Talking to the Dead (38 page)
Read Talking to the Dead Online
Authors: Barbara Weisberg
11.
S. Taylor, ed.,
Fox-Taylor Automatic Writing,
400.
12.
S. Taylor, ed.,
Fox-Taylor Automatic Writing,
400.
13.
Information on Maggie's death comes from her death certificate and from two letters from Titus Merritt to Mrs. M. T. Longly, March 26, 1903, and March 31, 1903, Archives of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, Lily Dale, New York.
14.
Banner of Light,
March 18, 1893.
CHAPTER 19: “WE OF MODERN TIMES”
1.
The chapter title comes from
Banner of Light,
March 18, 1893. For a lively and engaging portrait of the town of Lily Dale yesterday and today, see Christine Wicker,
Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). See also the
New York Times,
August 25, 1997.
2.
The number of Spiritualists remains a point of controversy and to some degree depends on whether one is talking only about those affiliated with the church or all sympathizers with the movement. Emma Hardinge, in
Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years' Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits
(1869; repr., New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1970), estimated that by the 1850s there were 40,000 Spiritualists in New York City alone (101). The
Banner of Light
in 1888 put the number far higher, at between 8 and 11 million believers (November 24, 1888). These estimates may have included not only committed Spiritualists but also curious investigators who for a time took part in seances. R. Laurence Moore puts the number of Spiritualists who participated in the movement in an organized church form at about 35,000 at the end of the nineteenth century. However, he adds that the number does not represent individuals who may have expressed the thought that “there was something in” spirit communication; see
In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41, 68.
3.
For information on life expectancy, see Robert V. Wells,
Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750â1990
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172â79.
4.
On the impact of electricity, see Alexander Murray, “Revenants from Darkness: Clergy, Community, and a Twelfth-Century âInvasion of Ghosts,'”
Times Literary Supplement,
June 4, 1999, review of Jean-Claude Schmitt,
Ghosts and the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On Thomas Edison, see Moore,
In Search of White Crows,
176.
5.
An excellent source on the history of medicine in nineteenth-and twentieth-century America, particularly as medical practice and drug therapy pertained to women's health, is Sarah Stage,
Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine
(New York: Norton, 1979).
6.
Sources on the later history of Spiritualism, the SPR, the ASPR, the Theosophical Society, and occultism include books already cited: Ruth Brandon,
The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1984); Alan Gauld,
The Founders of Psychical Research
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); R. Laurence Moore,
In Search of White Crows;
Janet Oppenheim,
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850â1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Peter Washington,
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
(New York: Schocken, 1993). In addition, a remarkable biography, John Patrick Deveney,
Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century
Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), examines one man's spiritual journey. There is, of course, an extensive literature by and about Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott for readers who wish to delve into the history and philosophy of the Theosophical Society.
7.
For information on Yeats's occult associations, see Brenda Maddox,
Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
8.
Information on World War I and the fragment of the Wilfred Owen quote come from Pat Jalland,
Death in the Victorian Family
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 370â74.
9.
For information on Kingsley's death, see Daniel Stashower,
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 345â46. For Houdini's and Doyle's divergent views of the Fox sisters, see Houdini,
A Magician Among the Spirits
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1924), 1â16, and Arthur Conan Doyle,
The History of Spiritualism,
vol. 1 (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 61â118.
10.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke,
The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology
(New York: New York University Press, 1992).
11.
There is an extensive literature on parapsychology; Richard S. Broughton,
Parapsychology: The Controversial Science
(New York: Ballantine, 1991), provides a good overview of the field. The Parapsychology Foundation's Web site, as of October 30, 2003, found at http://www.parapsychology.org, and the American Society for Psychical Research in New York are both excellent sources for more detailed and current information.
12.
For membership in the NSAC within the last decade, see the
New York Times,
August 25, 1997.
13.
Boston Journal,
November 23, 1904. Another doctor refuted the findings in print five years later, in the
ASPR Journal,
March 1909.
14.
Gene Gordon,
Magical Legacy
(Norcross, GA: David Ginn, 1980), 43â44.
15.
The subsequent history of the house is taken from Arthur Myers,
Fox Cottage Burns, September 21, 1955
(Lily Dale, NY: Lily Dale Historical Society); from the
Wayne County Star,
November 19, 1983; and from the Internet newsletter of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, http://www.nsac.org/newsletter, September 24, 1998.
16.
Syracuse Post Standard,
October 21, 1899, Wayne County Historical Society. Mariam Buckner Pond was married to a grandnephew of the Fox sisters. W. G. Langworthy Taylor, in
Katie Fox: Epochmaking Medium and the Making of the Fox-Taylor Record
(New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933), supplies the death dates for Henry and for Ferdie (158). However a Jencken family tree puts Ferdie's death date as 1914.
17.
Titus Merritt to Mary Longley, March 27, 1903, Archives of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches.
AFTERWORD
1.
James's evocative sentence, a portion of which Moore uses for the title of his book, can be found in “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” an essay James wrote in 1897 and that can be found today in many anthologies of his work.
2.
Quoted by Thomas L. Friedman, “Is Google God?”
New York Times,
op-ed section, Sunday, June 29, 2003.
3.
According to the
Fortean Times,
July 1998, 6, a
USA Today
article (April 28, 1998) cited a Gallup poll that a belief in Spiritualism (defined as “mediums and ghosts”) rose from 12 percent in 1976 to 52 percent in 1996. The
New York Times
referred to the same poll in an article titled “A Voice from the Other Side” (October 29, 2000). According to the
Times'
s interpretation, the Gallup poll found that 20 percent of the respondents believed in spirit communication, and another 22 percent believed that spirit communication might be possible.
4.
Quoted by William Riordan,
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics
(1905; repr., New York: Dutton, 1963), 3.
5.
R. Laurence Moore makes this point in
In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5. A last-minute rereading, on David Black's recommendation, of Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(1964; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), left me listening for the train's whistle as I finished this book.
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