Also on the platform that night were five distinguished local people chosen by the spirits, including a Methodist minister named the Reverend Asahel Jervis. Referring to the supernatural source of the rapping, he said, “I know it is true, and I’ll face a frowning world.” Yet so certain were the editors of the Rochester Democrat that the committee would reveal the whole business as a hoax they had prepared a story with the headline “Entire Exposure of the Rapping Humbug” for the next morning’s front page.
At the spirits’ request, Eliab Capron took the podium first, to give a short introductory lecture, summarizing the mysterious events that had occurred, beginning with the eerie rapping in the Hydesville house nearly twenty months earlier. He also told the audience that he had begun to hear the sounds in his own home, in Auburn, and that several other prominent local people had also had the same experience. Capron closed by admitting that he could not explain what the mysterious noises were, but he was convinced of what they were not—fakery, or demons.
To be fair, the editor of a religious newspaper called Second Advent was also allowed to speak briefly. He earnestly announced that he had no doubt the sounds were spiritual but that they were the spirit of the devil, who was up to his old tricks “in these latter days.”
Then Capron, with a dramatic flourish, announced that the spirits would demonstrate the famous “rapping” that had excited the attention of all upstate New York. First faintly, then more loudly, a ghostly rapping resounded through the hall—apparently from the floor, then the walls, then the ceiling.
At the close of the meeting, a committee of five distinguished local men was appointed. The next evening, in the second meeting at Corinthian Hall, the committee reported its findings to a restive crowd. At a secret location, without any of Leah’s or Maggie’s friends present, and in proximity to them, the committee members had distinctly heard the rapping sounds themselves. And though the answers to their questions “were not altogether right nor altogether wrong,” the committee admitted it had “entirely failed to discover any means by which [the presumed fraud] could be done.”
Murmurs of discontent rippled through the audience at the reading of this report. “Many persons,” wrote Leah, “were disappointed and indignant at the discovery that it was not a cheat.” Leah sensed such hostility from the crowd that there was an “unmistakable willingness to proceed to violence.”
The disgruntled crowd, still unsatisfied, appointed another five-person committee of discontents, including a Dr. Langworthy, as chairman. Held in a lawyer’s office, this second examination involved (among other things) listening to the women’s hearts with a stethoscope, but though the committee had “conclusively shown [the sounds] to be produced neither by machinery or ventriloquism,” no clue was discovered that would fully explain them. All the committee members reported hearing the raps on the floor, on the wall, and on the door. Yet a third committee was appointed, this one so openly hostile it came to be known as the Infidel Committee. One man, W. L. Burtis, volunteered that he was an expert at exposing fraud and said that if he failed to figure out the trick, he would forfeit a new beaver hat. He was immediately voted onto the committee. Another man, named Kenyon, said, “If I cannot fathom the fraud, I will throw myself over Genesee Falls!” And he was promptly voted aboard the new committee. A committee of three ladies was also appointed, to examine the girls after they had disrobed.
The next morning, in a hotel room, Maggie and Leah were subjected to the indignity of a strip search. In that prudish age, both of them shed a few tears of humiliation. The female investigators examined their gowns, petticoats, and underwear after they’d removed them, but no “trick” could be found. Then they gave Maggie and Leah dresses of their own choosing to wear.
Next, the rest of the committee began rudely grilling the two women, “taunting us in every way,” and attempting to induce the famous rapping sounds in response to questions. But to the chagrin of Maggie and Leah, and the merriment of the committee, the “spirits” remained completely silent all morning. Irreverent jokes began bouncing around the room. Maggie started to cry. They could hear the footsteps of their friends in the hall outside the locked hotel room, but their supporters were not permitted to come in, and “we felt ourselves forsaken, and disposed to give up in despair,” Leah recalled. Finally, after several hours, someone suggested that they all adjourn this nonsense for lunch.
“No,” Leah insisted, “we shall not stir from this room until the time for this investigation shall expire; which will be at six o’clock P.M.”
So lunch was brought in; it was laid on a big table in the middle of the room. While they ate, “the party were joking and funning at our expense, when, suddenly the great table began to tremble, and raised first one end and then the other, with loud creaking sounds, like a ship struggling in a heavy gale,” according to Leah’s account. For a moment, everyone was silent. The table returned to the floor. Several waiters fled from the room. And then members of the women’s committee threw their arms around Leah and Maggie, apparently remorseful for their doubts.
The committee chairman adjourned the meeting, but before everyone left the room, a sympathetic friend came to the door to whisper a message of warning to Leah and Maggie: If the Infidel Committee made a favorable report at Corinthian Hall that night, the girls would be attacked. Maggie had been so relentlessly harassed during the committee’s investigations that day, and was so frightened by this warning, that at first she refused to go to the hall that night. But their loyal friend Amy Post told them, “Go, and I will go with you.” Leah told her friend, “Amy, if you will go, I will go with you, if I go to my death.” And when they questioned the “spirits,” the reply came back: “Go, and God will protect you. You will not be harmed.”
At the last minute, Maggie relented. “I cannot have you go without me,” she said. “I must go, although I expect we will all be killed.”
Several hours later, Maggie, Leah, the Posts, and a small group of their loyal supporters trooped into Corinthian Hall, now overflowing with people, to face the music. The crowd was much larger than any of the previous nights, and much louder, rowdier, and more openly belligerent. People yelled off-color jokes at the comely, uncomfortable Maggie and referred to both sisters as “witches.” One friend of the Fox family’s had already discovered a bucket of hot tar hidden in a stairwell.
This time, the committee’s chairman gave a much more thorough report than the previous two but in the end had to admit that the committee members had failed to discern how the trick was accomplished. Neither Mr. Burtis nor Mr. Kenyon could explain it, even though they’d clearly heard the sounds, like everyone else. Alas, neither one of them offered to forfeit a beaver hat or take a plunge over Genesee Falls.
Summing up these four meetings at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, Conan Doyle later observed, “So long as the public looked upon the movement as a sort of a joke, it was prepared to be tolerantly amused. But when successive reports put the matter in a more serious light, a wave of blackguardism swept over the town.”
Now, in response to the unsatisfying report from the last committee, the mood of the crowd shifted from angry discontent to naked rage. In fact, according to Leah’s memoir, the crowd quickly began turning into a “howling mob, who were predetermined to assault us.” A lawyer named Josiah Bissel, apparently the ringleader of the riot, had passed out firecrackers to men and boys in the crowd beforehand. At an agreed-upon moment, before the committee had even finished its report, Bissel leaped onto the stage and raised his cane as a signal to set off the free-for-all. The hall exploded with the sound of firecrackers, howls, and yelling. People jumped into the aisles, brandishing clubs. The hall was engulfed in “stamping, shrieking and all kinds of hideous noises,” according to Isaac Post.
But no sooner was the signal given than “a fine, large, respectable-looking gentleman sprang onto the platform and took a seat between myself and my sister,” Leah wrote. Thinking he was one of the ruffians, Leah demand
ed that he not lay a finger on Maggie.
“I am your friend,” the man said calmly. “I’m the Chief of Police. Look, these men in front are all my men. They have come to protect you.”
He quietly told Josiah Bissel that if anyone were taken into custody, it would be him. Leah and Maggie were hustled out a back door of the hall, leaving the pandemonium behind.
* * *
THEN, AS now, people seemed to take away from these improbable events what they brought to them. The mysterious manifestations were like Rorschach tests of preexisting beliefs. Whether you mocked them, feared them, belittled them, or believed, your reaction often said more about you than the phenomena themselves.
There were plenty of people—men, mostly, for reasons we’ll get into later—who were determined to dismiss it as a humbug. Among the fanciful explanations was a declaration by three doctors at the University of Buffalo (in 1850, it wasn’t exactly a scientific powerhouse) that the girls produced the knocking by cracking their knee joints. This theory was scorned by medical men of far greater fame, including Conan Doyle, but the great French physiologist Charles Richet put it best. “This infantile explanation,” he wrote in 1920, “that we smile at today was well received by scientists who probably had never heard the raps which cause wood to vibrate sometimes loudly, sometimes with musical rhythm, and have nothing in common with the snappings of a tendon.”
Nonetheless, that’s one of the explanations you’ll read today on Wikipedia. If something out there caused all the racket, what was it? Most clergymen of the day hastened to say the following: They were evil spirits! The devil himself! Mister Splitfoot! Other deep thinkers said there must be something in nature, “an imponderable agent,” that connects all matter in the universe. Or it was a manifestation of what the twentieth century would call the subconscious mind. A few decades later, late-Victorian occultists claimed the phenomena were caused by living persons, acting at a distance. Possibly they were “great souls from Atlantis, incarnated into the bodies of North American Indians,” or members of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor!
But a whole lot of Americans were ready to agree with Leah Fox. These were truly the spirits of the departed, and what had just happened was nothing less than “the birth-throes of a new truth.”
By the end of the 1800s, the spiritualist community of Lily Dale was part summer camp, part church, part Oracle at Delphi. Spiritualism had become a major movement and shared many ties with the woman’s suffrage movement.
COURTESY OF LILY DALE MUSEUM
CHAPTER THREE
The Spiritual Wildfire
In the spring of 1850, Eliab Capron somehow persuaded Mrs. Fox to take her three daughters to New York City in order to “proclaim these truths to the world.” Ever since hosting Kate Fox at his house the year before, Capron had been conducting his own séances in his hometown of Auburn, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. He summarized his experiences in the pamphlet Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits: Comprehending the Rise and Progress of the Mysterious Noises in Western New-York, Generally Received as Spiritual Communications, which was given a long front-page treatment in the New-York Tribune that January 18. The Tribune was published by the abolitionist and future presidential candidate Horace Greeley. Alone among the newspaper editors of New York, he was open-minded about spiritualism. When Mrs. Fox and her daughters arrived at Barnum’s Hotel on Broadway on June 4, 1850, their first visitor was Horace Greeley.
Two nights later, they conducted one of the most famous séances in American history. They were invited to the home of a New York clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Griswold, “who has been incredulous from the first,” said a June 8, 1850, Tribune article, which ran under the headline “An Evening with the ‘Spirits.’” Among the guests waiting for them were James Fenimore Cooper (author of The Last of the Mohicans), the poet William Cullen Bryant, the editor Nathaniel Parker Willis, and the historian George Bancroft, as well as other clergymen and doctors—all in all, a roomful of the leading lights of New York in those days. And they were as shrewdly skeptical as any New York dinner party of today.
The Foxes arrived at a little past 8:00 p.m.—Mrs. Fox, Leah, Maggie, and Kate—and the two younger sisters sat at a table, inviting others to join them in a tight circle. Then, for at least half an hour, nothing happened; that’s perfectly normal in séances, but this was New York, and “the company gave obvious symptoms of impatience.” Finally, faint sounds began to be heard under the floor, around the table, and in various parts of the room. They increased in loudness and frequency until the sisters asked, “Will the spirits converse with anyone present?” At first the spirits seemed pointedly unenthusiastic. At long last the gentlemen in the room took turns playing a sort of mental charades with the spirits, who would correctly guess a person they would silently fix in their mind.
Fifth in line was James Fenimore Cooper. His questioning, as recorded by the Tribune’s George Ripley, went like this:
“Is the person I inquire about a relative?”
Yes, was immediately indicated by three distinct knocks.
“A near relative?”
Yes.
“A man?”
No answer.
“A woman?”
Yes.
“A daughter? A mother? A wife?”
No answers.
“A sister?”
Yes.
“How many years since her death?”
At this the spirit slowly knocked fifty times.
“Did she die of consumption?”
No answer to this and many other diseases named.
“Did she die by accident?”
Yes.
“Was she killed by lightning? Was she shot? Was she lost at sea? Did she fall from a carriage?”
No answers.
“Was she thrown from a horse?”
Knock knock knock.
Cooper then stopped the questioning and told the room that he indeed had a sister who “just fifty years this present month was killed by being thrown from a horse.” Evidently, the evening left a deep impression: On his deathbed a year later, Cooper left instructions to tell the Fox family, “They have prepared me for this hour.”
The circle broke up, for the hour was late, but several gentlemen asked the Fox sisters to stand in another part of the room. “The knockings were now heard on the doors, at both ends of the room, producing a vibration on the panels which was felt by everyone who touched them,” noted the article. “The ladies were at such a distance from the door in both cases, as to lend no countenance to the idea that the sounds were produced by any direct communication with them.” The party then went downstairs into a parlor, where the sounds caused “sensible vibrations in the sofa.”
The Tribune offered no explanation for the mysterious noises. It staunchly defended the Fox sisters, who clearly wowed the crowd: “The manners and bearing of the ladies are such as to create a prepossession in their favor.” But if the knockings are made by spirits of the departed, “why do they come [on] such an unusual journey, on an unprofitable errand? At the utmost they only exhibit their credentials, but bring no messages.” Having been left with more questions than answers, the Tribune’s Ripley concluded with a nonconclusion: “We wait for further disclosures.”
Many Americans were not waiting around. Seemingly overnight, spiritualism in America was a vastly popular grassroots movement, and the Fox sisters, although the most visible emblem of the movement, were by no means its leaders. During that summer of 1850, as they toiled away on Broadway, the weekly Spirit Messenger was being started in Springfield, Massachusetts; Eliab Capron said his town of Auburn, New York, housed a hundred mediums; and Cincinnati was about to hear its first raps, courtesy of a Mrs. G. B. Bushnell. Soon thereafter, “detailed instructions for the formation of circles appeared in print,” notes the Harvard Divinity School professor Ann Braude in her landmark study, Radical Spirits. “Most advised a maximum of twelve investigators, equally divided betwee
n men and women, seated close together around a table, hands either joined or laid on the table. They stressed the necessity of harmony among the circle’s participants.” Many circles opened with the singing of familiar hymns. In many ways, spiritualism was ideally suited to a young democracy. You didn’t need money or class distinction or special permission. All you needed were friends, family, and a parlor table. Séances were social. And, in a time before electricity, they offered something to do when the sun went down.
And so, away it went: By 1853, dozens of spiritualist titles had appeared in print, from The Celestial Telegraph to The Science of the Soul. By 1854, thirteen thousand people signed a petition asking the U.S. Senate to appoint a scientific committee to investigate spirit communication. And by 1855, Henry J. Raymond, a founder of The New York Times, said of spiritualism’s influence, “In five years it has spread like wild-fire over this Continent, so that there is scarcely a village without its mediums and its miracles.”
Meanwhile, the Foxes went back to Barnum’s Hotel, where they spent the summer conducting séances three times daily, from 10:00 to 12:00 each morning, then from 3:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon and from 8:00 to 10:00 each night. “The dear spirits are doing wonderful things,” Kate wrote in an early letter to Amy Post back in Rochester. “The piano was sweetly played upon by spirit fingers, the guitar was played then taken up and carried above our heads.… We have convinced many skeptical people.” But the pace was grueling; soon enough it got old—and the sisters were so young. Conan Doyle quoted Emma Hardinge, the great American historian of spiritualism, recalling in her autobiography that she paused “on the first floor to hear poor, patient Kate Fox, in the midst of a captious, grumbling crowd of investigators, repeating hour after hour the letters of the alphabet, while the no less poor, patient spirits rapped out names, ages and dates to suit all comers.” He then shook his head, in effect, saying that they lacked a “wise mentor at the elbow of these poor pioneers.… Worst of all, their jaded energies were renewed by the offer of wine at a time when at least one of them was hardly more than a child.” Writing this in the 1920s, he knew how badly the Fox sisters’ story would end.
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