year. Soberanes, who also helped establish the World Wrist Wrestling Championship and the World's Ugliest Dog Contest, had been the Argus-Courier's columnist from 1954 to 2003 and died of congestive heart failure that June, according to petalumanews.com's profile of the columnist.
Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch made attempts to revive the local séance tradition in the years that followed, including creating a documentary titled “Harry Houdini: Magic Among the Spirits.”
Petaluma's Houdini Connection, Verified and Unverified
Houdini's link to Petaluma itself has long carried a whiff of local legend. He was rumored to have performed in person at Petaluma's Hill Opera House, now the Phoenix Theater — but Atchley said that specific claim is unsubstantiated, according to the seed reporting. What a museum research volunteer did confirm were January 1920 Petaluma Argus advertisements for Houdini's silent film “The Grim Game,” which played at the Hill Opera House on January 10 and 11, 1920 — documentation of his cinematic, if not necessarily physical, presence in town.
The broader spiritualist movement that gave rise to séance culture has its own deep roots in the region. Spiritualism emerged in the 1850s as a countercultural movement built around claimed communication with the dead, according to petalumanews.com's history of the era. Petaluma had an active spiritualist community of its own, with séances and trance-speaking taking place in private homes, including gatherings at the Liberty Street home of Chester and Lucretia Hatch that often featured visiting mediums. The movement became tied to reform causes including temperance, abolition, children's rights and female emancipation, and it offered women public speaking and leadership opportunities at a time when such roles were otherwise limited — female mediums who migrated to California after the Civil War went on to become founding members of the state's women's suffragist movement, a history that includes Abigail Haskell's December 1869 meeting launching the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association.
What to Expect at the 2026 Event
This year's gathering is structured as a fundraiser for the museum and its work, with three ticket tiers. Inner Circle tickets run $100 and include seating at the séance table itself; Outer Circle tickets cost $50 for standing-room admission; and Mezzanine tickets, at $40, offer a view from above. The museum has also designed a limited-edition centennial séance patch for the occasion, with reservations available at petalumamuseum.org.
Beyond Wyatt's séance, the evening will include North Bay illusionist Chris Britt and tarot reader Shera Sever, with Griffo Distillery and Moonlight Brewing providing beer and cocktails. Wonderstump artists are designing a light-and-sound scape for the event inside the museum's century-old walls.
Petaluma is not alone this Halloween in marking the Houdini centennial. In Detroit, where Houdini died, the Detroit Historical Society is hosting a full week of Halloween programming, according to ClickOnDetroit, including a free lecture and a ticketed Halloween-night dinner event featuring historian Nathan “McScary” Wakefield. The Center for Inquiry is staging its own commemorative program as well, one that frames Houdini less as a spirit to be summoned than as a skeptic in his own right — the organization's event description, posted at cfiwny.org, notes his determined efforts to expose fraudulent mediums and psychics, closing with what it calls a recreated historic performance of a Houdini séance.
