More On Mind Reading...

As I've said, mind reading is just another parlor trick, and there are many ways to do it. Harry Houdini and others had an ingenious method. He and his wife would ask people to come forward, and lay everything in their pocket on a table. And they figured out everything that anyone at that time could possibly have in their pocket (which I thought was amazing by itself, when I first read this age 12). And the way Bess told her husband Harry what was on the table, was the way she asked the question.

Words, movements, gestures, were all important to for this trick. There even was a code at the time for spelling out word thru a type of Morse code. I'm not kidding. That was idea behind the code Houdini promised Bess he would use if he could communicate from the dead, "Rosabelle, believe". In their act, each word or pair equaled a letter, and "Rosabelle" spelled out the word believe. (Rosabelle was also Bess Houdini's favorite song.)

I was also thinking then, misdirecting people might work better if the code word was at the end of the sentence. The crowd would never suspect that. Remember, the person doing the mind reading act only has to hear that one word or phrase. Something that had no meaning to anyone else, except Houdini and his wife. (John Dennis Fitzgerald also talks about this trick in his Great Brain novels.)