Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death

by Deborah Blum

  IN THE VERY YEAR that Crowe’s book was published, a pair of spirit mediums appeared in the unlikely setting of a New York farm town. In the same sense that The Night Side of Nature was considered the most influential publication of its kind, these mediums would come to be hailed as the most revolutionary ghost talkers of their time. In the beginning, though, they were no more than a couple of farm girls, living in Hydesville, New York, which was no more than a scatter of wooden houses, dirt roads, and small farms, about twenty miles from Rochester.

  John Fox, his wife, Margaret, and his three daughters had moved to Hydesville the previous year. They had a neat serviceable house, with wood-framed walls and a dirt-floored cellar. They’d heard rumors that it was haunted, nicknamed “the spook house,” but the place seemed ordinary enough to them, country quiet and country dark, until the night that Mr. Splitfoot came calling.

  The racket began on a spring night in 1848, and it shook the household awake. Something, it seemed, was trying to beat its way out from the timbers. The knocks rattled the rooms, made the floor shiver underfoot. The girls—Leah, sixteen, Margaretta, fourteen, and Kate, eleven—ran screaming into their parents’ bedroom.

  Night after night, the beat sounded in the walls. Exhausted, tired beyond fear after several weeks, the younger daughter, Kate, stood up in bed and issued a challenge to the rapper in the wood.

  “Mr. Splitfoot,” she said, giving him a name.

  Her voice was high and light, a child’s voice.

  “Do as I do.”

  She clapped her hands once.

  Came one knock.

  Kate clapped twice. Two knocks.

  Her sister, Margaretta, snapped her fingers. Again the raps echoed her actions.

  Snap. Rap. Snap. Snap. Rap. Rap.

  In his book A History of Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories and a devoted believer in the spirit world, tried to re-create the moment: “the earnest, expectant, half-clad occupants with eager, upturned faces,” the small pool of candlelight around them, the heavy shadows coiled in the corners of the room, the dead knocking at the walls of the living. “Search all the palaces and chancelleries of 1848, and where will you find a chamber which has made its place in history as secure as this little bedroom of a shack?”

  According to the legend of the Fox family, Kate and Maggie next devised a simple code to communicate with the spirits: Two knocks for yes. Silence for no.

  “Were you murdered?”

  Two knocks.

  “Can your murderer be brought to justice?”

  No sound.

  “Can he be punished by law?”

  Silence.

  The girls developed a gruesome portrait of the spirit in the house. He was a peddler, killed for his money by previous occupants. His throat had been cut with a kitchen knife, and his body had been dragged, smearing blood, through the buttery, down the stairs, down to where he now lay buried in the earth-floored cellar.

  That summer, John Fox and his neighbors started digging in the “spook house” cellar. Five feet down, they found a plank, and beneath the wood a layer of charcoal and quicklime. In the dirt below, they found fragments of bones and hair. They called in a doctor to look over the filthy bits and pieces. He identified them as the pitiful remnants of a human body.

  THE STORY OF the Fox sisters was big news in upstate New York and even the surrounding states. It grew to national, even international quality, thanks largely to that master showman Phineas Taylor Barnum.

  P. T. Barnum read and enjoyed news accounts of the Fox sisters’ amazing powers. He also realized that the girls were wasted in the upstate sticks. They belonged in his American Museum, a marble showcase on lower Broadway, emblazoned with brilliant flags, packed with 600,000 live and dead curiosities—stuffed lions to living fortune-tellers, two-headed men to dancing midgets.

  The two younger Fox sisters were the attraction: brown-haired girls from the country—chubby Maggie with her big dark eyes and round face and skinny little Katie with her sharp, birdlike features and restless hands. They were shy, barely educated, simply dressed in their neat dark dresses and white collars. But Barnum was sure visitors would pay to sit down with daughters who talked to the dead. Regular admission to the American Museum was twenty-five cents. To converse with ghosts, people might pay a full dollar. They might even pay two dollars.

  “Is the person I inquire about a relative?”

  Two knocks for yes.

  “A near relative?”

  Yes.

  “A man?”

  No answer, meaning no.

  “A woman?”

  Yes.

  “A daughter? A mother? A wife?”

  No answer.

  “A sister?”

  Yes.

  The questioner was the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of the sprawling American epic The Last of the Mohicans. He had come to visit the Fox sisters at Barnum’s place, along with other luminaries, including the newspaper man Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, the poet William Cullen Bryant, and Nathaniel Tallmadge, former governor of Wisconsin.

  How long ago had his sister died? Fifty raps sounded, one for each year.

  Had she died of illness? No answer.

  “An accident?”

  Yes.

  “Was she killed by lightning? Was she shot? Did she fall from a carriage? Was she lost at sea?”

  No answer. No answer. No answer. No answer.

  “Was she thrown by a horse?”

  Two knocks. Yes.

  Definitely.

  After he left, Cooper told his companions that every answer had been correct. He had been thinking about his sister, who, fifty years ago that month, had been killed when her horse threw her.

  Cooper decided not to return. He was spooked. So was Greeley, but he described the visit anyway in his influential newspaper column. It would be the “basest cowardice,” Greeley said, to deny that sensation of spirits knocking at the door.

  Most mainstream church leaders loathed the spiritualist movement and condemned the Fox sisters, almost immediately, as a “nemesis of the pulpit.” There was nothing of a biblical God, none of the teachings of Jesus Christ, in these tales from other side. The movement drew congregation members away from traditional teaching. Swedenborg’s church reported a rush of new members; other “churches of spiritualism” flung their own doors wide.

  The term medium—a person who provided a medium through which spirits could connect to the world of the living—became part of the common language. So did sensitive, meaning someone claiming an unusual sensitivity to messages from the summerland, the borderland, the spirit world, the seventh heaven, the misted realms where the dead wandered, waiting their chance to return. Professional mediums and fortune-tellers advertised in the local papers, hung their signs out to attract customers, offered sittings in their parlors. Newspapers that catered to the growing audience of believers—Zoist, Light, Banner of Light—claimed new subscribers every day.

  In the early 1850s America, especially, seemed possessed. The spiritualist publications claimed that at least two million solid citizens.could be counted as believers, perhaps half again that many in Europe. Many believed they had themselves talked to the dead. Not everyone shared the Fox sisters’ talent for calling spirits out of the woodwork. But most people could manage the new craze of table tilting: gather a group around a pedestal table, place hands above the table’s edges, fingers just touching the wood, watch the table bobble back and forth in response to questions asked, speculate about the power of the spirits to move material objects.

  It was spiritual power at work, people said. Invitations to “tea and tabletilting” became standard social events. Others labelled their events table talking and invited professional mediums to join their parties. People said that when a gifted psychic joined in, tables did more than tilt and wobble. They hopped, crackled, hummed like a vibrating string. Some rose into the air, as if being tugged by invis
ible hands.

  In 1853, three newly published books made the response of the clergy bitterly clear. The publications unanimously warned that table talking belonged to the devil. One author said he’d proved it through the power of the Bible. Merely placing the Good Book upon a levitating table, he said, would return it to the floor, subduing the evil spirits. Another writer titled his book Table-talking: Disclosures of Satanic Wonders.

  A LETTER IN the Times of London, also published in 1853, signaled that other combatants were prepared to do battle with talking tables. The letter was signed by the physicist Michael Faraday, whose talent for invention had helped power the industrial revolution. His letter served notice that the science community was paying attention to the paranormal, but not in the way that Catherine Crowe had hoped.

  Faraday was a prototype of the brilliant nineteenth-century scientist. He’d been revolutionizing science at the Royal Institution in London since 1808. He experimented with chemistry, showing how to liquefy chlorine (demonstrating that an element could transit from gas to liquid, a transition known as a phase change). He isolated the compound benzene, which became a critical component in motor fuels. Faraday followed these feats by developing an electric generator in 1831, a device he called a dynamo, and a prototype electric motor. He went on to design a simple battery and to experiment with creating a transformer. Many doubted that industrial production could have advanced so rapidly without him.

  Faraday’s letter to the Times concerned another experiment he had just completed that had nothing to do with invention at all. It was a laboratory test of a talking table.

  For this particular study, Faraday took two flat pieces of wood and placed glass rollers between them. He fastened the device together with India rubber bands. With the rollers tucked in place, if a person pushed on the upper board, it would slide over the lower board. An instrument attached to the upper board was set to record even the smallest motion. Faraday then asked sitters to gather themselves around the table, fingertips resting on the edges of the upper board. It moved, despite the insistence of participants that they were sitting perfectly still. But there was no mystery to it, he declared, no spiritual magic.

  As the instrument recorded, again and again, the people touching the board were pushing it sideways, sliding it along the rollers. The experiment showed that table tilters were often unaware of their own actions. As Faraday explained it, the board was responding to unconscious muscular twitches, “mere mechanical pressure exerted inadvertently by the turner.”

  In his letter to the Times, and in another to the Athenaeum, Faraday dismissed every theory put forward by the spirit believers. There was no ghostly energy guiding the tilts, no electrical force generated by dead-to-living communication, he said. He didn’t want to hear any more pseudoscience from people who “know nothing of the laws” of electricity and magnetism. He’d been pestered enough by the superstitious, and his aim in writing the public letters was to restore some sanity to the discussion: “If spirit communications, not utterly worthless, should happen to start into activity, I will trust the spirits to find out for themselves how they can move my attention.”

  FARADAY’S SOBER call to sanity did not have much effect—at least not the effect he had hoped for—on a public caught in the thrall of spiritualism. People seemed instead to be attracted to yet another medium, even more eerie than the Fox sisters—the impossible, unearthly Daniel Dunglas Home.

  Born in Scotland in 1833, Home had emigrated from Edinburgh to New York as a child. Raised by an aunt and uncle, he grew up a soft-spoken child with a gentle, affectionate manner. When he was seventeen, his aunt threw him out of the house anyway. He’d become a child of the devil, she said. Tables floated when he entered a room, and he laughed when his frightened cousins shrank from an airborne chair. He wasn’t safe to have around.

  By the time he moved to England, Home swirled mystery around himself like a magician’s cape. Tall and slim, so pale from underlying tuberculosis that he appeared near translucent in appearance, silver eyed and copper haired, he seemed a man made for magic. From American spiritualists came extraordinary tales of Home’s feats: Knickknacks moved without being touched. Knocks sounded. Lights glimmered and faded like fireflies at dusk. Muffled voices whispered in empty corners. The wings of invisible birds rustled overhead. Ghostly hands touched people and then melted to mist.

  “We were touched by the invisible,” the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the summer of 1855, after a sitting with D. D. Home. She found the spectral hands completely believable and the medium completely wonderful. Her husband and acclaimed fellow poet, Robert Browning, dragged to the affair by his wife, resentfully admitted only to a peculiar evening. One hand had literally crawled, spiderlike, up Home’s arm, Browning said. Another had tapped Browning on the shoulder, “a kind of soft and fleshy pat.”

  It was the table that really bothered Robert Browning. The table had risen off the floor at Home’s bidding. The medium then invited Browning to inspect it. Browning felt around and under the legs. He watched Home’s fine-boned hands, kept clear above the table, as the oaken legs shuddered into the air.

  “I looked under the table and can aver that it was lifted from the ground, say a foot high more than once, with no wires or rods to be seen. I don’t in the least pretend to explain how the table was uplifted all together.”

  Home gave his own explanation. If tables floated, if misted forms drifted across the room, if bells jangled on their own, each served only as evidence—the kind that science could never produce—of powers from beyond. He was a conduit, he explained, a messenger from the beyond.

  “I believe in my heart that this power is being spread more and more every day to draw us nearer to God. You ask if it makes us purer? My only answer is that we are but mortals and as such liable to err; but it does teach that the pure in heart shall see God. It teaches us that He is love and that there is no death.”

  He promised, as Swedenborg had before him, that he could help people see God, prove to them that the afterlife could be seen and touched. “Fear not,” wrote a ghostly hand to a young woman who had frozen into a white silence during one of his seances. And as she shrank back, a heavy bookcase—“one that would at least require four men to move”—began to trudge ponderously toward her, thumping across the floor.

  In Home’s soft voice, in his words of faith and hope, even a walking bookcase could seem, somehow, shining with the dust of angels. “Fear not, Susan, trust in God. Your father is near. He is the Great Father.”

  IN THE SPRING OF 1857, a tired and cranky team of scientists made its way from Harvard University to upstate New York, determined to try yet again to rub some of the superstition out of modern culture.

  They’d been sent to investigate claims that two sons of a Buffalo police officer were able to summon spirits into a theatrical performance. There was no talk of God and holy messengers from Ira and William Davenport. Instead there were rolling hoops, ringing bells, twanging mandolins brought to insane life while the mediums sat tied to their chairs. But following Home’s lead, the Davenport brothers gave full credit to the spirits for enlivening their events.

  Such spirit shows now drew audiences in villages and cities across the land. There were so many, and so many were so obviously phony, that the editor of the Boston Courier offered $500 to any medium who could really produce spirit phenomena. His one condition was the results had to be verified by Harvard University. The university administrators preferred to take the higher road of scoffing at such productions. But they also believed that if some reputable professors took on the job, spiritualism could be easily exposed and, they hoped, eliminated. Over the protests of the designated investigators, Harvard’s president sent his professors to Buffalo.

  The Davenport Brothers—as they billed themselves—had pioneered a technique for inviting spirit participation, a large wooden box that they called a cabinet. The enclosed space, they claimed, was necessary to “condense the psychic ene
rgy.” Of course, no one could see the Davenports while they were inside, something that other traveling mediums noticed, admired, and imitated.

  The Davenports’ cabinet looked like a wide walnut armoire, with three doors in the front. The center door held an oval window, curtained by dark velvet. Behind it were two wooden chairs, placed so that when the brothers sat down, they faced each other. Members of the audience could enter and tie the Davenports’ hands and feet. They could bind Ira and William together if they wanted. They could check the knots, seal the ropes with wax. Once the satisfied audience sat back down, once the doors closed, the cabinet slowly came to exotic life. The bolts on the doors mysteriously slid into place, phantom hands appeared and retreated through the velvet curtain, musical instruments placed inside played familiar tunes. (This was twenty years before Edison introduced recorded music.) When the watchers reopened the cabinet, the brothers still sat tied to their chairs, unbroken wax sealing the knots.

  The Harvard investigators required more than a few cords and some dabs of wax. They brought a wagonload of rope. Local newspapers estimated the scientists had five hundred feet of good hemp cord with which to tie the brothers’ hands and feet. The professors also bored holes in the cabinet and ran the ropes out through the openings, back in, out again. They knotted the cords, again and again, into a net around the outside walls. Amused reporters noted that the observers could barely make out the cabinet through Harvard’s skein of rope.

  Still, as journalists wrote, the mandolins yet twanged and the spirit hands still fluttered. They also wrote that the university refused to publish a full account of the day with the Davenports. The professors issued a report condemning the performance as a trick, but added that the findings didn’t need to be dignified with details.