Talking to the Dead (13 page)

Both girls, like Leah, continued to suffer from severe headaches. One or all of the sisters, like others of their time, may have sought occasional relief for pain not only in mesmerism but also in medications legally made with alcohol or morphine, substances that have been known to blur the line between the real and imagined.

 

The desire to establish proof of spirit communication found a hopeful symbol in a great technological achievement of the age, the telegraph. One of the first individuals to draw the analogy, the Reverend Ashahel H. Jervis, was a machinist and Methodist minister who had joined the Fox sisters onstage during their demonstrations at Corinthian Hall. One afternoon Jervis's out-of-town houseguest, a man named Pickard, was visiting other local friends; they were trying to initiate spirit contact when raps delivered tragic news: Pickard's son had died suddenly a few hours before. The distraught father rushed to catch the next stagecoach home.

That night a telegram for Pickard arrived at the Jervis household. When Jervis opened it, he read the same sad news reported earlier in the day by the spirits. Drawing a parallel between the revolutionary advance in human communication and the little-understood phenomenon of spirit contact, Jervis announced to his wife: “God's telegraph has outdone Morse's altogether.”
²¹

Another incident underscored the analogy. In a letter to the
Rochester Daily Magnet
in February 1850 Nathaniel Draper, a farmer and Rochester pioneer, described what happened when he magnetized his wife, the purportedly clairvoyant Rachel. To the couple's surprise, she was contacted by neither friends nor family but by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, who appeared to her in a vision.
²²

Asked why he had come, the founding father told Rachel that he was establishing a new line of communication, the term
line
a reference to the telegraph. Franklin then urged the Drapers to invite Kate, Maggie, and a few others for an experiment to determine the feasibility of establishing “communications between two distant points by means of these rappings.”

Understandably dubious, Nathaniel Draper asked Franklin to give
him a signal to confirm his identity. Franklin, an early promoter of electricity, promptly administered an electric shock to wake up the magnetized Rachel, who assured her worried husband that the jolt had only helped clear her head.

The Drapers obediently assembled a group of about ten people, including Kate and Maggie. Franklin appeared to Rachel Draper soon after she'd entered the magnetic state and through her ordered the group to be divided in two, with half of the participants sent to a room at the opposite end of the house. In both places, the participants were startled to hear taps like those of an unusually loud telegraph. Franklin was “trying the batteries,” Rachel Draper commented. But the spirit, apparently disappointed with the outcome, scheduled another session for the next day, this time inviting Leah too.

At this second session Franklin again divided the group, assigning Maggie and the Drapers to remain with those in the parlor and Kate and Leah to join the others at the far end of the house. The mysterious telegraph resumed its loud taps, a sound so strange that Maggie apparently became alarmed and wondered aloud, “What does all this mean?” Rachel Draper, her face radiant in her magnetic state, explained that Franklin, as before, was testing the batteries. At that moment, raps called for the alphabet, and Franklin's spirit slowly spelled a message, letter by letter: “‘Now I am ready, my friends,' he rapped. ‘There will be great changes in the nineteenth century. Things that now look dark and mysterious to you will be laid plain before your sight. Mysteries are going to be revealed. The world will be enlightened. I sign my name Benjamin Franklin.'” The spirit concluded a bit more prosaically, “Do not go into the other room.”

After waiting a respectful few minutes, the Drapers' awed guests reassembled in the parlor to compare notes. What greater reassurance could mortals puzzled by the raps possibly hope for? The two groups agreed that each had heard the same auspicious message, given via the tap-tap of the ineffable telegraph in two different places at once.

E
LIAB
C
APRON
may have been sincere in his beliefs, but he was also a newspaperman with his eye on the main chance. Soon after
Singular Revelations
came out in 1850, he tried to pressure Margaret into allowing her daughters to go to New York City, and he criticized her for hesitating. Delay, he warned, might offend persons who “stand among the first in the nation for science and influence.”
¹
He assured her that powerful supporters could put to rest rumors that the girls were frauds. Sensitive, eager little Kate, the sister he had taken to Auburn with him, “might convince some of the best minds in the nation,” he enthused.

He resorted to wheedling: “Now I want you to answer and do say that Cathy may go…. Why you would hardly realize her absence, we could go to New York and back
so quick.
” He also threw in an appeal to the girl herself. “You want to go, don't you Cathy? It would be a delightful trip.”

Recognizing that strong-willed Leah was key to any family decision, he asked Margaret to broker his case with her oldest daughter. “I think
she will say [yes] for me,” he prompted. With a wry aside hardly appropriate for a supporter of women's rights, he added, “Try her. If she says no it will be the first lady that ever said so to me—
on serious matters!
”

Ending on a practical note, he admitted that eminent men of science offered no pay other than expenses, but he reminded Margaret that some people were always willing to give presents to girls. “Besides,” Capron observed, “money is not always the
greatest
advantage to be made by a good deal.”

Margaret Fox held her ground for a few months, keeping her daughters closer to home. By April 1850 a sufficient interval had passed for the sisters to dare to return to Corinthian Hall, this time under the protection of a former Universalist minister named R. P. Ambler, who took Capron's place as lecturer. “Public opinion had changed since the first lectures on the subject,” Leah wrote. If some members of the audience remained hostile, the sisters' many new friends rushed to the stage afterward to congratulate them on a successful appearance.
²

The Fox sisters now launched their first professional tour to spread word of the spirits. While John, as always, remained in Wayne County, Calvin Brown accompanied Margaret and her daughters to their next engagement, scheduled in Albany, New York, with Ambler once again delivering the lecture. The sisters found themselves in demand not only for large public events at Albany's Van Vechten Hall but also for seances held at their hotel. Their expenses amounted to about one hundred fifty dollars per week, but by charging a dollar per person for a group session and five dollars for a private one, the Fox sisters easily covered their budget. The Albany appearance, Leah wrote, was the “first stage of the fulfillment of our mission.”
³

They moved on to Troy, New York. “The ‘knocking' spirits are actually in town,” the
Troy Daily Whig
announced on May 1, 1850, “and ‘knock' at Apollo Hall for a night or two more. The Professor's lectures may be all well enough but the ‘spirits' will draw the quarters.”

The sisters were besieged by the converted and curious, but new problems surfaced. “A murmur arose among the ‘women' whose conduct toward us in Troy was cruel and unchristianlike,” Leah wrote. “They insinuated that if the mediums were men their husbands would not
become so deeply enlisted in this unpopular, and, seemingly, weird subject…. One lady especially distinguished herself by her intellectual antics in her line of procedure. (Her husband was much younger than herself, handsome and prosperous.)”

Despite the slurs of jealous wives and the scorn of the press, crowds of well-wishers saluted the sisters on their departure from Troy. Fortified by their triumphs in smaller cities, Margaret and her daughters made another stop in Albany then took the night boat south on the Hudson River for New York City.

 

By the first week of June 1850, the Fox sisters had settled into a suite at Barnum's Hotel, an establishment on the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane owned by a cousin of the famed impresario.
⁴
As she walked along Broadway, Maggie, who thrived on Rochester's noise and confusion, must have reveled in New York City's sensory assault: rumbling carriages and clanging fire bells; choruses of voices in different accents and languages; slogans splashed across brick walls and banners hanging from windows and lampposts; muddy streets and marble buildings; odors of garbage and manure, whiffs of ocean breeze and ladies' fancy perfume. “Faces and coats of all patterns, bright eyes, whiskers, spectacles, hats, bonnets, caps, all hurrying along in the most apparently inextricable confusion. One would think it a grand Gala Day,” wrote one awed observer.
⁵

Exploding in population, area, and wealth, New York had emerged as the nation's major metropolis. Imitating the banker and conspicuous trendsetter August Belmont, the wealthy were moving north of the city's business district to Fifth Avenue and Union Square, building marble mansions, and driving about town in gilded carriages, some drawn by as many as four sleek horses. Deluxe hotels—nineteen would be constructed between 1850 and 1854—featured ornate lobbies with overstuffed divans, red-flocked wallpaper, and glistening chandeliers. The A. T. Stewart department store, designed like an Italian palace, lured customers not just with its luxurious goods but with its fifteen plate-glass display windows, walls festooned with paintings, and full-length Parisian mirrors in which customers could view the ultimate product: themselves.

The age of public display had been born: it was splendid to look, see,
admire, and be seen. New Yorkers—rich and working-class alike—aimed to be fashionable, a goal that rivaled older aspirations such as respectability and gentility.

In the nation's commercial and manufacturing capital, newly arrived immigrants joined the native born in search of a livelihood or, better yet, a fortune. Sometimes the city's population seemed comprised entirely of isolated individuals with no friends or family, no past or community. Without reference points, who could tell if people were what they said?

One widely reported incident highlighted the dangers—real and imagined—of being duped in such an environment. In 1849 a charlatan named William Thompson greeted a stranger like an old acquaintance, asking the gullible gentleman if he had the “confidence” to lend him his watch. Watch in hand, Thompson disappeared. A journalist called him “a confidence man,” and the apt phrase entered the lexicon.
⁶

As some entrepreneurs grew rich, extremes of wealth and poverty emerged, but the majority of New Yorkers fell within the mutable bounds of the great middle class, some members comfortably entrenched there, others rising or falling in status, depending on their enterprise and luck that week or that year. While the poorest endured crowded, filthy tenements, even their lot in life wasn't static, and New Yorkers with a little money in their pockets had more choices. Some boarded in rows of brick houses. The well-to-do might buy one of the newly constructed brownstones that lined side streets.

Professionals and wage earners alike, whatever their tastes and finances, enjoyed going out on the town, whether to restaurants, oyster saloons, theaters, dance halls, summer gardens, concerts, lectures, or operas. New York allegedly had more theaters than any other city of its size in the world, although the presence of prostitutes in the balconies often deterred respectable women from attending.

Men of all classes visited houses of prostitution. They did so, respectable husbands protested, to save their virtuous wives from the onerous burdens of sex.

New York was also the newspaper capital of the nation. With literacy approaching 90 percent among white adults, access to printed information was a common denominator among New Yorkers.
⁷
Innovations in
printing meant that more newspapers could be sold, and sold cheaply, than ever before. Publishers raced to scoop their competitors, and the man and woman on the street were deluged daily with lurid gossip, sentimental anecdotes, and vital news about the city, the nation, and the world.

 

Horace Greeley, the iconoclastic editor of the
New York Tribune,
was one of the nation's most influential voices and tireless crusaders. Under his guidance the
Tribune
covered literature as well as news; championed the working class, women's rights, and abolition; and lent moral support to many of the utopian movements of the age.

Greeley's interest in spirit communication wasn't entirely objective; his curiosity, like that of many other investigators, was emotional as well as intellectual in origin. He and his wife, Mary, had lost four of their five children, the last boy less than a year before the Fox sisters' visit to New York. In 1849 the couple's golden-haired, five-year-old son, Pickie—his parents' favorite child, the light of their lives—had died suddenly of cholera.

“The one sunburst of joy that has gladdened my rugged pathway has departed…” Greeley mourned to his close friend, the author Margaret Fuller. After Pickie's death, Mary Greeley urged her husband to learn more about spirit communication.
⁸

Even so, he wasn't the first visitor to the Fox sisters' suite. “They have already been visited by a number of persons,” Greeley reported on June 5, 1850, “all of whom have been astonished at the developments made to them, and some more or less convinced of their supernatural origin.” He described Leah as a lady of about twenty-five, an unwitting compliment that must have thrilled her, for she not only radiated a youthful vivacity but also suffered a reputation in her family for vanity. He also noted her “pleasing and intelligent countenance.” To him, all the sisters seemed refined and their behavior proper. Their skin was almost transparently pale, he observed, like that of subjects susceptible to mesmeric influence.

Greeley heard the raps, felt the vibrations, and received correct answers to his questions, but he left the Fox sisters' rooms as baffled and curious as he was when he entered. He had gone there with a friend
who received only one correct answer to his six different questions. The whole “curious and puzzling affair,” Greeley concluded, could be “stripped of all supernatural interest” and still merit further investigation.

Usually joined by Margaret, a gray-haired bastion against insolent liberties, Kate, Maggie, and Leah conducted their sessions in one of the hotel parlors, gathering their guests around a large table that sat up to thirty people. They held sessions at 10
AM
, 5
PM
, and 8
PM
, fitting private meetings between the group sessions. The sisters went to bed each night exhausted but during their long working hours found the crowds generally courteous.

Journalists, politicians, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and ministers—those who could afford to pay—jammed the sessions. A significant sampling of Americans showed up at the door: “from sunbrowned Hoosier of the West to the Jewelled aristocracy of New York,” the
Tribune
reported.
⁹
So popular were the seances that a well-known singer incorporated a new song, “The Rochester Knockings at Barnum's Hotel,” into her Broadway act.
¹⁰

Many investigators emerged from the hotel sharing Greeley's mystification. “The production of the sounds is hard to explain, and still stranger,” mused the lawyer George Templeton Strong, “is the accuracy with which the ghosts guess of whom one is thinking—his age, his residence, vocation, and the like.” After carefully weighing different possibilities, such as the sisters' ability to use sleight of hand or to read clues from facial expressions, he eliminated the notion of trickery and “deliberate legerdemain.” He was inclined to believe that a mysterious but natural cause was at work, “some magnetic or electrical or mesmeric agency” that propelled the young mediums, a power that they themselves couldn't explain.
¹¹

Strong may have dismissed legerdemain not only because he saw no evidence of it but also because he doubted the sisters' capabilities. Nineteenth-century professional stage magicians often compared their performances to scientific exhibitions, masculine work that involved experiments in optics and chemistry and that was analytical and rational in nature. In contrast, women—long credited with wielding supernatural or spiritual powers as saints, sorceresses, and witches—were perceived
as spiritual beings even in their domestic role. It may have been easier for some visitors to view the Fox sisters as mediums or sway to mesmerism than to accept the possibility of their being innately talented, largely self-taught conjurers.

The most famous seance the Fox sisters conducted in New York, held at the home of the prominent author and minister Rufus Griswold, was attended by members of the nation's intellectual elite. Among others, Griswold hosted James Fenimore Cooper, author of the
Leatherstocking Tales;
George Ripley, the
Tribune'
s literary critic and a founder of Brook Farm, the recently defunct experiment in communal living; George Bancroft, former secretary of the navy, historian, and statesman; the poet William Cullen Bryant; and N. P. Willis, editor of the
Home Journal,
a magazine that kept the fashionable apprised of what was “new, charming, or instructive in the brilliant circle of city life.”
¹²

The Fox party consisted of Margaret, whom Ripley called “an elderly lady, the mother of the ghost-seers”; Leah, whom he referred to as “a married lady” rather than “a widowed lady,” as she presumably had resurrected Bowman Fish for the occasion, having killed him off but a few months before; Kate and Maggie; and “a couple of gentlemen from Rochester whose names we did not learn.”