Talking to the Dead

I asked these spirit figures if I was seeing them or if I was seeing what was in my own brain. They answered, “both.”

—E
ILEEN
G
ARRETT
,
twentieth-century medium

Epigraph

Introduction

Part I
Earth and the World of Spirits, 1789–1849

Part II
The Progress of Modern Spiritualism, 1849–1852

Part III
Darling Little Spirit, 1852–1857

Part IV
Worldly Trials, 1857–1888

Part V
Afterlife, 1888–to the Present

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
N LATE
M
ARCH
1848 two young sisters excitedly waylaid a neighbor, eager to tell her about the strange sounds they had been hearing at home nearly every night around bedtime. The noises, the girls confided to Mary Redfield, seemed to have no explanation. Their father had failed to discover the source of the raps and knocks. Their mother was exhausted from worry and lack of sleep.

Ghosts, Mary Redfield thought wryly. As she later told a newspaper reporter, what she really suspected was a childish prank.

She didn't know the girls well. Along with their parents, they had just moved to Hydesville, a quiet community of farms and fields in western New York State, the previous December. Margaretta, nicknamed Maggie but sometimes called Margaret, like her mother, was a pretty, saucy fourteen-year-old. Eleven-year-old Catherine, called Cathie or Kate, was black haired and pale, more delicate in appearance than her sister. The two children were outgoing, polite, and friendly, and they were almost always together.

A few nights later, on March 31 at about 8
P.M
., Mary and her husband, Charles, heard a sharp knock—a human one—on their own front
door. John Fox, the girls' father, was standing in the snow with a bizarre story to tell. Raps had broken out in his house more loudly than ever, and his wife, Margaret, had determined that they were caused by the spirit of a murdered man whose remains lay buried in the cellar.

Would the Redfields come immediately? Margaret urgently wanted their opinion.

Charles Redfield declined, but Mary agreed to go, teasing John that she would “have a spree with it, if it was a ghost.” Humor, however, wasn't one of dour John's strengths. He grimly led Mary to the house, a nondescript frame structure on a neatly fenced plot, and headed straight to the bedroom that he and Margaret shared with the girls. Margaret Fox, a comfortably plump, generally cheery woman, though now highly agitated, met Mary at the door.
¹

Glancing inside the room, which was lit by a single candle, Mary recognized in an instant the seriousness of the situation. Kate and Maggie were huddled on their bed, clinging to each other in terror.

Margaret drew Mary down beside her on the other bed in the room, then began to speak into what must have seemed like thin air.

“Now count five….” Margaret Fox commanded. Five knocks followed, seeming to indicate an intelligent presence.

“Count fifteen,” Margaret ordered. The invisible noisemaker did so. She asked it to tell Mary Redfield's age, and Mary later remembered with wonder that it “rapped thirty-three times so we all heard it.”

“If you are an injured spirit,” Margaret Fox continued, “manifest it by three raps.”

Knock, it answered.

Knock.

Knock.

There was no sign that anyone in the room was making the noise.

“By this time,” Mary Redfield candidly confessed, “I became much interested….”

She decided that she wanted her husband, Charles, to size up the situation for himself, but before leaving the Fox household she paused for a moment to comfort Kate and Maggie. She tried to reassure them that if indeed a spirit was present, it had no intention of hurting them.

One of the girls—like most people, Mary had a habit of referring to the sisters as if they were interchangeable—answered with emotion: “We are innocent—how good it is to have a clear conscience.”

 

Forty years later, on an autumn night in 1888, a bespectacled Maggie Fox, wearing a red flowered hat and black dress, stepped onto the stage of New York City's Academy of Music to a cacophony of hisses, cheers, and boos. Standing in front of the packed house, she glanced nervously down at her prepared speech and started to speak in an excited voice. She was about to make a stunning—and to some members of her raucous audience devastating—pronouncement.

In the four decades since the first raps at Hydesville, she and Kate had become world famous. When the eerie sounds continued, word had spread that spirits made them and that the girls were talking to the dead. Soon Kate and Maggie were delivering otherworldly messages to friends, then strangers, then large public audiences. Debates about the authenticity of spirit communications had riveted the nation.

Before long, other mortals discovered that they too could serve as intermediaries between this world and the next. By the mid-1850s tens of thousands of Americans—the curious, the skeptical, and the converted alike—were flocking to seances to contact the departed. A journalist had called the movement Modern Spiritualism, and it swiftly had acquired an international following.

It was Modern Spiritualism, the fervor of which she had helped to create, that Maggie now, trembling visibly in the footlights' glow, set out to destroy: she had come to announce to the overflow crowd at the Academy of Music that the spirits of the dead never return to communicate with the living. The raps that had sent Mary Redfield hastening to find her husband on that long-ago night in 1848 had been a fake, as had so many other alleged spirit manifestations through the years.

Front-page headlines shouted news of Maggie's confession: she had dealt a death blow, reporters wrote, to Spiritualism.

But the headlines, as it turns out, were premature. The Fox sisters' story wasn't over, and the Spiritualist movement hadn't been destroyed. A year later Maggie recanted her confession of fraud. Asserting that she had
been under the sway of the movement's enemies and overwhelmed by financial pressures when she falsely confessed, she adamantly reaffirmed her faith in the spirits. And Modern Spiritualism, a religion and social force that has dramatically influenced our ideas about immortality, remains very much alive today.

Faith in the power of good and evil spirits is ancient, although ideas about the nature of these entities differ from culture to culture. It was—and is—Modern Spiritualism's central tenet that death does not exist. Instead, the state commonly called death is only a transition, a shedding of the body, and the spirits of individuals not only survive beyond the grave but also communicate from the other side. A related belief holds that mediums, men and women who are able to receive and transmit spirit messages, can help other, less finely attuned, mortals establish contact at seances. The word
seance,
French for “session,” now almost exclusively denotes a gathering held to commune with spirits.

Formed by many different influences, Modern Spiritualism as a popular movement began with the Hydesville raps. In defiance of Judaeo-Christian theologians who argued that alleged spirit visitations were either demonic manifestations or delusions, Americans in the third quarter of the nineteenth century crowded into seance rooms, seeking wisdom and comfort in what they perceived as tangible evidence of immortality. Many believers were men and women struggling to reconcile religion with science at a time when geologists were questioning the very age and origins of the earth and its creatures. Whether by design of the spirits or inadvertently, Kate and Maggie Fox served as the catalyst for what believers in spirit communication called the dawning of a new era.

The passionate interest of the mid-nineteenth century is in fact a mirror of our own. Since I began my research on the Fox family, books on the afterlife by mediums and psychics have appeared consistently on the
New York Times
best-seller list, and several of the authors have become television celebrities, as widely sought after in our day as Kate and Maggie were in theirs. In movies and TV dramas, individuals whose spirits survive death routinely return to help with the problems encountered by the living.

Opinions about Kate and Maggie vary, of course (as they do about
today's mediums). There are debunkers—among them some, but by no means all, magicians and historians—who delight in or abhor the sisters as one more example of humbug in a society famous for it. Several decades after the sisters' deaths, two particularly memorable antagonists contributed to the debate over Spiritualism: the magician Houdini and the author Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the master detective Sherlock Holmes. In the 1920s Houdini tried to convince Doyle that Spiritualism was a fraud by unmasking fake mediums, while Doyle persisted in holding tight to his Spiritualist beliefs.

Controversy about the Fox sisters accounts in part for the frequent retelling of the girls' story through the years: there are so many possibilities and versions. For Spiritualists, the saga has the resonance of a sacred story, one that helps illuminate the origins or at least an aspect of their continuing faith. Others find the sisters' story intriguing because it reads like a classic ghost yarn or because it triggered such a widespread and colorful inquiry into the nature of life after death. Still others are interested in exploring how the girls might have faked their spirit manifestations.

I first encountered Kate and Maggie Fox in a book about mystics and mediums, Peter Washington's
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America.
The two Fox sisters jumped off the page and seized me with a grasp as firm, if as invisible, as a ghost's. I was consumed with curiosity to learn more about these nineteenth-century children. What actually took place that March night in Hydesville? Had the girls pulled off an elaborate hoax, mischief that might have started innocently? If so, how could they have perpetuated such a fraud for forty years? Alternatively, were they in the grip of some powerful, shared delusion? Or, as some theorists suggest about teenagers in general and about those who trigger strange phenomena in particular, had the stresses of puberty released unconscious forces, sexual energies capable of turning the most ordinary household into a horror?

Or were Kate and Maggie spirit mediums, as many reputable people of the day believed?

I began my exploration into the sisters' lives with a focus on the paranormal and otherworldly. My curiosity led me not only to bookstores and libraries but also to Hydesville, for the hundred fiftieth anniversary of
Modern Spiritualism in 1998, and to Lily Dale, a Victorian town located near Buffalo, New York, that's now inhabited almost entirely by mediums and other Spiritualists.

Somewhere along my route, however—and much to my surprise—my interest in Kate and Maggie shifted from the paranormal to the normal or at least to the social and cultural aspects of life in the nineteenth century. I became less absorbed with the elusive question of whether the Fox children invented the spirits, and I grew more curious about who the girls were and what kind of world they lived in. What factors in the Fox family and the culture helped produce these two strikingly original young women? Faced often with derision and scorn, forced to undergo grueling investigations of their powers, why did Kate and Maggie continue to hold seances? And in an age when almost no one achieved the celebrity status that our athletes, movie stars, and mediums take for granted today, how did these two unknown country children manage to seize the public's imagination to such an astonishing degree?

Over the last three decades, historians have produced a significant body of work that explores Spiritualism as both a reflection and expression of the tensions inherent in nineteenth-century America. Following their lead, I became intrigued by the saga of this particular nineteenth-century family—John and Margaret Fox and their children—navigating, with resilience and invention though not always with success, a rapidly changing culture.

Ordinary Americans in the 1800s had great opportunity for social, economic, and geographic mobility. They faced a number of questions that perhaps can be summed up in a simple query that had rarely been so pressing in the past: “Where are we going?”

Shall we pack our worldly goods and journey westward? Or leave the farm behind and head for the city?

Are our struggles moving us upward on the social ladder, or have our risks only pushed us down a notch?

Is our society advancing toward utopian perfection? Or under new pressures such as urbanization, is it descending into chaos?

Those of us who are women—will we stay placidly at home or step out into the street, into the labor force, into public life?

Those of us who are enslaved—will we remain in bondage or march forward into freedom?

For many Americans of the time, each of these questions was coupled with an older, deeply personal one: am I bound for heaven or hell?

And all these questions were shadowed by a pervasive concern: what control do we have over any of our destinations?

The more I thought about the Fox sisters, the more it seemed to me not only that Kate and Maggie sparked a movement, but that their lives epitomized the conflicts and urges that helped fuel its blaze. The question of the other world aside, the girls' appeal surely stemmed in part from the ways they embodied—and intuited—their culture's anxieties and ambitions.

Not that the two of them can be viewed simply as emblematic of their times. Charismatic individuals in their own right, they were as different from one another as most siblings are. They've often been treated as a unit and portrayed flatly either as frauds or martyrs.

I approached Kate and Maggie primarily through the narratives written by their contemporaries. Few of the mediums' own unpublished letters seem to have survived, although the ones included here allow an intimate, if often oblique, glimpse into each sister's emotional life. But there's no scarcity of books, pamphlets, and letters in which to find the girls' nineteenth-century visitors registering violently different opinions about them.
²

Not surprisingly, little documentation exists for the period before Kate and Maggie rose to fame. Their oldest sister, the thrice-wed Leah Fox Fish Brown Underhill, wrote a useful but frequently unreliable and self-serving memoir, which has to be read with care. For anyone interested in the Fox sisters, there are many discoveries yet to be made.