Talking to the Dead (27 page)

The scientist concluded that the manifestations he had witnessed were “facts” that were neither the product of fraud nor of his own delusions. He admitted, however, that determining the causes required still further experimentation. Crookes conjectured that what sometimes was called the “Psychic Force” or the “Mind of Man” could account for the extraordinary occurrences.

“But I, and all who adopt this theory of Psychic Force as being the agent through which the phenomena are produced,” Crookes added, “do not thereby intend to assert that this Psychic Force may not be sometimes seized and directed by some other Intelligence than the Mind of the Psychic.” The spirits, in other words, remained part of the picture.

Although he advocated new trials and tests, Crookes, Home, and Kate never again collaborated with one another so closely. In the fall of 1873 Crookes turned his attention to “other matters of scientific and practical interest,” Home was ill, and Kate became preoccupied with an altogether new role, that of mother.

She and Henry had spent the summer at the seaside, where she suffered miserably in the late stages of her pregnancy. In September, nine months after her marriage, she gave birth, in what was a painfully long and difficult delivery, to a son she named for her husband's brothers: Ferdinand Dietrich Lowenstein Jencken.

The little baby with the long name, affectionately called Ferdie or “boysie,” was immediately rumored to be blessed with gifts of mediumship, and England's Spiritualist press spread the news. Nursemaids reported encounters with veiled white figures in Ferdie's room; Henry himself was said to boast that little Ferdie, at six months old, grasped a pencil in his tiny hand to write a message in Greek. Whatever Henry actually claimed, and despite Spiritualists' passion to meet the gifted child, the happy father steadily insisted on protecting his son from the celebrity that had once surrounded his wife.
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The stories that swirled around Ferdie, like the accounts of the events at Hydesville, became part of the ongoing mystery or series of puzzles that surrounded the Fox sisters then and that continue to surround them today. Had Kate's first baby become part of a ruse to fool the credulous into believing in the spirits? Was Henry Jencken, dignified and kind, practical and respected, a collaborator in fraud or his wife's dupe? Did Kate have visions in which her son accomplished astonishing feats, and did others around the child fall into such fantasies and expectations as well? Or was the supernatural or psychic legacy of Ferdie's great-great-grandmother, Margaret Rutan, at work again?

Kate quickly became pregnant a second time; shortly before her child was due, she decided to return home to her sisters. In October 1874 she and Ferdie sailed for New York. Since Henry remained behind in England, detained on business, his namesake, Henry Jr., was born far from his father's comforting arms, at Leah Underhill's home early in 1875.

During their visit Kate and her boys of course spent time with Mag
gie, the sister with whom she had shared so many childhood hours and adventures. Now in her early forties, Maggie looked drawn but had regained some of her former magnetism. Although she seems to have remained absolutely faithful to Elisha Kent Kane's memory, she was flattered by the attentions of two men who found her as vibrant as the explorer once had. Joseph LaFumee, editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle,
and Wilson McDonald, a noted sculptor, reportedly were her devoted admirers and friends.

Reconciled to receiving no further income either from the Kanes or her book, she had finally managed to cut back on her drinking and had resumed holding public seances. One of her clients, the mineralogist Henry Seybert, was a wealthy philanthropist known for donating the Liberty Bell to Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Maggie's return to professional mediumship, however, must have felt on one level like a betrayal of Kane, causing her to experience some anger both at herself and at those unwitting fellow Spiritualists who required her services.
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A few of the old friends Kate might have visited during her stay in the United States had passed away in her absence, including Horace Greeley, whose death in 1872 was a particularly tragic one. So outraged had Greeley been by Grant's scandal-plagued Republican administration that he himself had campaigned for the presidency on the third-party Liberal Republican ticket, only to find himself endorsed by Democrats and tarred by Republicans as a Southern sympathizer who would sacrifice the rights of African Americans in the interests of sectional harmony. His humiliating defeat, coupled with his wife's death earlier that same year, had caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown. He had died soon afterward in a mental institution.

To the embarrassment of some Spiritualists and to the pride of others, the medium and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull had run in the same election on the Equal Rights ticket, the first female candidate for president of the United States.

In March 1875 Kate and her boys left Leah's house and moved to the Taylors' for four months. The Swedish Movement Cure had switched its quarters to a new location, the Hotel Branting on Madison Avenue, and financial reversals had hurt Dr. Taylor's business, for Sarah worried
constantly about money matters. Benjamin Franklin's spirit kindly interceded with practical suggestions.

“Let me say sell,” Franklin urged the Taylors, “but sell to advantage. You can sell this place for twice the money you gave for it. So I say sell, do not delay, do not delay…. Then you can purchase a house of your own, a private house and enjoy your children….”
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With his injunction to “enjoy your children,” Franklin may have been gently prodding Sarah, who had recently given birth to a little girl, to remember to cherish her mortal as well as her immortal babies. Kate had no such difficulty, and Sarah complained that the medium's maternal duties too often limited the time for seances; the older woman felt that their gatherings were never quite the same as they had been: “the baby would cry or [Ferdinand] would awaken or something would surely mar the smoothness of the chain that held us in communication.”

Benjamin Franklin did what he could to console Sarah about the situation, enthusiastically booming, “And so we have Katy back again, not Katy alone, but Katy with two beautiful children, two blessings that she can see and feel and touch and feel the little hand touch her back.” Sarah, the spirit seemed to imply, be
happy
for Kate!

In May 1875, after a separation of seven months, Henry Jencken finally arrived in the United States to meet his new son and his wife's relatives, and in July he and his family returned home to London. Maggie soon followed to spend time with her sister, afterward traveling there for extensive visits and eventually establishing her own following among English Spiritualists.

The next few years were happy ones for Kate's marriage, but she worried constantly about Ferdie and Henry, both of whom were frail children who suffered frequent bouts of illness. In an account later written by the wife of a Fox family descendant, Henry Jr. was said to have suffered from epilepsy, a possibility that raises intriguing questions about Kate. Although epilepsy isn't necessarily genetic, and there seem to be no other signs of the disease on either the Fox or Jencken side, it's tempting to think about Kate's early trances, and the “commotion” of snapping and cracking noises once commented upon by her childhood family doctor, in relation to seizures. Epilepsy in ancient times was little understood and
often associated with religious ecstasy or demonic possession. Although more was known about the disease by the nineteenth century, the relationship between temporal lobe epilepsy and altered states of consciousness continues to be studied today.
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Relatively stable though Kate's home life was during these years, a storm was brewing in Spiritualist circles, for the medium Daniel Dunglas Home had decided to write a book about his fellow mediums, a work rumored to be unflattering at best. Some mediums responded to word of Home's potential betrayal with fury, but Kate took a gentler route, albeit one that was consciously or unconsciously manipulative. In a letter written in response to one of his in February 1876, she reminded Home of their friendship, stressed forgiveness as a virtue, and shared confidences about her personal life.

“I was very happy to hear from you and to learn that you were writing such an important book,” she began, adding with a characteristic flourish that “some good spirit must have admonished you to do it!!!”
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His letter, she continued, showed that he had a kind heart and “as for listening to tale bearers it is simply a waste of time…. I have never said an unkind word of you for I never had one unkind thought towards you, and I do not believe those who have said that you have spoken harshly of me.”

Her letter doesn't identify the cause of the breach that had occurred with Home in years past, but it's revelatory of Kate's feelings toward her sisters and her children. “You know that I have had severe trials,” she told Home. “My sister Mrs. Underhill who is more than twenty-three years older than myself was always jealous of me, and when my blessed mother died we were not on speaking terms.” Nevertheless, Kate continued in her letter, Home should avoid criticizing Leah in his book, for “Mrs. Underhill” was at last “trying to make up for past injustice to my sister and myself.”

By the term
injustice,
Kate may have meant any one of a number of old wounds: the hurdles Leah had set for her sisters in the early 1850s; the harshness she had shown to Maggie over the affair with Kane; the lack of compassion she had demonstrated in response to her sisters' alcoholism in the 1860s. Margaret Fox had been an indulgent, loving woman if not always a wise one; Leah, the other maternal figure in Kate's
life, had been tough, a demanding though arguably misguided taskmaster. Kate, who as a little girl far from home used to weep with longing for her mother, felt overwhelmingly grateful for Leah's recent solicitousness.

“She writes to me now,” Kate confided with some poignancy, “calling me her dear child, which she never did before and when I was in America some months ago, she did everything that a mother could do so I forgive her, and although at times I find the shadows of her unkindness lingering in my heart, I try to remember that she is a changed woman and a good woman….”

Powerfully attached to her true mother, flawed though Margaret might have been, Kate also was struggling desperately with her own maternal role.

“My little ones have been very ill. You are aware, I suppose,” she wrote, “that my youngest child was born in America, in Mrs. Underhill's house. He has been very ill and I have nursed him day and night seldom taking time to step out of the room. What a hold a child has upon a mother's heart and oh, what a care they are. I want you to see my children.”

Home's book,
Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism,
a work that castigated a number of mediums for faking manifestations and duping clients out of their fortunes, said not a word that was disparaging of Kate or Maggie Fox.

The children's health seemed to stabilize, and Kate's and Henry's relationship, both with one another and their children, flourished. Writing in 1880 to his brother in Australia, Henry noted with a touch of pride, “In my home, my 2 little boys Ferdinand and Henry are growing up into boyhood and offer me much pleasure. The day of schooling is almost at the door.”
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But he was destined not to see that day arrive, at least not for his younger son; in November 1881 Henry suffered a stroke and died three days later. After a marriage that had lasted almost ten years, his grief-stricken wife was left with their two little boys of six and eight and with whatever comfort the contemplation of the spirit world could offer.

F
OR A DECADE
Henry Jencken had provided well for his family, but he wasn't a wealthy man; his personal estate at the time of his sudden death, excluding real estate, amounted to less than two hundred pounds. Like her sister Maggie, Kate now had to face life without a husband to support her and without any reliable means of earning an income except to hold seances.

Still, Kate remained one of the world's most famous mediums, and even after her long retirement, opportunities came her way. In January 1882 A. Aksakoff, a Russian bureaucrat and a dedicated investigator of Spiritualist phenomena, wrote Kate to offer condolences on her husband's death. Since he had recently suffered a similar loss—although not one that placed him in financial straits—he found himself sympathizing with her sorrow and eager to assist her if he could.
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Certain that he could help both Kate and the cause of Spiritualism, Aksakoff invited her to his country on a mission: to convert skeptics
through her mediumship and also, in consultation with the spirits, to design safety measures for the coronation of Czar Alexander III, thereby enabling the new ruler to avoid his father's fate of assassination. For her services, Aksakoff offered her a hundred pounds plus expenses for the first month. Although he sharply warned that a frigid climate, unfamiliar food, and a tense political situation made Russia an inhospitable place for delicate boys raised in London, Kate took them with her anyway. She couldn't bear to be parted from Ferdie and Henry so soon after their father's death.

The popular movement that had started with raps trailing two charismatic young girls and that had grown despite, or in part because of, the controversy that followed the Fox sisters to Rochester and beyond, could now claim to have swept across two continents. Kate later took pride in showing off the jewels and other gifts she received in St. Petersburg and in having held seances for the royal family. According to the historian Emma Hardinge, the spirits once again played the role of conciliator and adviser, urging the czar to steer clear of political oppression and to favor liberal reforms. The immortal visitors who had first come calling during the heady days of agitation for abolition and woman's suffrage in the 1840s apparently hadn't forgotten their social agenda.

As international interest in Spiritualism continued to burgeon, so too did the number of organized groups dedicated to the systematic investigation of paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception. One of the most important, the Society for Psychical Research, known as the SPR, was started in 1882 at Cambridge University in England. Its impressive founders included Henry Sidgwick, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge; his wife, Eleanor, who later founded a women's college there; her brother, Arthur Balfour, future prime minister of England; and William Barrett, who taught physics at the Royal College of Science in Dublin.

Mrs. Sidgwick recalled first meeting Kate in 1874 during a seance at which the medium had “obtained a word written on a sheet of our own paper, under the table in light which I believed would have been good enough to read ordinary print by.” But Mrs. Sidgwick suspected that Kate might have written the word with her foot, a common trick among fraudulent mediums.

Under the auspices of the SPR, Mrs. Sidgwick retested Kate a decade later, determining nothing conclusive but noting that the medium sometimes seemed to ask leading questions and that she occasionally claimed a coincidence as the work of the spirits. Mrs. Sidgwick admitted that Kate's raps were “peculiar—quite unlike what one can produce oneself by rapping with the foot.” But she subsequently recanted even this statement. After reading the thirty-year-old report issued by the Buffalo doctors in 1851, she mused that Kate's “peculiar” raps might have been due after all to toe snapping. It was a conclusion shaped largely by hindsight.
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In the United States, Maggie too became caught up in the new round of organized investigations. Henry Seybert, the Philadelphia philanthropist, had willed funds to the University of Pennsylvania for an impartial inquiry into the nature of Spiritualist phenomena. In November 1884, not long after the philanthropist's death, Maggie met with the doubting and daunting members of the Seybert Commission at the Philadelphia home of its chairman, Horace Howard Furness. According to transcripts, the raps on both evenings were erratic, as were the answers to questions.

“This investigation is of great importance to us,” noted Chairman Furness, a renowned Shakespearean scholar. “There is no question about it—we have heard these curious sounds.” The issue for the committee, of course, as it had been for other investigators for more than thirty-five years, was whether the sounds emanated from the medium or from the spirits.

“I think you are entirely at one with us in every possible desire to have this phenomenon investigated,” he told Maggie, who assured him that she was. She wearily refused to claim that the sounds were either otherworldly or independent of herself, observing that she would “leave others to judge for themselves.”
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After hearing faint raps and loud ones, Furness placed his hand on Maggie's foot, announcing jubilantly, “This is the most wonderful thing of all, Mrs. Kane, I distinctly feel them in your foot. There is not a particle of motion in your foot, but there is an unusual pulsation.” Certain that Maggie made the raps but unsure as to whether she did so consciously and
deliberately, he invited her back for a third session, but she declined, pleading poor health and adding politely that she would be happy to return when she felt stronger. She never did. Her attitude throughout had been one of mild acquiescence.

A month later the American Society for Psychical Research, the ASPR, was formed, largely through the efforts and interest of the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of the novelist, Henry. From the late 1860s William had been fascinated by psychic phenomena, and he had attended many seances. Most had turned out to be depressing demonstrations of fraud, but he remained committed to the idea that “there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomenon are
impossible.
”
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His words can be seen as a motto for those who joined organizations such as the ASPR.

 

With circumscribed resources and no compelling reasons to remain in England, Kate and her sons returned to the United States in 1885. She moved in with Leah and Daniel, then in July called on George and Sarah Taylor, who hadn't seen her for a decade. Thrilled by her visit, Sarah wrote, “My joy can better be imagined than described. Here was Katie looking well and happy, though ten years older, with two nice healthy looking English boys.”
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The medium and the spirits were equally ecstatic. “We shall have such sweet meetings again, as of old,” Olin assured Sarah, with Kate scribbling each word. “We shall talk of the past, present, and future. We shall advise. We will bring all the loved ones back to whisper their loving greetings in your ear.”

Later that summer Kate left Leah's and moved to her brother David's farm in Wayne County. She may have found it difficult to play the role of Leah's little sister again after having been a matron in charge of her own household. Moreover, Leah had come to view her various nieces and nephews as if they were her own, and she probably felt entitled to comparable maternal prerogatives with Ferdie and Henry, an attitude that the boys and their mother might well have resented.

There was surely another reason for the tension: the publication of
Leah's book,
The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism,
in 1885. The book, padded with many newspaper articles and letters, reviewed the history of the Fox family, burnished to a sheen, and recounted the trials and triumphs of Spiritualism's first decades, focusing on events in which Leah's role was prominent. The work undoubtedly stirred bitter questions in the hearts of her sisters. How had Leah managed to protect herself from obloquy and to emerge from their ordeals unscathed? The thrill of the seances, the money and the gifts, even a sense of helping others, perhaps had once compensated Kate and Maggie for the pressures of their lives, but no longer. And here was Leah, capitalizing once again on the fame of her sisters.

The tone of
The Missing Link
tends to veer between nostalgia and bombast, but in places Leah's account evidences a distinctly wry and even subversive wit. Like her sisters, she remains an enigma in her own right. Her book, a mixed bundle of distortions and truths, is self-aggrandizing at the same time that it's faintly scandalous. While claiming middle-class respectability, she pokes fun at bourgeois gentility with references to the money she's made and the number of times she's been stripped naked. Referring discreetly to herself in the third person, she wrote of one investigation by a committee of women:

“They took the mediums into a room, bolted the door, and erected a platform of tables, on which [the mediums] were compelled to stand. Here, piece by piece, they were disrobed by the committee, and every article of wearing apparel examined and laid aside.”
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She added the titillating detail that “a large number of gentlemen and others waiting to hear the report of the committee” were standing impatiently just outside the door. Leah's book, indeed, is a little like a seance: sparkling effects, intimate confidences, false family histories, a few startling facts, and a shiver of the erotic.

Kate stayed at David's farm until the late fall of 1885, then rented a ground-floor apartment for herself and her boys on East Eighty-Fourth Street in New York City. Here she conducted private seances and hosted one public gathering a week. Sometimes as many as fifteen people attended Kate's “Public Evenings,” among them her surrogate mother, Sarah Taylor, who wrote of manifestations that were as startling as of old:
objects floating, tables levitating, and invisible hands that caressed, tugged, and poked.

With Henry Jencken no longer in Kate's life to protect her from temptation, however, she succumbed to her old enemy, alcohol. On June 2, 1886, George Taylor found her drunk in a saloon. “He had heard that something was wrong and had searched her out,” Sarah wrote. “She was taken to her rooms and all the miseries of her old life of ten and fifteen years ago were repeated.”
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Kate struggled on for two years, until her drinking precipitated a crisis with long-term ramifications for her family and for the Spiritualist movement: on May 4, 1888, Kate was arrested and held for three hundred dollars' bail at the Harlem Police Court on charges of neglecting fourteen-year-old Ferdie and twelve-year-old Henry. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, otherwise known as the Gerry Society after its founder, had arranged for the indictment. Ferdie and Henry were tall, lean young men who looked well cared for and bright eyed to the arresting officers, but Kate was undeniably drunk. The boys were sent to the Juvenile Asylum, an establishment for children who were deemed to have no better home.

The day after her arraignment, Kate gave an interview to the New York newspaper the
World
in which she broke down and sobbed. She told the reporter that the boys had been in school at Rochester and had been visiting her for only two weeks. After fiercely denying that she ill-treated her children, she sadly admitted to what she called “intemperate habits.” These habits showed in her once-handsome face, the reporter wrote, which was lined with worry, age, and dissipation.

Kate made no reference to her father's alcoholism in talking about her own. When she and her sister Maggie were young and famous, she confided, the two of them had been wined and dined everywhere; people had sent them baskets of champagne. And so the drinking habit, she said, had been born.
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The Fox sisters' weakness for alcohol and—it was rumored—drugs too had embarrassed Spiritualists for some time; many conservative, middle-class adherents of the movement, concerned about their own credibility,
had become uneasy with other aspects of the movement as well, including the radical ideas often associated with Spiritualism and extravagant manifestations such as materializations. Everyone was uncomfortable with what seemed to be rampant fraud. A notorious medium was on trial that very spring for allegedly duping a wealthy patron out of his fortune.

Trying to position herself in the most respectable light, Kate criticized the “fanatics who hire halls and preach universal belief in everything.” She was a firm believer in some manifestations, she asserted, but not in all. Then the old Kate flamed up through her tears, and she invited the reporter to return on another day to visit with the spirits.

Word of her nephews' detention quickly reached Maggie, who had been visiting friends in England since the previous March. Her devotion to Kate surfaced immediately, and she formed a plan: she sent a cable signed, not with her own name, but with that of Edward Jencken, Henry's brother in Australia, whom she claimed was the boys' legal guardian. The cable ordered Henry and Ferdie's release, and the ruse worked.

With her boys again by her side, Kate immediately booked passage to England. According to Maggie, on their arrival in London her nephews greeted her joyfully, and she threw her arms around them, joking, “Here's your Uncle Edward boys.”

“Hello Uncle Edward!” they shouted in unison.
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Then Maggie struck again in defense of Kate, this time with a stunning blow aimed at the entire Spiritualist movement. She sent a letter to the
New York Herald
that appeared under the headline “The Curse of Spiritualism”; in it she denounced the rise of fake mediums, and as Kate had, she lambasted “fanatics” who blindly believed anything. Hundreds of men and women, Maggie seethed with self-serving wrath, ignored harmless messages such as the ones she delivered to “rush madly after the glaring humbugs that flood New York.”
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