Talking to the Dead

Local lore says it was a cold winter night in 1847 when two young farm girls from Hydesville, New York plotted to scare the wits out of their mother by making ghost noises. The young pranksters were Maggie and Kate Fox. The prank went so far that by March 31st, 1848 a nationwide spiritualism movement was born.

It began when Maggie, fifteen, and Kate, eleven, tied strings to apples and thudded them on the stairs to create the eerie sound of footsteps in the night. It worked. After her initial fright, the girls’ mother, Margaret Fox, was nearly (not completely) convinced that the house was haunted. And she wanted to speak to the ghost herself. The girls knew that in order to fully convince their mother they’d have to do better than plunking apples on the stairs. Besides, the apple trick could not be performed directly in front of her, so they came up with something new.

During the night, the two girls practiced making rapping or knocking sounds using their feet. Their method had to be unseen to be believed, so stomping or tapping a foot would not work. So, they taught themselves how to snap their toes inside their stockings and inside their shoes. According to later confessions, their toe snapping was a lot like finger snapping. They became so adept at it that the knocking sounds were loud enough to wake their parents in the night. Heartened by their success, the girls made the noises more and more frequently and told their mother the dead were communicating with them using the rapping sounds.

While their mother was increasingly beguiled by the girls’ ability to communicate with spirits through these rapping noises, the girls’ father brushed off the noises as normal creaking and rattling of the house.

To be sure their mother was fully convinced, Maggie and Kate planned a performance during which they would communicate with the ghost while their mother was present. That day was March 31st, 1848.

They began with rapping sounds in the evening, prompting their mother to light a candle and search the house. In the darkness of a bedroom, Kate spoke to a spirit she called Mr. Split-foot. She told him to repeat the same number of knocks that she made, and he did. Mrs. Fox was aghast and confounded. Maggie then clapped her hands four times and told the spirit to rap four times as well. Four raps followed. Mrs. Fox was truly terrified, but she would not run and would not be finished with it. Instead, she insisted on speaking with Mr. Split-foot herself, at which time she asked the ghost to rap ten times. And he did. Amazed, she asked him how many children she’d had. Seven raps followed. How many were still alive? Six. She even asked their ages, to which Mr. Split-foot answered correctly. Mrs. Fox took it yet further. She asked the phantom to rap twice if his spirit was injured and Mr. Split-foot answered with two knocks. Then, to the utter surprise of Maggie and Kate, their mother asked the spirit if she could invite the neighbors over to hear the rappings. Mrs. Fox had already mentioned the haunting to some of her friends, but her stories were mostly dismissed.

There was a long awkward pause during which Maggie and Kate considered the consequences. With their mother so invested in the existence of a spirit, they could hardly stop now. But they realized, too, that their prank had inadvertently become a cruel joke rather than the lighthearted prank they’d intended. Regretting her part in the scheme and fearful for her mother’s potential humiliation in front of the neighbors, Kate suggested that the noises were possibly an early April Fool’s joke. But Mrs. Fox would have none of it. She was irrevocably convinced. At that point, Maggie and Kate had gotten themselves into a pickle. How could they tell the truth now knowing how betrayed and humiliated their mother would feel? Surely, she would be furious!

In answer to Mrs. Fox’s request, Mr. Split-foot rapped back two times conveying his agreement that Mrs. Fox could invite the neighbors.

The Fox family and the neighbors held a séance. A neighbor named Mary Redfield was the first to ask some very personal questions to test the spirit’s authenticity. Maggie and Kate snapped their toes in answer to her questions so well, that Mrs. Redfield hurried off to tell more neighbors.

Maggie and Kate had pulled off their trickery again, but now they were really on the hook. Not only was the Fox family reputation on the line, but also all the people who came to the séance would feel tricked and betrayed if the girls came out with the truth.

The next night a crowd of people showed up at the Fox house to hear the rappings. Someone in the crowd proposed using a code so the spirit could spell out words. Ever deeper into the ruse, Maggie and Kate could not refuse and even added to the tale. The spirit was a dead peddler who was buried in the cellar. Little did the girls know that the neighbors would decide to excavate their basement looking for the peddler’s remains. Good fortune or bad, the excavation was suspended because that spring heavy rain seeped into the cellar and flooded out the digging.

Word spread quickly. Visitors began to show up unannounced and hang around till after dark to hear the mysterious rappings. The séances became regular occurrences, and Maggie and Kate were seen by many as divinely chosen to speak with the dead. But while some revered the girls, others saw their activity as unholy and blasphemous.

Nevertheless, word continued to spread. By May of that same year, a prominent attorney from the City of Canandaigua named E.E. Lewis came to investigate the phenomenon at the Fox house. And soon after, he published a pamphlet called A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D. Fox in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County. The Lewis investigation made it to the City of Rochester, where news of two young mediums who could speak to the dead inspired hope in grieving families. Many families had been touched by death from illnesses like influenza, diphtheria, cholera, and whooping cough. Further, children were often lost in childbirth or in their first year of life. New mothers, too, often died of fever due to infection after childbirth. The possibility of communicating with their lost loved ones was too enticing to ignore.

Hearing the news that her sisters had become revered as communicators with the dead, an older sister, Leah, a shrewd single mother living in Rochester coerced her way into the ruse. Financial gain was her aim, and her timing could not have been more perfect. Plagued by the high death rate in the city, the mood of the general population remained susceptible to the notion of communicating with the dead. Despite being publicly scoffed at by churches that called the sisters evil witches, the sisters were inundated by people wanting to contact family members on the “other side”.

The séances became a dramatic performance during which the participants would hold hands, pray and sing followed by either Maggie or Kate feigning a trance. As their business grew, however, so did their opposition. Disapproval of their séances grew to a dangerous level in the fall of 1849 when Leah arranged some shows at Corinthian Hall, an auditorium in Rochester, NY. Tickets sold for twenty-five cents each, and a large group of naysayers, who believed the girls and their doings were evil, gathered with firecrackers and a barrel of hot tar which they planned to use to tar and feather the girls.

Lucky for the sisters, the police intervened and they escaped harm. Controversy surrounded every performance, yet the girls carried on with Leah at the helm. Several newspapers wrote scathing accounts of the girls’ activities, yet no one, even after great scrutiny examining the girls’ clothing, detected the toe snapping. The girls became known as the Rochester Rappers, and all the publicity, both positive and negative served to spread spiritualism.

Mediums began springing up everywhere. Many were young girls copying the Fox sisters. One orphan boy performed levitations. Spiritualism boomed and supporters of the movement expanded to include prominent reverends and even politicians.

By the 1850s, people in major cities around the country were regularly participating in spirit circles and most every community had some involvement with spiritualism.

As the years passed and people continued to suffer great losses during the Civil War (1861-1865), the spiritualist movement was bolstered. But by then the Fox sisters were often pushed out of the limelight by the newest and best shows. Always looking for opportunity but plagued by guilt and other issues born of their business, the sisters, on and off sabotaged their work with interviews. At one time one sister confessed the toe snapping and then recanted her confession. But the damage could not be undone, and the sisters’ status as mediums eventually fizzled out.

Spiritualism, however, one hundred and seventy-three years later, still survives. There are countless books and celebrity mediums and even a whole village of spiritualists in Lily Dale, NY. The three sisters are now long dead and all that is left of the old Fox house is its foundation. The site is preserved, however, and known locally as the foundation place of modern spiritualism. Oddly enough, visitors to the site sometimes come away saying they heard distinct rapping noises while they were touring.

References:

Stuart, Nancy Rubin. “The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism's Unlikely Founders.” Historynet.com, 2021, https://www.historynet.com/the-fox-sisters-spiritualisms-unlikely-founders.htm. Originally published August, 2005 American History Magazine