The 5,000-square-foot Houdini Museum, which boasts two of the graphically loudest websites on the Net, cornering the domain-name market with Houdini.org and Houdini.net, is housed in a century-old building on Main Avenue in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in an area, its owners point out, that was on the vaudeville circuit frequented by their hero.

Claiming to have “the world’s only building devoted to Houdini”, magicians Dorothy Dietrich and former Hocus Pocus magazine publisher Dick Brooks (aka John Bravo) offer Houdini-related artefacts including a milk can, straitjackets and locks in a setting that recreates Thomas Edison’s America. They have also persevered in holding seances each Halloween to try and contact Harry’s spirit.

The Houdini Museum opened in Scranton to house the collection that had been in part on display at Dietrich and Brooks’ Magic Towne House on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during the 1970s. That venue hosted not only performances by a series of professional magicians but also annual Halloween seances, some of which had Houdini biographers Milbourne Christopher and Walter Gibson in attendance.

Brooks says Gibson was asked by Bess to carry on the seances, not so much in plaintive yearning for contact but as a tribute to the much-missed star, and Gibson in turn asked Dietrich to keep them going. They do continue, and the museum’s website invites everyone to participate by taking a few minutes to think about Harry each Halloween — and let them know if anything happens.

In August 2007 Fox News and newspaper editors had some headline fun after a 25-year-old man broke into the museum but was unable to escape from police. Three witnesses saw two men fleeing the building in the early hours of August 29 and one even gave chase, but the other suspect got away.

A local man was charged with attempted burglary, trespass and loitering. Then a witness pointed out a car parked in an adjacent alley, with six large statues in its trunk: four sculpted “monk heads” and a pair of flowered, terracotta stone pieces.

None belonged to the museum, from which nothing was taken, Dietrich said, and only minor damage was done there. The cops traced the statues to a store that salvages architectural antiques and put their value at $600, then added charges of theft and receiving stolen property to the suspect’s resume.

In August 2008 the Scranton museum hosted a well-publicised attempt to contact Harry’s spirit by Canadian psychic Kim Dennis, who claimed beforehand says that Houdini regularly communicates with her and asked her to arrange a meeting for him with Jeff Blood.

The “seance” — unusual since it wasn’t Halloween — began at 7pm in the presence of the museum’s Dick Brooks and Dorothy Dietrich (who is married to Jeff Blood’s brother Forrest) and Richard Bangs, former president of the Society of American Magicians’ New York chapter. The details were set out in a rather frank “press release”.

Dennis, who starred in her own television series, “Antiques Psychic”, for three years on Canadian Learning Television, began by asking whether any observers had questions for Houdini. Blood posed a health question, the answer to which he believed only Harry would know. Dennis failed to provide any response.

When Brooks produced a sealed envelope containing the answers to three questions forwarded by celebrated debunker James Randi, Dennis called a halt to the proceedings and stormed out. When approached later by a local TV news team, she fled again.