Talking to the Dead (10 page)

T
EDIOUS SUMMER DAYS
in the country ended soon enough.

After returning from Wayne County in September 1849 Leah moved her family to a new home on the corner of Troup Street, in a location on the edge of Rochester's fashionable Third Ward. The house was modest, but the area nearby was resplendent with fine homes and mansions, some built in the classical Greek Revival or the stately Queen Anne style, others adorned with the gables and gingerbread of the Gothic Revival. The move, Leah's second in a little more than a year, continued her ascent into ever more desirable housing.

Her sisters' reputation as spirit messengers by now had started to spread to nearby counties, with visitors to Leah's household ranging from evangelicals to radical reformers, from grief-stricken parents to suspicious skeptics. Interest in the noises, however, still remained largely local to western New York. Those who came consisted primarily of friends or the friends of friends, those who had learned about the raps through hearsay.

Kate remained only briefly in Rochester. At the invitation of the journalist Eliab Capron and his wife, Rebecca, she visited Auburn, New York, staying at the same comfortable boardinghouse where they were living. Capron, who regarded Kate as the most impressive medium in the Fox family, wanted to test her powers in a setting apart from her family.

The visit must have been an ordeal at times for the twelve-year-old girl, even as it was undoubtedly an adventure for the family of Capron's landlord. “The medium was tested in every conceivable way,” Capron observed. “She slept with the ladies in the house—different ones—and was tested by them, as well without a dress as with.”
¹

The spirit manifestations that followed Kate to Auburn, Capron testified, astonished his acquaintances. He later published an account of her visit, a record he claimed to have drawn largely from journal entries he made during her stay in 1849.

Sounds ricocheted through the boardinghouse, he wrote, and through other homes where curious investigators met. Spirits had characteristic raps, and attuned listeners became able to identify each spirit by its sound—hollow or ringing, heavy or light.

Every variety of test, he insisted, was set to challenge the spirits. In different hosts' parlors, with the gas turned down or candles extinguished, tables tipped over and flipped back. Small chairs pinioned themselves to the floor and could not be budged. Combs flew out of ladies' upswept hair and fastened themselves to other women's topknots.

The dead sprang to life through sound and touch, raps and tugs. Eternity's silence, it seems, was turning out to be quite noisy, vanquished as much by the sensory excitement of the gatherings as by the content of any specific message.

Music continued to hold a pivotal place. Unseen fingers played the guitar, Capron said, “so exquisitely…that it seemed more like far-distant music to one just aroused from midnight slumbers, than the music of an instrument a few feet from us.”

In the dark an invisible hand might tap a sitter's arm, charging the spot with a feeling of electricity. A spirit's hand felt like that “of a person who is in a magnetic sleep, being colder…and having a moisture like a cold perspiration upon it….”

Yet on request such a hand could change both its temperature and texture. “It will in one instant feel as cold as ice,” Capron wrote, “and as warm as a common hand of flesh.” One sitter asked to see a spirit's hand. A moment later, silhouetted, it drifted across the moonlit window.

The local newspapers called the meetings tomfoolery. A reporter for the
Auburn Daily Advertiser
revived the story that Kate and Maggie's father, John, had first instigated the craze, creating “a great variety of supernatural sounds” and wonderful sights such as “the locomotion of chairs, tables, books, and other household fixtures.” But as soon as the so-called spirit of Hydesville was unmasked, the reporter joked, “it departed in disgust, and has remained in retirement until its present visit to Auburn.”
²

The newspaper, of course, was wrong. The spirits had been continuously active for a year and a half in Rochester. And for most of that time, prayerful John Fox, long past his days as a gambler and troublemaker, had stayed in his new house in Arcadia, his hopes of reuniting his family waning as the fortunes of the spirits waxed.

 

By the fall of 1849 the invisible beings themselves had grown insistent in pressing certain demands, lobbying believers to proclaim the truth of immortality to the wider world. But the Fox family seemed ambivalent about taking this next step. Maggie and Leah expressed concern not only about subjecting themselves to ridicule for their beliefs, but also about making a public appearance outside the home, an act considered improper for respectable women of the day. Even men such as Isaac Post and George Willets, who boldly stood up for causes such as abolition and women's rights, urged discretion in the matter of the spirits. Isaac had his drugstore to run and Willets a job to keep, and neither was anxious to invite further controversy.

But with Kate in Auburn that autumn and with Margaret on a visit to John in Arcadia, the situation in Rochester abruptly changed. Apparently grown impatient with mortal cowardice, one afternoon at a small gathering that included Isaac Post, George Willets, Maggie, Leah, and several other friends, the raps abruptly spelled a startling message: “We will now bid you all farewell.”

The medium and author Emma Hardinge later evoked the impact of that statement in her milestone history of the movement,
Modern American Spiritualism,
a book for which she conducted interviews with those who had experienced the sudden hush.

“A mournful silence filled the apartment which had but a few minutes before been tenanted with angels, sounding out their dear messages of undying affection, tender counsel, wise instruction, and prescient warning,” Hardinge wrote. “
The spirits indeed were gone.
…There was a mighty blank in space, and a shadow everywhere, but spirit light came no more to illuminate the thick darkness.”
³

Maggie and Leah at first seemed relieved by the spirits' departure, but the Posts and others felt desolate over the loss—for a second time as it seemed—of contact with their deceased friends and relatives. The sisters soon joined in these expressions of grief. Still, there were no reassuring raps.

Silence.

When George Willets and Eliab Capron, a frequent visitor to Rochester, stopped by almost two weeks later, Maggie and Leah greeted the two men with the sad news of the spirits' continued absence. “We answered,” Capron ventured, “that perhaps [the spirits] would rap for us, if not for them.” His influence in the other world must have been strong, for as the foursome stepped into the front hall, raps suddenly thundered a welcome on the walls, ceiling, and floor.

“Had a long-lost friend suddenly returned, the two sisters could not have been more rejoiced,” Capron recalled.

Whether the spirits, or the mediums, had genuinely wished to retire or merely to test their powers of persuasion, now the future course was set. “You all have a duty to perform,” the raps reiterated. “We want you to make this matter more public.” This time the mortals listened and took action.

The spirits gave highly specific instructions, placing Willets in charge of business affairs and giving Capron the responsibility for drafting a lecture on spirit communication. A great deal of preparation was necessary, the spirits stressed, before anyone appeared in public.

Over the next month practice sessions were held at different homes in Rochester, each with about twenty invited guests. Test questions were
banned. The meetings' main purpose was to determine if the sounds were loud enough to be heard in different places and among a large crowd. However, R. D. Jones, a newspaper editor and a believer in spirit communication, offered an additional reason for the gatherings. There had been “inquiry as to the object of the meetings and why these strangers to the manifestations were invited,” he explained at a later date.
⁴

“The answer was: ‘We wanted prominent persons to hear the sounds who should know they were not the result of trick or deception, for the influence they may exert on the public meeting; and more than all, to give friends confidence in our ability to make the sounds in a public meeting.'”

After a number of successful rehearsals, the spirits ordered Capron and Willets to rent Rochester's largest theater, Corinthian Hall, for the night of November 14, 1849.
⁵
Built only a few months earlier, Corinthian Hall symbolized the town's burgeoning appetite for information, culture, self-improvement, and performances of all kinds, sometimes presented in a bewildering mix. Pugilists and humorists, gymnastic demonstrations and Shakespearean readings, and lectures on mesmerism, phrenology, and the marvels of the telegraph—secular entertainments of the sort previously frowned upon by the religious town fathers—vied for the public's attention. Circuses, banned for years, visited Rochester, among them P. T. Barnum's extravaganzas. Promising to deliver exactly what the public craved, Barnum's advertisements touted shows “combining both instruction and amusement.”
⁶

Centrally located behind the popular shops of Rochester's most important commercial building, the Reynolds Arcade, Corinthian Hall could seat eleven to twelve hundred people in its theater and also housed a law library, public reading rooms, and offices on its top floor. So impressive was the new theater that Horace Greeley in the
New York Tribune
complimented its “lofty ceiling, admirable lighting, air ventilation and thorough adaptation to speaking and hearing.”
⁷
Only its entryway disappointed him; he thought it too narrow to accommodate the potential crowds.

On Tuesday, November 13, 1849, the
Daily Advertiser
printed a paid notice announcing the Fox sisters' public debut: “Doors open at 7 o'clock.
Lecture to commence at 7 1/2. Admittance 25 cents; 50 cents will admit a gentleman and two ladies.”
⁸
The next day—Wednesday, November 14—the paper added a word of its own: “Corinthian Hall is this evening to be the theatre of very new and startling developments, or the exposure of one of the most cunningly devised and long-continued impositions ever practiced in this or any other community.”
⁹

T
HAT NIGHT
four hundred people crowded through Corinthian Hall's single doorway, spilled into a corridor that spanned the length of the building, then turned left or right to climb the steps to the theater on the next landing. They entered through one of the two doors that framed the stage, facing as they did so a large, level seating area, with six raised tiers of additional seats behind it. After settling in their places, audience members gazed ahead at a platform stage, an alcove at the back of it formed by the two Corinthian columns that had given the building its name.
¹

A few of the Fox sisters' supporters—among them, Amy Post and Lyman Granger—sat onstage, there both as silent observers, lending moral weight to the proceedings, and also as gentle protectors, ready to intercede on the sisters' behalf if the lively crowd turned angry. Audiences of the day were known to be rambunctious; given the controversial nature of the event, this group may have been even rowdier than usual.

Some in the audience came primed to expose chicanery—and a few to unveil witchcraft. A milder sentiment, curiosity, motivated others. The evening promised to be all the things audiences of the day enjoyed, whether in circuses or dramas: a spectacle at once exciting, instructive, and entertaining.

Some of those who attended that evening undoubtedly hoped to hear news of the departed. They may have been looking to shore up their faith or for a specific sign from someone they had loved. They may have welcomed relief from the burden of sorrow their age imposed on mourners, for spirit communication as transmitted through the Fox sisters was the opposite of lugubrious, sentimental mourning. It was lively—and alive.

Dark-haired Maggie was said to have worn a soft blue dress onstage that night, and the image is evocative. She surely seemed, even to hostile members of the audience, to be an appealing but otherwise unimposing figure. She was neither a philosopher of the divine as Emanuel Swedenborg had been nor a mystic like Andrew Jackson Davis, who spoke from his own private visions. Instead, as everyone in attendance well knew, the sounds that followed her—puzzling and stimulating—were as accessible in their way as she was approachable in hers. If there were raps to be heard, the curious men and women in the audience expected to hear them, and to judge their meaning, for themselves.
²

Kate was absent, said to have remained in Auburn with friends. Surprisingly, since to this point she still publicly disavowed her powers, Leah joined Maggie onstage, took part in each public appearance at Corinthian Hall, and submitted to all the examinations that followed.

That night Capron delivered a lecture on the “full history of the rise and progress of these strange manifestations,” while raps—some said muffled—were heard throughout the room. A reporter for the
Auburn Daily Advertiser
expressed droll ambivalence about the lecture itself, commenting dryly that the audience “listened to a long address from E.W. Capron, Esq. of Auburn, which contained much abstract truth and but little that related to the business that had called the audience together.” On the other hand, the writer expressed reluctant admiration for Maggie, Leah, and the spirits.
³

“The ‘ghost,' however,” he remarked, “a good deal more observing than his spokesman commenced his manifestations immediately after the young ladies, whom he always attends, had entered the hall. Yes, the ‘knocking' commenced forthwith, and continued during the entire evening, to the great astonishment of those who had gone thither, with gaping ears, to catch the mysterious sounds.”

If in fact everyone with “gaping ears” heard the raps, the evening must have been an engrossing one indeed, engaging listeners' attention and involving them, not just as observers of an event, but as participants in it. Prodded by disembodied sounds, audience members had three choices: they could share in an active and lively sense of bewilderment, imagine themselves as someone whom the spirits wished to contact, or project themselves into the role of triumphant investigator. At least in the moment, the twin acts of listening and deciphering turned the audience into a company of equals in the presence of the mystery, a dramatic side effect of an evening already sizzling with the hint of supernatural visitation.
⁴

At the conclusion of the first night's lecture and demonstration, the audience delegated, probably by a process of nominations and catcalls, a committee of five men to inquire further into the matter of spirit communication. The
Rochester Daily Democrat
had prepared in advance a scathing review of the evening but scuttled it when events went smoothly for the spirits.

Without giving Leah and Maggie any warning, the committee decided early on Thursday, November 15, to hold its investigations that morning at the Sons of Temperance Hall and that afternoon at the Posts' home. That night an even larger audience than on the previous evening came to Corinthian Hall to learn the results.

Eliab Capron and George Willets wrote the most detailed and influential—if not entirely accurate—account of the events at Corinthian Hall. Their version, published on December 8, 1849, in Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune,
reached a readership that relished news spiced on occasion with more sensational fare.

According to their article, the first committee announced “in substance” the following: During their morning hours at the Temperance Hall,
members had heard raps on the walls and floor and had asked questions that were answered “not altogether right nor altogether wrong.” After moving to the Posts' home in the afternoon, they had heard more raps, and they had also conducted a variety of experiments with Leah and Maggie.

“One of the Committee,” Capron and Willets wrote, “placed one of his hands upon the feet of the ladies and the other on the floor, and though the feet were not moved, there was a distinct jar on the floor.”

The committee members had noticed a characteristic sound: “On the
pavement
and on the
ground
the same sound was heard,—a kind of double rap, as if a stroke and a rebound, were distinguishable. When the ladies were separated at a distance no sound was heard; but when a third person was interposed between them the sounds were heard.”

In sum, Capron and Willets reported, “all agreed that the sounds were heard,
but they entirely failed to discover any means by which it could be done.”

With the exception of believers, the audience registered shock when the first committee delivered its report at Corinthian Hall. How was it possible that five respectable men, after an entire day's worth of examinations, had failed to expose two presumably fraudulent females and to discover the means of their deception?

To double-check the findings, the crowd insisted on choosing another committee of five men, an impressive group that included the vice chancellor of New York State, Frederick Whittlesey, who was appointed chairman. His committee met with Leah and Maggie in his office on Friday, November 16, but disagreement and a whiff of scandal almost immediately soured the proceedings when Whittlesey stood accused of going “over to the enemy.” On the very night of his appointment as chief investigator, he had been seen accompanying the Fox sisters to Corinthian Hall. Under a cloud, the chancellor resigned from the committee, Leah later admitting that he indeed had sworn friendship.

“He said to me,” she remembered, “‘Now don't be alarmed…. I have read [Andrew Jackson] Davis's Revelations, and I believe fully that Spirits can communicate. You shall have a fair investigation.'” The chancellor's words seemed especially comforting to her after another committee member, a physician named H. H. Langworthy, behaved in a way she found “very insulting and even violent.”
⁵

The investigation was thorough and may well have been intended to be humiliating and rough. The sisters were placed on a table to permit the male committee members all the better to touch, hold, and closely observe their subjects' feet. The gentlemen also tied cords around the sisters' dresses at a point that corresponded, according to Langworthy's oblique reference, to “gentlemen's inexpressibles.” He later modified this phrase to “ankles”—still a body part little discussed in polite company at the time. Langworthy further insisted that the committee heard no knocks whatsoever during these particular tests, although he admitted to hearing them at other times during the examination.

Capron and Willets glossed over the discord in their article for the
Tribune.
They instead implied that Langworthy had lent his seal of approval to Maggie and Leah, and they specifically noted that the doctor “made observations with a stethoscope to ascertain whether there was any movement of the lungs, and found not the least difference when the sounds were made; and that there was no kind of probability or possibility of their being made by ventriloquism as some had supposed—and they could not have been made by machinery.”

Whatever the squabbling second committee actually reported to the audience on the night of Friday, November 16, its members wound up as stymied as the first committee by the mysterious sounds. The restless and increasingly disgruntled crowd at Corinthian Hall proceeded to appoint a third committee, this one even more skeptical and determined than the previous two. One man swore that he would destroy his favorite beaver hat if he couldn't outwit the sisters; another announced that he would throw himself over the Genesee Falls.
⁶

The spirits must have anticipated an excited audience and a good financial return, for George Willets had already booked Corinthian Hall for a fourth consecutive night. The third committee promised to conduct its investigations and deliver its findings on Saturday, November 17.

For the sake of the spirits, Maggie and Leah allowed themselves the next day to be held, bound, manipulated, and maneuvered as before, but they also suffered a new indignity. With the sisters' reluctant consent, a subsidiary Committee of Ladies took them into a separate room, then stripped and searched them, examining both “their persons and clothing”
in search of noisy devices such as leaden balls. Mortified, both sisters wept through much of their ordeal, until their sobs reached such a pitch that Amy Post burst into the room and brought the investigation to a halt.

And in the end, the good women of Rochester failed to find evidence of duplicity. A certificate issued by the Committee of Ladies sidestepped the more delicate parts of the examination, focusing instead on tests designed to prove that the raps weren't caused by electricity. When the sisters “were standing on pillows,” the certificate noted, “with a handkerchief tied around the bottom of their dresses, tight to the ankles, we all heard the rapping on the wall and floor distinctly.” Maggie and Leah were also made to stand on glass, another nonconductor of electricity.
⁷

By that Saturday afternoon, however, rumors of serious trouble were already circulating. Some of Rochester's leading citizens, outraged by the events, asserted that the three committees hadn't been objective at all but had been packed with spirit sympathizers. Head of the cadre was Josiah Bissel, son of the fervently religious businessman who had invited the Reverend Charles Finney to hold revivals in Rochester in the 1830s. Bissel's father had been not only devout but industrious, leaving behind an earthly fortune. Josiah Bissel the younger came from one of Rochester's wealthiest and most established families.

Bissel may have been incensed during the Corinthian Hall investigations by what he considered blasphemy and outraged by women who were willing to flout conventional morality. In an era that valued middle-class privacy and feminine purity and that damned public expressions of sexuality, the Fox sisters not only had offended morality by daring to appear onstage but had allowed themselves to be physically handled in a way that was considered highly unseemly—and the procedures to be discussed in a very open forum. Undoubtedly, Bissel also had decided in advance that the sisters were frauds and that Rochester would become known as a place haunted not by ghosts but by credulous fools duped by two attractive young women.

Maggie and Leah, well aware of the threats against them, retreated to the Posts' home for their own protection. Frightened by the rumors and exhausted from the grueling investigations, Maggie refused to go to the hall that last night. Amy planned to attend anyway and sit onstage in a
symbolic gesture of support for her friends and the spirits. Leah, who had been wavering, resolved: “Amy, if you will go, I will go with you, if I go to the stake.” And just as the two women were leaving, Maggie relented, saying, “I cannot have you go without me. I must go, though I expect to be killed.”
⁸

That evening, Capron and Willets wrote, the final committee—the third—made its report, stating that despite all its precautions the sounds had been heard and that various questions asked of the spirits had been answered generally correctly. The man who had sworn to destroy his hat and his friend who had promised to hurl himself over the falls chose not to deliver on their vows.

So it was, Capron and Willets concluded, that after “three days of the strictest scrutiny by means of intelligence, candor and science, were the persons in whose presence these sounds are heard, acquitted of any fraud.”
⁹

The two men had shaded the facts about the unanimity of the second committee, and it was optimistic at best to say that the investigators had acquitted Maggie and Leah of deliberate deception. It was absolutely true, however, that no one had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt whether—or how—the sisters made the raps. After “three days of the strictest scrutiny,” they had won a remarkable victory.

But it was a victory that left Josiah Bissel and his cronies unimpressed, and they behaved in anything but a genteel fashion themselves: they lit firecrackers and bombarded the room. In her history of Spiritualism, Emma Hardinge underscored the sexual nature of the attacks, stating, “Josiah Bissel, writing himself ‘Esq.' and ‘gentleman,' proceeded to distribute torpedoes amongst ‘the boys,' and on every side the explosion of these noisy tormentors distracted the ears and stimulated the ribald jokes of the mob against ‘the rappers.'”
¹⁰