HOLLYWOOD, California, USA, October 31, 2026 — A pocket watch Bess Houdini gave her husband in 1910 sold for $204,000 at the Magic Castle on Saturday, leading an auction held 100 years to the day after Harry Houdini’s death.
All 100 lots from the collection of Kevin Connolly sold in Houdini Returns: The Centennial Auction, presented by Potter & Potter Auctions. The prices realized total $960,030, including the 20% buyer’s premium, as do all prices mentioned below. A companion online sale added $31,000, for a grand total of $991,030. Gabe Fajuri, president of Potter & Potter, confirmed the final total at just shy of a million dollars.
“We were ecstatic with the results of the record-setting auction,” Fajuri told Conjurly. Potter & Potter called it a white-glove sale, auction parlance for one in which every lot sells and a rarity in the business. The total came to nearly three times the projected high estimate, the company said.
A pocket watch and a record handcuff price
Houdini’s watch sold for more than 10 times its low estimate of $20,000, against a high estimate of $40,000. Randy Pitchford, owner of the Magic Castle, had the winning bid.
Bess gave Houdini the watch for his 36th birthday, on March 24, 1910, while they were touring Australia. Its engraving contains a cryptic acrostic reading, “For Harry / Ever Houdini / Remembering In / Complete Happiness / BESS / 3/24/10.” The first letters of the words in the body of the inscription spell “Ehrich,” his birth name. The date is telling, too. Houdini publicly gave his birthday as April 6, but his letters to his brother Hardeen put it at March 24, the date on the watch.
Fajuri said the price was the second highest ever for a Houdini item. The record is the $324,000 Potter & Potter got on October 29, 2022, for an automatic flowering rosebush, a magic apparatus made for Houdini. Guinness World Records lists that rosebush as the most expensive magic trick sold at auction.
A pair of gaffed Darby-style handcuffs from the 1890s, stamped “HOUDINI” in block capitals, making them one of a kind bearing that hallmark, brought $114,000 against an estimate of $6,000 to $12,000. Fajuri told Conjurly it was the highest price ever for a pair of Houdini handcuffs, and perhaps for handcuffs of any type.
The early years, on paper
A group portrait of the Welsh Brothers Circus cast, with Houdini and Bess seated among them, brought $45,600 against an estimate of $10,000 to $20,000. Fajuri called it the most expensive circus photograph ever sold.
Houdini identified the performers on the mount in his own hand and added a caption: “Welsh Brothers Circus Season 1896. Great 10 cent circus in out of the way places.” The photograph passed from the Houdinis to the family of mentalist Joseph Dunninger and then to Connolly.
An August 1911 family photograph showing all five Weiss brothers with Bess and their mother, Cecelia, drew 44 bids and sold for $31,200 against an estimate of $3,000 to $6,000.
Posters, portraits, and spirits
Two circa 1915 Orpheum Theater posters, each estimated at $4,000 to $6,000, ran well past expectations. One for Seattle, billing him as the “Justly World Famous Self-Liberator,” brought $36,000. One for Winnipeg, billing him as “The Elusive American,” brought $26,400.
A 39-by-30-inch lobby portrait from New York’s Apeda Studio, which Potter & Potter called the only such example it could trace, also brought $26,400 against an estimate of $5,000 to $10,000.
A 1920s composite spirit photograph, showing Houdini’s ghost rising from his own body on a sofa at his Harlem home, sold for $14,400 against an estimate of $1,000 to $2,000. Potter & Potter said it is likely unique. An invitation to the final Houdini séance, held on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles on Halloween 1936, sold for $6,600 against an estimate of $1,000 to $2,000. Signed in ink by Bess, it is on silver paper, while about 300 others were printed on gold. Potter & Potter said it is the first silver example it has seen.
The house behind the sale
Gabe Fajuri and his father, Sami Fajuri, founded Potter & Potter in Chicago in 2007. Its name is an English translation of the Arabic “Fajuri.”
The business grew out of Gabe’s friendship with Jay Marshall, the “Dean of American Magicians,” who ran the Chicago magic shop Magic Inc. with his wife, Frances Ireland, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 14 times with his glove-puppet rabbit, Lefty. Gabe befriended Marshall at the shop after moving to Chicago in 2001. When Marshall died in 2005, Gabe helped sort and sell his collection, and Potter & Potter later started in Gabe’s living room.
The house began as a magic specialist. By 2023 it was selling dozens of categories of collectibles, with annual revenues of more than $10 million, Crain’s Chicago Business reported.
In June, Potter & Potter’s Magicana of the Golden Age auction brought in $1.17 million. With the Halloween sales, those two events alone put more than $2.1 million in magic across the firm’s auction block this year.
A collector’s half century
Connolly began collecting as a teenager in New Jersey after watching the 1953 Tony Curtis film Houdini with his father in the late 1960s, LAist reported. The sale marks the winding down of his collecting after more than five decades.
The collection was shown at Potter & Potter’s Chicago gallery during October before traveling to the Magic Castle. Collectors, historians, and Academy of Magical Arts members were in the room, with phone and online bidders also participating. A centennial Houdini séance at the Castle, led by magician Rob Zabrecky, followed at 5 p.m.
The enthusiasm for items in this collection can be seen when comparing it with Potter & Potter’s June sale, which offered more than three times as many lots. The Connolly lots averaged $9,600 each, nearly three times June’s $3,263. Even without the watch and the handcuffs, they averaged $6,551, about double June’s figure.
Connolly spent more than five decades building his collection. On the 100th anniversary of Houdini’s death, these 100 pieces found new homes in two exciting hours of bidding that exceeded expectations.
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