Talking to the Dead (8 page)

The implications of such an assumption were enormous, for if the raps emanated from a spirit, potentially they could provide what had long been hoped for: evidence of immortality and knowledge of what the other world held in store.

Skeptics, unmoved by the significance of the buried artifacts, scoffed at the diggers and claimed that the bones belonged to a farm animal—a pig or a horse. Others—whether friends of the accused murderer, John Bell, or religious enthusiasts who feared that the devil had been raised from the cellar's dirt floor—had a more hostile response. About a week after the bones had been found, an angry mob of agitators, some carrying shotguns, assembled outside David's farm.
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The potential for violence was real. Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, had been murdered by just such a mob in Illinois in 1844 for the radical beliefs he propounded and practiced. Although Kate and Maggie hadn't yet posed a comparable threat to mainstream religion and morals, the possibility that they talked to the dead was incendiary. In the not-so-distant past—the Salem trials of the 1690s were among the most famous examples—women had been labeled witches and condemned to death for much less. Although the nineteenth century abjured such superstition, fear had an insidious way of persisting.

Kate and Maggie's brother, gentle David, diffused the danger by showing his usual common sense and courage. Rather than resorting to guns for protection, he invited the crowd to come in and search the house. On recognizing David, one man reportedly cried out, “My God, Dave Fox, is it YOU they have said so much about? No, we won't come in. We'll go home and come back another time, properly, as we should.” And the mob dispersed.

The following week Leah, Maggie, and Kate all returned to Rochester, only to find themselves rushing back to Wayne County in early September to mourn the unexpected death of David and Elizabeth's two-year-old daughter, Ella.
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Kate and Maggie, like the rest of their family and community, suffered loss and grief at first hand, and the girls undoubtedly wondered what it felt like to die and whether there was such a thing as immortality.

I
SAAC
P
OST
, the Fox family's Quaker neighbor in Rochester, wasn't superstitious, and when he first heard about the Hydesville rapper he “paid no more heed” to the news than he did to stories of the old Salem witch trials. Like most nineteenth-century Americans, he consigned that stain on the nation's soul to dark days, before science and reason shone so brightly. It was easy for a sensible man to dismiss the whole subject of spirits.
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Then Isaac learned the identity of the haunted children, either from Leah or from a mutual acquaintance, and he realized that he knew them well. The bond that he had formed with the Fox family when they lived in his old house in Cornhill, his belief in their honesty and integrity, prevailed over Isaac's initial disinterest.

Soon after joining Leah in Rochester, Kate and Maggie visited the Posts at the couple's new home on North Sophia Street. The girls hardly conveyed the sense—or at least not to Isaac—that the raps were a potentially earthshaking matter. Instead, Kate and Maggie seemed eager to please their adult friends, “very anxious,” Isaac said, “that we should enjoy what they did.”

But the Posts didn't hear the raps until several days later, when Kate returned alone for a second visit. After dinner she invited Amy and the couple's friends, Abigail and Henry Bush, into another room. A few minutes later she asked Isaac to join them.

“I went with as much unbelief as Thomas felt when he was introduced to Jesus after he had ascended,” Isaac admitted. But his attitude shifted instantly when he peered in the door with his “countenance so doubting” and saw the Bushes “looking as tho they stood before the Judgment seat….” And he felt “rebuked” for his initial skepticism.

From then on Isaac's entire household became absorbed in the effort to communicate with the other world. He and Amy, as well as their two oldest sons, Jacob and Joseph, often spoke with the spirits. Eighteen-month-old Willie loved to “put his ear down” to hear the raps. Even the Posts' Dutch serving girl liked asking questions of her own.

Not that spirit communication came easily. Isaac acknowledged that his family never received answers to questions “without one of the Sisters are present and not always then for I have been in quite large companies and all would be still. It is natural to suppose that it is very difficult to converse where there is nothing said but thumps.”

It was Isaac who reinstated a method of communication previously attempted by both David Fox and the Foxes' neighbor, William Duesler. If someone called out the alphabet, Isaac suggested, the spirits could spell their messages by rapping on particular letters, thereby conveying more meaningful responses than yes or no.

Once the invisible beings could make themselves better understood, Isaac hoped they would behave less restlessly and be less provoked by mortal obtuseness. The first time he and the Fox sisters tried this tactic, they were rewarded with the name Jacob Smith—the girls' grandfather.

Slowly through the summer of 1848, methods of communication between mortals and spirits were refined and codified, although most would be modified again in time. Three raps indicated yes and five signaled a demand for the alphabet. Silence or a single knock meant no.

These methods received their first great test when the Posts' cousin George Willets visited Rochester that summer on business. He was there to meet with a local resident who owned a plot of land for sale in Michi
gan, property that Willets had recently seen and was interested in buying. But the contemplated move meant uprooting his family from their home in Waterloo, New York, and planting them down in what he called “the wilds of the West,” untamed territory as rife with danger as it was rich in opportunity.

The Posts, of course, were bursting with news about the mysterious raps, which they believed “displayed intelligence, and purported to be made by ‘spirits' or persons invisible.”
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Skeptical but curious, as Lemuel Clark had been, Willets attended a gathering to converse with the invisible beings and was astonished by what transpired.

The raps answered several other participants' questions, then communicated the request “that three persons be magnetized, two of whom were present….” The third person whom the raps wanted magnetized—a word often used interchangeably with
mesmerized
—was sent for, Willets testified in a statement later written for publication, “from a neighboring family.” Willets mentioned no names, but the threesome presumably included Kate and Maggie, who were central to efforts to talk with the spirits, and Leah, who seems to have been in the process of exploring her own clairvoyant capabilities, a legendary legacy on her mother's side of the family.

Although Willets insisted that no one in the room knew him except Isaac, the “clairvoyants,” as he called the trio, demonstrated uncanny knowledge of his dilemma and plans. They spoke as if with one voice: “We have got to go to Michigan.” And they proceeded to describe in detail the places and things he had seen on his recent western trip, until, he wrote, they “came to a piece of land which they said was the place they came to look at. They then described the land so accurately, which I had stopped in Rochester to buy, that I began to wonder who had told them.”

The message he received was not encouraging. “They all with one accord then said, ‘But he must not go there. His father says that he had better not go.'”

A host of raps, each with a different timbre, seemed to him to signal the presence of his father, his mother, and his sister, all in resounding agreement that he shouldn't purchase the land. Sweating with anxiety, Willets ventured a step further.

“As you assume to know my father, and what his mind is concerning me, perhaps you can tell me his name,” he asked.

Loud deliberate raps tolled under George Willets's feet, and the clairvoyants spelled William Willets, the correct name.

Later George Willets and the Posts met alone with Kate for three hours. During this second meeting William continued to tap his paternal advice, while the child helped convey the spirit's meaning: George should remain east. He wouldn't enjoy himself in new country such as Michigan and also might jeopardize his health.

Then what should he do? Willets asked.

Move to Rochester instead of Michigan.

Without a job?

He would have a job if he moved.

Where would he live?

The spirit advised him about a lot for sale, then specified a time and place to meet with the owner as well as the exact price he could expect to pay for the land.

George Willets tried to contact the owner a few hours earlier than advised but was unsuccessful. From the hour of the assignation—ten in the morning—to the land's price, everything seemed to him to turn out exactly as the spirit had predicted.

Although he wrote only reluctantly for publication, Willets's private letters also reveal his state of puzzled indecision. Home again in Waterloo, he worried. The idea of moving to Rochester appealed to him, but he had no job prospects there, and he hesitated to follow blindly the spirits' instructions.

“All that hinders our going immediately,” he confided to Isaac, concerned that others would treat the move as a fools' errand, “is to see some employment which if I should move there and not obtain would render me unhappy and give the ridiculers more reason to say that it was an Ignis Fatuus that we had followed.”
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Despite their doubts, by Christmas 1848 Willets and his wife, Ann, had settled in Rochester. He still had no employment, although Isaac had been on the lookout for possibilities since the summer.

The couple had been living in their new home only a few days when Kate visited, bringing two spirit messages: in four days' time Willets would know what his work was to be.

“In the mean time,” Kate advised on the spirits' behalf, “the antislavery folks are going to hold their fair; would it not be well for thee to help them?”
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Several days later she visited again, with word that the spirits wanted him to apply for a job with the Auburn and Rochester Railroad. Willets did so, only to be disappointed. William Wiley, the railroad's superintendent, assured him that all positions were full and that there were no prospects. Downhearted, Willets again went in search of Kate. Steadfast as an oracle, the raps consoled him:
“Thee will have a place on the cars, and will know it before the week is out.”

That week, as predicted, Wiley reversed his decision and hired Willets.

“One month after I had been running on the cars,” Willets marveled in his statement, “I learned that the person whose place I took had done things worthy of a dismissal,
previous
to my being directed to make application, and which did not come to Mr. Wiley's notice till
the day on which I received the appointment.”

It was a triumphant moment for the spirits. Whether they had obtained their information through mortal or immortal means, they had demonstrated what seemed to be stunning foreknowledge of events, and they had exercised an exhilarating influence over Willets. In doing so, they had shown that they had reformed their ways; they had abandoned their habit of provoking people in favor of helping them.

By assisting Willets, the spirits had also evinced a certain bias. They had kept him close by, in New York, near the Posts and other friends who cared about him. Their advice to him suggests that they valued warm family ties, bonds like those enjoyed by Kate and Maggie, and that they discouraged the kind of transience the Fox children had endured in moving from one home to another.

 

July of 1848 witnessed an event that helped shape the future of the United States: the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights
assembly organized in America. The meeting took place in the Burned-over District, on a site about forty miles from Rochester and less than twenty from Hydesville.

The twin struggles for the abolition of slavery and women's rights were closely allied in the 1840s and 1850s, although conflict eventually erupted over differing priorities. Many abolitionists were also feminists. The plight of women, whatever their race, was compared in kind if not in severity to the bondage imposed on enslaved African Americans: women too were considered inferior and treated as subordinate by the dominant white male culture; they too were denied the vote and opportunities to work and be educated and, if married, the right to control their own wages and property, to sign contracts, and to protect their bodies from their husbands' unwanted advances. Enslaved African American women, of course, endured far worse, some of it at the hands of their white sisters, and free black women in the North also remained subject to specific injustices produced by racist prejudice and discrimination against them. Nevertheless, the Seneca Falls Convention represented the beginning of a remarkable revolution in women's lives.

Amy Post and her good friend Abigail Bush were both present, as were a number of their other friends. Many of those in attendance, such as Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist and author, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an emerging leader of the women's rights movement, had already heard about the possibility of spirit communication through their Rochester acquaintances, and others soon learned of it. Raps were reported to have struck the very table at which Stanton and her colleague, Lucretia Mott, had drafted the convention's resolutions.
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A few people began to feel as if they too might become the mediums—transmitters—for the spirits to converse with mortals. George Willets, for one, frequently began to hear gentle taps in the area of his neck and coat collar, but to his regret he wasn't yet able to converse with the spirits or to interpret their messages for others.

“So what it is or whether I shall ever be able to talk with it,” he wrote to Isaac, “I do not know but hope I shall. Thomas McClintock's folks are…sure that they have heard the same. Also Elisabeth Stanton—Gerrit Smith's daughter—was on a visit to E. Stanton and heard about it.
She went home and told her mother who had full faith in it and the daughter wrote to E. Stanton a day or two since that her mother had heard it several times so if it is Humbug it seems to spread fast.”
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As interest and curiosity grew among those who had attended the convention, the Hydesville peddler, his horrific accusations muffled, retreated into the background. The spirits of relatives and friends swarmed into the sittings to bring loving advice and consolation. Amy and Isaac were no exception; like many other early believers in spirit communication, they had experienced their share of personal tragedy. Only a few years earlier, in the mid-1840s, their little daughter, Matilda, had died. If concern about the afterlife nurtured interest in spirit communication, so too did a yearning to connect with the departed.

“I believe [the spirits] always speak of seeing Matilda,” Isaac wrote with some poignancy. “[They] say she is happy [and] is around us.” Kate interpreted other raps as messages from his late sisters, Phebe and Lydia.
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Radical reformers of society on earth, the Posts were as willing to scrutinize conventional religious wisdom as they were to question state and federal laws. Although Christianity generally taught that alleged spirit visitations in the present day were either human delusions or demonic manifestations, Amy, Isaac, and members of their circle refused to dismiss the possibility that the spirits were who and what the raps claimed.

After meeting with one of the Fox sisters, the Posts' friend and fellow activist, Sarah Fish, regretted not hearing “that little girl out instead of interrupting her.” She vowed that she would be more patient in the future. That night, as Fish lay in her bed thinking about “the mysterious workings of Providence,” she decided that she had “resisted the divine spirit in my own heart by making light of what that child said and turning it away….” At that moment she heard soft knocks emanate from underneath her pillow, a sign that she took to affirm “the truth that our departed friends are with us striving for our good….” The recognition calmed her, easing her dread of death.
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