The table will be set again. On the evening of October 30, 2026, the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum will push its reading-room furniture aside and try, one more time, to reach Harry Houdini. The timing is not casual. Houdini died on October 31, 1926. The museum's gathering falls on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of his death, which is to say on the night the old séance tradition always favored.
For anyone who grew up in Sonoma County in the second half of the last century, the ritual needs no explaining. For decades, a Houdini séance was as reliable a Halloween fixture here as pumpkins in the grocery window. It began in 1964, when Bill Soberanes, the Petaluma Argus-Courier columnist, teamed up with two local residents, Nahmen Nissen and Fred Daniels, to hold a sitting. Thirteen people formed an inner circle around a table laid with candles and props: a pistol, a ouija board, handcuffs, and Houdini's own magic wand.
Soberanes was the engine of the thing, and he was, by any measure, an odd and generative man. Born in 1921, he spent 49 years at the Argus-Courier, and in that time he seemed to invent half the town's civic life. He founded the World Wrist Wrestling Championship and the World's Ugliest Dog Contest. He was known around Petaluma as Mr. Petaluma, a man with a briar pipe he spent more time relighting than smoking, and a habit of firing off ideas at machine-gun speed. The séance was one of them, and it stuck.
The annual sittings moved around the county as the years went on, from private homes to old buildings with haunted reputations. Houdini himself, notably, never showed.
What gave the séances their standing was not spectacle but a genuine thread of connection. Soberanes enlisted William Allstrand, a Sonoma County magician who performed under the stage name Poogie-Poogie and who had been a friend of Houdini and his wife, Bess. Allstrand was said to hold a coded message the couple had arranged between them, the kind of private signal spiritualists had used for generations to test whether a communicating spirit was who it claimed to be. Because of Allstrand, the Petaluma séances were regarded as "official" séances rather than a local stunt. Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch, who grew up waiting for the Halloween Argus-Courier because he knew Soberanes would be writing about the séance, later made a documentary about the tradition. "What struck me was that they were done honestly," he told the Petaluma360 news site in 2012. "It wasn't a show or something done as a joke. They were serious about what they were doing."
The run of annual séances ended in 2002. Wyrsch's documentary screened in Petaluma in November 2012, and there have been flickers of revival since. This year's is the most ambitious.
Leading the attempt will be Jenessa Wyatt, a Sonoma County psychic and professional medium. She will be joined by Chris Britt, a North Bay illusionist, and tarot reader Shera Sever. Wonderstump artists are designing a light-and-sound scape for the evening, and Griffo Distillery and Moonlight Brewing will supply cocktails and beer. The museum has also produced a limited-edition centennial séance patch, available for reservation through petalumamuseum.org.
Seating is tiered, and the tiers mean something. Inner Circle tickets, at $100, put you at the séance table itself, the modern equivalent of those thirteen chairs. Outer Circle admission, at $50, is standing room. Mezzanine tickets, at $40, offer a view from above. Proceeds support the museum and its work.
The setting is apt in ways the organizers may not have planned. The museum occupies one of Sonoma County's two surviving Carnegie libraries, its cornerstone laid in 1904 to a design by Brainerd Jones, the Petaluma architect for whom the building was a first major commission. It served as the city's free public library for most of a century before becoming a museum. A hundred and twenty years of accumulated Petaluma history will be stacked in the rooms around the table.
There is a further resonance, and it cuts against the evening's premise in an interesting way. Spiritualism took root in the region in the 1850s as a countercultural movement, and Petaluma had an active community of its own, with séances and trance speaking held in private homes, including gatherings at the Liberty Street house of Chester and Lucretia Hatch that often featured visiting mediums. The movement attached itself to reform causes, among them temperance, abolition and female emancipation, and it gave women a public platform when few existed; female mediums who came west after the Civil War became founding members of California's suffrage movement, a history that runs through Abigail Haskell's December 1869 meeting launching the Sonoma County Woman Suffrage Association. Houdini spent much of his later career exposing mediums as frauds, and the museum's own building sits on ground where the movement he fought was thriving.
As for Houdini's personal connection to Petaluma, the record is thinner than local legend suggests. He was long rumored to have performed at the Hill Opera House, now the Phoenix Theater. Museum executive director Stacey Atchley has said that claim is unsubstantiated. What a museum research volunteer did confirm were January 1920 advertisements in the Petaluma Argus for Houdini's silent film "The Grim Game," which played at the Hill Opera House on January 10 and 11 of that year. His presence in town, in other words, is documented on celluloid rather than in the flesh.
Petaluma will not be alone in marking the centennial. In Detroit, where Houdini died, the Detroit Historical Society has planned a week of Halloween programming, including a free lecture and a ticketed Halloween-night dinner with historian Nathan "McScary" Wakefield. The Center for Inquiry is staging a commemorative program that frames Houdini as a skeptic in his own right, noting his campaigns against fraudulent mediums and closing with a recreated historic séance.
But the Petaluma version has the longer local memory behind it. Sixty-two years after thirteen people sat around a candlelit table with a pistol, a ouija board and Houdini's wand, the museum will try again. The event runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at 20 4th St. Whether anything answers is, as ever, the point.