Talking to the Dead (3 page)

The knocks continued night after night.

On Friday, March 31, a fresh snowstorm blanketed the fields just as everyone was beginning to look ahead to spring. Making his way by wagon, David Fox managed despite the weather to stop by for a visit with his parents and little sisters. Sweet-tempered and practical, David tried to reassure them about the rapping by providing a dose of common sense.

“I told them that if they searched,” he said, “I guessed they would find a cause for it, as it must be something about the house.”

He later testified to E. E. Lewis that the house, as houses should, had remained quiet and well behaved throughout the whole afternoon.

That night, the eve of April Fool's Day, Margaret decided that raps would no longer rule her family's life. She resolved that “if it came, we thought we would not mind it, but try and get a good night's rest.” The sky had hardly turned dark when she sent the girls—perhaps Lizzie, too—to bed early.

“We went to bed so early,” she said, “because we had been broken so much of our rest that I was almost sick.”

Although John wasn't yet in bed, Margaret lay down. The raps “commenced as usual,” but what followed had never happened before.

“The girls, who slept in the other bed in the room, heard the noise, and tried to make a similar noise by snapping their fingers. The youngest girl,” Margaret explained, “is about 12 years old;—she is the one who made her hand go. As fast as she made the noise with her hands or fingers, the sound was followed up in the room…. it made the same number of noises that the girl did.”

When Kate stopped, the noise stopped. But the strange game continued.

“The other girl,” Margaret said—neglecting to use specific names—“who is in her 15th year, then spoke in sport and said, ‘Now do this just as I do. Count one, two, three, four,' &c., striking one hand in the other at the same time. The blows which she made were repeated as before. It appeared to answer her by repeating every blow that she made.”

It was Maggie's turn to be—or act—surprised.

“She only did so once,” Margaret recalled of her daughter. “She then began to be startled….”

Rather than taking a moment to question or soothe the girls, however, Margaret pressed forward and asked the noise to “‘Count ten,' and it made ten strokes or noises.”

What were her children's successive ages? When the raps responded accurately, Margaret quickly concluded that an invisible intelligence was at work, and she set out to confirm its nature.

“I then asked if it was a human being that was making the noise,” she continued, “and if it was, to manifest it by the same noise. There was no noise. I then asked if it was a spirit? and if it was, to manifest it by two sounds. I heard two sounds as soon as the words were spoken. I then asked, if it was an injured spirit? to give me the sound, and I heard the rapping distinctly. I then asked if it was injured in this house? and it manifested it by the noise. If the person was living that injured it? and got the same answer. I then ascertained by the same method that its remains were buried under the dwelling, and how old it was.”

Would the spirit continue to rap if Margaret summoned the neighbors? It tapped the affirmative.

The children, Margaret admitted in her statement, were now clinging to one another in terror. She seems to have been oblivious to the possibility, soon trumpeted by the local newspapers, that her daughters were teasing her with an April Fool's Day joke. If so, the girls might have been frightened, not by an unseen presence, but by the unexpected success of their prank.

But Margaret remained confident that her instincts that night were appropriate to the situation. “I was as calm, I think,” she assured Lewis, “as I am now.”

On Margaret's command, around eight o'clock that March evening John hurried to summon their neighbor, Mary Redfield. As it turned out, the children had already reported news of the sounds to her several days before. After hearing the raps for herself, Mary left the Fox household and returned almost immediately with her husband.

“Then Mr. Redfield called in Mr. Duesler and wife, and several others,” Margaret remembered. “A great many questions were asked over, and the same answers given as before. Mr. Duesler then called in Mr. and Mrs. Hyde; they came, and also Mr. and Mrs. Jewell.”

The men who were night fishing in the Ganargua River heard the hubbub and arrived to investigate. By nine o'clock, a dozen or more curiosity seekers had packed the house.

William Duesler, an aggressive, athletic man who had moved to the area from a neighboring county, had rented the Hydesville house briefly seven years before. After initially dismissing the haunting as pure
nonsense, he soon seized the lead in the questioning, extracting the rest of the spirit's tragic tale.

With some admiration, Margaret reported that Duesler ascertained “that it was murdered in the bed room, about five years ago, and that the murder was committed by a Mr. [Bell], on a Tuesday night, at 12 o'clock; that it was murdered by having its throat cut with a butcher knife; that the body…was taken down cellar, and that it was not buried until the next night…that it was buried ten feet below the surface of the ground.”

The rapper claimed to be the spirit of a peddler, brutally murdered for the small fortune he had been carrying: five hundred dollars, more than a laborer's wages for an entire year. In response to a litany of past and present neighbors recited by Duesler, the sounds also identified the alleged murderer: John Bell, a former resident of the house who had since moved to a nearby town.
¹¹

The peddler's story was riveting, but witnesses were perhaps most amazed by the spirit's thorough knowledge of themselves and their community.

“I then asked the number of children in the different families in the neighborhood?” Duesler said, “and it told them in the usual way, by rapping. Also, the number of deaths that had taken place in these families? And it told correctly.”

In a transient community, the spirit's gossipy omniscience must have seemed not only uncanny but also something more: intimate. People weren't strangers to
this
rapper; they were known to it. And by the end of the evening, after they had huddled together and listened to the spirit answer questions about their lives, they were undoubtedly better known to one another as well. As the long, cold winter (when even the mills, traditional gathering places, were closed) wound down, the peddler was drawing neighbors together.

Throughout the evening the spirit responded primarily by rapping only to yes-or-no questions, with an affirmative indicated by a rap and a negative by silence. But at one point Duesler, through a laborious process of calling out the alphabet and asking the spirit to rap on certain letters, learned that its initials included a
C
and a
B.

Charles Redfield, Mary's husband, descended, candle in hand, into the
cellar's pitch darkness to search for the murdered man's hidden grave. Duesler's voice from above and raps from an unspecified location directed Redfield to return again and again to the same suspicious spot in the dirt floor.

Around midnight, the exhausted Margaret and her daughters abandoned the house. She went to Mary Redfield's but added rather vaguely that “my children staid [sic] at some of the other neighbors.” John Fox and Charles Redfield stood guard in the house all night.

By the time Duesler returned at seven the next evening, Saturday, April 1, the raps had resumed, and several hundred people—half the population of Arcadia—had gathered to gape and listen, crowding the house and milling in front of it. Committees had staked out different areas to monitor, but the main action continued to be centered in the east bedroom. Duesler entered, only to be quickly asked to leave.

“Some of those in the room wanted me to go out and let some one else ask the questions,” he admitted. “I did so and came home.”

David Fox and his wife, Elizabeth, also visited the house that Saturday night.

“I did not stay in the room but a few minutes,” Elizabeth remarked. “There were so many there that they kept going out and in every few minutes, so that they could all have a chance to hear the noise.”

Once the crowds dispersed, David led a small crew of men downstairs to dig up the dirt floor in search of the peddler's grave. The workers had reached a depth of about three feet when they hit a stream of underground water, which forced them to stop.

The next few days were hectic ones for Hydesville. The digging continued on and off, the effort always thwarted by rising water. The crowds and the raps persisted, peddler and people alike noisily vying for attention.

Some of the queries addressed to the spirit turned to matters of theological and philosophical importance. Duesler asked if Universalist doctrine was true but received no raps. After asking the same question about Methodist doctrine, he heard raps—appropriately enough, since the spirit was a guest in a Methodist household.

Mary Redfield asked the most urgent questions of all, ones that foreshadowed later interest in spirit communication.

“I went into the bed-room with others, and knelt down upon the floor by the side of the bed,” she said, “and asked if there was a heaven to attain? And got three raps—is my child Mary in heaven? The knocking was heard in answer. These questions, and others,” Mary explained, “were asked while in the attitude of prayer to the Supreme Being for a revelation of these mysterious noises to me. Another lady in the room remarked that she was afraid,” Mary remembered. “I told her that God would protect her, and at that moment we heard several distinct
raps.
…I asked if it was a spirit from God? And it rapped,—are the spirits of our departed friends now around us? The rapping was heard.”

It seems that the rapper was behaving in a restrained and dignified manner rather than in the vengeful way its unhappy story might have justified.

Not everyone returned the courtesy. In the weeks following, many of Wayne County's residents came to witness a miracle, others to excoriate the Fox family for fraud or blasphemy. John Fox, beside himself with distress, swore that he had no idea what caused the raps.

“We have searched in every nook and corner in and about the house, at different times, to ascertain if possible whether any thing or any body was secreted there, that could make the noise,” he tensely informed Lewis, “and have never been able to find any thing which explained the mystery.”

The local newspapers relished the situation.

“The good people of Arcadia, we learn, are in quite a fever, in consequence of the discovery of an ‘under ground'
ghost,
or some unaccountable noise,” the
Western Argus
reported on April 12. “Picks and bats were at once brought into requisition, and on digging down about four feet, a stream of pure water gushed forth and filled up the ‘ghost' hole.”

Some of the curious went away awed. Others departed as they had arrived: doubting. More than seventy years later, Andrew Soverhill, a retired attorney who had been a neighbor of the Fox family, described a gathering he had witnessed as a boy.

“We…found the small house pretty well filled,” Andrew Soverhill wrote in the
Syracuse Herald.
“There were 15 or 20 in the rooms…. After we had been there for a while Mrs. Fox went into the bedroom and occupied a chair near the head of the bed. I followed her in with
boyish inquisitiveness to see everything that could possibly happen, and sat down beside her.

“The girls, Margaret and Catherine, sat on the bed. They invited me to climb on with them and I did. There was no light in the room at all, but a gleam from a tallow dip in the living room illuminated it enough so that it was possible to distinguish one person from another.”

That small beacon was too bright for the girls' mother, Margaret, who worried that light might scare the spirit. With the door closed, proceedings continued.

“To some questions there were answering raps,” Soverhill recalled, “to others none at all. I couldn't tell where the raps came from.”
¹²

The daughter of the Fox family's physician, Mrs. Henry P. Knowles, recalled how her father had been summoned to the house to see Kate, who had “taken ill.” The doctor said that he had found “great commotion in the room of his patient; snapping, cracking noises all about the bed…as fast as he changed places the raps would do the same.” He couldn't account for the noises, he told his daughter, but he thought that Kate was “in some way manipulating the joints or muscles of the fingers, toes, and knees.”
¹³

E. E. Lewis himself tried to defend the puzzled residents of Hydesville in the newspapers, but other reporters accused him instantly of commercial exploitation.

“Knowing that if the excitement should subside, or people abroad be apprised that the story was a hoax (as every intelligent person would of course pronounce it), it would materially injure the sale of his contemplated work, he has taken the above course…” sneered the
Newark Herald.
¹⁴

The Weekmans, who had lived in the house the year before the Fox family, came forward. They too had been terrorized by raps, they told Lewis. Their adolescent boarder and part-time servant, Jane C. Lape, went further. In her statement she claimed to have seen a man who “had on grey pants, black frock coat and black cap.”

She was sure it had been a specter.

Nineteen-year-old Lucretia Pulver completed the story. Several years before, she confided, when she had worked for the accused John Bell, a foot peddler had called at the house.

“This pedler [sic] carried a trunk—and a basket, I think, with vials of essence in it,” she remembered. “He wore a black frock coat, and light colored pants.”

The Bells had sent Lucretia away for a few days. When she returned, Lucretia testified, there was no sign of any peddler, but Mrs. Bell asked her to mend two coats that had been suspiciously ripped to pieces. Although Lucretia never saw the peddler again, Mrs. Bell claimed that he still visited. She occasionally showed her young boarder silver thimbles and other items likely to have been found in a peddler's trunk.