The Victorians Speaking With the Dead : William Michael Rossetti / The Fox Sisters

 

 
Death and disease are no strangers to the streets of Britain. By the late 19th century, tens of thousands of people had contracted fatal infections, such as cholera, smallpox and scarlatina, beginning with the first cholera epidemic of 1832, when detailed records first started being kept.
 
Wave after wave of typhoid also swept over the population where cause, diagnosis and cure were all equally uncertain – and social class provided no protection. In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens recorded “fever” deaths in the slums of London. But the most prominent flesh-and-bone victim was Queen Victoria’s own husband, Prince Albert. He was diagnosed with typhoid and died in December 1861.
 
Meanwhile, a bizarre form of comfort was at hand. In 1848 in Rochester, New York, two sisters claimed to have received messages from the spirit of a long-dead inhabitant of their house, and their conversation with him fired the imagination of America. Soon “table-rapping” swept the American continent, modern spiritualism was born and in the early 1850s it crossed the Atlantic. Séances began to take place in the parlours and dining rooms of France, Germany, Italy and Britain. All communication with the spirits was done through letters of the alphabet, similar to ouija boards.
 
The fashion for spiritualist séances was fuelled by those who longed for communication with lost loved ones or friends. The pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, started holding spiritualist séances after the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862. Many of these took place in his home in Chelsea, attended by friends and acquaintances. The most regular participant was his brother, William Michael Rossetti.
 
Pursuing William Rossetti’s stray memories led me and my colleagues Rosalind White and Lenore Beaky to the Special Collection of the Library of the University of British Columbia where a small notebook by William Rossetti (labelled “Séance Diary”) is kept. We have co-edited this meticulous record of 20 séances that William attended between 1865 and 1868, published for the first time this year as a volume titled Pre-Raphaelites in the Spirit World – The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti.
 
Many of the séances feature conversations he and his brother had with Elizabeth Siddal, whose presence punctuates the three recorded years. Many others feature dead friends and relatives. According to William, on one occasion their uncle, Gaetano Polidori, once Lord Byron’s doctor, correctly confessed that he had died by suicide. On another, their Italian father, Gabriele Rossetti, was reportedly summoned and addressed the brothers in his native Italian.
 
Many of the spirits that Rossetti said rose from the dark were artists, often responding accurately to being asked about when, where and how their deaths had occurred. Some of the most remarkable manifestations involve figures of whom there is no evidence yet whose accounts have been confirmed recently through the archival research of the editors of this volume. And so, like many people curious about spiritualism we remain mystified by the bizarre accuracy of some of the messages coming from the spirit world through these diaries.
 
 
William Rossetti was a diligent civil servant with a strong sense of probity and an eye for detail, and what he gave us in this little notebook was an unparalleled insight into the Victorian spirit world.
 
Victorian séances
 
 
The Rossettis were by no means the only Victorians committed to a belief in the occult. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the social reformer Robert Owen, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace and the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle were just a few more passionate believers in the power of séances. William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and the painter G.F. Watts were all members of the Society for Psychical Research, a badge of belief in spirit activity, and it was even rumoured that Queen Victoria received messages from Prince Albert via a psychic teenage boy named Robert James Lees.
 
Mediums became celebrities. The most famous, D.D. Home, came to Britain from America in 1855. In 1853 the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray met him in America and, convinced of his authenticity, used the pages of his journal, The Cornhill Magazine, to promote Home’s career. In Britain, one of the most famous mediums was Mary Marshall, who had risen to prominence in the late 1850s and who presided over a number of séances recorded by William Rossetti.
 
But dealing with the dead created as many sceptics as it did fans. The novelist George Eliot and her partner G.H. Lewis turned to the press to denounce spiritualism as a sham. Meanwhile the journal Once A Week described the aforementioned Mary Marshall as “poor”, “vulgar”, but hugely eminent as the “washerwoman medium”, describing “the abominable profanity and wickedness” of her séances.

 
The satirical journal Punch was quick to seize on the comic potential of the new vogue. Weekly cartoons depicting humorous dialogues with the dead appeared. Like this piece of doggerel in which Mr Punch:
 
“Wanted to know what on earth are the merits
That make Mrs. Marshall affected by ‘sperrits!
Wanted to know why respectable dead
Come back to life at five shillings a head.”
 
The most consistent war on spiritualism, however, was waged by the powerful voice of Dickens. He was outraged by D.D. Home. In 1860, he denounced Home’s autobiography as “odious”, written by a “ruffian” and a “scoundrel” and agreed with George Eliot that Home was “an object of moral disgust”. As for Mary Marshall and her daughter, he said they possessed the “duplicity and legerdemain of … two illiterate conjurors” playing on “the holiest and deepest feelings of their audience”.
 
While the debate about authenticity raged, séances – both in public and in private – took place throughout the country. Some were spectacular displays of showmanship involving large audiences; some were intimate, devout gatherings, while others took the form of after-dinner entertainment.
 
The social, anthropological and religious role of spiritualism in Victorian culture has been much debated, but one important factor drove people to the darkened room of the medium: the need to contact a dead loved one. It was this motive that lay behind Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s desire to communicate with her brothers, both of whom died in 1840 – in February Samuel died of a fever in Jamaica, and shortly afterwards her favourite brother Edward was drowned in a sailing accident in Torquay in July.
 
Indeed, the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, started a career of his own in spiritualism after the death his brother in 1845. And the death of Conan Doyle’s son, Kingsley, strengthened the crime-writer’s lifelong belief in the occult. Death also lay behind the séances in William Rossetti’s diary, since many of them were driven by his brother’s desire to reach out to the spirit of his dead wife.
 
Though there are many records of spiritualist experiences in the 19th century, what makes William Rossetti’s diary so valuable is its detail. Every moment in the 20 séances is meticulously recorded, every participant and his or her reaction to the events is noted down, and the presence of so many prominent artists from the Pre-Raphaelite movement casts each of their personal beliefs and prejudices in a new light.
 
The spirit world
 
The lights are dimmed. The candles flicker. William Michael Rossetti asks some questions of the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife. His questions involve a picture that he has just sent to a wealthy patron in Birkenhead called George Rae. The questions are strange, the responses reported by the diary monosyllabic but accurate.
 
William: Did you consider that picture which Gabriel sent away the other day one of his very best?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Do you know to whom it has gone?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Give initial of surname?
Elizabeth: R [correct for Rae]
William: Do you know in what room of Rae’s house that picture is now placed?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Dining room?
Elizabeth: No.
William: Drawing room?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: How many in the whole house?
 
At this point, a pause of some 15 minutes ensues, within which no answers are reported.
 
William: During that pause were you absent looking into Rae’s house?
Elizabeth: Yes.
William: Can you give me any idea of the process by which you pass from one place to another?
Elizabeth: No.
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with the occult went back to his early experiences of the poetry of Dante Alighieri in the scholarly work of his father Gabriele. In the course of his work, Gabriele frequently invoked the authority of the Swedish mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg who, around 1744, began to have visionary experiences of the afterlife. He had become a “seer”, he said, by God’s command to explain the correspondences between life on earth and life in heaven.

 
He claimed not only communication with angels and demons, but spoke of how he had been admitted into the spirit world and how he had returned to the terrestrial sphere to tell the story. Consequently, Rossetti’s poems and pictures are filled with spiritual experiences; with stories of hauntings and uncanny events. In the late 1850s he began to participate in séances, but it was the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, that lent his participation a new urgency.
 
Prior her death, Siddal had been suffering from post-natal depression caused by a still birth. Driven to despair by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s long-term infidelity and neglect of her, she took an overdose of laudanum. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was consumed by guilt and filled with remorse and, as some kind of compensation, he buried the whole manuscript of his unpublished poems in her coffin. But no sooner had she been placed in the earth than he began to have nightly visions of her in his bedroom. At that point he decided to try and look for her in the afterlife.
 
In October 1862, abandoning the house which they had shared, he took up residence beside the River Thames, where he began holding séances with his new friend, the American painter James McNeill Whistler. Many years later, Whistler spoke of the “strange things that happened when he went to séances at Rossetti’s” since, according to William Michael’s daughter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was “anxious to get some message” from Elizabeth.
 
William Rossetti’s séance diary
 
By the time William Rossetti began his séance diary in 1865, he was already a firm believer in spiritualist communications. Some of the séances he recorded came under the auspices of amateur mediums.
 
The richest and most dynamic ones took place under the mediumship of two professionals, Mary Marshall and Elizabeth Guppy, and the very first one he recorded took place in Marshall’s house. William Rossetti was accompanied by his artist friend, William Bell Scott. The two men, who were certain that the Marshalls had no personal knowledge of them, wanted to make contact with the recently deceased brother of Scott’s mistress, Spencer Boyd.
 
The information that emerged from this séance was striking. The spirit of Spencer Boyd was reportedly summoned, and stated, correctly, that he had died in Scott’s home, providing the address together with the date on which he had passed away. He is also reported as correctly telling the group that he had heard of, but never met, William Scott in person.
 
More startlingly, however, was a communication with people of whom there is no evidence that anyone present had any knowledge of – yet whose accounts have been subsequently confirmed by our own archival research. In February 1866, for example, a New Zealand Maori chief calling himself “Hemi” is reported to have appeared out of the dark. Sources show that he claimed to have met William Rossetti three years previously in Newcastle, when the chief was touring Britain exhibiting Maori dances.
 
Information gathered from historians in New Zealand, and our own research in the archives of local newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle, confirmed that in the week beginning September 14, 1863, a group of “Maori chiefs” had indeed performed to audiences in Newcastle. On that same day, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote a letter to a friend saying, in passing, that his brother was about to leave on a visit to Newcastle.
 
On other occasions, what were called “aports” were allegedly materialised. Eau-de-cologne and water were described showering out of nowhere, books thrown from the bookcases and, in one incident, the medium asked the participants if they would like to receive flowers. In response, roses, ferns and jonquils were requested and, to their amazement, appear to have dropped out of the darkness onto the table in front of them or onto their laps. Dante Gabriel Rossetti invited Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, to two of these séances, where she claimed to have seen unexpected lights and cold draughts of air passed over her hands.
 
The most moving and dramatic séances, however, are those that featured the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal. In the second séance recorded by William Rossetti, his brother spoke to her with clear reference to the past. “You used to give me clear [and] significant answers,” he said, “but of late the reverse: can you tell me why?” He writes that she had no answer. In a later séance, the spirit reportedly confessed that she knew William Bell Scott, and thought that William Rossetti had been a very affectionate brother to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later, at the home of Thomas Keightley, historian and folklorist, the diary describes her as telling the participants that she knew William Morris, and correctly told them his London address.
 
The most intensive cross-questioning of Elizabeth’s spirit took place in the very last séance at 2am on Friday August 14 1868. In this, the spirit was asked about the Rossetti’s father Gabriele in the afterlife, about the nature of Christ, and about the nature of the manifestations that they had recently witnessed at another séance. The most touching exchange is described as occurring between Dante Gabriel and Elizabeth.
 
Gabriel: Are you my wife?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Are you now happy?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Happier than on earth?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: If I were now to join you, should I be happy?
Elizabeth: Yes
Gabriel: Should I see you at once?
Elizabeth: No
Gabriel: Quite soon?
Elizabeth: No
 
 

 “Bogie pictures”
 
Though they are not usually linked, during this period, both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Whistler created pictures with an occult significance. Dante Gabriel’s drawing How They Met Themselves (1860-64) is a ghostly double in a dense wood. It was completed in its first version during his honeymoon in 1860, and reworked as a coloured version in 1864. Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it his “bogie picture”.

 
William Rossetti said of it: “To meet one’s wraith is ominous of death, and to figure Elizabeth as meeting her wraith might well have struck her bridegroom as uncanny in a high degree. In less than two years the weird was woefully fulfilled”. Then, in 1863, both Whistler and Rossetti embarked on paintings with links to other spiritualist experiences.
 
Whistler’s Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864) has a contemporary setting and, like Dante’s drawing How They Met Themselves, it is also a doppelganger work: in it, Jo Hiffernan, Whistler’s mistress and her reflected image gaze down towards a lacquered Japanese box which Whistler employed in séances. Attached to the frame were Swinburne’s lines:
 
“Art thou the ghost, my sister,
White sister there,
Am I the ghost, who knows?”
 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (1864-79), was begun at about the same time. Its original title was “Beatrice in a Death Trance”, a Dantean image which linked the death of Beatrice Portinari, the woman believed to be the muse for Dante’s Vita Nuova, beside the Arno with Elizabeth Siddal’s death beside the Thames. The painting was based on an unfinished portrait of Elizabeth and depicts the moment of her passage from life into death. The picture came to the notice of the prominent spiritualists William and Georgina Cowper-Temple.
 
William Cowper-Temple was president of the Board of Trade, and he and Georgina presided over séances in their family home with the most famous mediums of the day. In September 1865 they began to take an interest in Dante Rossetti’s work. They frequently visited his studio where he was working on the painting and offered to buy it as a genuine spiritualist work. It was beneath this picture and in the same studio that Rossetti was trying to conjure up the spirit of Elizabeth Siddal.
 
The Rossetti brothers have long been known for their contribution to writing and painting in the 19th century, but the record of their séances connects them to the widespread Victorian preoccupation with the occult.
 
The huge mortality rate in Victorian Britain encouraged large numbers to seek the support of mediums. Similarly, around 1918 the carnage of the first world war and the waves of Spanish flu created a new interest in spiritualism. Perhaps in this context, it’s unsurprising that the COVID-19 pandemic is reportedly driving a revival of the ouija board.
 
Though spiritualism is still surrounded with an air of suspicion and mystery, William Rossetti’s diary shows that believing one has made contact with the next world is usually a source of consolation and reassurance. For some, spiritualism was as precious as fiction: a place to go to when needing to step away from too harsh a reality.
 
Before the Ouija board: William Rossetti’s diary gives an insight into Victorian séances. By Barrie Bullen. The Conversation, December 23, 2021.

It’s a good time to be dead—at least, if you want to keep in touch with the living. Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, television: whatever the medium, there’s a medium. Like clairvoyants in centuries past, those of today also fill auditoriums, lecture halls, and retreats. Historic camps such as Lily Dale, in New York, and Cassadaga, in Florida, are booming, with tens of thousands of people visiting every year to attend séances, worship, healing services, and readings. And many people turn up not every year but every week: there are more than a hundred Spiritualist churches in the United States, more than three hundred in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of others in more than thirty countries around the world. Such institutions hardly represent the full extent of Spiritualism’s popularity, since the movement does not emphasize doctrines, dogmas, or creeds, and plenty of people hold spiritualist beliefs within other faith traditions or stand entirely outside organized religion.

 The surging numbers are reminiscent of the late nineteenth century, when somewhere between four million and eleven million people identified as Spiritualists in the United States alone. Some of the leaders back then were hucksters, and some of the believers were easy marks, but the movement cannot be dismissed merely as a collision of the cunning and the credulous. Early Spiritualism attracted some of the great scientists of the day, including the physicists Marie and Pierre Curie, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the psychologist William James, all of whom believed that modern scientific methods, far from standing in opposition to the spiritual realm, could finally prove its existence.

 So culturally prevalent was Spiritualism at the time that even skeptics and dabblers felt compelled to explore it. Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, and Queen Victoria all attended séances, and although plenty of people declined to attend so much as a single table-turning, the movement was hard to avoid; in the span of four decades, according to one estimate, a new book about Spiritualism was published roughly once a week. These included scientific-seeming tomes purporting to offer evidence of the afterlife, as well as wildly popular memoirs such as “Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance” and “Shadow Land; or, Light from the Other Side.” Meanwhile, more than a hundred American Spiritualist periodicals were in regular circulation, advertising public lectures and private séances in nearly eight hundred cities and towns across the country.

 A recent spate of histories of the Spiritualist craze and biographies of some of its central characters have attempted to locate the movement’s origins in various cultural, political, and technological aspects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These accounts vary in both plausibility and persuasiveness, yet all of them are interesting—partly because of what they tell us about the Victorian era, but also because of what they suggest about the resurgence of Spiritualism today.

 Because Spiritualism so strongly rejected hierarchy and orthodoxy, it is difficult to say exactly when or how it started. Plenty of scholars regard it as part of the larger religious efflorescence that began in the early nineteenth century in the area of New York State that became known as the Burned-Over District, which gave rise to the Second Great Awakening. Others, including Robert S. Cox, in his magisterial “Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism,” have looked far beyond that century and that countryside. This long view was also taken by one of Spiritualism’s first major historians, the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, who became so zealous a believer that he set aside Sherlock Holmes in order to focus on his research, ultimately writing more than a dozen books on the subject. His two-volume “History of Spiritualism” starts by situating the movement as “the most important in the history of the world since the Christ episode,” then proposes the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, born in the sixteen-eighties, and the Scottish reformer Edward Irving, born in 1792, as forerunners of the Victorians.

 But most accounts of Spiritualism don’t begin with great men or distant precedents. They start with little women on an exact date: March 31, 1848. On that night, as Emily Midorikawa details in her new book, “Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice” (Counterpoint), two sisters, fourteen-year-old Margaretta Fox and eleven-year-old Catherine, finally convinced some of their neighbors that an unsettling series of knockings and tappings in their home, near the south shore of Lake Ontario, was coming from the spirit world. Soon the whole town of Hydesville, New York, was gripped by the mysterious noises that haunted the Fox family.

 Maggie and Kate, as the Fox sisters were known, claimed that they were able to communicate with the maker of those noises, which they said was a spirit called Mr. Splitfoot. From beyond the grave, the spirit answered their questions, first rapping back to respond with a simple yes or no, then using a more complicated series of raps to indicate letters of the alphabet. In this manner, the spirit allegedly revealed that he had been murdered for money some five years previously and been buried in the cellar of the Fox house. That revelation only further excited the residents of Wayne County—no strangers to new religious claims, since they had already welcomed the Shakers at Sodus Bay, witnessed the founding of Mormonism at Palmyra, and lately outlived the doomsday prophecies of the nearby Millerites.

 The Foxes fled their haunted home, but the rapping followed the girls into other houses during the next few months, and their sensational story continued to spread. In the fall of 1849, four hundred people gathered at Corinthian Hall, in nearby Rochester, where the Foxes demonstrated what they had advertised as “WONDERFUL PHENOMENA” for a paying audience—the first of many during the next forty years. William Lloyd Garrison and James Fenimore Cooper came for séances with the girls, and Horace Greeley and his wife, Mary, not only visited with the sisters but boosted their celebrity in Greeley’s newspapers, including the New-York Daily Tribune, which would go on to cover the Spiritualist craze as dozens and then hundreds of others claimed that they, too, were capable of hearing “spirit rapping.”

 According to Midorikawa, the Greeleys were representative of some of the earliest and most enthusiastic adherents of Spiritualism: affluent and progressive mothers and fathers who were desperate to communicate with sons and daughters who had died too young. In the mid-nineteenth century, an estimated twenty to forty per cent of children died before the age of five, and scholars often point to this fact to help account for the appeal of Spiritualism. But it was worse in the preceding centuries; for some time, the child mortality rate had been falling. What mattered more was that the average family size was shrinking, too, at the same time that modern ideas of childhood were taking hold—trends that combined to make the loss of any child seem that much more anguishing.

 But it wasn’t only the death of children that brought people to Spiritualism, or kept them in the fold. Mary Todd Lincoln, who lost three of her four children, visited with mediums in Georgetown before hosting her own séances in the Red Room of the White House. She also hired the country’s most famous “spirit photographer” to take a picture of her with her husband after he was assassinated. Peter Manseau’s “The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) offers a fascinating account of that photographer, William H. Mumler, who worked as a jewelry engraver in Boston before taking a self-portrait that, when developed, revealed what became known as an “extra”: in his case, a young girl sitting in a chair to his right, whom he recognized as a cousin who had died a dozen years before. Mourning portraits—paintings of the recently dead—had long been popular, but spirit photographs offered something more: not just the memorialization of lost loved ones but confirmation of life after death.

 In the years following the Civil War, when around three-quarters of a million dead soldiers haunted the country, spirit photographs were in high demand. After Spiritualism migrated to Europe, its prominence there tracked loosely to war, too, with a spike following the First World War. Mumler alone took dozens of spirit photographs, in which deceased friends or relatives appeared behind or beside their living loved ones. Other photographers focussed on capturing active séances, table-turnings, acts of levitation, and even ectoplasm—spiritual substances that mediums “exteriorized” from their own bodies, often their mouths, noses, or ears, but sometimes their stomachs or vaginas. Such substances could be clear or dark, pasty or gauzy, shapeless or in the form of appendages or faces.

 Technological explanations for the rise of Spiritualism often cite the development of photography, which at the time was an inherently spooky medium, in that it could show things that were not actually there. Although it can be hard to remember in the age of deep fakes, photography was initially thought of not as a manipulable art but as a mirrorlike representation of reality, which made its role in Spiritualism seem probative. Other technologies similarly seemed to bridge such unfathomable gaps that the one between this world and the next appeared certain to collapse as well. The telegraph, for instance, offered access to voices from the beyond; how far beyond was anyone’s guess. The very word for those who could talk with spirits reflected all the new “mediums” through which information could be transmitted; spirit photographs were marketed alongside spirit telegraphs, spirit fingerprints, and spirit typewriters. Inventors such as Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison even tinkered with uncanny radios and spirit telephones, inspired by some of the disembodied voices of their own experiments and curious about the supernatural implications of electromagnetism and other universal energies.

 Still, like the appeal to mortality rates, this account of the rise of Spiritualism goes only so far. For one thing, no notable uptick in spiritualist beliefs accompanied earlier technological upheavals, including the entire Industrial Revolution, even though it altered our sense of time and set all kinds of things spinning and moving in previously unimaginable ways. For another, some of the most popular Spiritualist technologies were some of the oldest: the Ouija board was simply a branded, pencil-less version of the planchette, and forms of planchette writing had been around for centuries.

 The use of technology to document spiritual phenomena was of interest not only to believers but also to skeptics, who pored over images looking for cheesecloth passing as ectoplasm, overexposures masquerading as ghostly apparitions, and wires or pulleys that could account for rappings and table-turnings. In one of the most publicized attempts to test the claims of Spiritualists, Scientific American offered five thousand dollars in prize money to anyone who could produce psychic phenomena sufficient to convince a committee that consisted of academics from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, psychic experts, and also Harry Houdini, who knew something about illusions and developed a sideline in exposing those which hucksters were trying to pass off as real. Armed with electroscopes and galvanometers, the committee tested all mediums who presented themselves for scrutiny, sometimes attending multiple séances before rendering a verdict.

 Houdini’s debunking of one famous medium, Mina Crandon, is thoroughly recounted in David Jaher’s “The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World” (Crown). Crandon was married to a prominent surgeon and attracted Boston’s élite to her performances, channelling her dead brother’s voice and even revealing his fingerprints from beyond the grave, while also levitating tables and producing ectoplasm from her mouth and from between her legs, often while naked. (The backlash against Spiritualism, which came partly from the clergy, stemmed not only from its challenge to orthodox ideas about Heaven and Hell but also from its scandalous exhibitionism.) Crandon’s case divided the Scientific American committee, with some members accusing others of having been sexually coerced into validating her fraud and even conspiring with her. Houdini had already exposed the deceptions of other mediums in his book “A Magician Among the Spirits,” and he never relented in his effort to discredit Crandon, publishing an entire pamphlet detailing her tricks, and going so far as to incorporate some of them into his own stage act in order to demonstrate their fraudulence.

 Houdini prevented Crandon from winning the Scientific American prize, but her fame only grew, and her case later splintered another group of researchers. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1885, a few years after its British equivalent, was devoted to the investigation of spiritual phenomena, which the society considered as worthy of careful study as fossils or electricity. In “Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death” (Penguin), Deborah Blum records the society’s investigations into everything from haunted houses to hypnotism. For the most part, those investigations only ever succeeded in disproving the phenomena they studied, but it was James, a founding member, who best articulated why they nonetheless continued their work. “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he said, “you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

 “My own white crow,” James announced in that same address to the Society for Psychical Research, “is Mrs. Piper.” He was referring to Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife turned trance medium who withstood years of testing and observation, her fees rising twenty-fold in the meantime and her fame extending all the way to England, where she went on tour. On one occasion, Piper impressed the James family by making contact with an aunt of theirs. Asked about the elderly woman’s health, the medium informed them that the woman had died earlier that day. “Why Aunt Kate’s here,” Piper said. “All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate has come.’ ” The Jameses received a telegram a few hours later confirming Aunt Kate’s death the night before.

 Unlike Crandon, Piper was not fully discredited, though many people doubted her abilities, noting her failed readings and prophecies and offering convincing psychological explanations of those predictions and telepathic readings which seemed accurate. Her feats as a medium were not particular to the James family; in the course of her career, she claimed to channel, among others, Martin Luther and George Washington. As such efforts suggest, the allure of Spiritualism was not limited to consolation for the bereft: plenty of mediums worked as much in the tradition of the carnival barker as in that of the cleric, and Spiritualism was popular in part because it was entertaining. Its practitioners, some of them true connoisseurs of spectacle, promised not only reassurances about the well-being of the dearly departed but also new lines from Shakespeare and fresh wisdom from Plato.

 Even more strikingly, from the perspective of the present day, early mediums offered encounters with the culturally dispossessed as well as with the culturally heralded. Piper, for instance, claimed to channel not only Washington and Luther but also a young Native American girl named Chlorine. And she was not alone in allegedly relaying the posthumous testimony of marginalized people. Enslaved African-Americans and displaced Native Americans were routinely channelled by mediums in New England and around the country. Whether race persisted in the afterlife was a matter of some dispute, but racially stereotyped and ethnically caricatured “spirit guides” were common, conjured with exaggerated dialects for audiences at séances and captured in sensational costumes by spirit photography. Flora Wellman, the mother of the novelist Jack London, claimed to channel a Native American chief called Plume; the Boston medium Mrs. J. H.Conant became associated with a young Piegan Blackfoot girl she called Vashti. Mediums with abolitionist sympathies passed on the stories of tortured slaves, while pro-slavery Spiritualists delivered messages of forgiveness from the same population and relayed visions of an afterlife where racial hierarchies were preserved.

 For white mediums, communicating with spirits of other races could be a form of expiation, a way to confront violent histories and make cultural amends—or merely crude appropriation, garish performance art that was good for business. But Spiritualism was not only a white phenomenon. There were plenty of Black Spiritualists—including Sojourner Truth, who lived for a decade in the Spiritualist utopia of Harmonia before settling in Battle Creek, Michigan—and many Black mediums, including Paschal Beverly Randolph and Rebecca Cox Jackson, both of whom wrote books that included their work with spirits. Harriet E. Wilson, one of the first Black authors to publish a novel in the United States, later became a Spiritualist healer who was known, like some of her white counterparts, for summoning indigenous spirits, and who was described, in one of Boston’s Spiritualist newspapers, as “the eloquent and earnest colored trance medium.”

 The lines between syncretism and appropriation were often fuzzy. If the initial Victorian wave of Spiritualism had a distinctly American character, later iterations took on global influences, as when the theosophists incorporated elements of Eastern religions, including belief in reincarnation and past lives. Immigration and translation brought sacred literatures into renewed contact with one another—the Bardo Thodol handed to readers of the Zohar, the Vedas and the Upanishads circulating alongside Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart. Occult practices melded with culturally blurry techniques of meditating and altering consciousness, and the roots of the esotericism that would eventually be known as New Age took hold.

 As a belief system, Spiritualism was largely free of the legal and moral strictures of orthodox religion. It made few demands on its practitioners, while offering them many rewards, from an uplifting and personalized vision of the afterlife to otherwise unavailable opportunities in this one. In its Victorian incarnation, Spiritualism had provided ways for female mediums to lead and to profit. The medium Annie Denton Cridge became a newspaper publisher and wrote one of the earliest feminist utopian novels, wherein the narrator dreams first of a matriarchal government on Mars that oppresses men, and then that America has a female President; Victoria Woodhull, a clairvoyant turned suffragist, became, with her sister, one of the first women to start a brokerage firm on Wall Street and, later, the first to actually run for President of the United States; Emma Hardinge Britten, an opera-singing skeptic who set out to discredit the Spiritualists but ended up joining them, became one of the country’s most popular public speakers and helped Abraham Lincoln win reëlection. But they and other Spiritualists faced a cultural backlash almost immediately. The religion scholar Ann Braude’s groundbreaking “Radical Spirits” (Beacon) situates spiritual work as social and political activism, since it gave women the opportunity to speak in public, and as a foundation of the women’s-rights movement, since it demonstrated the equality of the sexes. Such a framing helps explain why Spiritualism became so ridiculed, and why its opponents sought to discredit its female leaders most vigorously.

 Not that those opponents needed a great deal of assistance. Much of the disillusionment came from the inside—including via the Fox sisters, the Hydesville girls credited with starting the Spiritualist craze. For years afterward, they entertained private gatherings and large public audiences in America and England. All the while, they endured examinations by physicians and gadflies, who strip-searched them, looking for bodily explanations or external assistance, and were attacked by mobs of Christians and secular skeptics alike, who threatened them with grenades and guns. Many people had tried to discredit them, but, in the end, they discredited themselves: in 1888, Maggie Fox, fulfilling the wishes of the late famous Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, whom she had allegedly married in secret, declared that the whole thing had been a hoax.

 As Midorikawa recounts in “Out of the Shadows,” a newspaper advertisement ran in New York City in October of that year announcing the “DEATH OF SPIRITUALISM” and promising “A THOROUGH AND COMPLETE EXPOSE.” With her sister Kate watching from the audience, Maggie, now in her fifties, appeared onstage at the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, put on a pair of glasses, and read from a prepared statement confessing “the greatest sorrow of my life”: namely, that she and her sister had collaborated in “perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public.” After her reading ended, three doctors came to the stage and waited for her to begin cracking her big toe; each doctor then confirmed that the rappings were coming from the clicking of her joints, which grew louder and louder until finally she shouted, “Spiritualism is a fraud from beginning to end!”

 The scandal crossed the Atlantic faster than any steamship, and Spiritualists around the world reeled. A written confession followed the performance, describing how Kate “was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints and that the same effect could be made with the toes,” and that after a great deal of practice the girls mastered making these noises in the dark. “Like most perplexing things when made clear, it is astonishing how easily it is done,” Maggie Fox said. But, the very next year, Fox recanted her recanting, leaving both sides to claim and reject the testimony of the sisters as they saw fit, a contest that was still unresolved when, a few years later, both sisters died poor.

 Helped along by such scandals and the passage of time, Spiritualism eventually moved to the fringes. It became a kind of curiosity, a Victorian fad encountered chiefly in the biographies of artists such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who dabbled in mesmerism; in the footnotes to the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, with their invocations of astrology, sorcery, and Madame Blavatsky; in museum exhibits of the mystical paintings of Hilma af Klint; in horror films like “Ouija” and “Things Heard & Seen.” Spiritualism is most often invoked only to be discredited, and cynical accounts routinely sneer at the sincerity or impugn the sanity of individual believers, unwilling or unable to imagine the appeal of a movement that dominated several decades of religious life both here and abroad.

 Still, purely cynical accounts like those are dead ends—intellectual cul-de-sacs, bent on describing Spiritualism as a passing phenomenon when, in reality, the movement never really came or went. Necromancy had only just faded from cultural memory when Queen Victoria was born, and long after her death people with spiritualist beliefs continued to gather, as they still do, meeting regularly at the Golden Gate Spiritualist Church in San Francisco, the Swedenborg Chapel in Cambridge, the Summerland Church of Light on Long Island, and the Wimbledon Spiritualist Church in London, to say nothing of the nearly four million active spiritists in Brazil.

 The flaw in most efforts to account for historical iterations of Spiritualism is that they look exclusively to transient features at the expense of more fundamental ones. It is true that today’s Spiritualists have something in common with their Victorian predecessors, situated as they are in another era of rapid technological change and increasing secularization; the Internet and virtual reality are the present moment’s photography and telegraphy, technologies so advanced that they approach the uncanny; then as now, a vast penumbra of proto-spiritualists surround the true believers. No longer persuaded by orthodox religious accounts but also not satisfied with pure materialism, they experiment with psychics, crystals, tarot, and astrological charts, or simply swap stories of the eerie and the unexplained.

 But, if today’s Spiritualists have much in common with the Victorians, they also have something in common with the ancient Romans, who celebrated the festival of Lemuria by making food offerings to their restless dead, and with the Israelite King Saul, who consulted a medium in the Canaanite city of Endor. Arthur Conan Doyle’s long view may well be the right one, for, as he wrote, there is “no time in the recorded history of the world when we do not find traces of preternatural interference and a tardy recognition of them from humanity.” The dread of mortality has always inspired the dream of immortality, and the hopes that animated Victorian Spiritualism are eternal: to bridge the divide between ourselves and those we have lost, to know that they are safe and content, and to believe that they are thinking of us just as much as we are thinking of them. ♦

 

 Why Did So Many Victorians Try to Speak with the Dead? By Casey Cep. The New Yorker, May 24, 2021.

On October 21, 1888, a startling newspaper advertisement appeared in New York City. Block capitals declared that at the Academy of Music, that evening, the audience would witness the “DEATH OF SPIRITUALISM.” The performance would amount to “A THOROUGH AND COMPLETE EXPOSE,” an onstage battle of “SCIENCE vs. SPIRITUALISM.” What’s more, the legendary Fox sister Margaretta Fox Kane would be the star attraction.

 That night, hordes filled the famed theater where Victoria Woodhull had delivered an address to a boisterous crowd during her 1872 run for the presidency. In the words of the next day’s New York Herald, the place hummed with “the wildest excitement.” Among those present were hundreds of agitated Spiritualists, still not quite able to believe that one of those who’d initiated their movement forty years ago should now emerge from her relative obscurity of recent times to try to strike its death blow. Also in attendance, seated in a prominent theatrical box, sat Maggie’s sister, Catherine Fox Jencken. Although Kate wouldn’t be sharing the platform with her sibling, her conspicuous presence gave the impression that she supported Maggie’s actions. It would not have escaped the attention of the crowd that the eldest sister, Ann Leah Underhill, was not in attendance.

 After some opening discourse from the night’s compère, Dr. Cassius M. Richmond, Maggie entered the stage, eliciting cheers and hisses all around the auditorium. Now in her mid-fifties and clad all in black, she cut a very different figure than that of the lively adolescent who’d first appeared in public in 1849 at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. The unhappiness of her later life, especially the struggles with alcoholism that had plagued both her and her younger sister, showed on Maggie’s gaunt face. She drew out a pair of heavy-rimmed glasses strung on black cord, placed them upon her nose, dropped a curtsy to the audience, and, standing, began to read from a prepared confession.

 That she had played such a large part in “perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public” had, she said, been “the greatest sorrow of my life.” Lifting her hands heavenward, she continued, “It is a late day now, but I am prepared to tell the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God!”

 Further clapping and hissing followed. Once it had died away, Maggie went on with her speech, laying the blame for her part in the decades-long “deception” on her young age at the time of its beginnings. Perhaps wisely, she didn’t state how old she had been— about fourteen—since her words probably gave the impression that she was rather younger than this. Instead, Maggie preferred simply to insist that she had been “too young to know right from wrong.”

 At this point Dr. Richmond brought on three somber-looking male doctors, who knelt on the floor by the now seated Maggie, who removed her shoe. The audience waited.

 Then it began, softly at first, the mysterious knocking. Each doctor took his turn to place his hands on Maggie’s shoeless foot before announcing to the audience that he could hear the infamous rapping sounds emanating, not from any hidden spirit presence, but from her clicking big toe.

 In the stunned silence that followed, Maggie climbed up onto a small wooden table, so that the packed theater could get a good view. Having placed her foot against a wooden board designed to amplify sound, she stood, seemingly unmoving in her stocking feet, while more raps rang out. The knocks came louder now, louder in fact than one might have thought it possible for a toe to make, even with the aid of a sounding board. Indeed, contrary to what the crowd had just been told, the noises appeared to come not just from her foot but also from behind the backdrop of the stage, the rigging above, and the galleries packed with seated onlookers.

 Still, apparently now relieved of a long-held secret burden, Maggie became animated: clapping, dancing, and calling out, “Spiritualism is a fraud from beginning to end!”

 Climbing down from the stage, into the audience, she daringly placed her toes, clad in nothing but a layer of stocking, against the shoe-clad foot of one man. In an act that harked back to the twin aspects of theater and inquisition of her early Corinthian Hall performances—but that this time seemed to place her in a position of greater control—Maggie asked the man to tell the house what he felt. He was able to confirm that, like the doctors, he could feel vibrations.

 At the conclusion of the evening’s program, applauded by Kate up in her box, both sisters found themselves surrounded by enthusiastic new supporters. Spiritualists in attendance, the Herald said, “almost frothed at the mouth” before departing the theater muttering “furious threats” against the two women now recast as the would-be destroyers of their movement. The newspaper’s own opinion of the evening’s entertainment was, perhaps not unreasonably, that “one moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.” Modern Spiritualism could “never recover from this crushing blow,” the Herald said. On the other hand, another of the city’s papers, The World, felt that, even in the aftermath of Maggie’s pronouncements, “spiritualistic imposters” would continue to “find as many fools as ever and continue to make their cheats profitable.”

 _________________________________

 Excerpt from Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice by Emily Midorikawa. Counterpoint Press, 2021

  

From Victorian Mediums to Anti-Spiritualism Activists : The Legendary Fox Sisters.By Emily Midorikawa. LitHub, May 26, 2021.

Out of the Shadows : Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice. By Emily Midorikawa

 Small groups gathered for séances, some in ornately furnished parlors, others in humbler settings. They held hands or placed their palms on a table, then fell silent or uttered a prayer or sang a hymn. They tried to include equal numbers of men and women, among them, ideally, someone scarcely out of girlhood. Young women, they believed, were most receptive to messages from another realm, and some might even discover that they were mediums who could decipher knocking noises or speak in the voices of the dead or write as those spirits directed.

 For many Victorians in both the United States and Britain, those parlor gatherings were a passing diversion, but for others, efforts to commune with the dead proved more sustained and far more serious. Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — gave comfort to the bereaved, assurance of an afterlife to the anxious and support for faltering Christian faith. But some among a select group of mediums discovered in Spiritualism the chance to perform, to profit and to emerge, in the words of Emily Midorikawa’s title, “Out of the Shadows” and have a public voice.
 
Modern Spiritualism started in the Finger Lakes region of New York, for years a crucible of evangelical revivalism, new religions and reform movements. Early in 1848, members of the Fox family began to hear mysterious rapping sounds in their Hydesville home, a sign, they suspected, that a ghost was reaching out to them. When the adolescent Fox daughters, Maggie and Kate, revealed that they could commune with this spirit, their elder sister, Leah Fox Fish, monetized the girls’ claims, staging public performances and scheduling private readings.
 
Although they inspired many imitators, the Fox sisters did not number among those mediums who subsequently developed Spiritualism as an organized movement in both the United States and Britain. Their ranks included Emma Hardinge Britten, who wrote its history and traveled the public lecture circuit as a trance medium in the late 1850s, delivering opinions about the issues of the day as dictated by the spirits. By contrast, Victoria Woodhull had cut her ties to Spiritualist groups when her claim to clairvoyant powers persuaded the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt to back her in founding the first female brokerage firm on Wall Street. But shortly thereafter she managed to recruit both Spiritualist and women’s rights organizations to support her bid for the presidency in 1872. Meanwhile in Britain, Georgina Weldon — not a medium herself but a stage-struck Spiritualist — fought the efforts of her husband and his squad of doctors to commit her to an asylum. She challenged Britain’s lunacy laws with more than a decade of agitation, which included parading sandwich-board men as pickets, scattering leaflets from a hot-air balloon, giving theatrical performances and offering antic testimony in court.

 Midorikawa’s chosen Spiritualists are a colorful bunch, and her lively writing makes their careers fun to follow. But why bring them together in a book? The author ventures that these six women acquired a “voice within a patriarchal society” and, as such, belong in our accounts of “the journey toward female empowerment.” True, every one of those visionaries knew how to draw a crowd. It’s true, too, that Spiritualists as a group played a major role in spreading the message about women’s rights throughout the 19th century and that merely by standing up and speaking in public they were defying Victorian gender norms. Yet the goal of advancing feminism played little role in prompting the careers of the women described by Midorikawa.

 Leah Fox Fish, a single mother deserted by her husband, needed the means to support herself and her daughter, and once a third marriage guaranteed her economic security, she retired. Neither she nor her sisters lent their support to any women’s rights organization. Emma Hardinge Britten — who from youth supported her widowed mother — turned to mediumship when her star as an actress faded on Broadway. Women’s rights numbered among her many lecture subjects, but Britten’s most consistent aim was to seize on any topic that would grab the attention of a paying audience. It’s hard to say what causes, if any, Victoria Woodhull took to heart because ghostwriters — especially her very corporeal second husband, Col. James Harvey Blood — wrote her speeches and articles. She latched onto the Spiritualist movement to gather support for her presidential campaign when business reversals and personal scandals threatened to derail her ambitions and remove her from the public eye. Many Spiritualist and feminist leaders condemned her opportunism and ultimately both movements ended their connection with her. As for Georgina Weldon, although she excelled at confounding her male adversaries, her main goal was basking in the limelight, and she vied for it ferociously — even with other women.

 Other Spiritualists would have made a much better fit as feminists, but Midorikawa’s ensemble do belong together in a different book — one that explores the making of popular entertainments in the 19th century and the origins of celebrity. Kate and Maggie, Leah and Emma, Victoria and Georgina: Victorian Kardashians all. They were pioneers in show business strategies, media manipulation and advertising techniques, and their spirits still lurk among the many people intent on making a spectacle of themselves.

 

The Victorian Women Who Pierced Glass Ceilings by Speaking to the Dead.  By Christine Leigh Heyrman. The New York Times,  May 11, 2021

 

One of the greatest religious movements of the 19th century began in the bedroom of two young girls living in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. On a late March day in 1848, Margaretta “Maggie” Fox, 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, waylaid a neighbor, eager to share an odd and frightening phenomenon. Every night around bedtime, they said, they heard a series of raps on the walls and furniture—raps that seemed to manifest with a peculiar, otherworldly intelligence. The neighbor, skeptical, came to see for herself, joining the girls in the small chamber they shared with their parents. While Maggie and Kate huddled together on their bed, their mother, Margaret, began the demonstration.

 “Now count five,” she ordered, and the room shook with the sound of five heavy thuds.

 “Count fifteen,” she commanded, and the mysterious presence obeyed. Next, she asked it to tell the neighbor’s age; thirty-three distinct raps followed.

 “If you are an injured spirit,” she continued, “manifest it by three raps.”

 And it did.

 Margaret Fox did not seem to consider the date, March 31—April Fool’s Eve—and the possibility that her daughters were frightened not by an unseen presence but by the expected success of their prank.

 The Fox family deserted the house and sent Maggie and Kate to live with their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, in Rochester. The story might have died there were it not for the fact that Rochester was a hotbed for reform and religious activity; the same vicinity, the Finger Lakes region of New York State, gave birth to both Mormonism and Millerism, the precursor to Seventh Day Adventism. Community leaders Isaac and Amy Post were intrigued by the Fox sisters’ story, and by the subsequent rumor that the spirit likely belonged to a peddler who had been murdered in the farmhouse five years beforehand. A group of Rochester residents examined the cellar of the Fox’s home, uncovering strands of hair and what appeared to be bone fragments.

 The Posts invited the girls to a gathering at their home, anxious to see if they could communicate with spirits in another locale. “I suppose I went with as much unbelief as Thomas felt when he was introduced to Jesus after he had ascended,” Isaac Post wrote, but he was swayed by “very distinct thumps under the floor… and several apparent answers.” He was further convinced when Leah Fox also proved to be a medium, communicating with the Posts’ recently deceased daughter. The Posts rented the largest hall in Rochester, and four hundred people came to hear the mysterious noises. Afterward Amy Post accompanied the sisters to a private chamber, where they disrobed and were examined by a committee of skeptics, who found no evidence of a hoax.

 The idea that one could communicate with spirits was hardly new—the Bible contains hundreds of references to angels administering to man—but the movement known as Modern Spiritualism sprang from several distinct revolutionary philosophies and characters. The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and by the 1840s held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a “magnetic fluid” that could become imbalanced, causing illness. By waving his hands over a patient’s body, he induced a “mesmerized” hypnotic state that allowed him to manipulate the magnetic force and restore health. Amateur mesmerists became a popular attraction at parties and in parlors, a few proving skillful enough to attract paying customers. Some who awakened from a mesmeric trance claimed to have experienced visions of spirits from another dimension.

 At the same time the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish philosopher and mystic, also surged in popularity. Swedenborg described an afterlife consisting of three heavens, three hells and an interim destination—the world of the spirits—where everyone went immediately upon dying, and which was more or less similar to what they were accustomed to on earth. Self love drove one toward the varying degrees of hell; love for others elevated one to the heavens. “The Lord casts no one into hell,” he wrote, “but those who are there have deliberately cast themselves into it, and keep themselves there.” He claimed to have seen and talked with spirits on all of the planes.

 Seventy-five years later, the 19th-century American seer Andrew Jackson Davis, who would become known as the “John the Baptist of Modern Spiritualism,” combined these two ideologies, claiming that Swedenborg’s spirit spoke to him during a series of mesmeric trances. Davis recorded the content of these messages and in 1847 published them in a voluminous tome titled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. “It is a truth,” he asserted, predicting the rise of Spiritualism, “that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres…all the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communication will be established.” Davis believed his prediction materialized a year later, on the very day the Fox sisters first channeled spirits in their bedroom. “About daylight this morning,” he confided to his diary, “a warm breathing passed over my face and I heard a voice, tender and strong, saying ‘Brother, the good work has begun—behold, a living demonstration is born.’”

 Upon hearing of the Rochester incident, Davis invited the Fox sisters to his home in New York City to witness their medium capabilities for himself. Joining his cause with the sisters’ ghostly manifestations elevated his stature from obscure prophet to recognized leader of a mass movement, one that appealed to increasing numbers of Americans inclined to reject the gloomy Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and embrace the reform-minded optimism of the mid-19th century. Unlike their Christian contemporaries, Americans who adopted Spiritualism believed they had a hand in their own salvation, and direct communication with those who had passed offered insight into the ultimate fate of their own souls.

 Maggie, Kate, and Leah Fox embarked on a professional tour to spread word of the spirits, booking a suite, fittingly, at Barnum’s Hotel on the corner of Broadway and Maiden Lane, an establishment owned by a cousin of the famed showman. An editorial in the Scientific American scoffed at their arrival, calling the girls the “Spiritual Knockers from Rochester.” They conducted their sessions in the hotel’s parlor, inviting as many as thirty attendees to gather around a large table at the hours of 10 a.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., taking an occasional private meeting in between. Admission was one dollar, and visitors included preeminent members of New York Society: Horace Greeley, the iconoclastic and influential editor of the New York Tribune; James Fenimore Cooper; editor and poet William Cullen Bryant, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who witnessed a session in which the spirits rapped in time to a popular song and spelled out a message: “Spiritualism will work miracles in the cause of reform.”

 Leah stayed in New York, entertaining callers in a séance room, while Kate and Maggie took the show to other cities, among them Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, where one visitor, explorer Elisha Kent Kane, succumbed to Maggie’s charms even as he deemed her a fraud—although he couldn’t prove how the sounds were made. “After a whole month’s trial I could make nothing of them,” he confessed. “Therefore they are a great mystery.” He courted Maggie, thirteen years his junior, and encouraged her to give up her “life of dreary sameness and suspected deceit.” She acquiesced, retiring to attend school at Kane’s behest and expense, and married him shortly before his untimely death in 1857. To honor his memory she converted to Catholicism, as Kane—a Presbyterian—had always encouraged. (He seemed to think the faith’s ornate iconography and sense of mystery would appeal to her.) In mourning, she began drinking heavily and vowed to keep her promise to Kane to “wholly and forever abandon Spiritualism.”

 Kate, meanwhile, married a devout Spiritualist and continued to develop her medium powers, translating spirit messages in astonishing and unprecedented ways: communicating two messages simultaneously, writing one while speaking the other; transcribing messages in reverse script; utilizing blank cards upon which words seemed to spontaneously appear. During sessions with a wealthy banker, Charles Livermore, she summoned both the man’s deceased wife and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, who announced his identity by writing his name on a card. Her business boomed during and after the Civil War, as increasing numbers of the bereaved found solace in Spiritualism. Prominent Spiritualist Emma Hardinge wrote that the war added two million new believers to the movement, and by the 1880s there were an estimated eight million Spiritualists in the United States and Europe. These new practitioners, seduced by the flamboyance of the Gilded Age, expected miracles—like Kate’s summoning of full-fledged apparitions—at every séance. It was wearying, both to the movement and to Kate herself, and she, too, began to drink.

 On October 21, 1888, the New York World published an interview with Maggie Fox in anticipation of her appearance that evening at the New York Academy of Music, where she would publicly denounce Spiritualism. She was paid $1,500 for the exclusive. Her main motivation, however, was rage at her sister Leah and other leading Spiritualists, who had publicly chastised Kate for her drinking and accused her of being unable to care for her two young children. Kate planned to be in the audience when Maggie gave her speech, lending her tacit support.

 “My sister Katie and myself were very young children when this horrible deception began,” Maggie said. “At night when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple on a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound.” The sisters graduated from apple dropping to manipulating their knuckles, joints and toes to make rapping sounds. “A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them,” she explained. “It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: ‘I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder.’ Of course that was pure imagination.”

 She offered a demonstration, removing her shoe and placing her right foot upon a wooden stool. The room fell silent and still, and was rewarded with a number of short little raps. “There stood a black-robed, sharp-faced widow,” the New York Herald reported, “working her big toe and solemnly declaring that it was in this way she created the excitement that has driven so many persons to suicide or insanity. One moment it was ludicrous, the next it was weird.” Maggie insisted that her sister Leah knew that the rappings were fake all along and greedily exploited her younger sisters. Before exiting the stage she thanked God that she was able to expose Spiritualism.

 The mainstream press called the incident “a death blow” to the movement, and Spiritualists quickly took sides. Shortly after Maggie’s confession the spirit of Samuel B. Brittan, former publisher of the Spiritual Telegraph, appeared during a séance to offer a sympathetic opinion. Although Maggie was an authentic medium, he acknowledged, “the band of spirits attending during the early part of her career” had been usurped by “other unseen intelligences, who are not scrupulous in their dealings with humanity.” Other (living) Spiritualists charged that Maggie’s change of heart was wholly mercenary; since she had failed to make a living as a medium, she sought to profit by becoming one of Spiritualism’s fiercest critics.

 Whatever her motive, Maggie recanted her confession one year later, insisting that her spirit guides had beseeched her to do so. Her reversal prompted more disgust from devoted Spiritualists, many of whom failed to recognize her at a subsequent debate at the Manhattan Liberal Club. There, under the pseudonym Mrs. Spencer, Maggie revealed several tricks of the profession, including the way mediums wrote messages on blank slates by using their teeth or feet. She never reconciled with sister Leah, who died in 1890. Kate died two years later while on a drinking spree. Maggie passed away eight months later, in March 1893. That year Spiritualists formed the National Spiritualist Association, which today is known as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches.

 In 1904, schoolchildren playing in the sisters’ childhood home in Hydesville—known locally as “the spook house”—discovered the majority of a skeleton between the earth and crumbling cedar walls. A doctor was consulted, who estimated that the bones were about fifty years old, giving credence to the sisters’ tale of spiritual messages from a murdered peddler. But not everyone was convinced. The New York Times reported that the bones had created “a stir amusingly disproportioned to any necessary significance of the discovery,” and suggested that the sisters had merely been clever enough to exploit a local mystery. Even if the bones were that of the murdered peddler, the Times concluded, “there will still remain that dreadful confession about the clicking joints, which reduces the whole case to a farce.”

 Five years later, another doctor examined the skeleton and determined that it was made up of “only a few ribs with odds and ends of bones and among them a superabundance of some and a deficiency of others. Among them also were some chicken bones.” He also reported a rumor that a man living near the spook house had planted the bones as a practical joke, but was much too ashamed to come clean.

 

The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism. By Karen  Abbott. Smithsonian Magazine, October 30, 2012.