Talking to the Dead (11 page)

Bissel and others who considered themselves “leaders of public opinion” then mounted the stage, Hardinge continued, “and invited up the ‘rowdies' for ‘investigation,' until the police, perceiving the disgraceful turn the proceedings were taking, urged the ladies and their friends to retire….” Ashen and terrified for their safety, Leah and Maggie were escorted out of Corinthian Hall under the police chief's protection.

As it turned out, Bissel's efforts backfired. The cause that “the
elite
of
Rochester citizenship” had tried to disgrace, Emma Hardinge wrote, “rose triumphantly out of the ruins they strove to create. The aim of wide-spread publicity was attained.”

The events at Corinthian Hall—and the article by Capron and Willets in the
Tribune
—stimulated an interest in spirit communication that transcended the confines of western New York. But Maggie and Leah had paid a steep price for their success by submitting to humiliation and abuse. If their faith in the spirits was genuine, they had done so for an important cause. Whatever their motives, it's certain that an event that they had tried to shape, by holding rehearsals and soliciting allies, had spiraled beyond their control.

Fame was theirs but at the cost of notoriety. And the criticism didn't stop. H. H. Langworthy went on from the committee to mount a serious attack on the Fox sisters, one published in the
New York Tribune
and other newspapers. He insisted in print that “by placing the girls on a table and putting our hands on their feet, the knocking stopped. By tying their dresses around their ancles [sic] with cords, it also ceased…. When there was a knocking on the doors and tables…these girls were in every case, touching these articles with the back of their dresses….” Langworthy concluded that “this ‘mysterious rapping' was so connected with the persons of these girls, that were they thoroughly examined
sans
culottes, they would stand out in base relief. But we were
men
and as the girls were cornered and very much frightened, we let them go at this….”
¹¹

Eliab Capron angrily responded that Maggie and Leah had in fact been examined “sans culottes” or very close to it by the diligent “Committee of Ladies.” His assertion may not have kept Dr. Langworthy and other male investigators from entertaining—and enjoying—the notion that had
they
stripped the sisters, the outcome might have been different.

The Corinthian Hall demonstrations sparked confusion even among those who supported the sisters. In a letter to relatives, a member of the Post family—possibly Isaac himself—pondered the contradictions that puzzled him. “If the spirits of our departed Friends are watching over us for good and are willing to communicate with us,” he commented, “it seems strange to us, it should be nessary [sic] to go to two or three girls to have the raps explained.”
¹²

Others stood firmly by the sisters yet worried about what would happen next. The abolitionist William Cooper Nell, a former associate of Frederick Douglass on the
North Star,
often visited the Town and Country Club in Boston, a place frequented by luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and A. Bronson Alcott.

“We all meet here and discuss about the many things
Celestial
and
Terrestrial,”
Nell wrote to Amy Post.
¹³

Nell devoted much of his letter to matters celestial: “spiritual matters which have thus far excited many circles aside from Western New York.” William Lloyd Garrison, Nell said, planned to publish parts of Capron's
Tribune
article in the
Liberator.
Garrison was not altogether sure what he felt about the “mysterious Knockings,” Nell confided, but was nonetheless a seeker of light. As for the
Tribune,
Nell continued, another article on the mysterious knocking had already appeared, accounting for it “as of a similar fact with those…in the history of Swedenborg and A. Jackson Davis.”

Nell reminded Amy that he considered Kate, Maggie, and Leah “as entirely honest in the business and on those premises the
wonder
and
mystery
is augmented. I can appreciate the trials to which you and they were exposed during the investigation…. Your motives are Godlike and your satisfaction will be ample,” he assured his friend but added with obvious concern, “even though the result may be different so far as the Girls are concerned from what you and other friends expect….”

Nell was right to be worried. However radical in her political and religious actions and opinions, Amy Post was a mature, middle-class married woman, well known and respected in the circles in which she moved. Kate, Maggie, and Leah, relative newcomers in the public arena, had no such long-established reputation for wisdom and integrity. Moreover, the girls were young and single, and Leah had no husband in evidence to provide a veneer of conventional respectability. John Fox had absented himself from his children's lives, and Margaret rarely objected to what her children did. Apart from a small group of friends, the sisters had no one to protect them from the demands of the spirits or their own desires or the probing hands, curious eyes, and mocking words of their contemporaries.

1849–1852

O
NSTAGE AT
Corinthian Hall in November 1849, Maggie and Leah had briefly joined the legions of Americans who broadcast new scientific, social, political, religious, and medical theories from platforms across the country: phrenologists who displayed their marked charts of skulls; mesmerists who magnetized audience members; inspirational speakers like Andrew Jackson Davis, who expounded on his visions of the afterlife; social and political reformers; healers, doctors, and quacks hawking their cures.

Some of these lecturers and demonstrators believed in what they preached; others didn't. But in the cause of commercial enterprise, with rare exceptions the sincere and insincere alike hoped to spread their ideas while making money from their performances and books.

Amid the exuberant clash of theories, who could know for certain what was real and what wasn't? Scientific and technological advances had
helped create the question. Rational, scientific inquiry seemed capable of providing answers.

In the 1840s the word
scientist
itself was just coming into popular use, as scientific study fragmented into discrete professional fields such as chemistry and physics. What helped unite these separate disciplines, it was argued, was method: the scientist's process of developing general truths from carefully observed facts.
¹

Throughout the nineteenth century new discoveries challenged old ideas and riveted the public's attention. The unimaginable turned out to be possible; mysteries proved penetrable. Nor were scientists shy about trumpeting their achievements in museums, exhibitions, and magnificently illustrated books. In the 1830s the English scientist Michael Faraday experimented with electromagnetism and hosted Friday evening lectures to describe his own and other scientists' work. His discovery of electromagnetic induction, important both theoretically and practically, also stimulated widespread fascination with the elusive force of electricity.

From observing rocks and fossils, geologists postulated that the earth and its varied species had evolved over millions of years. In the early 1800s the fossilized bones of enormous creatures resembling mythological dragons began to be collected for systematic study. In 1841 the English anatomist and zoologist Richard Owen gave these prehistoric reptiles a name:
dinosaur,
meaning “terrible lizard.”
²

Amazing events could seem theatrical, contrived, or even terrifying. In 1854 the first life-size reconstructions of dinosaurs were displayed outside London on the grounds of the Crystal Palace. Women and children screamed and fainted on catching sight of the nightmarish beasts.

Naturalists traveling far and wide reported on equally astonishing, living species of flora and fauna: in the Amazon, one intrepid explorer observed a bird-eating spider so large that children tied a cord around its middle and walked it like a dog.
³

Who could doubt that the skies held wonders rivaling the earth's? Andrew Jackson Davis, the American mystic known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” confidently expressed his belief in extraterrestrial beings, suggesting that contact with spirits, when it became commonplace, would resemble that “now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn, because of their superior refinement.”
⁴
Although apparently uninhabited by extraterrestrials, Neptune was discovered in 1846, the first major planet to be identified on the basis of mathematical calculations rather than from being observed directly with the human eye and telescope.

Anything seemed possible, but some things were just hoaxes. In the 1840s Barnum exhibited a Mermaid, a preserved monkey's head attached to a fish tail, at his American Museum. His practical, nineteenth-century audiences were open to everything but convinced of nothing until they had their empirical, material proof.
⁵

Advances in the so-called pure sciences were matched by technological leaps. The proliferation of steam-powered machines enhanced productivity. A revolution in transportation had produced the steamboat, the Erie Canal, and the railroads. The telegraph, still a novelty in the mid-1840s, seemed a marvel in its own right, capable of communicating messages almost instantaneously across great distances. Improved printing methods, along with the telegraph, had created a lively and querulous press.

Of course, not everyone unconditionally applauded each forward stride. “Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson warned in 1847.
⁶
In “The Celestial Railroad,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, passengers rode straight to hell in a roaring, belching locomotive. Critics worried that the material evidence demanded by science, coupled with the material prosperity promised by technology, would diminish or obscure the spiritual dimension of life.

The plethora of discoveries often seemed to contradict orthodox religion, a quandary that was difficult to resolve then as it is now. With the authority of the Bible undermined, weakened by historical explanations, geological explorations, and liberal theologians who stressed human goodness rather than sinfulness, churchgoers sometimes felt their faith rested on shaky ground. Still, science and liberal theology alike promised that humankind would progress ever upward and onward, advancing in knowledge and marching toward perfection.

 

In February 1850 Eliab Capron, in collaboration with a friend from Auburn, Henry D. Barron, issued a pamphlet that presented the surprising
argument that spirit communication should be viewed, not as a
supernatural
phenomenon, but as a
natural
one produced by natural causes. The pamphlet, the first substantive one since E. E. Lewis had published his in 1848, was titled
Singular Revelations: 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.
It was intended specifically to remove the spirits from the shadowy realm of superstition and place them squarely within the sunny domain of scientific reason.

“By natural causes,” Capron and Barron explained, “we do not mean that the cause is known to man at the present time; or that it is produced by collusion or machinery of any kind. We
know this is not the case.”
Instead, the communication between “superior and inferior intelligences” was part of a grand scheme, the underlying laws of which had yet to be discovered. Once scientists better understood its principles, it would rightfully be viewed as one more scientific wonder in their wondrous scientific age.
⁷

“The why of its appearance just at this time,” Capron and Barron wrote, “or the reason why it has not become more extensively known before, we are as unable to tell as we should be to tell why all the great discoveries in science were not made known to man at once.”

The authors' emphasis—an extension of their own and the nation's fascination with science and empirical investigation—had more in common with Enlightenment rationalism than it did with religious enthusiasm, and it was an approach that potentially held appeal for a wide audience. Capron and Barron hoped to appeal to seekers who wanted to reconcile faith with science as well as to men and women who might otherwise have spurned the spirits as supernatural bosh.

The material and the spiritual, they argued, were intimately connected, although the connection wasn't fully understood. Theoretically, they mused, “It is no more proof that [spirits] are not thus about us because not seen, than electricity or the numerous animalculae which we are constantly eating, drinking, and breathing, although unseen, do not exist for the same reason.”

On a practical level, skeptics—like scientists—could devise experi
ments to investigate the raps under strict test conditions, then arrive at conclusions on the basis of empirical proof.

Singular Revelations,
though small in size, was ambitious in scope. The authors established not only a scientific rationale for the spirits but a historical pedigree as well, describing the intrusion of “Old Jeffrey,” the fractious poltergeist, into the household of John Wesley's family.
Singular Revelations,
like a manual or reference book, synthesized for a bemused and curious public many of the theories about spirit communication that had been circulating since Hydesville.

The authors praised the Fox sisters' honesty and courage but also stressed that spirit visitations were by no means exclusive to the Fox family. A former church deacon from the nearby town of Greece had experienced raps long before hearing of Kate and Maggie. The loudest noises to date followed twelve-year-old John Beaver, another resident of New York State. Marvelous spirit feats could be experienced daily, the authors asserted, in the presence of Auburn's homegrown medium, Sarah Tamill, who had become active after meeting Kate.

The pamphlet's focus on the growing amount of spirit activity argued for Kate and Maggie's historic instrumentality: when Kate assumed the Hydesville rapper was sentient and snapped her fingers…when Maggie asked it to count to four…at that moment, Capron and Barron intimated, the close connection between worlds had been disclosed. With other demonstrations occurring around the state, Kate and Maggie surely could be absolved of mischief and deception.

To explain the presence of such communicative and humanlike spirits, Capron and Barron drew primarily on the ideas of their contemporary Andrew Jackson Davis, who in turn derived them from the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg—or from conversations, as Davis claimed, with Swedenborg's spirit. Davis had already produced an astonishing body of lectures and books developing what he came to call a “harmonial philosophy” in which like attracted like. So great were the similarities and affinities between beings of both worlds, Davis had written, that the recently deceased often failed even to recognize that they had died. Naturally, they felt a profound attachment to the mortals they had left behind.
⁸

Capron and Barron also relied on Davis's work to help them explain the existence of mischievous or evil spirits, the sort who pulled hair or deliberately lied on test questions. The authors of
Singular Revelations
dealt with this persistent problem by adapting Davis's theories on the structure of the other world.

There were seven spheres through which spirits passed, Capron and Barron wrote, proposing that the term “higher and lower spheres” substitute altogether for heaven and hell. Although immortal spirits at first closely resembled their mortal selves, flaws and all, everyone passed to a superior condition immediately upon dying. The longer a spirit inhabited the heavens, the farther it progressed through the seven spheres, advancing in ethereal virtue.
⁹

The authors had effectively sidestepped the whole issue of hell and eternal damnation that had so troubled the Posts and others. Immortal souls, like ambitious nineteenth-century Americans, had hope for self-improvement.

What if a mortal was contacted by the resident of a lower sphere? Capron and Barron counseled their readers to trust themselves and their instincts. Good spirits spoke the truth. Spirits that had not yet progressed teased or told lies. Sensible men and women, they argued, would discern the difference.

Horace Greeley's review of
Singular Revelations
for the
New York Tribune
managed to balance serious interest in the subject matter with tongue-in-cheek skepticism about some of the authors' assertions. He noted, “No theory of collusion or juggle or ventriloquism or hallucination suffices to account to our mind for the concussions, sounds or ‘knockings' which have been heard by hundreds of the most respectable and sedate citizens of Western New York.”
¹⁰

Still, he found parts of the book irresistibly amusing. “According to this,” Greeley commented, “a man wishing to get out of Hell has only to cut his throat, which most people would consider a far more likely way to get
into
that interesting predicament.”

He ended his review with a sensible caveat: “We have not meant to imply that any statement in this book is
necessarily
false or incredible, but only that they are of such a nature as to require a very large amount of unimpeachable evidence to sustain them.”

Letters about the spirits were now appearing almost daily in the
Tribune,
irate denunciations alternating with impassioned defenses, and other pamphlets on the subject swiftly followed
Singular Revelations.
With a title that outdid Capron's for sheer length,
History of the Strange Sounds or Rappings, Heard in Rochester and Western New York, and Usually Called the Mysterious Noises! Which Are Supposed by Many to Be Communications from the Spirit World, Together with All the Explanation That Can Yet Be Given of the Matter,
appeared in March 1850. It was written and published by a Rochester printer named D. M. Dewey, who, like Capron and Barron, reprinted letters, testimonials, and newspaper columns and who also expressed sympathy for the notion of spirit communication. He emphasized, however, that it was up to “every man to decide for himself…. Noman should believe without evidence.”

With the publication of Dewey's pamphlet and the hundreds of others that followed, Kate and Maggie's story evolved into a multiauthored tale. Conflicting opinions about the spirits influenced different versions; factual errors, deliberate distortions, and conscious or unconscious omissions and embellishments added a level of further confusion through the years. Dewey, for example, wrongly stated that Maggie, not Kate, had originally accompanied Leah to Rochester, an assertion that was often repeated. Reports of a famous comment attributed to Kate in her first encounter with the peddler—“Here, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do!”—may have been accurate, but they didn't appear in print until years after the event. By the end of the girls' lives too, their purported ages at the time of the Hydesville raps would vary from account to account, some authors averring that Kate and Maggie had been only six and eight when the murdered peddler first knocked.