Oops! You didn't think that one through, Mrs. Doyle!

In 1922, in Atlantic City, Houdini joined the author Arthur Conan Doyle in a séance led by his wife, Jean Conan Doyle, who tried to contact Houdini’s mother. 

In a trance, she scrawled pages of writing, Houdini later said, a letter “purported to have been dictated by my sainted mother.”

Like a skeptical Sherlock Holmes, Houdini was unconvinced. The event spurred the magician on in his campaign to debunk spiritualists. His mother would never have invoked a Christian cross, he said, and certainly wouldn’t have sent messages in English, which she couldn’t even speak.

“Houdini: Art and Magic” opens on Friday and runs through 27 March at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street NY ; thejewishmuseum.org. It will later travel to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin.