Talking to the Dead (14 page)

Calvin, now the Fox sisters' constant companion, was certainly one of the unnamed; the other gentleman remains a mystery. Ripley's failure to ascertain such basic facts is intriguing. It suggests that the literati didn't care to be bothered with those whom they considered beneath them in class or intellect except as they were a curiosity or provided entertainment. And it raises the possibility that the investigators weren't quite the eagle-eyed detectives they assumed themselves to be.

“For some time,” Ripley wrote in the June 8 issue of the
Tribune,
“perhaps a little over half an hour after the arrival of the ladies no sounds were heard, and the company gave obvious symptoms of impatience. They were then requested to draw nearer the table, which was in front of the ladies, and form themselves into a compact circle. Soon after faint sounds began to be heard from under the floor, around the table, and in different parts of the room. They increased in loudness and frequency,
becoming so clear and distinct that no one could deny their presence, nor trace them to any visible causes.”

James Fenimore Cooper was one of the individuals invited “to enter the supra-mundane sphere.” He proceeded to interrogate the spirits, Ripley wrote, “with the most imperturbable self-possession and deliberation.

“After several desultory questions from which no satisfactory answers were obtained, Mr. C. commenced a new series of inquiries. ‘Is the person I inquire about a relative?' ‘Yes,' was at once indicated by the knocks.”

Cooper, it turned out, was thinking of his sister. How many years ago had she died?

For a few moments a clatter of rapid raps confounded the sitters, “some counting forty-five, others forty-nine, fifty-four, etc.” Finally the spirit agreed to rap slowly enough for a consensus to be reached at the number fifty.

Cooper then asked about the cause of death, presenting a number of chilling options: Struck by lightning? Drowned at sea? Thrown by a horse? The raps pounded on the latter, and Cooper confirmed that fifty years ago his sister had been killed in such a fall.

In the end George Ripley remained on the fence about the raps. In concluding his article, he explained that Kate, Maggie, and Leah “have no theories to offer in explanation of the acts of their mysterious attendants, and apparently have no control of their incomings or outgoings. But if the raps are not made by their agency, are they made by the spirits of the departed?”

He provided no answer to his own question.

Visitors disagreed about the raps and their origin, but a number of skeptics emerged with a favorable opinion of the sisters, who were complimented on the good humor and ease with which they handled the visiting crowds. Several reporters noted how attractive the girls were, one calling Maggie “a very pretty, arch-looking, black-eyed, and rather modestly behaved young girl.”
¹³
Modestly behaved, he seemed to imply, for a young woman with an arch look who happened to be engaged in such unconventional behavior.

The girls' charm had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it drew a scandalous number of gentlemen to their door. On the other hand, the
mediums' very presence exerted its own mesmeric influence, disarming many of their most suspicious critics and giving the sisters leeway to forge ahead with their activities. The spell that they cast silenced only some of their critics, however. Others remained determined to expose the sisters as frauds and subjected them to tests that may have enhanced the spirits' reputations but surely damaged those of Kate, Maggie, and Leah.

“The only thing approaching an indignity we had to complain of among ourselves,” Leah later admitted, “was the frequency with which committees of ladies would retire with us to disrobe and reclothe us, the holding of our feet, etc.”
¹⁴

William Fishbough, an early colleague of Andrew Jackson Davis, complained in the
Tribune
about one especially egregious encounter. Challenged by a man named Davies, the sisters consented to be examined by a group of mutually agreed upon women at a mutually agreed upon time. Ignoring the ground rules, however, one afternoon Davies and his wife interrupted a seance unannounced, rudely demanding that the sisters instantly submit to the proposed test. Davies further insisted on its being conducted by his wife and the three women who happened to be present for the seance. The men, of course, discreetly left the room.

After the investigation Mr. Davies delivered the committee's report, since the four gentlewomen professed themselves too modest to deliver it. The report “was to the following effect,” the indignant William Fishbough wrote in his letter to the
Tribune
.

1. That the ladies [the sisters] had been disrobed with the exception of their nether garments, and that the most thorough investigation had failed to disclose any machine by which the sounds might be produced.
   
2. That the ladies, after being unclothed, had been placed in a variety of positions, and still the sounds were heard, while the most careful watching had failed to detect any physical movements which could account for their production.
   

Although Mrs. Davies had tentatively ventured a guess “that the sounds might be produced by the ‘cracking of the bones of the ladies,'”
the origin of the raps, Fishbough concluded triumphantly, had remained a mystery.
¹⁵

Fishbough kindly intended to lend his support to the Fox sisters, but in effect he had produced some racy reading for the
Tribune
's audience. The public display of the nude or partially clothed human body was permissible in art, and museumgoers enthusiastically admired the female form in all its glory depicted in paintings and statues of gods and goddesses, peasants from another era, or island girls from distant lands. These images were cloaked, not with skirts, but with the romance of the long ago and far away.

Otherwise, discussion of the naked or partially clothed female body was taboo, certainly in any conversation having to do with respectable women who were neither actresses nor prostitutes. And while the Fox sisters could claim spiritual justification for their states of undress, they had ventured into dangerous territory by submitting to the invasive examinations of their contemporaries. Their behavior, in fact, was so daring that it points either to the strength of their ambition or to the courage of their convictions. Perhaps the two motivations became linked, at least for a time.

What exactly were Kate, Maggie, and Leah thinking—and doing—as they met with hosts of curious, kind, skeptical, hostile, earnest, and intrusive investigators during the summer months of 1850? Were the Fox sisters engaged in deliberate fraud? The victims of self-deception? The standard-bearers of a cause?

The spirits may have chosen them for a mission, but human motives also must have come into play to spur them on their course. Certainly the lure of fame and money played a role for Leah and excitement and adventure for Maggie. Whimsical and given to flights of fantasy, Kate may sometimes have merged her sisters' wishes with the spirits' and her own.

In August, just before the sisters left New York, they were guests for several days at the Greeleys' home, a farm in an area called Turtle Bay on the still countrified edges of Manhattan. After they departed Greeley published the most unequivocal defense of them that he had issued to date. He reminded his readers that the mediums had been subjected to
every conceivable test by hundreds of citizens. Their rooms had been searched, they had been repeatedly disrobed and examined, they had been scrutinized not just in their hotel but in the homes of many discerning New Yorkers.

“Whatever may be the origin or cause of the ‘rappings,'” Greeley stated, “the ladies in whose presence they occur do not make them. We tested this thoroughly, and to our entire satisfaction. Their conduct and bearing is as unlike that of deceivers as possible; and we think no one acquainted with them could believe them at all capable of engaging in so daring, impious, and shameful a juggle as this would be if they caused the sounds. And it is not possible that such a juggle should have been so long perpetuated in public.”
¹⁶

While his stance reflected careful, thoughtful investigation, it is not irrelevant that Horace Greeley had suffered another grievous loss only three weeks earlier. For many years he had found welcome companionship in Margaret Fuller, former editor of the
Dial
and author of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
She wrote columns for the
Tribune
and for a while had lived—as a friend and perhaps buffer between the spouses—in the Greeleys' house. But in the late 1840s Fuller had traveled abroad to report for the
Tribune
on the republican revolution in Italy; there she had met and had a child with the marchese Angelo Ossoli, whom she later married. Her long absence overseas had left an echoing silence in the lives of both Horace and Mary Greeley, who were looking forward to her return that summer of 1850.

On their way back to the United States in July, Margaret Fuller and her family died in a shipwreck off the coast of the United States, so close to land that horrified men and women on the beach watched, helpless, as the ship sank.
¹⁷

The Greeleys were devastated, in need of solace. Both of them had been taken with Kate and genuinely moved by the girl's—or the spirits'—powers of insight. Horace was convinced that she would benefit from a first-rate education, an important tool for improving a young woman's options. With schooling, she could teach or write for women's magazines or marry a better class of man. Yearning for comfort not only
from the spirits but certainly from the child too, the Greeleys invited Kate to live with them that fall, as Margaret Fuller once had. The Fox family accepted the invitation on Kate's behalf, but the opportunity meant another separation between the thirteen-year-old girl and her mother and sisters. The cost exacted by the spirits was high.

 

The summer the Fox sisters introduced the spirits to New York, death was on everyone's mind, intruding its grim presence alarmingly into politics when President Zachary Taylor contracted cholera and died after an illness of five days. While mourning the dead, the nation assessed the living, wondering exactly what impact Taylor's successor, Millard Fillmore, would have on the issue of slavery. He was expected by some to be a “healer,” a code word selectively used to imply that he was more sympathetic to the South than his predecessor had been.
¹⁸

That autumn Congress enacted the Compromise of 1850 with little objection from President Fillmore. Among other provisions, the compromise included the Fugitive Slave Law, which empowered federal agents to find and return escaped slaves to the South, even those who had reached free soil in the North, and which made harboring fugitives a federal offense punishable by six months in prison.

Abolitionists were stunned by the severity of the measure, however much they had anticipated its passage. Fugitives could be kidnapped from the homes, stores, and streets of Northern cities. Those who were recaptured often faced harsh reprisals and even death at the hands of white plantation owners or overseers; and men and women like the Posts who ran stations on the Underground Railroad were in danger of arrest.

Far away as she was from her Rochester friends, Kate's worries that fall were personal not political; she was predictably miserable as the Greeleys' guest at their farm, a house bitterly labeled “Castle Doleful” by Horace, who managed to be there infrequently himself. She went to school daily except Sunday, most likely as a student at one of the private academies for fashionable young ladies that were proliferating in New York. Her teachers were kind and her studies interesting, and she enjoyed her dance lessons on Mondays and Saturdays.

Enrolled under an assumed name to protect her privacy, however, she had no chance to make friends or socialize with anyone her own age. Instead, most of her time outside of school was spent at Castle Doleful. While Horace reported on the important affairs of the nation, she was left in the company of his angry, grief-stricken wife, Mary.

Lonely and sad, Kate confided her plight in a letter to “My Dear Friend,” most likely John E. Robinson of Rochester, a family friend to whom she turned for sympathy and attention. Her attachment may have reflected a desire for a more involved father figure than John Fox.

“I think you have forgotten me as I am shure [sic] you would have answered my letter,” she wailed. She confessed that she was powerfully homesick, then turned to another serious problem, admitting that she couldn't abide the morbid Mary Greeley.
¹⁹

“O how I hate her,” she exclaimed, adding a few sentences later, “I have cried myself almost sick. O why did I leave my mother….”

She had tried writing to Leah, Kate complained, but the letters went unanswered. She had made up her mind to leave New York at the end of the fall semester of school, and she was suffering from the terrible headaches that also afflicted Maggie and Leah.

“O John if you knew how sick at heart I am you would come after me,” she pleaded.

It was probably a plea she had expressed earlier to her mother and Leah. But Margaret generally complied with what Leah wanted, and Leah surely wasn't eager to remove Kate from under the wing of the influential Horace Greeley.

Despite tensions in the Greeley household, there were some interesting spirit communications, too. Immortal little Pickie recalled once disturbing Horace at work in his study and his father sternly asking him to leave the room. During a seance Mary expressed regret over the incident, but the son's spirit loyally defended the newspaper editor, rapping that sometimes his father simply had to work very hard.

“Mrs. Greeley is more and more confirmed in the communications with the spiritual world by ‘Rappings,'” Horace Greeley confided in a letter to a friend, “and I am sure it cannot be accounted for by merely
human agency. It is a puzzle which you will some day be interested to investigate—don't look at it till then,” he counseled. “A mere fraud would not live so long and spread so widely.”
²⁰