Talking to the Dead (15 page)

Greeley, along with almost every other journalist, reported extensively on Jenny Lind's first visit to the United States in September 1850, a happy distraction for the nation from the disturbing subject of politics. Known as the Swedish nightingale, the singer was sponsored by P. T. Barnum, and she was promoted not just for her beautiful voice but also for her fine morals and ladylike manners. Lind was a major celebrity, and New Yorkers of every social class packed her concerts.
²¹

Like the word
scientist
and the phrase
confidence man,
the modern notion of celebrity was a nineteenth-century product. Newspapers and the telegraph were able to excite national and international interest in authors, performers, and lecturers; improved transportation allowed sponsors to create a circuit of cities for the stars to visit. Fame had become a manufactured commodity.

Jenny Lind expressed interest in meeting another celebrity, one who was emerging and more controversial: Kate Fox. In his autobiography Greeley described this seance as not entirely successful. Lind arrived with a retinue of strangers, who were seated around a large table. As soon as loud raps broke out, she fixed Greeley with an imperial stare and commanded, “Take your hands from under the table!”
²²

Much to Greeley's consternation, he realized that Lind was accusing him of creating the sounds. He clasped his hands over his head and, while raps continued around him, patiently and uncomfortably waited for the sitting to end.

Unfortunately, there's no record of how Kate experienced the seance, although other accounts suggest the meeting ended on a happier note, with Lind not only praising the young medium but kissing her sweetly in farewell. If true, the singer's kindness perhaps helped dispel for a moment Kate's depression over life at Castle Doleful.

 

With Kate in New York, Maggie and Leah—the latter no longer hesitant to claim her own powers of mediumship—resumed holding seances at
home in Rochester. They described their work in letters to the
Spirit Messenger,
one of a growing number of newspapers and journals devoted to spirit communication.

“The ladies…inform us,” the paper reported, “that, in the presence of a respectable circle of friends and neighbors…new and startling demonstrations were made…. The sounds were very loud upon the walls, floor, and other parts of the house. Sometimes sounds imitating heavy footsteps were heard, apparently upon the floor of the room in which the company were sitting.”
²³

The spirits of Dr. John Webster, a chemistry professor at Harvard, and Dr. George Parkman, uncle to the famed historian Francis Parkman, were frequent visitors to the Fox cottage on Troup Street. Webster had been executed that year for murdering Parkman, a wealthy benefactor of the college, in a dispute over a bad debt. It must have been a nasty disagreement; the victim's dismembered body was found beneath the professor's laboratory.
²⁴

The two men became contrite friends in the afterlife. Webster generously acknowledged that there were “many extenuating circumstances on both sides—and all our difficulties are settled.” The spirits seem to have been constantly at work, albeit after the fact, to reconcile the differences and disagreements that had troubled their mortal relationships.

What the
Spirit Messenger
on another occasion referred to as the fact “of the progress of the spirit in goodness and happiness hereafter” could sometimes confuse or frustrate people.
²⁵
The spirit of John Calhoun, the recently deceased senator from South Carolina, returned in an effort to avert the impending national crisis over slavery. Calhoun, that stalwart champion of the South and spokesman for slavery in life, now made a case in favor of abolition. A relative of the Posts confessed that she “would much rather he had given evidence while here for his testimony now is not of much value….”
²⁶

While startling in some respects, Calhoun's shift may have been predictable. From its inception, spirit communication had attracted reformers who rejected the established order, whether in religion, politics, or social convention. Along with proponents of abolition, the growing swell of believers included those who urged diet and health reform, who
decried the current state of prisons, and who promoted communities based on socialist principles. Women's rights advocates campaigned not only for suffrage but also for changes in marriage laws. More radical yet, some men and women questioned the very concept of marital monogamy, arguing that it deprived individuals of the chance to find their true spiritual partners. Critics sometimes equated faith in the spirits with advocacy of “free love,” exaggerating the relationship between the two in the interests of discrediting both.

Given the convictions of many of the mortals they visited, it's hardly surprising that most spirits supported reforms. Not unlike an individual's conscience freed from the fetters of authority, they often countenanced change when established religious institutions urged caution or noninvolvement or rejected reforms altogether. Not every spirit, however, could be expected to undergo a transformation as extreme as John Calhoun's, nor did all spirits agree with one another or progress at the same pace. Opinions varied sharply in the other world, as they did in established churches and the nation.

A gentleman in Memphis, Tennessee, while under the influence of mesmerism, asked, “Is the holding of slaves in conformity with the eternal laws of Deity?” The spirit he addressed equivocated, responding with a compromise position: “In time, but not in eternity.”

 

Maggie stayed with Leah in Rochester for much of the fall, but in November 1850 they divided up their labors. Seventeen-year-old Maggie returned, alone, for a visit to Troy, New York. This was the city where she and Leah had experienced troubles with the married ladies the previous spring, and far more serious difficulties arose on this trip. Motivated by jealous wives, fears of witchcraft, or both, five men began following Maggie by day and spying on her at night. Her hosts, Robert Bouton and his wife, feared that the men were assassins and that “a deep plot” had been laid to destroy the medium.

“Last night Mrs. B. and Margaretta went to the door of a shed together,” Bouton wrote to Leah, “and a stone was thrown at them. One man on the roof made an angry exclamation on finding that the two were together, instead of Margaretta alone.”

Violence escalated. Maggie's enemies, who hid in the lumberyard next to the Boutons' property, first hurled rocks through the windows then broke into the house. Prepared for the attack, the family drove the men away. After locking Maggie in a small room for her own protection, Bouton telegraphed Leah to come immediately and in secret to escort her sister home.
²⁷

The panic-stricken Leah boarded the train for Troy, convinced the whole way that mysterious men were stalking her. Her fears were reinforced on her arrival, when she saw her host brandishing a pistol to hold her enemies at bay. A mob greeted them in front of the house, but the Boutons' friends shielded her by lifting her up and carrying her bodily inside. She found Maggie sobbing and vomiting from fright in the room that had been her prison for several days. Shots were fired through the windows, but the agitators eventually dispersed. With Maggie too ill to travel far, Leah took her to Albany to recuperate.

Fears were difficult to dispel. For weeks Maggie cried out in her sleep. After returning to Rochester Leah became convinced that confederates of Maggie's Troy persecutors had been prowling around the house in her absence. But no further incidents occurred, and the two of them resumed holding seances, safely among their Rochester friends.

 

If the Fox sisters were fast becoming modern celebrities—promoted, loved, and despised as fervently as movie stars, athletes, and others in the public eye are today—they also fell within a long-established tradition that accorded fame, not just to royalty, military heroes, and statesmen, but also to religious figures. A few women in the United States had served as religious leaders, for example Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, but virtually all middle-class women in the nineteenth century were responsible for shaping the religious and moral atmosphere of the home. Children, moreover, had been spiritualized and sentimentalized by the Romantic movement, which painted them, as Wordsworth wrote, “trailing clouds of glory.”

Kate and Maggie, country girls on the cusp of adolescence at the time of the first raps, benefited from the aura of religiosity surrounding women and children. To many of those who believed in spirit commu
nication, it seemed that Emanuel Swedenborg and Andrew Jackson Davis had prepared the way for new revelations but that the two young mediums had ushered in a new stage of human development, the dawning of an era in which human beings would recognize that death did not exist.

Charlotte Fowler Wells, a publisher and phrenologist, was among those who, in the wake of the Fox sisters' New York visit, began to host private gatherings to commune with the spirits. Horace Greeley sometimes attended these events, occasionally bringing Kate with him. By December 1850 members of the New York Circle, as the group called itself, were meeting on a weekly basis without charging fees, and Wells's brother, Edward Fowler, had become a medium himself, passing into a trancelike state to communicate with the other world. In a process known as automatic writing, the spirits sometimes used his hand as an instrument to transmit messages; alternatively, words sometimes seemed to materialize on paper without human intervention in a process called spirit writing. Messages were often scrawled in hieroglyphics or foreign languages with which Fowler allegedly wasn't familiar, and they generally were philosophical or theological in content, elaborating, for example, on the seamless connection between matter and spirit.
²⁸

Similar circles were forming in other cities: Philadelphia, Providence, Cleveland, Boston, St. Louis, and elsewhere across the nation. Eliab Capron, by now working on the
Providence Morning Mirror,
claimed that there were fifty to one hundred mediums in Auburn, New York, alone.

“The ball once set rolling in New York,” the historian Emma Hardinge wrote two decades later, “sped on with an impetus which soon transcended the power of the press, pulpit or public to arrest it, despite of every force that was brought to bear against it.”
²⁹

A
S THE
F
OX SISTERS
' influence grew, so too did the number of battles waged in the press over the spirits' authenticity. One of the mediums' most virulent antagonists, Stanley Grimes, was a well-known lecturer on mesmerism and phrenology. He was also the man who had first magnetized Andrew Jackson Davis, although he had dismissed the soon-to-be famous seer as a weak and uninteresting subject, a mistake Grimes surely regretted.

In a series of letters to the
Tribune,
Grimes adopted a scattershot approach to the sisters, accusing them of virtually every trick in the book, from ventriloquism to the use of mechanical devices to collusion. Their success depended in part on their sex, he wrote; men didn't have the luxury of voluminous skirts to conceal their feet. Worse than that, he asserted, the mediums hired confederates to research their mortal visitors' backgrounds. From a phrenological point of view, he absolved Kate and Maggie of any innate predisposition to have chosen such a course for
themselves. He pointed the finger at Leah, however, whose phrenological chart apparently revealed the ominous traits of intelligence, skepticism, and masculine ambition.
¹

C. Chauncey Burr, a lawyer who became a Universalist minister then a lecturer on mesmerism and electrobiology like Stanley Grimes, had decided to make exposing the Fox sisters his fourth career. His attacks multiplied in January 1851 when he and his brother, Heman, announced that they had produced the raps “so loud that they were distinctly heard in a hall that was crowded with an audience of a thousand people.”
²

They had managed this accomplishment, the Burr duo informed readers of the
Tribune,
by cracking their toes. Heman Burr subsequently responded indignantly to those who doubted this achievement, providing them with a list of variables that he claimed could alter the raps' volume and tone, such as a particular toe's size and strength, a shoe's fit, a foot's moisture or dryness, and the substance—wood, glass, or metal—on which the medium stood.
³

Believers in the spirits ridiculed “Toe-ology,” as some papers gleefully labeled C. Chauncey Burr's theory. But his demonstrations attracted a new class of critics to test the Fox sisters: professors of medicine and medical doctors. Maggie and Leah were about to come under harsher and more expert scrutiny than any they had endured before.

Not that the medical profession could call itself an altogether objective or disinterested party, since many mediums, like mesmerists, claimed the ability to diagnose and heal disease. Mesmerists credited these powers to electromagnetic fluids in the atmosphere and body, while mediums relied on the advice and guidance of the spirits. Already losing patients to the more gentle regimens of homeopathic physicians, some medical men sensed competition from the other world and quickly dismissed all mediums as quacks.

Despite her unhappiness in the fall, Kate had agreed to stay in New York that winter, probably because Margaret finally recognized her daughter's cry for companionship and joined her there. Reunited following the Troy fiasco, Maggie and Leah set out together in February 1851, traveling west from Rochester to meet the residents of Buffalo, New York, who were invited to attend sittings at the sisters' hotel, the Phelps House.
Later that month the Buffalo
Commercial Advertiser
published a letter by three medical professors at the University of Buffalo—Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee, and C. B. Coventry—who described a visit they had recently made to the sisters' quarters. Everything about the letter struck Maggie and Leah as an insult, particularly the tone in which the doctors referred to them as “females,” a term that one influential magazine editor sniffed could apply as readily to horses as to ladies.

“Reasoning by way of exclusion,” the doctors wrote, they had gone into the meeting having agreed in advance that a spiritual explanation for the raps couldn't be considered until all possible physiological explanations had been eliminated. And the gentlemen had emerged from the meeting convinced, after careful observation, that Maggie's barely perceptible bodily movements produced the noises.
⁴

Maggie's tired expression, they argued, gave her away, proving not only that “the sounds were due to the agency of the younger sister” but also that they involved her conscious effort, “the action of the will, through voluntary muscles, on the joints.” Then the doctors dropped their bombshell: by coincidence, they had met a woman who produced the exact same raps by using, not her toes, but her knees.

“Without entering at this time into a very minute anatomical and physiological explanation,” the doctors wrote, embarking on just such an explanation, “it is sufficient to state that…the large bone of the leg (the tibia) is moved laterally upon the lower surface of the thigh bone (the femur) giving rise, in fact, to partial lateral dislocation…occasioning a loud noise, and the return of the bone to its place is attended by a second sound.”

The force of such a dislocation, they continued, was sufficient to jar doors and tables if the medium's offending knee was in contact with the furniture.

When a critic delivered a copy of the accusatory article to her room, Leah slammed the door on him. Then she and Maggie responded in kind by placing a challenge to the doctors in the newspapers. They resented “the imputation of being imposters,” the sisters wrote, but were nevertheless willing to undergo further examinations, provided that six of their own friends could be present as witnesses. If indeed the raps were to be
explained on anatomical or physiological principles, so be it. Let the doctors expose any humbug if they could.

A series of grueling investigations at the Phelps House ended in a draw. The sisters again agreed to be contorted into a variety of positions: heels on cushions, legs extended, feet elevated. During one four-hour experiment, the doctors sat directly in front of Maggie and at periodic intervals seized her knees through her dress. At the insistence of the eight or ten onlookers, the investigators reluctantly abandoned their plan to bandage Maggie's legs, cynically noting that the young medium's tears had “excited much sympathy.”

Afterward, the doctors reaffirmed their conviction: Maggie made the raps; virtually no sounds were heard when her knees were held or otherwise constrained. On the rare occasion when she managed to produce a faint rap, Dr. Lee (who defined his role as “being the holder”) maintained that he could feel the motion of the bone.

In a subsequent letter, to account for the way the sounds varied and seemed to ricochet around a room, the doctors turned to the laws of acoustics. “Those having a nice musical ear,” wrote Dr. Lee, “can generally locate [the raps] directly in [Miss Fox's] vicinity. But if the attention is drawn to another part of the room, then, as in the case of ventriloquism, the sounds seem to proceed
thence.
”

Leah responded with her own aggressive press campaign, skewering the Buffalo doctors for deliberate obfuscation and stating that they had heard many more raps than they were willing to admit. However, she did acknowledge occasional lapses on the part of the spirits, admitting that “when our feet were placed on cushions stuffed with shavings, and resting on our heels, there were not sounds heard….” But she insisted that the spirits had been well within their rights to retreat, offended as they were by the harsh behavior of their medical persecutors.

The dispute, as Leah later said, “had put all Buffalo on the boil.” Slogging through deep rivers of melting snow and mud, the result of the unseasonably warm, sunny March weather, eager crowds descended on the Phelps House. Demonstrating a gift for public relations, Leah refused for a fortnight to charge a fee. So crowded were the sessions that Charles White Kellogg, a produce commission merchant, complained
about being turned away twice before finally having a chance to meet with the sisters. “Mrs. K and I visited Mrs. Fish and Miss Fox, the celebrated Rochester Knockers,” he wrote on the evening of March 18.

“Amongst other remarkable demonstrations,” Kellogg confided to his journal, “a large Dinner Bell & a small tea bell sitting under the table rang frequently & traveled from one end to the other, the large one frequently coming up agst. the table with such force as to knock the table, as hard as a man could strike it with a heavy hammer—knocking the candlestick six inches or more clear of the table & the candles out of the sticks, & put the candles out. The small bell would change from outside to inside of the large bell, both keeping their perpendicular position. A violin under the table was played & moved from place to place, so far as could be discovered by 13 of us, without human agency—in short, all was done without our being able to discover the why or
wherefore.
”
⁵

When Maggie and Leah left Buffalo in April 1851, they could readily call their visit a financial success. “Not a few of the principal gentlemen of the city sent us parting gifts of congratulations on a noble scale of munificence,” recalled Leah, “as tributes of sympathy for what we had had to bear, and of gratitude for the demonstrative proofs of immortality it had been ours to bring to their experimental
knowledge.
”
⁶

Leah may have conducted a fortnight's worth of free sessions, but she could afford to do so. The Fox sisters were now financially secure enough to dress well, to travel more comfortably, and to give generous presents to their family and friends in Rochester and Wayne County. Perhaps in part because she felt so flush, Leah changed her residence in Rochester for a third time, moving to a fine, large home ideally situated on the corner of Troup and Sophia Streets, no longer on the edge but in the heart of Rochester's wealthy Third Ward. The stress of the Buffalo investigations and the strain of moving, however, were too much for her. Ill and exhausted, Leah took to her bed to recuperate.

 

Spring of 1851 found Kate and her mother still living in New York, spending most of their time at Castle Doleful but occasionally visiting other investigators. A student by day, Kate continued to participate in
seances at night. As the Greeleys' guest, she received no fee for her work; she was considered a subject of scientific interest.

A New Yorker named Charles Partridge, a wealthy match manufacturer, had met both Kate and Maggie previously; like the Greeleys, he and his wife were so drawn to Kate that they invited her to their home for several weeks that March. According to an account by the Fox family's friend Eliab Capron, Partridge's neighbor adamantly insisted the medium was a fake until, finally, the spirits politely inquired whether anything could change his mind.

“He replied,” Capron wrote, “‘To see the medium stand up in the chair so that we can see her feet, and then hear the rapping.' The spirits then spelled, ‘Cathy…stand up in the chair.' She stood up in the chair, and the rapping was made in various places, and in great abundance. She was then requested to sit down, which she did, when the lamp on the table was moved about, without any visible means, to the entire satisfaction of the skeptic.”
⁷

Perhaps in reaction to having to convince so many suspicious strangers of her worth, fourteen-year-old Kate's affections for her family's tried-and-true friend, John E. Robinson of Rochester, seem to have developed into a full-blown schoolgirl's crush. A bachelor twice her age, Robinson may have been flattered at first, but his indulgence soon shifted into a serious concern for Kate's welfare. As he wrote to Leah, the little girl who captivated everyone with her compelling presence and her intuitive, or spiritual, gifts was swiftly growing up.

“I received a good letter from your witch sister, my darling little Katie, this morning,” he told Leah. “She writes with much cheerfulness. Says she has commenced another quarter at her school…. She says also she is ‘crazy' to see me! You know just about what is intended to be understood when she thus addresses me (her friend and advisor); but Cathie is fast learning to be a woman, and my prayer is that she may escape the bitter trials through which you and your mother have been called to pass.”
⁸

The trials to which Robinson undoubtedly referred were the consequences of a rash, precipitous, and unsuitable choice of husband, a choice Margaret had made at sixteen and Leah at younger than fifteen.

Not all of Kate's trusted allies were so protective of her, and in April 1851 the Wayne County township of Arcadia—home to her father and her brother, David—produced a traitor, or a liar. David's wife, Elizabeth, had a sister-in-law, Mrs. Norman Culver, who announced in a deposition that the previous year Kate had confessed to fraud. The deposition had been solicited by C. Chauncey Burr, who hadn't abandoned his efforts to destroy the Foxes.
⁹

At the time, Culver explained, she had made up her mind to get at the truth behind the spirits. She waited until Maggie was away, then approached effusive Kate with a proposition: a cousin of hers wished to attend a seance, Culver said. How could she help Kate ensure the seance's success? Kate, Culver continued, had accepted the bait and volunteered to teach her how to be a medium.

“She said that when my cousin consulted the spirit, I must sit next to her,” Culver testified, “and touch her arm when the right letter was called. I did so, and was able to answer nearly all the questions correctly. After I had helped her in this way a few times, she revealed to me the secret. The raps are produced by the toes. All the toes are used…. Catharine told me to warm my feet, or put them in warm water, and it would then be easier work to rap; she said that she sometimes had to warm her feet three or four times in the course of an evening. I found that heating my feet did enable me to rap a great deal easier.”

According to Culver, Kate then moved on to admit to other tricks long familiar to magicians—for example, to reading facial clues and body language for answers: