American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  By the 1890s, when Annie Abbott traveled the world and Bertha Staab watched her perform, the Spiritualist movement was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe, drawn mostly from the upper and middle classes. All across America and throughout Europe, perfectly respectable citizens opened their homes to Fox-like mediums who fell into trances and produced ghostly “spirit guides,” many of them clad in turbans and bearing Hindu-sounding names like Abdula Bay, Bien Boa, Uvani, Feda, Afid, and Nepenshis. The visiting ghosts, in turn, summoned other spirits—the Victorian dead—who indicated their presence by tilting and turning tables, levitating flower vases, writing on walls, clog dancing, exuding “ectoplasm” (the spirit ooze so memorably popularized in the Ghostbusters movies) from various orifices, and ultimately, if the spirits were so kind, “materializing” hands, or heads, or even full-fledged bodies clad in frilly high-necked dresses. Spiritualist mediums held trance lectures, teacup readings, and demonstrations of automatic writing. They sold aura photography, in which clients sat for photographs with their dead friends and relations. And they conducted vaudevillian displays of paranormal powers such as those claimed by Annie Abbott.

  Not everyone accepted these claims without scrutiny. The most popular mediums found themselves examined extensively by doctors and researchers. Scientists at the time didn’t shy away from such pursuits; such intellectual luminaries as Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, the physicist Sir William Fletcher Barrett, and the British chemist William Crookes all dabbled in paranormal research at one time or another. In America, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James founded the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), a spin-off of a British group aiming to prove—or refute—the validity of paranormal phenomena by subjecting claims of table tipping and telepathy to the withering light of scientific method. All one needed to prove that ghosts could exist in general, James explained in a famous 1890 lecture, was to prove that one ghost existed in specific. “To upset the conclusion that all crows are black,” he said, “there is no need to seek demonstration that no crows are black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient.” One real ghost would be enough.

  In the hopes of finding that one real ghost, James’s paranormal researchers devised all manner of experiments and contraptions—objective measures that might explain or debunk the phenomena they witnessed. Commissions formed; reports were issued; leading scientific and academic lights weighed in on the subject of ghosts. Lots of tomfoolery was detected: mediums’ cabinets with hidden compartments; psychics levitating stools with their feet from the safety of billowy skirts; ectoplasm that, upon further scrutiny, proved to be cheesecloth, or toothpaste, or gelatin and egg whites. But there were also investigations that defied explanation.

  The Fox sisters stumped the scientists. William Crookes, the prominent British chemist who worked with the British Society for Psychical Research, examined Kate Fox and found her powers—spirit writing, lights, teleportation, materialized hands, and her famous rapping—to be formidable and inexplicable. “With mediums, generally it is necessary to sit for a formal séance before anything is heard; but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off,” he wrote. He heard the thuds when her hands and feet were held; he heard them when she was “suspended in a swing from the ceiling,” when she was enclosed in a wire cage, “when she had fallen fainting on a sofa.” He felt the raps on his shoulder and under his hands. “I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means,” he concluded.

  A scientist from the ASPR examined Annie Abbott, too. She stood on one foot and held a pool stick horizontally in front of her in her open hand while four men tried to force it down and upset her balance. After two hours of this, reported Dr. Lewis G. Pedigo, an ASPR researcher, Annie had defeated “the strength of a dozen vigorous, athletic men,” but was “perfectly fresh and free from fatigue.” In a twenty-six-page study of her powers, he concluded that her strength came not from “a new force, but a rather unfamiliar manifestation of an old one—viz: nerve force.”

  What is remarkable, from our vantage point today—from my vantage point, exploring this unfamiliar paranormal culture—is how few people thought these investigators crazy. Much of what looked convincing back then seems flagrantly fake today: obviously doctored photographs, women with ectoplasmic arms made of sheep intestines and cheesecloth adhered to their torsos. But at the time, all sorts of new, invisible, and inexplicable forces were capturing sounds and voices and images from the ether. Electricity, for one. Telegraphs—some mediums took dictation from spirits in Morse code—telephones, photographs, X-rays. These technologies were no easier to understand and believe, for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans, than unseen departed souls communicating from beyond—and yet they worked. Modern life required a degree of credulity.

  My sessions with Sarina and Misha made me uncomfortable. It is not considered rational, in this century, to schedule meetings with the dead, and I worried that my friends and colleagues would think me softheaded. But in Julia’s time, perfectly respectable people—scientists, journalists, presidents, scholars—conversed with the departed, and weren’t afraid to admit it. They listened to young women barely Bertha’s age, and imagined that they had something important to say. Women—whether they were working-class girls like the Foxes, or wealthy women like Bertha and Julia—had little control over their worlds. They served their parents, then their husbands and their children. But standing in front of a Spiritualist audience, Maggie and Kate Fox and Annie Abbott commanded esteem. These women had a voice. They had a number of voices, actually, many with odd Hindu accents.

  Spiritualism gave these nineteenth-century women a source of power and respect they could not otherwise expect to hold. But this public life was neither quiet nor easy. Annie Abbott traveled the world proving her strength with a succession of different husbands and lovers (seven, total) who inflicted a succession of humiliations: desertion, fraud, embezzlement, bigamy, infidelity, domestic battery, perhaps even infanticide. One husband took off with Annie’s money; another left her and found a new Annie Abbott to shill for. Annie abandoned a twin son and daughter. She suffered “noises in her head,” debilitating migraines, and mysterious blackouts, and as her fame ebbed, she was reduced to selling trinkets from her European tours. She even sold her sixteen-year-old daughter, Maud, into marriage with a man three times her age. Maud ran away and Annie never saw her again.

  Annie probably had a morphine problem. She accused many people of robbing her—mainly of jewels; they were always stealing jewels. When she accused her oldest son of stealing from her, he had her arrested on a charge of lunacy. She was accused of kidnapping young children and of nonpayment of taxes. She died in 1915 at the age of fifty-five, indigent and alone, remembered by few. “It is one of the ironies of fate,” wrote a local newspaper, “that such a woman should die and even her own generation forget all about her.” Her grave, they say, is cursed. Spiritualism gave Annie Abbott a voice, but it came at a price.

  It didn’t end well for the Fox girls, either. They had both, by their mid-thirties, developed severe drinking problems, and they were able to navigate public appearances only with the help of canny handlers. In 1888, the two sisters convened an audience at the New York Academy of Music and, in front of two thousand onlookers, demonstrated that by cracking their toe joints, they could produce, on demand, rapping noises that could be easily heard throughout the large theater. They both signed a lengthy explanation of their frauds in the New York World, a confession for which they were paid fifteen hundred dollars. Maggie explained that they had dreamed up the noises to scare their mother, and that the sisters then had found themselves trapped in a lie and learned to prof
it from it. Maggie denounced Spiritualism as “an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world”; Kate issued a similarly scathing statement. Maggie retracted her words a year later, but it did her no good; the magic was gone from the act. Within five years both sisters had died in poverty, shunned by their friends and former supporters.

  That might have been the end of Spiritualism, except it wasn’t. Believers remained convinced that the Fox girls had spoken to spirits and that the women’s confessions, swayed by dire need, were fraudulent. In 1904, nearly six decades after the first queer knockings in Hydesville, the Boston Journal reported that a basement wall had fallen in the Foxes’ old house. Investigators found “an almost entire human skeleton between the earth and crumbling cellar walls,” along with a peddler’s tin box. The finding, said the paper, cleared the Fox sisters “from the only shadow of doubt held concerning their sincerity in the discovery of spirit communication.”

  Though of course it did no such thing. When you traffic in spirits, doubt casts a long shadow. People will believe exactly what they want. And yet we keep trying to exhume those skeletons—I kept trying to understand my family’s history, stringing together clues real and imagined, hard facts and softer “spirit communication,” hoping to find a story that felt something like truth. We are all mediums, who try to connect to the past. Like Annie Abbott and the Fox Sisters—like Julia perhaps—we hear voices.

  The Reverend Conklin

  IN CASSADAGA, FLORIDA, THERE is a picture of the Fox girls’ childhood home. The framed black-and-white photograph is nailed to the wall of a wooden meetinghouse—a spare, camp-style building with a pitched roof and folding chairs. I went there on a breezy day in March with my mother-in-law, who had recently lost a brother. She wanted to learn of his fate; I wanted to learn of Julia’s.

  Cassadaga is a Spiritualist colony—the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Meeting—one of the few remaining, a modest remnant of the much larger nineteenth-century movement. It is sometimes referred to as the “psychic center of the world.” It is about an hour from Orlando, where my in-laws live. The camp was chartered in 1894 by a tubercular upstate New Yorker named George Colby whose spirit guide, Seneca, led him from a séance in Iowa to a ferry landing on Florida’s Saint John’s River. He hacked his way through thick palmetto and pine forest over seven hills to a spot overlooking “a chain of silvery lakes.” There he was cured of his tuberculosis and established a Spiritualist outpost.

  These days, the psychic center of the world consists of a tight grid of sleepy, sandy streets with a scattering of clapboard buildings, a tin-roofed camp headquarters, a gas station, a post office, and a two-story stucco hotel that offers such services as past life reflection, chakra balancing, auric repair, crystal healing, and, in case you need it after all that psychic tumult, “hair design.” After we arrived, my mother-in-law, Toni, wandered over to the hotel to see if she could scare up a reading. Toni has a high voice and near-buzz-cut graying hair, and is as large in pluck and persona as she is small in stature. She suffers from none of the sheepishness about communing with the dead that I do—she encounters dead relatives everywhere. I was sure she would learn lots of intriguing news about her departed; I was less convinced of my own success. I headed to a large tin-roofed camp building to meet with the Reverend Judy Cooper, the camp’s media liaison.

  We liaised in a large meeting room behind the camp store, sitting down in folding metal chairs to chat. The Reverend Judy looked to be around sixty years old, enveloped in a pouf of blond hair and accessorized with glittery nail tips, pearl earrings, and a pink sweater with pearl buttons. I told her about my search for Julia and explained that I was here to understand, if I could, the things that eluded me in the books and newspapers and genealogies. Was Julia truly a ghost? And why was it that she was so unsettled?

  Reverend Judy asked me if I had tried to contact Julia on my own, and I told her that I didn’t know how. She suggested that I could, through meditation, connect more deeply with my spiritual side. My “gut,” she said, was my door to the spirit world. “You get gut feelings all the time but then try to rationalize them,” she explained. “Your gut feeling is a little muscle. The more you trust it, the stronger it will get.”

  My gut was weak from a lifetime of neglect. I didn’t trust it at all. But I also didn’t rule out its existence. Once many years before, a friend and I, terrifically bored in the rain on a camping trip, played a game in which we tried to guess the next card in a deck. I guessed wrong every time, until about halfway through the deck, when I suddenly and absolutely knew that the next card would be the four of clubs. And it was. That’s why I was here.

  After Judy and I finished chatting, I found my mother-in-law—back from communing with her brother—and joined a group of seven or eight visitors for a tour. Our guide was named Jeri. She was a Reiki master who was in training to be a medium. It was a rigorous curriculum that involved four to seven years of work to develop her “gifts of clair”: clairvoyance (seeing things); clairaudience (hearing voices); clairsentience (feeling and knowing, the gut feeling Reverend Judy Cooper described); and clairgustience (tasting and smelling, cigars, roses, perfume, fish). Jeri had been clairsentient all her life, she explained, but she had thought she would never be clairvoyant, because she wore glasses.

  Not so. Thanks to her rigorous training at Cassadaga, Jeri was gaining new gifts. Recently, in the middle of the night, she had seen a “white, scintillating” energy emanating from crystals on the dresser next to her bed.

  We strolled down Spiritualist Street, past a tidy row of tin-roofed clapboard houses. Just past the intersection with Mediumship Way, we stopped at a charming cottage constructed a century before from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The house, Jeri said, was often visited by the spirit of an eight-year-old girl named “Nietzsche.” If you wake up and find pennies, Jeri said, you know that Nietzsche has been there.

  Jeri pointed out other homes, other spirits—ghosts of Julia’s vintage in Victorian clothing. A number of homes included odd second-story doors that opened up to nothing: no balcony, no fire escape. They were “spirit doors,” human-sized exits from the pitched-roof upper floors that once housed séance rooms. In the colony’s early days, the occupants believed that ectoplasm—spirit ooze—needed a quick way of escaping the room; hence the spirit doors. “Since then we’ve realized that spirits can go out through walls,” Jeri explained, “and we don’t need that.”

  We stopped at a sunken circle of head-high dog fennel known as Spirit Pond—it was formed from the overflow of three lakes that rarely overflowed anymore, and it was dry. If we took a photo between two palm trees next to what had once been the edge of the water, Jeri said, we might see orbs; green ones indicated a human spirit. Three closely clustered palms nearby, she said, were called the Elevator Trees. “Put your hands on the trees and just relax,” she said, “and you can feel the energy coming up,” like a “spirit elevator.” She asked if we wanted to try it out. A lady in pink went first. She stood facing us between the palms expectantly, and waited. She waited some more, then walked away.

  I went next. I placed my hands on the rough bark, closed my eyes, and felt nothing. I wondered if perhaps the soles of my shoes were too thick. My mother-in-law went after me. And the moment—the very moment—that she put her hands on the trees, she shivered and made a surprised, ticklish sound. “Whoo! That is really—ooh!” The woman in pink looked disappointed; I imagine that I did, too. “What are you supposed to feel?” the woman asked. Toni said she felt the energy rising upward through her feet, making her whole body numb. Jeri explained that my mother-in-law had clairsentient gifts.

  I, clearly, did not.

  Next I met with the Reverend Ed Conklin, a renowned Spiritualist minister whose great-great-grandfather had given more than thirty private readings to Abraham Lincoln, including one in which the spirits dictated the text of the Emancipation Proclamation. Reverend Conk
lin lived in a white clapboard house with peacock-blue shutters and a souped-up black Honda coupe parked on the Bahia grass in front. He was in his seventies with a white beard and slightly sunken eyes. In his plaid shirt and down vest, he looked as if he should be splitting wood in Maine instead of reading fortunes in central Florida.

  We walked through his cluttered living room to a sitting room in the back, where the Reverend Conklin settled into an armchair surround by statuettes—buddhas, Indian goddesses—and explained how the session would work. “I’ll relax, the spirits will come to me. Hopefully, they’ll come. About half the time they do. They can give me a word, a sentence, a rhyme, a letter, sometimes a name.” He got a look in his eyes, as if he were blind. “Now, I think you’re much too young for Dad to be in spirit,” he began. “If he’s living they’re referring to him. Does he have kind of a big laugh?”

  My father’s laugh is almost silent, high-pitched. “Just a regular laugh,” I said.

  “What about his father or mother, your grandparents. Did one of them have a hearty laugh?”

  G-pop, my father’s father—Julia’s grandson—did have a distinctive, chuckley sort of a “heh-heh.” I mentioned it to the Reverend.

  “OK, I feel that’s him coming through,” the Reverend Conklin told me. “Did he get to the age where he had false teeth?”

  Yes, I told the Reverend Conklin, he did use dentures, though I didn’t know it until the very end of his life. He died at ninety-seven, after undergoing two hip replacements within three months. I was there for the second surgery. We didn’t know if he would survive it—he was so frail, so outrageously old. His skin hung from him, his face was skeletal, his spine twisted. But he was as sharp as ever. G-pop was a man who knew how to live, how to grasp every passing minute. I loved this about him. We held hands and talked about the future.