A Century After Houdini, Petaluma Pulls Up a Chair for Mr. Petaluma's Séance Again

What happens to a town tradition when the man who invented it was also the one writing it up in the paper?

For close to four decades, Petaluma's Halloween séance for Harry Houdini belonged to Bill Soberanes. He organized it, ran the circle and then wrote about it in his column. On Friday, October 30, the eve of the 100th anniversary of Houdini's death, the Petaluma Historical Library & Museum brings the séance back under its own leaded-glass dome. The séance no longer belongs to one man. It has become part of local history, and the museum is presenting it alongside a cemetery walk and an exhibition in the same week.

The columnist who staged his own news

Soberanes was born in 1921 and started a weekly column in the Petaluma News in 1950. He moved it to the Petaluma Argus-Courier in 1954 and stayed with that paper until 2003. By the 1970s, people commonly called him "Mr. Petaluma."

The séance was only one of his promotions. According to the Petaluma Historian, he set up a January 1955 match between Jack Homel and Oliver Kullberg that grew into the town's wrist-wrestling tournament. ABC's Wide World of Sports started televising it in 1969. He also put on a Sonoma-to-Petaluma walkathon, a Whiskerino contest, a river rowboat contest, a table-tennis championship and an ugly-dog contest.

That background explains the séance. Soberanes invented events and then reported on them, and Halloween gave him a yearly event with a ready-made story.

How the circle worked

The Argus-Courier's 2014 history dates the first Harry Houdini Memorial Séance to October 31, 1964. Soberanes organized it with magician Nahman Nissen, Fred Daniels and William Alstrand. The setup followed the same rules every year:

1. An inner circle of 13 people sat at the table.
2. Magical props were set out, and everyone linked hands.
3. The circle sat through 13 minutes of silence.
4. Soberanes then asked people what they had experienced, and he reported it in the paper.

Bill Linnell recalled that last step for the Argus-Courier in 2021. Accounts of the timing differ. The 2014 report says the circle sat at midnight. Linnell remembered a gong 13 minutes before midnight, followed by the 13-minute period.

The location changed from year to year. The 2014 account lists historic homes, a cemetery, San Francisco's Wax Museum Chamber of Horrors and places with a haunted reputation. The museum says many of the séances took place in its building at Fourth and B.

The séance also had a real target. Houdini died on October 31, 1926. Before that, he and his wife, Bess, worked out a secret code so she could tell whether a message really came from him. The Argus-Courier noted in 2015 that Bess gave up her own ten-year séance effort in 1936. Petaluma picked up the effort 28 years after she stopped.

The years after Mr. Petaluma

The record after Soberanes is less clear. The Argus-Courier's 2021 retrospective names 2002 as the last Soberanes-era séance. The same article reproduces a museum flyer, captioned June 2003, that advertises an "umpteenth annual" séance.

Filmmaker Tom Wyrsch brought it back about a decade later. The 2021 piece dates the revival to 2012. The Argus-Courier's 2014 history says he revived it "last year," which would mean 2013. His 50th-anniversary séance took place on October 30, 2014, at Flying Cloud Farm in Petaluma. The Argus-Courier's write-up counted about 50 people. Attendees told the paper they felt chills and cold spots, saw candle flames move and sensed a presence in the room. Like the Soberanes reports, these were impressions people shared afterward.

This year's version differs from all of those. The museum is the host, which takes the séance out of the hands of an individual promoter and puts it in the institution that keeps the town's records.

The 2026 gathering under the dome

The building fits the occasion. It opened as a Carnegie library, with its cornerstone laid in 1904. It was built from locally quarried stone to a design by local architect Brainerd Jones. It was dedicated as a museum in 1978. The museum describes its leaded-glass dome as one of Northern California's largest free-standing domes. Guy wires hold it up, and light comes through a glass roof enclosure above it.

The evening runs from 7 to 9 p.m. It opens with a reception that includes cocktails, small bites, tarot and magic. Then the lights go down and Sonoma County psychic medium Jenessa Wyatt leads the séance. The ticket tiers reflect the layout of the old library:

• The Inner Circle, $100: a seat at the séance table, with very limited seating
• The Gathering, $50: standing room on the main floor around the circle
• The Beyond, $40: a view from the museum's historic mezzanine

All tickets include the reception, and guests must be 21 or older. Tickets are sold through the museum's Eventbrite page.

The museum also repeats a local legend that Houdini performed in Petaluma himself. It remains a legend, which suits a séance.

Petaluma is not the only place marking the date. Houdini's former New York home has scheduled three séances for Saturday, October 31, each limited to 13 guests. The first, at 1:26 p.m., is billed as the "Time of Death" séance. Both places use the same number 13. Petaluma's version also has decades of local newspaper coverage behind it.

The same museum fills the rest of the week

The séance is the main event, but the museum's people are behind much of Halloween week. The schedule after this post publishes:

The Cemetery Walk is presented by the Petalumans of Yesteryear. Costumed docents play early residents such as Lyman Byce, Addie Atwater and Ida Belle McNear. The tour starts at the Cypress Hill Memorial Park office parking lot and ends inside the Cypress Hill columbarium, another Brainerd Jones design. That means the week opens in one Jones building and peaks in another six days later. Questions about the tour go to the museum at 707-778-4398, not to the cemetery.

The Cider Circus takes place the same afternoon down by the river, so both events fit into one Saturday. On Halloween itself, the Petaluma Downtown Association's Trick or Treat Trail runs through participating businesses. The association plans to post its 2026 map and full participant list on October 26.

If you make it to the museum on séance night, the Día de los Muertos exhibition and its community altars are in the same building through November 8. For more about the town beyond Halloween, see our Petaluma neighborhood guide. If you're also following October events in Marin, here's how Novato fills the month with classic cars.

The Kristie Martinelli Team likes it when a town keeps its odd traditions going, and Mr. Petaluma's séance is one of the oddest in the North Bay. If you have memories or old clippings from a Soberanes séance, or plan to be in the circle on October 30, we'd love to hear from you. Work With Us to stay connected to Petaluma stories like this one.