Omaha’s Magic House

In Omaha, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century, businessman and magic inventor David P. Abbott held court in his “House of Mystery,” where magicians including Houdini, Kellar, and Thurston visited to create and discuss magic. “He would perform four-hour magic shows in his house, usually not starting before midnight. Because he was entertaining people who were coming through on the vaudeville circuit, and they weren’t done performing until midnight,” Dave Arch, executive director of the Omaha Magical Society, told Nebraska Public Media. 

Abbott died in 1934, and his house, nestled in a residential neighborhood of Omaha, was sold in 1936. In August 2024, however, the house was once again on the market after the previous family had lived there for over five decades. (That family also found a lost manuscript of Abbott’s in their attic, which Omaha Magical Society member Walter Graham first published in 1977.)

The Society heard the news and reached out to Teller, who is a huge fan of Abbott’s and had bought the manuscript from Graham decades before. Arch told Nebraska Public Media what happened next: “Teller said, ‘Here’s what I’m willing to do. I will buy the house. I will give it to the Omaha Magical Society. I’ll put a lien on it for two years, for what I paid for it, and if in two years, that would be September or October of 2026, if you guys have it off the ground and self-supporting, I’ll just forgive the loan.’”

The Omaha Magical Society now owns the house, and is working with Preserve Omaha to restore it back to how it was in Abbott’s time. The plan isn’t to have the house become a museum, but for Abbott’s home to become a space for Omaha Magical Society members to congregate for shows and events. It will also have a caretaker who will live in a basement apartment, and the goal is to get it on the National Register of Historic Places by October 2026, just in time for Teller’s two-year deadline.