Talking to the Dead (2 page)

Kate and Maggie are the protagonists in this true story, but other major players appear as well. Leah, a formidable woman who wielded immense influence over her younger siblings and on the course of Modern Spiritualism, became her sisters' impresario and a medium herself. The audience attracted by the sisters, composed of doubters and believers alike, served as a collective force that helped define and spread Spiritualism's concepts and practices. And, whether inventions of the mediums or immortal visitors, the spirits themselves were compelling figures.

When all is said and done, however, I always circle back to the impulse that first drew me to Kate and Maggie. The Fox sisters' story—of spirits and conjurers, skeptics and converts—remains a puzzle, a maze. I hope that readers will experience their story as I do, as a drama filled with emotion and surprise but one that also provokes questions in an unusually vivid and concrete way about how we
know
what we know and how secure we are in our knowledge.

As I read conflicting nineteenth-century accounts, I still feel that I'm in much the same position as the participants in the sisters' seances were one hundred and fifty years ago, asking the same questions, watching tables levitate, and struggling to understand inexplicable sounds.

E. E. Lewis, a writer who interviewed the Fox family in the 1840s, ended his introduction with an invitation I now extend to you: “Let them step forward and solve this mystery, if they can.”
³

1789–1849

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
Christmas 1847 a blacksmith named John David Fox, accompanied by his wife, Margaret, and their two youngest daughters, Kate and Maggie, moved to the rural community of Hydesville, New York. One of the worst winters in recent memory was pummeling the region, a windy, fertile plain in the northwest corner of the state.
¹

“The almost unparalleled bad weather which we have experienced since ‘cold December' set in,” complained the
Western Argus,
a local newspaper, “nearly diverted our attention from the fact that Christmas is almost at hand.” The writer regretted that residents were staying home by the fire instead of venturing out, by wagon or sleigh, to make the customary holiday calls.
²

The weather not only dampened good cheer, it also stalled construction on the new home that John and Margaret were building two miles from Hydesville, next to their son David's farm. Since work wouldn't
resume until spring, the couple had rented a modest, one-and-a-half-story frame house to wait out the winter.

Today Hydesville has vanished from all but the most detailed local maps, but it was—and is—part of the township of Arcadia, located in New York's Wayne County. Farmhouses, barns, and steeple-capped villages dot the surrounding countryside; here and there flat-topped hills, called drumlins, rise up like ancient burial grounds. The county's northern boundary is Lake Ontario, which separates western New York from Canada. In August, fields of peppermint, a major crop, blossom with pink flowers that release a faint, delicious scent, but winters like the one of 1847 bring month after month of slate skies and snow.

Slight but sturdy, a country girl, Maggie was an ebullient fourteen-year-old with glossy dark hair, a broad-boned face, and frank brown eyes. Black-haired Kate was slim and soulful, at ten years old still very much a child, with compelling eyes that struck some people as deep purple and others as black or gray.
³
The girls were the youngest of six children, the only two still living at home with their parents, and they were often thrown back on each other for company. Their four siblings, Leah, Elizabeth, Maria, and David, were already adults with families of their own.

The girls' father, John, was a wiry man who peered out at the world through brooding eyes, his spectacles balanced on his hawk nose. Sometimes considered disagreeable by people other than his children, he was intense and inward, an impassioned Methodist who knelt each morning and night in prayer.

His wife, the former Margaret Smith, was in most respects his opposite. A kindly matron with an ample bosom and a double chin, she was as chatty and sociable as her husband was withdrawn. In the uncharitable opinion of one Hydesville neighbor, sweet-faced Margaret was superior to John “in weight and good looks” and in personality “the best horse in the team by odds.”
⁴

Already in their fifties, the weary survivors of economic reversals and marital crises, John and Margaret undoubtedly hoped that when their new home was finished it would be their last: a permanent, comfortable place to complete the tasks of child-rearing. They even may have looked forward to help from their grown children who lived nearby.
Raising two young daughters was a responsibility that must have weighed increasingly on them as they aged. What would happen if they fell ill? Or if they died? How would Kate and Maggie manage, and who would care for them?

The couple had accumulated little in the way of land or money, and girls who grew up without either eventually needed to find a devoted husband or a decent livelihood. Teaching was one alternative for a young woman, the drudgery of factory labor another. It was possible to slip down the ladder of opportunity as well as to climb up it.

A close-knit family, however, could provide refuge in times of trouble, and despite a history of geographical dislocations and separations, John and Margaret's six children had remained remarkably attached to one another. With the exception of Elizabeth, who lived in Canada with her husband, they had settled down within an easy radius of one another, having forged what Maggie called “tender ties” to western New York.

Twenty-seven-year-old David Smith Fox, a farmer, lived in Arcadia with his wife and three children in the house that had once belonged to his maternal uncle, John J. Smith. Surrounded by the peppermint fields, filled with good conversation and well-thumbed books, the farm was a place where friends and family liked to gather.
⁵
Maria, who lived only a few miles from her brother, had done her part to solidify family bonds by marrying one of her cousins, Stephen Smith.

Leah, the oldest of the six Fox siblings, had settled farther away, thirty miles west of Arcadia in the thriving young city of Rochester, New York, but she too retained close ties to her family. Her adolescent daughter, Lizzie, spent almost as much time in Hydesville with her young aunts, Kate and Maggie, as she did with her mother in Rochester.

Officially a hamlet within Arcadia's borders, Hydesville was an ordinary little cluster of farms and establishments that served the farmer: a sawmill, gristmill, and general store, along with a few artisans' workshops such as the cobbler's. The hamlet had been named for Henry Hyde, a doctor who arrived in Arcadia by wagon in 1810, in the days before physicians needed either a license or formal training.

Death was a constant fact of life. The reaper struck with fire and drowning; typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and a host of other diseases;
accidents that ranged from the swift shock of a horse's kick to a slow-spreading infection from a cut finger; and suicide and murder. More than one-fifth of the children born died before their first birthday; at birth the average life expectancy for an adult was little more than forty.
⁶
Medicine at best could offer a patient little help and at worst was lethal, an excruciating matter of bleeding, blistering, and purging with potions such as laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol.

Dr. Henry Hyde discovered a tonic that worked for him if not for the sickly; he opened a public house at a busy crossroads, where migrants heading west paused to gamble, drink, and race their horses. Hydes Tavern became the nucleus of the new settlement, and he became a rich man.

Within a decade or two of the doctor's arrival, clapboard houses had replaced log cabins; soon several wealthier residents had built fine brick homes. By 1847 Hydes Tavern had disappeared, and its owner had passed away. His son, however, remained a well-to-do landowner, and it was from Artemus Hyde that John Fox rented the small frame house for his family of four.

The house had been occupied by a string of tenants. Although Hydesville boasted some second-and third-generation families, like other communities in western New York it attracted most of its inhabitants from elsewhere—adjacent counties, the East Coast, and other countries. Prospective residents came in search of new opportunities, and many families needed temporary lodgings until they either settled permanently or moved on.

While not large, the house was serviceable, with a good number of windows and two stoves. The front door opened directly into the south-facing parlor. The kitchen was set back, on the northwest side, and had its own door to the yard. On the east side, a buttery—sometimes used as a second bedroom—connected to the kitchen, and the main bedroom adjoined the parlor. An enclosed staircase between the buttery and main bedroom led up to a large attic, while another staircase led down to a dirt-floor basement. In back of the house flowed the Ganargua River, commonly known as Mud Creek, a popular spot for night fishing.

The rental's location on the busy corner of Hydesville and Parker
Roads offered everything that Margaret might have wanted for her family. There was a Methodist church within walking distance, next to a district school where Kate most likely studied her three Rs and geography. Maggie, who could already read and write, was beyond the age when school was considered necessary. Both girls ably expressed their thoughts and feelings in letters to friends, and if their punctuation and spelling were erratic, it was a flaw shared by even the most educated of their day.

The girls were smart and full of fun. One former schoolmate of Kate's remembered them as adept mimics.
⁷
But they weren't always so lively, since they also suffered on occasion from severe headaches that left them weak and depressed.

In late winter Kate and Maggie probably joined other children in going sugar mapling, and the sisters were likely kept busy helping their mother with household chores such as laundry, sewing, quilting, cooking, canning, and cleaning. Local newspapers of the day urged young women to govern their passions—anger and excitement could spoil the complexion—and practice reason, prudence, and virtue through devotion to education and domestic duty. One education expert warned parents that the “first appearance of stubbornness” in their daughters needed instantly to “be checked and resisted.” The result of immediate discipline, he promised, would be “tempers sweet and placid.”
⁸

Heightened emotion potentially posed another threat more serious than bad skin: hysteria. Doctors diagnosed the condition as a woman's disease, believed to originate in the womb and to demonstrate female frailty and fallibility. Girls around puberty were particularly susceptible, doctors worried, to the fits and seizures hysteria could induce. How important it was, then, for a young woman to exercise self-restraint and to remain in a limited arena: the home.

John Fox was an abstracted man, his mind focused on sin and redemption, financial worries and practicalities, rather than on the more subtle matters of his youngest daughters' behavior. And Margaret Fox was probably a more lenient mother than many others. She was a farmer's daughter who had grown up before women were relegated to such a limited, domestic sphere; moreover, in the 1820s she and John had made the hazardous journey westward across New York State to build a
new life. With past adventures of her own to remember and current worries to distract her, Margaret on occasion may have looked the other way when her bright, lively children found ways to escape the boredom and confinement dictated by current thinking. Or she may not always have known what diversions her daughters had discovered or what troubles (or visions) were haunting (or inspiring) them, all hidden beneath the pattern of their visible, everyday lives.

 

In March 1848 an unseasonable lightning storm flashed over Hydesville, followed by fresh snow. Otherwise, life went on much as usual. The Whigs battled the Democrats. Women baked cookies for a town festival. A farmer reported a stray cow. Fire left a family homeless. Kate's eleventh birthday was celebrated, if it was marked at all, on March 27.

In the newspapers, national and international events were duly noted: the end of the Mexican War, which wrested California from Mexico; the abdication of Louis Philippe, the French king, a fall that prefigured the democratic uprisings that swept across the rest of Europe later in the year. The news, however, had to fight for space with product advertisements, many for patent remedies such as Sand's Sarsaparilla and Brant's Indian Pulmonary Balsam, pious advice columns, amusing anecdotes, sentimental poems, and uplifting or shocking stories. One writer reported word of a haunting: the ghostly return of a sixteen-year-old Baltimore resident, murdered by her overbearing father, who had been aiming at her poor but honest suitor.

“The neighbors now a days”—so readers were told—“occasionally see the young lady, falling to the earth, the flash of the gun dispelling the darkness—disclosing her uplifted hands, radiant face, and disheveled hair….” The writer added ruefully that neither philosophy nor reason had been able to dispel the locals' belief “in the ghost of the martyr of love and fidelity.”
⁹

During the cold months of the year, houses in Hydesville often moaned and shrieked in the harsh winds. Tree branches snapped from the weight of ice. Loose boards smacked against the sides of houses. Small animals burrowed into kitchens, scurrying and scratching in search of food and the warmth of stoves and fireplaces. Sounds such as these were familiar. But in
the last two weeks of March 1848, the Foxes' rented house began to resound with eerie knocks at night: thumps on the ceiling, bumps on doors or walls, sometimes raps sharp enough to jar bedsteads and tables.

In statements made in April 1848 to an enterprising journalist named E. E. Lewis, family members and friends described the new and seemingly inexplicable noises that had suddenly disrupted the Fox household. Lewis subsequently published these interviews in a forty-page pamphlet titled
A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County, Authenticated by the Certificates, and Confirmed by the Statements of the Citizens of That Place and Vicinity.
The voices of the Fox family and their neighbors rise from the page like ghostly echoes.

“It sounded like some one knocking in the east bed-room, on the floor,” Margaret told Lewis. She added that the noise sometimes “sounded as if the chair moved on the floor; we could hardly tell where it was.”
¹⁰

The knocking always started in the evening, just after the family had gone to bed.

“The whole family slept in that room together, and all heard the noise,” Margaret stated, then added that there were four of them in the family “and sometimes five.” The fifth person—most likely Leah's daughter Lizzie—may have been visiting her grandparents that March, but Margaret wasn't explicit.

“The first night that we heard the rapping,” Margaret continued, “we all got up and lit a candle; and searched all over the house.” As they searched, the sound continued in much the same spot.

“It was not very loud,” she noted, “yet it produced a jar of the bedsteads and chairs, that could be felt by placing our hands on the chair, or while we were in bed. It was a feeling of a tremulous motion, more than a sudden jar.”