Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  * * *

  NOW, STANDING on the foredeck of the homebound steam whaler Hope, scanning the far horizon for land, Arthur Conan Doyle had no way of knowing what an extraordinary life lay before him. The whaling trip had been transformative for him. “I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth,” he wrote, but “I came off it a powerful, well-grown man.” Now all he knew for sure was that filling his lungs with the last of that “dry, crisp, exhilarating air,” he felt invigorated by it all. “I just never knew before what it was to be thoroughly healthy,” he recalled later. “I just feel as if I could go anywhere [or] do anything.” He would never forget “the peculiar otherworld feeling of the place.… You stand on the very brink of the unknown.”

  But what would come next?

  He’d recently published his first short story, “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley,” and was soon to publish another, “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star,’” using his experience on the whaling ship as grist for the mill. It was a fine short story, with a spine-tingling ending, and reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer he admired. In the story, a ship’s captain seems to go mad and runs off across the ice fields pursuing the ghost of his true love. He’s later found frozen to death. He had a smile on his face, “and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim world that lies beyond the grave.”

  “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” was the perfect story for a struggling young writer; it fit right in with a popular genre of his age. But as much as Victorians were interested in ghost stories, they were also fascinated by ghosts—ever since that night when two girls in America decided to start a conversation with “the dim world that lies beyond the grave.”

  The spiritualist movement began in upstate New York in 1848, when Kate and Maggie Fox claimed to communicate with the spirit of a murdered peddler by means of “rapping” sounds.

  COURTESY OF MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Mister Splitfoot, Do as I Do!”

  It was just after dark on a chill, blustery, early spring day, with snow still lingering on the ground in the tiny hamlet of Hydesville in upstate New York—a Friday, March 31, 1848, to be exact. In this peaceable rural community, with its gentle rhythms of seedtime and harvest, and weekly attendance at Sunday services, this day seemed much like any other. But seventy-five years later, Arthur Conan Doyle was to describe it as “in truth the greatest date in human history since the great revelation of two thousand years ago.” And that’s because a twelve-year-old girl had the fearlessness to talk back to a ghost.

  The setting could hardly have been more humble: a small wooden house on a dusty country crossroads in a town consisting of a schoolhouse, a Methodist church, and a blacksmith shop. Hydesville (so tiny it no longer exists) lay east of Rochester, then a bustling burg of about thirty-five thousand on the Erie Canal, and less than fifteen miles from the shore of chilly Lake Ontario to the north. In December 1847, a reformed alcoholic and staunch Methodist named John Fox had moved in, along with his wife, Margaret, and two youngest daughters, fourteen-year-old Margaretta (Maggie), and Kate, aged twelve. The little house was to serve as the family’s temporary rental quarters while they built something more permanent on his son’s farm nearby. Mr. Fox, who appears in an old engraving with glaring, protuberant eyes and what appears to be a permanent scowl, had moved from Rochester to take a job as the local blacksmith.

  Not long after the family moved into the Hydesville house, they began to hear odd bumps and thumps and rustlings in the house, at first only at night. The prosaic Mr. Fox ascribed the sounds to rats or mice in the walls. But it was odd: The sounds were not really like that at all. Sometimes they sounded like furniture moving. Sometimes they were distinct knocks or raps. Sometimes the sounds seemed to come from the bedroom, sometimes from the cellar. At other times, Mrs. Fox later reported in a sworn statement, the sound was “not very loud, yet it produced a jar of the bedsteads and chairs that could be felt by placing our hands on the chairs, or while we were in bed.”

  Mr. Fox, seeking another down-to-earth explanation, next tried to persuade Mrs. Fox that the sounds might be coming from the hammering of a nearby shoemaker. One problem with that explanation was that the shoemaker said he never mended shoes at night. But the raps persisted, and one night Mr. and Mrs. Fox got up in their nightclothes to prowl around the house with a lit candle, searching every nook and cranny for their source. They couldn’t find anything. Then there came a rap at the front door. Mr. Fox opened the door. There was no one there. He closed the door, waited until there was another rap, and flung open the door a second time. There was nothing there but the night air.

  As February turned to March, the disturbances increased. Footsteps echoed through the house after everyone was in bed. Once something heavy came to lie on the legs of the girls in their bed. Chairs were moved. Then the dining table. Then, one night, Kate felt something cold on her face. By late March, the two girls had grown so alarmed that their beds were moved into their parents’ ground-floor bedroom to sleep.

  “On March 30th we were disturbed all night,” Mrs. Fox later reported. “The noises were heard in all parts of the house.… We heard footsteps in the pantry, and walking down-stairs; we could not rest, and I then concluded that the house must be haunted by some unhappy, restless spirit.”

  The following day, Friday, March 31, the Foxes’ eldest son, David, who had a farm about three miles away, dropped by his parents’ house. When his mother told him about the mysterious goings-on, he smiled. “I advise you not to say a word to the neighbors about it,” David told her. “When you find it out, it will be one of the simplest things in the world.”

  That night, the family decided to go to bed early, almost before dark, because they were all so exhausted from lack of sleep. “I had been so broken of my rest I was almost sick,” Mrs. Fox recalled. But almost as soon as the family settled into bed, the knocking sounds commenced. The girls cried out, “Here they are again!”

  It was a windy night, and Mr. Fox, climbing out of bed, went to check the window sashes to see if it was simply the wind rattling the windows. Kate noticed that each time her father shook a window sash, the sounds seemed to reply. Then she turned to where the noise was, snapped her fingers, and called out the words that would later ring down through the history of spiritualism in America: “Here, Mister Splitfoot, do as I do!” (“Splitfoot” was a common term for the devil.)

  She snapped her fingers twice. And two raps immediately followed, apparently out of thin air.

  Then Maggie chimed in.

  “Now do this just as I do; count one, two, three, four,” clapping her hands with each count. Four raps immediately followed.

  Kate, still feeling playful, silently brought her thumb and forefinger together in the air. As many times as she did that, the raps responded. “Look, Mother,” she said. It can see as well as hear!

  Then Mrs. Fox, though shaken, asked “the noise” to count to ten. Ten raps followed.

  “How old is my daughter Margaret?” Fourteen raps followed.

  “How old is Kate?” Twelve raps.

  “I then asked it if it was a human being that was making the noise? And, if it was, to manifest it by the same noise,” continued Mrs. Fox’s sworn statement (made on April 11, 1848, twelve days after the “rappings” became a conversation). “There was no noise. I then asked if it was a spirit? and if it was, to manifest it by two sounds. I heard two sounds as soon as the words were spoken. I then asked, if it was an injured spirit? to give me the sound, and I heard the rapping distinctly.… If the person was living that injured it? and got the same answer.”

  “Oh, Mother, I know what it is,” Kate broke in. “Tomorrow is April Fool Day, and somebody is trying to fool us!”

  But Mrs. Fox persisted in conducting her remarkable interrogation, apparently across the veil of death, with an intelligent spirit that went on to explain (by means of rapped ans
wers to questions) that he had been a thirty-one-year-old peddler, with a family of five children, who had been murdered in the house and later buried in the basement. Finally, Mrs. Fox asked the purveyor of the sounds, whoever or whatever it might be, “Will the noise continue if I call in some of the neighbors, that they may hear it too?”

  The raps responded in the affirmative.

  At that, Mr. Fox snatched on some clothes and went to fetch the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Redfield. She was laughing when she walked into the house, thinking she’d have a good chuckle over some prank engineered by the girls. But “when she came, she saw that we were all amazed like, and that there was something in it,” Mrs. Fox recalled.

  “How old is Mrs. Redfield?” Mrs. Fox asked, and the correct number of raps immediately followed.

  “How many children does Mrs. Redfield have?” Mrs. Fox asked.

  Four raps followed.

  Suddenly Mrs. Redfield burst into tears. Her neighbors knew only her three living children. But there had been a fourth child, Mary, who died as an infant—a loss that she still felt keenly. Mrs. Redfield rushed from the house, “very much agitated,” as a neighbor later recalled, and went to get her husband, who came into the house and listened as, in response to Mrs. Fox’s questions, it rapped out his age, as well as the answers to other queries, all of them correct.

  Then Mr. Redfield went to get Mr. and Mrs. William Duesler, who had once lived in the house, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Hyde, Mr. and Mrs. Jewell, and a few other neighbors, who now crowded into the tiny, candlelit bedroom.

  Seventy-eight years later, in The History of Spiritualism, Arthur Conan Doyle imagined this scene: “That rude room, with its earnest, expectant, half-clad occupants with eager upturned faces, its circle of candlelight, and its heavy shadows lurking in the corners, might well be made the subject of a great historical painting.”

  By now, the news of these remarkable events had begun to spread like a virus through the tiny town. People up late fishing in the Ganargua River came crowding into the house, and still more, until there was barely enough room to move. And still the “spirit” responded to questions by rapping out answers.

  Eventually, the house became so crowded, and so filled with an atmosphere of expectant awe and excitement, that Mrs. Fox took the girls and left the premises. Mrs. Fox slept that night at Mrs. Redfield’s house, and the girls spent the night with other neighbors. Only Mr. Fox spent the night in the house, but the rappings continued all night long. Years later, when skeptics began to claim that it was the girls themselves who had produced what came to be known as “the Rochester rappings,” the eminent naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace observed that “on the night of March 31st, 1848, Mrs. Fox and the children left the house, Mr. Fox only remaining, and … during all night and the following night, in presence of a continual influx of neighbors the ‘raps’ continued exactly the same as when the two girls were present. This crucial fact is to be found in all the early records.”

  Mr. Duesler, bold and persistent, now took over the interrogation, probing for answers as the hushed crowd grew larger and more incredulous. Some were so frightened that they did not want to venture into the bedroom, but stood outside, listening, in the adjoining room. Though Mr. Duesler, like Mrs. Redfield, at first thought the whole business was “nonsense, and that it could be easily accounted for,” now he began asking a series of increasingly specific questions. By means of the rapped responses, Duesler elicited the same story: that the “spirit” claimed to have been murdered in the bedroom about five years earlier, by someone who lived in the house, at around midnight on a Tuesday night; that its throat had been cut with a butcher knife; that it was later buried in the dirt-floored basement; and that the motive had been a robbery of five hundred dollars. In response to a question, it affirmed that a young woman named Lucretia Pulver (known to the community) had worked there at the time of the murder but that she was gone when the crime took place.

  Then Mr. Duesler asked Charles Redfield to go down the narrow stairway into the cellar and stand in various places while Duesler asked the “spirit” if that was the correct spot where the body had been buried. In this fashion, after various questions went unanswered, the “spirit” rapped when Mr. Redfield stood in a certain spot, near the center of the basement floor.

  A crowd of people stayed in the house all that night, so hopped-up they couldn’t sleep. But by morning’s light, the rapping sounds had ceased, and the house remained silent all day. Even so, as that Saturday passed and word spread to surrounding farms and villages, more than three hundred people massed in the house and surrounding yard. And at nightfall, like a teasingly delaying prima donna, the “rapping” commenced again. By then, the townspeople had appointed a committee to begin investigating the sounds. And that night a group of men descended into the dark basement, with candles, and began digging up the dirt floor in the spot the “spirit” had indicated. But it had been an unusually wet spring, and the river ran nearby; before they got three feet down, the hole began filling with water, so they had to give up.

  “On Sunday morning, the second of April, the noise commenced again, and was heard throughout the day by all who came there,” Mrs. Fox’s sworn statement went on. “I am not a believer in haunted houses or supernatural experiences. I am very sorry there has been so much excitement about it. It has been a great deal of trouble to us. It was our misfortune to live here at this time; but I am willing and anxious that the truth should be known, and that a true statement should be made.”

  “Trouble,” to say the least. Her hair had turned white within a week.

  Mr. Fox, in his sworn statement, added his own bewilderment to that of his wife: “I do not know of any way to account for these noises, as being caused by natural means. We have searched in every nook and corner in and about the house, at different times, to ascertain, if possible, whether anything or anybody was secreted there, that could make the noise, and have never been able to find anything that explained the mystery. It has caused us a great deal of trouble and anxiety. Hundreds have visited the house, so it is impossible to attend to our daily occupations.” He concluded that if evidence someday indicates that a body was indeed buried beneath the cellar, “I shall have no doubt but what this is a supernatural appearance.”

  Mr. Fox, his wife, and his daughters were dead by the time the crucial evidence came to light half a century later. In November 1904, children playing in the basement of the local “Spook House” (as it came to be known) discovered that the east wall of the cellar had caved in and it was a false wall. Behind it stood the true outer foundation wall of the house. Between the two walls lay hidden the skeleton of a man and his tin peddler’s pack.

  * * *

  WITHIN DAYS after the rappings began in the house in Hydesville, word of these remarkable events had spread throughout the region. Among the curious was an attorney named E. E. Lewis, who lived in the nearby town of Canandaigua. By April 11, Lewis had arrived in Hydesville and began taking sworn depositions from every adult involved in the incident, including Mr. and Mrs. Fox, the Redfields, William Duesler, and other neighbors. By late April, Lewis had printed a pamphlet about his investigation, called A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County. It offered a fifty-dollar reward to anyone who could prove that the noises were “the work of any human being.”

  Lewis also sought out and interviewed Lucretia Pulver, the young woman who had lived in the Hydesville house while working for a previous tenant, a Mr. and Mrs. John Bell. Lucretia Pulver told this story: Five years earlier, in 1843, she had boarded for three months with the Bells, working as a household servant in exchange for room and board. One afternoon, a peddler arrived and was invited to stay overnight (a common practice at the time). He was a man in his early thirties, dressed in a black frock coat, with gray vest and trousers. When he opened up his pack on the kitchen table, Mrs. Bell and Lucretia saw his wondrous wares—fancy dress goods, laces and b
raids, thread, scissors and thimbles, and sparkling small trinkets.

  Afterward, Mrs. Bell told Lucretia to go home to her parents’ house. But Lucretia was so taken by some of the peddler’s goods she made him promise to stop by her parents’ house later, on his way out of town the next morning. But the peddler never appeared, and when she’d returned to the Bells’ house three days later, the peddler was gone. Lucretia told Lewis that some time later, she’d gone down into the basement to fetch something and was alarmed to find herself sinking up to her knees in loose dirt. She let out a shriek of surprise. When she came back upstairs, Mrs. Bell “laughed at me for being frightened, and said it was only where the rats had been at work in the ground.” Later, she testified in her statement, she had seen John Bell dragging heavy cartloads of dirt into the basement, allegedly to cover the rat holes. A couple of days later, the Bells abruptly announced that they were going away for a few days, but not before Mrs. Bell had presented Lucretia with a shiny new thimble, supposedly purchased for fifty cents from the peddler.

  Then the noises began. At night, the girl began to waken to strange sounds. The Bells’ dog would “sit under the bedroom window and howl all night long,” she testified. “I did not know what to think of the noises I have heard.”

  Because Lucretia’s statement appeared to point an accusatory finger at John Bell, the libel-wary attorney Lewis omitted Bell’s name from his pamphlet. But eventually word got back to Bell, who had moved away to a different part of the county. John Bell produced a certificate of good character, signed by forty-four people, to the effect that they “believed him to be a man of upright and honest life” and “incapable of committing the crime of which he was suspected.”

  Lewis also interviewed the Weekmans, who had lived in the house prior to the Fox family. Michael Weekman reported hearing a rap at the front door one night, but when he opened the door, there was no one there. A short while later, he heard the knocking again. But when he closed the door, he held on to the latch for a minute or so; then, when the rapping started again, he could feel a faint jarring of the door. But once again, when he flung open the door, no one was there. He walked around the house in the dark but could find nothing amiss.