Talking to the Dead (6 page)

If the outside world sometimes seemed composed of multiple realities, so too did the sisters' own inner worlds. Lively though the girls were, they also suffered from severe headaches, pain that—as many migraine sufferers know—can create a sense of standing outside oneself, of being not oneself but another person altogether.

At eleven and fourteen, Kate and Maggie were also at the age when childhood merges into adulthood, a period that the Romantics had painted as a borderline between innocence and experience and a time when childish fears and fantasies coexist with the reality of menstruation and sexual feelings. Maggie was almost as old as Leah had been on becoming pregnant with Lizzie, but she was also growing up in a different environment. Genteel society of the mid-nineteenth century encouraged girls to remain children far longer than in the past and at least on the surface was more prudish on the subject of sex.

Although many critics have dismissed the two sisters as clever mischief makers, naughty and imaginative little girls who trapped themselves in a lifetime of fraud, it's unlikely that the truth is so simple. Kate and Maggie, containing worlds within themselves and experiencing many worlds without, were undoubtedly subject to powerful and conflicting impulses. As later events would demonstrate, they were also endowed with unusual openness and sensitivity, whether to the messages of the spirits or to the spoken and unspoken wishes of other mortals.

T
HE SPRING OF
the peddler's return, thirty-five-year-old Leah Fox Fish was living at 11 Mechanics Square in Rochester, and she seems not to have heard about her family's troubles for close to a month. As she had been doing for some time, she was supporting herself and her daughter, Lizzie, by teaching piano. She was a robust, attractive woman with a square jaw and broad, capable hands, and her sociable personality complemented her considerable musical talent. Her husbandless status, however, now almost twenty years in duration, undoubtedly stirred at least polite disapproval among the members of Rochester's affluent and established circles. Leah probably drew her students from families with more open minds and more moderate incomes.

Her choice of work reflected her sharp eye for business as well as her good ear for music. A few decades earlier a piano had been a rare status symbol, but the upright variety had rapidly become a necessity in every middle-class parlor. Playing a musical instrument was a requisite skill for young ladies and teaching an acceptably genteel occupation for a woman.

Leah's occupation was also considered a challenging one; manuals of the day cautioned that music teachers shouldered important responsibilities. Acclaimed as “one of the sciences,” music was extolled also as “a medium of sacred sentiment and reverential praise…the handmaid of Religion, the teacher of Truth, and the inspirer of Devotion.” Teachers such as Leah were counseled to recognize the emotional impact of sound and melody in order to better exercise utmost care: given its unique powers, music could be used by the devil to incite carnal excitement as well as by angels to invite heavenly thoughts.
¹

Not surprisingly, heavenly thoughts often turned to the individual's mortality. A standard repertoire of the day, a mirror of shared values and concerns, included patriotic songs such as “Hail Columbia!”; classical pieces generically called “Symphonies”; Alpine tunes, believed to bolster good health; and an abundance of songs about death. Even young children weren't spared the constant presence of the grim reaper. The
American School Songbook
opened with a tune entitled “The Child of Heaven,” and young songsters dutifully warbled its uplifting and gloomy lyrics: “How many a rose of beauty, Will bloom to fade away / And many a child of pity, Will die e'er yet 'tis day.”
²

It seems to have been the mother of one of Leah's piano students who, in late April, first heard about the Fox family's Hydesville adventures and then reported the news. Leah later insisted that she had known nothing until then, since her parents hadn't wanted to worry her with letters.

Anxious for her family's welfare and curious to find out what was going on, Leah rapidly enlisted two friends, Mrs. Lyman Granger and Mrs. Elihu Grover, for moral support, and the three women boarded a night boat headed east on the Erie Canal for Wayne County. Leah's daughter, Lizzie, may have traveled with them, or she may have been in Hydesville already, a figure little noticed there in the swirling confusion of previous weeks.
³

In Newark the women hired a carriage to take them to Hydesville; they found the “spook house,” as reporters had dubbed it, completely deserted. The carriage traveled on to David's farm, where Leah discovered her parents, Kate, and Maggie barricaded with her brother and his
family. Margaret looked aged and drawn from the strain of the previous few weeks; her gray hair seemed to Leah to have turned white. Equally sunk in depression, John was stolidly working with a carpenter to complete the new house next to David's.

The move had done little to foil the crowds. The curious, while fewer in number, parked their wagons on the road, trampled through the muddy peppermint fields, and peered in the farmhouse windows. The move also had failed to deter the persistent spirit, who refused to leave and about whom further discoveries had been made. By calling out the alphabet and asking the spirit to rap on specific letters, David had determined the peddler's full name: Charles B. Rosna or Rosma.

Margaret, meanwhile, had reached a chilling conclusion, one shared by friends and neighbors. The raps weren't random; they trailed her two youngest daughters, Kate in particular.

After mulling over Margaret's theory, Leah formed a plan. She decided to take Kate with her when she returned home to Rochester to see whether “by separating the two children (Maggie and Katie)…we could put a stop to the disturbance.”

But the effort to silence the peddler's spirit by separating Kate and Maggie proved as futile as the earlier move to David's. “We had not gone many miles on the canal…when we became aware,” Leah wrote, “that the rapping had accompanied us.”

Back at David's farm, other spirits chimed in where the peddler had left off—thumping, cracking, snapping, and knocking—apparently undaunted by Kate's absence and just as eager to communicate through Maggie. Separating the girls had demonstrated only that there were many spirits waiting to be heard and that they, unlike the suffering ghosts of the old world, weren't about to remain for eternity in a dreary haunted house. These invisibles liked to follow and visit their mortal American friends.
⁴

 

There's no independent testimony to corroborate Leah's description of what happened next, but it's clear that Kate's first weeks in Rochester were chaotic. The spirits were overexcited and out of control. On the one hand, their behavior resembled that of a poltergeist like “Old Jeffrey,”
the Wesley family's resident ghost. On the other hand, the high jinks equally resembled those of high-strung and overstimulated youngsters.

On their first night together at the house on Mechanics Square, Leah, Kate, and Lizzie went to bed early.

“No sooner had I extinguished the light,” Leah remembered, “than the children screamed, and Lizzie said she felt a cold hand passing over her face, and another over her shoulder down her back. She screamed fearfully, and I feared she would go into spasms. Katie was also much frightened.”
⁵

Disturbances continued almost until dawn, when the girls and Leah finally fell asleep. But the next night brought renewed turmoil.

“Tables and everything in the room below us were being moved about. Doors were opened and shut, making the greatest possible noises.
Then they walked upstairs,”
Leah wrote, “and into the room next to us (our bedroom was an open recess off from this room). There seemed to be many actors engaged in the performance, and a large audience in attendance…. One Spirit was heard to dance
as if with clogs
which continued fully ten minutes.”

Leah instantly decided to abandon the house, an older residence that she maintained might be haunted, like the one in Hydesville. She may well have had another reason for the move: after two nights and a performance as entertaining as any theater troupe could mount, she may have recognized that these indomitable spirits weren't about to go away, that they were enormously clever, and that they would attract interested visitors.

Within a few weeks Leah had rented another home, one of an identical pair on a single foundation situated on Prospect Street. The house had a fresh, welcoming facade, a kitchen and pantry on the ground floor, a parlor and dining room on the second floor, and a single large room on the third floor. Leah partitioned this room with curtains, placing three beds in the more spacious area and keeping a corner for a storeroom.

The first night in the new house on Prospect Street was quiet, and Margaret and Maggie arrived as planned the day after the move for a long visit. The spirits apparently enjoyed the new quarters as much as the old. With the family reunited, they returned full force.

“All was quiet until about midnight, when we distinctly heard footsteps coming up the stairs, walking into the little room I had partitioned off with curtains,” Leah remembered. “We could hear them shuffling, giggling, and whispering…. Occasionally they would come and give our bed a tremendous shaking, lifting it (and us) entirely from the floor, almost to the ceiling, and then let us down with a bang; then pat us with hands.”

The next morning Margaret asked Calvin Brown, the young man whom she had taken under her wing, for assistance. He was invited to move into the Prospect Street house in the dual role of boarder and protector; his bed was placed in the second-floor parlor.

With the merry candor that distinguishes parts of Leah's memoir from the generally more earnest works by other advocates of spirit communication, she wrote in
The Missing Link
that in the night, everything “seemed to be in commotion” but that she herself felt more confident with Calvin there. When she heard a spirit walking around in the third-floor alcove, she began to question the invisible being, which answered by stamping its disembodied feet.

“I was amused,” she admitted, “—although afraid. He seemed so willing to do my bidding that I could not resist the temptation of speaking to him as he marched around my bed. I said, ‘
Flat-Foot,
can you dance the Highland fling?' This seemed to delight him. I sang the music for him, and he danced most admirably.”

Horrified, Margaret chastised her oldest daughter for encouraging the fiend. And the spirits indeed soon capitalized on Leah's easy familiarity with them. They made such a fearful fuss, giggling, scuffling, groaning, enacting murder scenes, and in many ways behaving like rambunctious adolescents, that Margaret cried out to Calvin to come upstairs. When he stomped into the room with a vow to end the deviltry, the spirits responded to his fighting words in kind, hurling bedroom slippers, a brass candlestick, and balls of carpet rags at him.

The poltergeists' hostility continued the next night. In the dark, the spirits took to slapping their human victims: Calvin, Margaret, Leah, Kate, Maggie, and Lizzie all felt the sting of the spirit's hand.

Suddenly, Kate cried, “O, look!”

“We all saw what seemed to be the form of a large man,” Leah wrote, “lying across the foot of our bed, breathing irregularly and apparently in great distress. (The sheet was wrapped around him, muffled closely about his neck.)”

At that moment Kate was slapped a second time, and she fell “to all appearances lifeless,” instantly becoming the focus of everyone's terror and alarm.

Margaret was at the point of calling in someone else for help when Kate groaned deeply, a sign that she was, if just barely, still alive. “We held her hands, but could not perceive the slightest pulsation,” Leah stressed. “After remaining in this unconscious state for some time, she again moaned piteously and raised her hand, pointing at something she saw, and explained to us afterward. We asked many questions which she answered by pressing our hands.”

As she regained consciousness, Kate communicated that she had witnessed the terrible events at Hydesville, and she sobbed inconsolably. Afterward, according to Leah, the eleven-year-old girl recited “twenty or thirty” verses of poetry, ending with the line: “To be with Christ is better far.”

In the dark, the scene just before Kate's swoon must have played out like a game of blindman's bluff, except that everyone was at once the stalker and the stalked, and the talk of demons must have heightened the teasing to breathless terror. Kate may have been stunned half senseless by a worldly or otherworldly slap, fainted from the orgy of excitement, or gone into a trance, overcome like someone at an evangelical revival by the thrilling events of the night. Or she simply may have been a splendid dramatic actress, as young girls can be. Or she may have been possessed by spirits determined to demonstrate their power to disrespectful mortals such as Calvin.

 

One of the first independent accounts of the spirits' activities in Rochester was written by Lemuel Clark, a Congregational minister from Westford, New York. Traveling on business in June 1848, the Reverend Clark stopped in Rochester to visit two of his closest friends, Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Granger. The Grangers, a Methodist couple, were also acquaintances of the
Fox family; she had been one of the two women who accompanied Leah to Hydesville in early May.
⁶

Clark found his hosts cordial but surprisingly tense. After supper Granger invited Clark to sleep with him that night, a not uncommon platonic practice and a signal, Clark realized, that his friend wanted to talk in private.

The two men were settled comfortably under the sheets before Granger hesitantly revealed his news: his older daughter, Harriet, had contacted her family. As the dumbfounded Clark well knew, Harriet had been murdered—poisoned—several years before. Her husband, a physician, had been tried for the crime but acquitted by an allegedly fixed jury.

Harriet's spirit, Granger continued, had been communicating with them by uncanny sounds that could be heard in the presence of a particular young girl, whose family had been troubled by similar sounds—“like persons rapping with knuckles”—since March, and who had recently moved to Rochester to live with her older sister. The child Granger was referring to, of course, was Kate.

The Fox family, as Granger told the story, had wished profoundly to keep the whole noisy affair quiet. But discretion proved impossible. “As a woman's secret will out,” Granger observed, “it soon leaked out into the ears of some confidential friends who would help them keep the secret….”

Outraged by what he considered blatant fraud, Clark instantly resolved to investigate the raps himself. He hoped to deliver his friend Lyman from “the snare of the devil”—a demon, the minister had no doubt, who would turn out to be very human.

At five o'clock on a sunny June afternoon—Clark reported several months later in a letter to his brother—his first chance to sleuth presented itself when nine people joined him in the Grangers' parlor: Granger and his wife, Adelaide, along with Elizabeth, their fourteen-year-old daughter; Kate and Margaret Fox; Leah and Lizzie Fish, whom Granger judged to be about fifteen although she was probably closer to twenty; Calvin Brown; and Mrs. Elihu H. Grover, the other woman who had gone to Hydesville with Leah. Maggie wasn't listed as present, although presumably she was in Rochester at the time.