Talking to the Dead (4 page)

 

Questions such as the ones Mary Redfield addressed to the murdered peddler of Hydesville—inquiries about the power of divine beings to protect (or punish), about the survival of the mortal individual's spirit after death, and about the nature of the afterlife—have been common to most cultures. So too have been efforts to understand and on occasion to try to harness supernatural forces.

Americans of the 1840s, whatever their religion or social class, were no strangers to spirits, both the spooky sort and the beatific. Some spirits were conceived of as independent entities, others as the manifestation of a person who had died. Although most inhabitants of the young United States prided themselves on their rationality and boasted of living in an age of material progress, in fact a wealth of beliefs about the supernatural, derived from Christian and non-Christian traditions, permeated mainstream religion, folklore, and popular culture.
¹⁵

Whether or not an unfortunate wanderer lay buried beneath the Fox family's cellar, peddlers were not only familiar figures in New York State but also well-known ghosts in local folklore. Arriving by wagon or on foot, these itinerant salesmen were perennial outsiders and so ideal candidates for tales about unexpected arrivals and mysterious departures, greed and retribution. In many tales, peddlers threatened to pull something over on the buyer—only to receive a comeuppance. In others, they were themselves innocent victims. One story lamented the fate of a peddler at a village inn: “At three o'clock in the morning, half a dozen revelers dragged the peddler down to the well-head in the cellar, murdered him, and cast his body into the well.”
¹⁶

From then on the peddler's ghost stalked the spot.

Ghosts and poltergeists—a word that means “noisy ghost” in German—traveled far and wide, borne less by their fearsome powers than by word of mouth and by newspapers that borrowed freely from one another. Even John Bell wasn't the only man by that name—common though it was—to have grappled with the supernatural. In Tennessee in the early 1800s, a witch was said to have driven another John Bell to death. His travails, which began with raps, may have been known in the North by the 1840s.

John Wesley, founder of Methodism, had pondered the issue of witchcraft, and his own family had experienced what may have been a supernatural visitation. In 1726 Wesley wrote that his father's household had been disrupted by raps and knocks, footsteps, groans, and crashes. The behavior was characteristic of a poltergeist, a spirit distinguished by its mischievousness from other more doleful and passive sorts of wraiths. Wesley's parents and his sisters had named the invisible troublemaker “Old Jeffrey.”

This episode was reported in the
Memoirs of the Wesley Family,
a book published in 1823 and reissued many times. A new edition was reviewed for the
New York Tribune
in the 1840s by the critic Margaret Fuller and presumably provoked lively discussion in Methodist circles and parlors.

The ideas and practices of Anton Mesmer, an eighteenth-century Austrian healer, had spread to the United States and by the 1840s held the nation in thrall. According to one theory, everything in the universe, including the human body, was composed of an electro–magnetic fluid. Proposing that an imbalance of this essential substance caused illness, Mesmer claimed to cure patients by readjusting the flow of electro–magnetism to the body's diseased or injured part.

Adapting his methods, healers known as mesmerists accomplished their work by placing a patient into a trance, called a magnetic sleep, while waving their hands gently over the subject's body. Whether or not the cure took, the subject was said to have been mesmerized or magnetized in a process now viewed as a precursor to hypnosis.

By the mid-nineteenth century, mesmerism had evolved into a form of entertainment as well as of healing. In parlors and at parties, amateur
mesmerists displayed their skills on willing volunteers to amuse the other guests. Professional mesmerists and their subjects also gave public demonstrations for curious—and paying—audiences. In some cases, in which a female subject seemingly fell sway to a male mesmerist's control, the situation resonated with erotic tension. Those who had been mesmerized often awoke believing that they had experienced visions of spirits or attained clairvoyant powers.

The ideas of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote extensively about his conversations with God, Jesus, spirits, and angels, had also crossed the Atlantic. Swedenborg's followers had founded the Church of New Jerusalem, but aspects of his writings appealed to other groups as well.

Swedenborg envisioned an afterlife that consisted of three heavens, three hells, and an interim place—the world of the spirits—where everyone went directly upon dying. Those who had accepted God's love on earth were drawn to other like-minded souls and eventually graduated as angels to one of the three heavens. Those who had loved only themselves or worldly things in mortal life discovered compatible companions in one of the three hells.

Swedenborg's reports of his communion with supernatural beings and his picture of paradise were long-winded but vivid. For those who inhabited the heavens, there were cities with broad avenues and handsome buildings, glittering palaces of gold and jewels, parks with flowering arbors, fruit trees, and pleasant walkways. Like mortals, spirits and most angels wore clothes, ate food, fell in love, and married. Children, innocent and good by nature, never went to hell.

The nineteenth-century seer Andrew Jackson Davis of New York State claimed to experience visions of Swedenborg while in a mesmeric trance, thereby linking his two predecessors in a manner that might have surprised them both in their lifetimes. A largely self-educated, handsome young man with a bushy beard and penetrating eyes, Davis reportedly had a clairvoyant gift for diagnosing disease, but in a trance state he also elaborated on and modified Swedenborg's ideas about the afterlife.

Davis's early lectures were published in the mid-1840s, and he became known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, for the upstate New York town
where he had grown up. Of course, it could be difficult for listeners to judge whether the spirits who conversed with such mystics and prophets had substance in reality or simply reflected the visionary's fertile imagination or aptitude for fraud.

A few miles from Poughkeepsie, the religious group popularly called the Shakers, for its members' physical bursts of piety, experienced an astonishing episode of spiritual frenzy in the late 1830s. The Shaker Society had been established in America about sixty years earlier by Mother Ann Lee, whose followers believed her to embody the feminine side of a dual-natured God, as Jesus had embodied his masculine aspects, and it was notably the community's girls and young women who were swept up in the excitement. Claiming to be seized by spirits, they danced wildly, sang, spoke in tongues, swayed, and swooned. These manifestations subsided in the mid-1840s, but community elders later viewed them as harbingers of the days when two other young women, the Fox sisters, would speak of strange raps.

Magicians and conjurers also weighed in on the question of raps, apparitions, and other alleged spiritual manifestations, at once playing on and distancing themselves from such beliefs. As early as 1810, a magician named John Rannie announced a campaign against those who pretended to raise the dead. He promised optical illusions that would “enable the attentive observer to form a just idea of the artifices by which they impose on the
CREDULOUS
and
SUPERSTITIOUS
in this and former ages….”
¹⁷

Nineteenth-century magicians skilled in ventriloquism, sleight of hand, and conjuring often described their work as scientific and analytical in nature, demonstrations of their proficiency in illusion, optics, acoustics, chemistry, pneumatics, and electricity. But magic, which had begun to develop a popular audience, wasn't always so complex. Books such as
Hocus Pocus; or, The Whole Art of Conjuring Made Easy for Young Persons,
published in 1846, taught parlor tricks. Nor were even rudimentary manuals required for a child to enjoy playing pranks.

“I was much interested in [magic] in early childhood,” a college student wrote in 1834, “and had discovered before my tenth year, that it was an easy matter to frighten my friends by doing what they considered
wonderful.” His first chance came, the young man recalled, when he terrified his cousin by producing strange raps.
¹⁸

 

E. E. Lewis, who industriously collected depositions from approximately twenty residents of Hydesville, was an attorney turned reporter from Canandaigua, a town in a neighboring county. Disavowing any intention to exploit the superstitious merely to make a profit on a good story, he insisted that he only hoped to discover the truth about the rumors of hauntings.

The bizarre events taking place were a product, he marveled, not of the dark ages, but of the enlightened nineteenth century. Distinguishing his interviewees from both the wily urban frauds who were said to stalk city streets and the humble bumpkins on whom such mountebanks were supposed to prey, Lewis described his witnesses as part of a “large, intelligent and candid community” of respectable American citizens. These men and women, Lewis pronounced, were not easily duped.

“Hundreds have been there,” he wrote, skeptics who assumed they would quickly discover a ruse. These doubters “have first carefully examined the premises; have gone into the ghostly presence, still incredulous and disposed to treat the affair with levity; have held converse with the unknown one, until the cold sweat oozing from every pore has coursed down their limbs, and they have been compelled to acknowledge that they felt themselves in the presence of one from the spirit-country.”

After denying any prior belief in the supernatural, the witnesses whose statements Lewis printed all told a similar story, describing spine-tingling raps that had plagued the Fox household. Most expressed bafflement over the source of the sounds, swearing that they had looked high and low.

Lewis not only listened to their stories but also added his own slant on what was happening. “If the spirit of Swedenborg could…reveal the coming of future events,” he commented, “why cannot the spirits of the dead come back and reveal to us that which would otherwise be unknown?”

At the end of his pamphlet he included a petition signed by more than forty of Bell's supporters, who proclaimed the alleged murderer a
man of honest character. Many of the signers also had witnessed the raps. While they couldn't account for the noises, they refused to accept a piece of information—Bell's guilt—that ran directly contrary to their own common sense.

Lewis's pamphlet and contemporary newspaper articles constitute the earliest known accounts of the events at Hydesville. As thorough as he was, however, Lewis made one mistake that would frustrate the skeptical, the faithful, and the curious of future generations: he failed to gather statements from Kate and Maggie. Perhaps the girls shied away from the chance, or their parents discouraged their participation. Perhaps no one thought to interview anyone so young.

Amid the clamor of voices, noises, and surging crowds, Kate and Maggie are silent.

O
N
J
ANUARY
4, 1851, Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune,
marveled at the literal and symbolic distance that the nation had traveled since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

“Fifty years ago,” Greeley intoned in his column, “George Washington had just gone to his grave…. Thomas Jefferson had just been designated for next President…. The population of our Country was over 5,300,000 or considerably less than one-fourth the present number…. Our own State had scarcely a white inhabitant west of the sources of the Mohawk and Susquehanna. Buffalo and Rochester were forests…. The Erie Canal had hardly been dreamed of by the wildest castle-builder.”

Kate and Maggie's father, John David Fox, was born in the late 1780s, when the American Revolution still lived in recent memory and white settlers had not yet streamed across the mountains that divided the east coast from the continent's interior.
¹
A descendant of Palatine Germans who had anglicized the name Voss to Fox, he grew up in Rockland County, New York, a rural triangle of narrow valleys and rocky cliffs in the southeast corner of the state.

His father was David Fox, a blacksmith by trade. David wrote his will in March 1800 when he was forty-five years old and John still a boy, then died that April, leaving his estate to his wife, Catherine, with the proviso that each of their children receive a share on marriage.
²
She gave birth to their youngest child in May, only a month after her husband's death.

John presumably received his inheritance a dozen years later when he married a sixteen-year-old Rockland County girl, Margaret Smith, on March 7, 1812. She had been born in October 1796 to Jacob I. Smith and Maria Rutan, who fondly nicknamed their new daughter Peggy.
³

On her father's side, Margaret's ancestry is easy to trace. Her paternal grandfather, John C. Smith, was a well-to-do farmer and civic leader; he and his wife, the former Elizabeth Blauvelt, both came from industrious Dutch families long established in the area.
⁴
The background of Margaret's maternal grandfather, on the other hand, is more mysterious. Perhaps it was kept so intentionally, especially if his last name—Rutan—was a variant of Ruttan. Descendants of French Huguenots, some members of this influential local family had switched their allegiance from Patriot to Loyalist midstream in the American Revolution. Afterward, having forfeited their land in the United States, they had settled on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario, where they'd been rewarded by the crown with new land in their adopted country.
⁵

If Margaret Fox's maternal grandfather Rutan was an elusive figure, stories about his wife, Margaret, were family staples. Grandmother Rutan was one of a long line of relatives reputed to be blessed, or burdened, with second sight. According to family lore, she would rise dreamily in a trance between midnight and two in the morning to track phantom funerals to the nearby graveyard, her distraught husband following to ensure her safety. At breakfast the next morning, Grandmother Rutan would relate the vivid details of her adventure: whose funeral it had been, what mourners had attended, which friend's or neighbor's horses had drawn the coffin and led the procession—events quite invisible to her husband's eye. Everyone at the breakfast table would be “sadly depressed” by her tale, for the sad scenes Grandmother Rutan witnessed allegedly always took place, just as she had envisioned them, within the next few weeks.

Margaret Fox's sister, Elizabeth Smith, also reportedly evidenced the gift called second sight or clairvoyance, the ability to see what the eye can't at a distance in time or space, even foreseeing her own death. At age nineteen—or so it was later said—Elizabeth told her parents, “I dreamed I was in a new country, walking alone, when suddenly I came to a small cemetery, and, walking up to one of the most prominent head-stones, read the inscription….”

Elizabeth confided that she had seen her own name on the headstone, the first initial of her husband's last name,
H,
and the information that she had died at twenty-seven years old.
⁶

Whatever mournful, clairvoyant strain may have marked the Rutan-Smith branch of her family, there's no indication that Margaret Fox predicted problems in her life. Although there may have been one child who died in infancy, she and John had four healthy children in relatively quick succession. Leah was baptized Ann Leah on April 8, 1813, in the Kakiat Reformed Church in West New Hempstead, Rockland County. Maria and Elizabeth followed. The couple's one son, David, was born in 1820.
⁷

Sometime after Leah's birth, John and Margaret moved to New York City, but they retained close ties to Rockland County. John and his father-in-law, Jacob, jointly purchased a plot of land there in 1816 for five hundred dollars, selling it in 1820 for double the price.

After 1820 John and Margaret become difficult to trace through public records. Their story for the next twenty years must be pieced together largely from hints found in
The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism,
a memoir written in the 1880s by the oldest of the Fox children, Leah, in which she explores “some family antecedents.”
⁸
Her anecdotes suggest that in the early 1820s the Fox family relocated to the western part of New York State, joined by Margaret's parents, Jacob and Maria Smith, and by her three siblings: John J., Catherine, and Elizabeth, who had seen her own sad future.

The Fox family's decision, like that of thousands of other Americans, was undoubtedly inspired by an abundance of western land and the promise of the Erie Canal. Championed by New York governor DeWitt Clinton and initially derided as “the Great Ditch,” the canal was started in 1817 and took eight years to complete. At its official opening in 1825,
cannons fired and crowds cheered: a continuous inland waterway at last linked the eastern seaboard with the Great Lakes.

Traveling less than four miles per hour, crammed with passengers inside the cabin and on deck, the humble mule-drawn packet boat boosted the population from Albany to Buffalo by shortening the journey from two weeks by overland routes to only a few days. Freight could also be transported more efficiently by canal. Barges carried farmers' produce and locally manufactured goods such as flour eastward to New York and returned with textiles and other products that eased life on the farm. Shipping costs dropped, and toll revenues rose. As the shift from a subsistence to a market economy accelerated, businesses and businessmen along the route grew rich.

Towns near the canal flourished, but others did less well. When plans called for the Erie Canal to pass parallel to Hydesville's main road, for example, legend has it that the locals objected vehemently. Some declared that they would rather die than see canal boats float through their farms. Others worried that the Great Ditch would stink of garbage and stagnant water.
⁹
Eventually the Erie Canal was dug through the Wayne County village of Newark, several miles away. Newark boomed, and Hydesville began a long, slow process of decline.

Thirty miles to the west, the already prosperous village of Rochester—built near the falls of the Genessee River, a thundering source of water power to run mills—grew into “the Young Lion of the West.” A manufacturing center best known for its flour, it was a canal town that roared with commercial vitality and that feasted as well on what some called riotous or ungodly activity. Dock workers and travelers, farmers and shopkeepers, transients and residents jammed the docks, packed the boardinghouses, and overflowed the taverns. Circuses, grogshops, and theaters attracted crowds whose nightly revels spilled into the streets until dawn.

When they first moved west, Margaret's parents, her brother, and her sister Elizabeth gravitated to the area officially designated Wayne County in 1823. According to Leah in
The Missing Link,
soon after settling there and marrying a man with the last initial
H,
Charles Higgins, Elizabeth indeed died at twenty-seven, the age predicted in her prophetic dream.

In the early 1820s John and Margaret Fox, the parents of four young children, separated. He had turned out to be what an acquaintance later called “a sporting gentleman,” with a taste for liquor, gambling, cards, and horse races.
¹⁰
Whether or not John had indulged his appetites before the move, in the hard-drinking, rowdy canal towns of the day, he was far from the only man to end an afternoon, or begin a morning, with the demon rum in one hand and a fan of cards in the other. The fact that others shared his habits did little to console Margaret.

She probably survived on money inherited from her paternal grandfather, John C. Smith, who expressed his loathing for her husband in his will. Smith left a share of his estate to each of his grandchildren, but he ordered that his executors manage “Peggy's” one-eighth portion “for and during the time my said [grand] Daughter Peggy remains under Coverture of her present Husband John Fox the said John Fox never to have any Management Controle or profits thereof….” Smith's executors were instructed further to provide whatever his “grand Daughter Peggy may need…and after the Death or lawful separation from the said John Fox to her heirs forever Except what is otherwise decreed.” These were unusual provisions at the time and perhaps not even enforceable without John Fox's cooperation. By law, married women in most states were required to cede control of all their property to their husbands.
¹¹

Leah was about ten years old when John C. Smith, her great-grandfather, died in 1823. She later called him “the very noblest and grandest man I have ever known.” She fondly remembered her visits to her great-grandparents' comfortable farm in Rockland County, perhaps recalling a world that offered a little girl a greater sense of security than could be found in the boomtowns of the 1820s. The trials of her growing-up years were to leave Leah with a high tolerance for risk taking even as she yearned for stability.

Margaret Fox now lived with her unmarried sister, Catherine Smith, in Rochester, boarding in a house on Clinton Street, one of the neat, two-story frame structures that had sprouted everywhere to accommodate the city's burgeoning population. As Leah later noted, her father was “absent from home much of the time.”
¹²
A euphemism for her parents'
separation, the phrase also suggests that he hadn't vanished altogether from his children's lives.

Around 1827, at the age of fourteen and a half, Leah left her mother's home and cast her lot with a man named Bowman Fish. Hardly a wise move, at the time it wasn't as scandalous a thing to do as comparable acts would become by midcentury. The median age of marriage for women was between eighteen and twenty, and on farms and in rough-and-tumble canal towns like Newark or Rochester, girls often married even younger.
¹³
Still, Leah's behavior must have devastated Margaret, who at sixteen had entered into her own unstable, unhappy relationship.

Leah's account of her life with Fish was brief. Her husband, she wrote, “discovered when too late that he had married a child…. He left Rochester under a pretense of going on business to the West.” Whenever her last contact with Fish actually took place, she dismissed the occasion with a wave.

“The next I heard of him,” she snapped, “was that he had married a rich widow in the State of Illinois.”
¹⁴

Leah made no mention of a legal divorce, possibly because her breakup lacked legal sanction. In the 1820s, particularly in newer towns and frontier areas, a community often accepted a de facto marriage as legitimate, so long as the man and woman viewed themselves as married by mutual consent. And even in the context of a legal marriage, desertion was frequently regarded as a pragmatic, if far from ideal, method of divorce.
¹⁵

Leah and Fish were together long enough to have a daughter, Lizzie, who was born sometime between 1827 and 1830. Whether they had other children is unclear, since Leah would later refer to some of her nieces and nephews as if they were her own, boasting that they even called her “mama.” Taking charge of other people's children in fact became one of Leah's lifelong habits; she may have hoped to save her protégés from some of the hardships she herself had suffered as a young girl.

 

In the early 1830s John Fox transformed himself from the “sporting gentleman” he had been in the 1820s into a sober, serious man. He became
an observant Methodist who eventually served as a class leader in his church, his metamorphosis most likely influenced by the great religious and reform movements of his day.
¹⁶
In western New York, the fires of religious enthusiasm burned so brilliantly that the area had come to be known as the Burned-over District.

The region had periodically erupted in evangelical revivals from the early 1800s on. Men and women who headed west, abandoning the settled communities of their youth, craved a faith that matched their fervor and offered solace against the hardships and diseases they faced. The fierce predestination of orthodox Calvinism, which denied the individual any role in achieving personal salvation, no longer satisfied the needs of people so actively engaged in the pursuit of happiness and other worldly goals. Similarly, the rationalist ideas embodied in deism, with its suggestion that a divine being successfully set the world in motion and then retired, hardly served as a bulwark in times of trouble.

In Methodist camp meetings, however, preachers promised that human beings could shape their own destiny. The responsibility for achieving salvation came to rest squarely on the shoulders, and in the heart, of the individual. Freewill Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians alike urged the faithful not only to accept God but also to demonstrate their conversion by the godly ways in which they lived their lives.

Enthusiastic expressions of conversion abounded in the Burned-over District and, depending on the denomination, were encouraged and expected. Revival meetings, at which ministers exhorted sinners to convert and change their ways, became the scene of shouts and whispers, shakings and quakings, hand clapping and singing, speaking in tongues and falling down in trances. Women joined men in exuberant prayer.