By Buck Wolf

Oct. 26, 2001 --   If there's a way to cheat death, Harry Houdini vowed he'd send a message from the Great Beyond. This Halloween, loyal followers of the famed magician will try once again to summon his spirit.

Don't be confused by cheap imitators, folks. If the world-famous Houdini is going to grace us with his ghostly presence, it's going to be at the Official Houdini Séance. It's even trademarked.

"I think the chances to make a connection this time are excellent. We have friends and family of Houdini who will join the séance and they will create the necessary spiritual vibrations," says Rev. Raymond Fraser, 56, of Canton, Mich.

"I have spoken to many spirits. I have a 70 percent success rate." Training at the Spiritualist Correspondence School

Houdini was a famous debunker of table-levitating spiritualists and often exposed them as flimflam artists who used simple parlor tricks to exploit the gullible.

Fraser, who was ordained through a correspondence course by the National Association of Spiritual Churches, says Houdini's low opinion of clairvoyants like himself doesn't matter.

"Folks like that are only non-believers when they are alive," he says. "When they are dead they know that we are all spirits who can exist outside the body."

Through séance, Fraser says he's helped dozens of people make contact with dead relatives. The communication can occur in many ways, he says. Sometimes it's a materialization — a milky white haze of the departed spirit hovers over the room. Sometimes it's a disembodied voice. Sometimes the spirit will speak through the body of a séance participant.

"In 1978, I was a salesman for IBM," Fraser says. "I went to a séance, a frail old woman went into a trance, and the spirit of a man spoke through her body. That's when I knew there was something here."

Yet Fraser admits there are fakes in his field. Beware those who claim they've spoken to famous people. "You hear all these claims that someone made contact with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln," he says. "Those people are full of crap."