Talking to the Dead (16 page)

“[Kate] said the reason why they asked people to write down several names on paper, and then point to them till the spirit rapped at the right one,” Culver stated, “was to give them a chance to watch the countenances and motions of the persons, and that in that way they could nearly always guess right.”

And to misdirecting the audience's attention:

“She told me,” Culver recalled, “that…when I wished to make the raps sound distant on the wall, I must make them louder, and direct my own eyes earnestly where I wished them to be heard.”

And to collusion:

“Catharine told me,” Culver concluded, “that, when the committee held their ankles in Rochester [during the Corinthian Hall investigations], the Dutch servant-girl rapped with her knuckles under the floor from the cellar. The girl was instructed to rap whenever she heard their voices calling the spirits.”

Eliab Capron derided Culver as Burr's pawn and contested her claims point by point. He asserted that, since Kate had been in Auburn during the Corinthian Hall demonstrations, she hardly could have known much about them. The investigations had been held at several different locations, he emphasized, without advance notice given to Leah and Maggie. And, he noted, the Fox family “did not have, and never had, a Dutch or other servant-girl in the family at Rochester up to the time of the investigation.”

He failed to mention, however, that some of the investigations had been held at the Posts' home and that a Dutch servant had been working for the family at the time. Along with Amy, Jacob, and Joseph, the young woman whom Isaac called “our little Dutch girl” had loved to ask questions of the spirits.
¹⁰

 

Even Mrs. Norman Culver's testimony failed to diminish popular interest in the sisters, although Kate no doubt felt betrayed. That spring, around the same time Culver's deposition was published and while Leah was still recuperating from her recent move, Maggie joined her mother and sister in New York City. There the mediums continued to build their own and the spirits' following. One highly influential newcomer was Judge John Worth Edmonds, chief justice of the New York State Supreme Court, who had become a serious investigator of the spirits soon after his wife's death in 1851.

Edmonds's state of mind when he met the sisters suggests the appeal of spirit communication for men and women who were grappling with changing ideas about the afterlife. “I was occupying all my leisure in reading on the subject of death, and man's existence afterward,” he wrote. “I had, in the course of my life, read and heard from the pulpit so many contradictory and conflicting doctrines on the subject, that I hardly knew what to believe.”
¹¹

He had remained dubious about the spirits, however, so much so that when he attended a seance at the home of Charles Partridge, the match manufacturer, on the night of May 21, 1851, Edmonds was still seeking proof which he hoped “should be entirely satisfactory.”

To Partridge, that particular evening seemed to have been expressly “selected for the purpose of producing these proofs” to convince Edmonds. Maggie was there, as was Dr. John Gray, a respected homeopathic physician and a friend of the Fox family. Other participants included a white-haired medium named Henry Gordon, famous for his levitations, and an anonymous observer who, along with Partridge, left an account of the evening's events. Both accounts are worth quoting almost in their entirety, for the witnesses saw and heard very different things.

The session began with one member of the group playing the piano while the spirits marked time by raps. As Partridge wrote down his account, he felt the table on which he was leaning vibrate beneath his hands. Soon the spirits suggested that the room be darkened, the better to demonstrate their own otherworldly glow.

“We accordingly did so,” wrote Partridge, “and the lights which had been desired, were at different times and in different places seen, sometimes resembling phosphorescent flames, occasionally forming luminous clouds moving about the room; sometimes they appeared like bright, glistening stars, and at other times, like sparkling crystals or diamonds…. Physical manifestations increased in variety and force, and continued for three hours during the whole of which time the Judge seemed to be in the possession of the spirits. Many things occurred to him (which he mentioned) that he alone could be conscious of; though we could perceive that something extraordinary was going on within and around him. Many things, however, occurred which all could witness and did.

“The card table before mentioned began to move with violent force from one side of our circle (which was large) to the other, rocking and raising up and coming down, and finally the leaf was shut up, the cover turned round in its place, the table was gently turned upside down and laid at our feet…. A chair, which stood outside of our circle and several feet from any one, was suddenly moved up to the circle and back, rocked, and finally, with great rapidity, conveyed from one end of the room to
the other, winding its way among the people who sat there…at times passing with fearful rapidity within an inch or two of our persons.

“We were touched on different parts of our persons, simultaneously, as by a human hand, so distinctly that its size and temperature could be felt…. Mr. Gordon was required to go into a closet, and the door was shut by some invisible power.

“Some of the party, among whom was Judge Edmonds, were requested to go into another closet…where there was a guitar, bass viol and violin, all of which were played upon, separately at first, and finally all together, in marked time, which was beat out by raps, sometimes on the viols, floor, ceiling…the bow often touching the persons there.

“Afterward, the bass viol and violin were raised above their heads and out of the reach…and in this position they were played and rapped upon as by human fingers….

“A dinner bell on the shelf was raised up and rung over their heads, then taken out into the parlor and carried over the heads of fifteen or twenty persons sitting in the circle there…. Another small bell was taken off the shelf, rung, and placed into and taken out of the hands of several persons. A pocket handkerchief was taken from the Judge's pocket, and tied into many knots, and put back again….

“Such things,” concluded Partridge, “went on for a period of about three hours, and it was asked: ‘Why are these strange and apparently inconsiderable things done?' it was answered: ‘that you may know it is super-terrestrial, and not the work of mortal hands.'”
¹²

While Partridge viewed the manifestations with reverence, the observer who left an anonymous account also couldn't believe his own eyes.

“After the spirits desired the lights put out,” the unidentified witness wrote, “and every vestige and gleam of light being excluded, in the most pitchy darkness, a series of proceedings took place which utterly and entirely disgusted me; of course, anything done in the dark is useless so far as convincing people goes. We sat and listened, for about one hour and a half, to a perfect pandemonium of noises, bangs on the table as loud as could be made by hand or foot, loud slaps, bells ringing loudly, the table creaking, flapping its leaves and turning quite upside down, as
was announced by the exclamations of those about it, Judge Edmonds continually exclaiming, ‘I'm touched—now I am tapped on the shoulder—hear that—now they are at my feet, now my head,' and then he would cry out, ‘They are pulling my coat-tails—they are pulling me towards Margaretta.'…Meanwhile the white-haired [medium, Henry Gordon] was going on in the most extraordinary manner, crying out, seemingly scuffling and contending with the spirits who wanted to take possession of him. At one time Dr. Gray says, ‘They have lifted him up in the air,' and someone else rejoined, ‘No, he is standing on his chair'; at length, amid a loud outcry, and exclamations of ‘Don't, I don't want to; leave me alone,' accompanied by the noise of a struggle, he was dragged into the closet and shut up there; this we knew from Dr. Gray's exclamations. Presently Dr. Gray was also sent in there, then Judge Edmonds, finally all the mediums and some others. We were then favored with the most absurd series of noises from this closet that ever was heard: loud bangings, a chorus of Auld Lang Syne, sung by all the
closeted,
accompanied by raps on the door, and scrapings on an old violoncello, which was in the closet…. We left them at last at half-past eleven still in there, the noises going on as loud and meaningless as ever.”
¹³

What to one observer seemed miraculous, to the other seemed ridiculous. To Partridge, the manifestations that night offered proof of immortality, but to the other unidentified gentleman, they offered proof only of human credulity.

A
S SOON AS
Leah felt well enough after her recent illness, she began to think about expanding—and defending—the Fox sisters' work by traveling to new cities. Cleveland, Ohio, seemed a natural choice. She could anticipate a receptive audience, for the city already had a number of existing spirit circles and enthusiasts; moreover, she had been warned by friends that C. Chauncey Burr was plotting a major toe-snapping campaign there. Never one to sidestep a battle, Leah made plans to travel west in May of 1851, accompanied by Calvin, her sister Maria Smith, and Maria's toddler, Charlie. There was a certain amount of risk involved in more ways than one; Kate and Maggie were still in New York City with their mother, so for the first time outside of Rochester Leah was to meet the public on her own, without either of her more celebrated younger sisters by her side.

The editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
coincidentally named John Gray like the Fox family's New York friend, welcomed her with the hearty announcement: “There are to be rapping times in Cleveland this week.” He knew the notice would sell papers, but he also was sympathetic
to the idea of spirit communication and did little to hide his bias. He mocked the Burr brothers for their “jokes and grimaces” and labeled the Buffalo doctors' conclusions “lame and impotent.”
¹

Leah and her entourage settled into a comfortable suite at the Dunham House, a bustling inn, tavern, and stagecoach stop. She held her own nicely, quickly impressing the influential Gray as an “intelligent lady, agreeably spoken.” Her earnest manner, he commented, divested her “of all mystery which imagination has thrown about her person, and all prejudice which slander may have attached to her character.”

Leah may have pleased John Gray, but the two “Misses Fox” delighted him even more when they finally joined their sister later in the month. The manifestations struck him as incrementally stronger in their presence. “They are very fine girls and with their older sister, make a very interesting group,” Gray advised his readers. “By this accession the strength of the spiritual battery is largely increased, and the raps in their presence more than threefold than with Mrs. Fish alone.” Leah graciously acknowledged that her little sisters were the world's most perfect mediums for spirit communication.
²

Perhaps the strain of being once again on the road exacerbated tensions, however, for the sisters' nerves seemed frayed, and a disagreement with a Rochester friend, Lemira Kedzie, caused a flurry of quarrels. A reformer with close ties to Amy Post, Kedzie had chaperoned the girls to Cleveland and apparently expected to take them on from there to visit other western cities, a tour she hoped to launch from her hometown of Cincinnati. Kedzie's motives aren't clear; she may have counted on a share of the tour's income, envisioned herself as a good influence on the girls, or wished to be part of a mission to help spread the word.

Whatever the sisters may have agreed to beforehand, on arriving in Cleveland Kate and Maggie adamantly rejected the plan. Kedzie promptly turned to their older sister for help in bringing them into line, but by then Leah already knew she needed at least one of the girls by her side to boost “the strength of the spiritual battery.” Negotiations ensued, winding up in a compromise. Maggie, who had often teamed up with Leah for arduous but successful investigations in the past, remained with her older sister and Calvin. Kate, by now used to working independently,
went off to Cincinnati with Maria, little Charlie, and the disappointed Kedzie.

Some Cincinnati residents claimed to have heard strange raps long before noises were reported in Hydesville but to have kept the incidents secret. Then, after visiting the sisters in Rochester in 1850, Mrs. G. B. Bushnell had emerged as Cincinnati's first public medium—
public
a word mediums usually preferred to
professional.
By the time Kate stopped there in June 1851, the spirits already had built a loyal following. One interested investigator, an editor named William T. Coggshall, was especially impressed by the peaceful domestic setting of a seance he attended. As raps echoed through the room, he and Kate were chatting while Maria Smith was sewing and Lemira Kedzie was reading a newspaper.

“They must be remarkable women,” he noted, “if they can attend to such business as this, and at the same time personate all the mysteries ascribed to them.”
³

Harmony didn't last. From Cincinnati, Kate's little group moved on to Columbus, Ohio, but here Kedzie's already compromised western tour ended abruptly when Maria's Charlie fell ill. Leah summoned everyone to return to Cleveland, where she claimed to heal the child with the help of the spirits. As soon as Charlie seemed well enough to travel, Maria returned home to Wayne County. Kedzie departed for Rochester shortly afterward, bitterly complaining that Leah was a weak and extravagant manager. Leah promptly developed a crippling headache that lasted for days, her own misery compounded by worry over Calvin, who had contracted a severe cold that had settled on his lungs. Being on tour had turned out to be an ordeal for all involved.

By late June matters were improving for everyone but Calvin, who was retching quantities of blood. Amy and Isaac Post's nineteen-year-old son, Joseph, visited Cleveland and reported news of the Fox family back to his parents. Margaret had finally made the journey to Ohio and had taken Kate back to Columbus to fulfill the medium's obligations there. Maggie and Leah were managing well. They “had one spat while I was there but soon got over it,” Joseph wrote with the breezy familiarity of one who had witnessed other sisterly spats between them.
⁴
The terrible headaches that plagued Leah continued to come and go.

That June an abolitionist magazine began serializing a new novel by a former Ohio resident named Harriet Beecher Stowe:
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the searing indictment of slavery that inflamed emotions North and South. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Posts were sheltering as many as ten or twelve refugees a night in their home while also continuing their work on behalf of women's rights. Like many reformers on the front lines of the antislavery and women's rights movements, Amy Post derived strength and inspiration from her belief in the spirits. She corresponded with the Fox sisters regularly, and she believed that they deserved her gratitude for helping transform her life.

“I have often thought of thee and thy company since you left your beautiful home for an Ohio city,” she wrote to Leah, “and have been much delighted to hear you have found friends who can appreciate the value and importance of this wonderful development to mankind.”
⁵

Amy expressed a loving debt to the mediums for helping her realize the spirit world existed, and her words provide insight into the Fox sisters' impact on their supporters' lives. “It is a wealth I had despaired of ever obtaining,” Amy explained, “to be convinced that we have commenced to live a life which will never end—a life whose joys, too, are enhanced by our practices of goodness.”

Although she had been drawn to such a vision in the past, Amy confessed that previously she had been unable to erase doubt, that her wish to believe had always been “accompanied with a desire for more
positive proof
of immortality.”

The nature of the afterlife also had worried her. The fate to which orthodox and even some liberal denominations condemned those poor souls who failed to achieve salvation had seemed stark. “For some time before your family made me acquainted with this blessed Spirit-rapping dispensation,” Amy explained, “I had become more settled in the belief…of there being no half-way house; but we must go either to Heaven or Hell.”

How could anyone question the Fox sisters' integrity, Amy demanded, when they had accomplished so much?

“Oh! could strangers only know as I have known the trials you have endured and the sacrifices you made the first two years,” she wrote, “they
could not be made to believe it an invention of your own, nor pursued for mercenary purposes.”

It was a powerful letter, one that Leah, ever aware of public relations, promptly arranged to have published, later asking to be forgiven for making such a warmly personal note so public.

It was to Amy that Leah unleashed her own frustrations. “My trials in this beautiful Western part of the world have been at times very great,” she complained, presenting her own version of the quarrel with Lemira Kedzie. Troubles with Kedzie, Leah confided, had reached such a peak that “the whole subject of spirits was for a time completely sunk—we feared never to rise again.”
⁶

Since Kedzie was spreading tales among their mutual friends in Rochester that Leah was an incompetent spendthrift, Leah in turn impugned Kedzie's character and motives to Amy. “I believe it is generally allowed by all who know anything about the matter,” Leah fumed, “that she is a very improper person—and has no business in the matter except to make a little Speculation out of the ‘Knockings.'”

However, Leah mused, she and Kedzie might have ended up the best of friends except for the shenanigans of Kate and Maggie. “Much of my trouble is caused by the girls,” Leah continued, “—who are always planing [sic] out something and then if they fail in their calculation they throw the whole thing on my shoulders.”

Leah portrayed herself as the responsible one who hardly knew how to bear up under her difficulties with her willful, charming, unpredictable sisters. “Now after they have been the cause of all the trouble between Mrs. Kedzie and me,” she wrote, “they write loving letters to Mr. Kedzie to try to currie [sic] favor with him….

“I can tell you truly, if it had not been for them I should never differ with many—but they are always working so underhandedly that I am tired—tired of Life or in other words of so much deception—”

By
deception
Leah seems to have meant a propensity on the part of her sisters to stir up trouble, to gleefully foment disagreements, and then to behave as absolute innocents. The portrait wouldn't have surprised many of the girls' public detractors, who had long viewed the two of them as mischief makers at best.

 

In the summer of 1851 the three Fox sisters, Margaret, and Calvin completed their tour of Ohio, then returned to Cincinnati to satisfy the crowds who had missed Kate the previous spring. The family remained there despite the sweltering heat of a merciless July. Calvin, who had never completely recovered from his cold, was too ill to travel farther, and when his lungs began to hemorrhage one night in late August, doctors who responded to the emergency offered little hope.

For hours that night Margaret and Leah watched by his bed, both of them mourning the man who had been the Fox family's steadfast friend and protector. By morning he had improved enough to speak, and in yet one more show of devotion he took Leah's hand in his and asked her to marry him. He was thinking only of her welfare, he explained.

“The best legacy I could leave you, as a protection when I am gone, is my name,” Calvin said. “If we were married now, your widowhood would be a protection from the importunate intrusions to which you are so frequently subjected.”
⁷

He and Leah had been inseparable for years; during that time their relationship may or may not have evolved beyond affectionate friendship into a sexual one. Faced now with Calvin's impending death, Leah weighed the decision for several days before accepting his proposal. Having conquered her doubts, she married him on September 10, 1851. Calvin then surprised everyone by recovering; instead of simply bearing the protection of his name, Leah found herself with a living, breathing husband. The newlyweds returned to Rochester, where they were greeted by Leah's daughter, Lizzie, who had been banished from home in 1848 for criticizing the spirits. Welcomed back into the family fold at last, Lizzie helped nurse her new stepfather back to health.

Kate, Maggie, and Margaret remained in Cincinnati through much of the fall. The work in Ohio had been an unqualified success, Kate reported to Amy that October, and they had convinced many skeptics. “Oh Amy the Spirits do such wonderful things,” Kate enthused. “They ring the bells, move the tables, all when our feet are held.”
⁸

As always, though, she missed Rochester and her many friends there.
With the flourish of a sentimental schoolgirl, she ended the note: “
Dear Dear Amy,
on the wings of the mind I send a kiss….”

But an equally schoolgirlish, petulant postscript followed, aimed at John Robinson.

“Ask John why he does not reply to my letters.
Is he mad.”

Amy responded with one of her kind letters, for Kate wrote again with heartfelt thanks. “I wish you knew how I felt. Oh so homesick. I want to see you Amy.”
⁹

To offset Kate's woes, exciting activities kept her from pining unduly: private parties as well as public demonstrations. Cassius Clay, the abolitionist editor and former captain in the Mexican War, attended a sitting with Kate and Maggie, chaperoned by Margaret. Clay, whom Kate called a great man, held her feet, and the proprietor of the hotel held Maggie's. All the while, Kate reported, the spirits played the guitar, the bells, and the accordion that the mediums had placed under the table.

“Cassius Clay is one of our best friends,” Kate bubbled. She also added more realistically that he was a great flatterer.

Still, she had another subject on her mind, more urgent even than the spirits. Robinson had done the unforgivable.

“You know my friend John Robinson,” she cried, “or he who used to be my friend wrote me and forbid [sic] me even writing him again, for the mere reason of my writing him a little
funn
[sic].”

She felt betrayed by his unfeeling behavior: “To think how much I thought of him and he should change so soon.”