Near Omaha’s 35th and Center streets sits an unassuming turn-of-the-20th-century house. The house was once owned by the Schrat family, which lived there for around 58 years. The parents raised their kids there, but made an effort to keep the house looking as it did when they bought it.
The house, unknown to many, was built for a very specific purpose.
To create magic.
Its original owner, David P. Abbott, was a banker by trade, but absolutely loved magic.
“He was an inventor of magic; some of his inventions remain to this day and are used by professional magicians,” said Dave Arch, executive director of the Omaha Magical Society. “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.”
One trick Abbott invented was called the talking tea kettle. The trick would have the attendees write questions to ask the tea kettle. The kettle would then answer their questions.
“He had figured out how to put a big induction coil under the floor, and then he had an induction coil in his tea kettle,” Arch said.
The pair of coils would allow Fannie Abbott, David Abbott’s wife, to speak into a microphone and have her voice transmitted through the coils, and out of the tea kettle’s spout.
“He used Dictaphone parts to build this material. We know that because he wrote down his directions for his talking tea kettle,” Arch said.
Abbott would have magicians and performers such as Harry Houdini visit his home to see what invention or trick he was currently working on. They would then take his tricks and use them in their performances. Houdini would actually stay at Abbott’s house from time to time.
“David Abbott, his writings carry through to where David Copperfield would be very familiar with his work and built on his work,” Arch said. “Penn and Teller did such great work with his floating ball, and took it to a level I don’t think David Abbott would recognize, but his was the inspiration that you would have a floating ball.”
Omaha’s Magical Society did know about the house’s history, with Abbott being a founding member of the club. Walter Graham, a former member who is now deceased, approached the Schrat family while they were living in the house and asked if they had found anything related to Abbott.
“They said, well, you know, there is a box upstairs,” Arch said. “And by golly, the manuscript that David Abbott had written down was in a box upstairs, just sitting in a corner.”
The manuscript contained the blueprints for many of Abbott’s tricks, and Graham would go on to print and publish Abbott’s manuscript.
Teller, of Penn and Teller, is a lifelong fan of Abbott, incorporating Abbott’s tricks into Penn and Teller shows. When he heard that Abbott’s manuscript has been found, he traveled to Omaha, and bought the manuscript off of Graham. He went on to publish a pair of books about the history of Abbott, and the house he built to perform magic out of.
This was only the first time Teller would cross paths with the Omaha Magical Society. In August of 2024, the Abbott house went up for sale. The Omaha Magical Society took notice, and immediately thought to contact Teller. After some back and forth, they were able to get in contact.
“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,’” Arch recalled.
The Omaha Magical Society now owns the house and is on the way to restoring it back to how Abbott left it.
“I can’t remember if they reached out to us or we reached out to them, but the bottom line is that when we started to hear about this in the works, we got very excited,” said Erin Fox, Preserve Omaha’s board of directors’ president. “This is right up our alley. I would say that we at Preserve Omaha, wanted to get into the house and see it, because that’s, I mean, because we’re all just preservation nuts and history nuts.”
Preserve Omaha’s goal as a group is to help people interested in preservation of old buildings accomplish that goal. That can be through connecting individuals to repair people who specialize in older infrastructure, or in helping with the application process for entering the National Register of Historic Places.
The Omaha Magical Society reached out to Preserve Omaha to assist with its goal of restoring the house to its original form, and in its goal of getting the house on the National Register of Historic Homes.
“It demonstrates Omaha’s historic prominence,” Fox said. “You had these famous magicians coming from all over the world to come meet with this banker/magician/inventor. That’s a huge part of Omaha’s history that has just resurfaced, and it just resurfaced because of the house, you know. And so, you know, I think that demonstrates the importance of preserving our physical place history, so that we can keep on telling these stories.”
The two organizations partnered to put on an event for members of Preserve Omaha to see the Abbott house, as well as to learn its interesting history.
At the event, attendees toured the house and were able to learn about how unique this normal-looking early 20th century house is.
When they weren’t touring the house, attendees were up the street at the Hispanic Art Center, watching magicians perform.
One of those magicians was Adam Schacht, the Omaha Magical Society’s acting president. He was going table to table performing close up magic. One trick that wowed each table had to do with disappearing clown noses. He would present two red balls, give one to someone at the table, and hold on to the other. He would then fist bump the person, and ask them to open up their hand, where there were now two balls.
Each time he performed the trick, audible gasps and wows would cascade around the table.
“The sponge ball routine was one of my first, was the first trick ever performed in [my first] show, where it jumped from one hand to the other hand,” Schacht said. “That trick’s so powerful. It gets everybody and the reaction’s always the same. It seems so simple, but once that happens, it’s just like, whoa. I love seeing that moment, and I think I always like doing it, because it just reminds me back to that first moment.”
That sense of wonder was a common factor in why the Omaha Magical Society and Preserve Omaha felt it important to preserve this house.
“David Abbott represents the romance that draws many in,” Arch said. “Now some come in because they like to watch magic. Some come in because they like the history of magic. Some come in because they like to perform magic. There’re so many rooms in the house of magic that they come in for different reasons, but ultimately, if they stay in, they have been intrigued by the romance that’s gone on through the ages, and David Abbott’s a piece of that.”
The house is not planned to be open to the public like a museum. The Omaha Magical Society will allow its members to use the house for shows and events. It also plans to have a permanent resident who will live in a basement apartment and take care of the house. The goal is to have the house operational, as well as on the National Register of Historic Places by October next year.
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