On the evening of March 31, 1848, neighbors crowded an unassuming frame cottage on Hydesville Road in upstate New York. They came “prepared to discover a hoax but instead found themselves utterly baffled” by strange, seemingly sourceless “spirit rappings” which appeared to be able to answer any question, “from the number of children in different families to the ages of each child in the neighborhood.”
While the religious movement known as Spiritualism claims ancient antecedents, for many practicing Spiritualists, their movement began that night, in a small cottage not far from Newark.
A Haunted House
The home in question was being rented by John and Margaret Fox, where they lived with their two youngest children, Catherine (Kate) and Margaretta (Maggie), while their nearby house was being built. There was just one drawback to the small cottage on Hydesville Road: it was rumored to be haunted.
The family had moved into the house the previous year, and by late March they seemed to be able to confirm the cottage’s haunted reputation. At night, they would hear strange noises; “thumps on the ceiling, bumps on doors or walls, sometimes raps sharp enough to jar bedsteads and tables.” The two girls seemed to take these noises in stride, but their mother was less nonplussed.
On that fateful night, she sent the family to bed early. “We had been broken so much of our rest that I was almost sick,” she said, ordering her two daughters to “lie still.” That night, the sounds reached their peak.
It was the girls who first began trying to playfully interact with their apparent unwelcome guest. Kate, who would have just turned eleven, began snapping her fingers, challenging the noises to “do as I do.” Their mother was stunned when the noises reproduced the sounds. Maggie chimed in next, clapping her hands and ordering the noises to “count one, two, three, four,” which was accompanied by four raps.
“Oh, Mother, I know what it is,” Kate is said to have declared. “Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day, and someone is trying to fool us.”
However, neither John nor Margaret could find any evidence of such a hoax. To them, the raps appeared genuine, and Margaret began interrogating the presence more assiduously. “I spoke and said to the noise, ‘Count ten,’ and it made ten strokes or noises,” she later said in a published statement. “Then I asked the ages of my different children successively, and it gave a number of raps, corresponding to the ages of my children.”
Maggie, Kate, and Leah Fox
Photo Credit: WikipediaThe Rise of Spiritualism
By the time a dozen-or-so neighbors had crowded into the little cottage to witness the phenomena, the modern Spiritualist movement had effectively begun. The Fox Sisters weren’t alone, however. The movement began in what was known as the “burned-over district” of New York State, a place that seemed ripe for such spiritual revivals, having previously seen the growth of such movements as Millerism and Mormonism.
Even then, Spiritualism needed touchstones, which included the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and the theories of Franz Mesmer, as well as the activities of individuals such as Andrew Jackson Davis, who claimed to be able to diagnose illness via clairvoyance, and who dictated his first book while in a trance.
Into this cauldron of potential, the Fox Sisters seemed to bring Spiritualism almost fully formed. A little more than a year after the events of that remarkable night in March of 1848, the Fox sisters demonstrated their spiritual rappings in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, which had been the sight of famous speeches relating to abolition and women’s suffrage, and was located directly across the street from Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper, North Star.
This presentation is widely regarded as the first time that a demonstration of spiritualism was put on for a paying audience; it was far from the last. Under the management of their older sister Leah, the two sisters became celebrities, touring and demonstrating their remarkable mediumship in seances held for hundreds of attendees. Among these were such luminaries as poet William Cullen Bryant, novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, politician George Bancroft, and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, among many others.
While many accepted the girls’ gifts as authentic and Spiritualism caught on not only in America but across the sea in Europe, the Fox sisters were not without their critics. In 1857, the Boston Courier offered a prize of $500 to any medium found to be genuine by their committee, which included the magician John Wyman. The Fox sisters attempted to claim the prize, but the committee concluded that the sounds were produced by the sisters themselves.
It turns out, they were probably right.
The Fox Sisters' Confession
Many were the doctors and other skeptics who attempted to disprove the validity of the Fox sisters’ spirit rappings, and one prominent theory as to the origins of the sounds gained the nickname “Toe-ology,” an argument which asserted that the sisters made the raps themselves by popping various joints in their knees and toes.
In October of 1888, not long after the movement had celebrated its 40th anniversary, Maggie stood before an audience of more than 2,000 at New York’s Academy of Music and gave a shocking statement: “I am here tonight as one of the founders of Spiritualism, to denounce it as an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.” She wasn’t alone in her confession, either. Her sister Kate stood beside her.
Subsequently, Maggie demonstrated how the sisters had performed their seemingly miraculous feats. “Finding that we could make raps with our feet – first with one foot and then with both – we practiced until we could do this easily when the room was dark. Like most perplexing things when made clear, it is astonishing how easily it is done. The rapping is simply the result of perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow the action of the toe and ankle bones that are not commonly known.”
She also explained the strange noises that had initially troubled their home on Hydesville Road. “When we went to bed at night, we used to tie an apple to 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 strange noise every time it would rebound.”
It seemed that the Toe-ologists had been right all along – or were they? In subsequent years, the Fox sisters would recant their confessions, claiming they had been pressured by powerful individuals and their own need for money. Both Maggie and Kate would seemingly veer from devout Spiritualism to full-on renunciation more than once in their often troubled lives.
Despite their confession that it had all been a hoax, Spiritualism itself seemed to take the revelation in stride, and by the 150th anniversary of the movement, which once again visited the spot on Hydesville Road where it had ostensibly all began, the apparent betrayal of the sisters seemed both forgiven and forgotten.
“The proof that there is no death and that communication is real,” claimed one attendee, “didn’t finally occur until two little children – two little children – bravely put their fear away and dared to say ‘come in’ when spirit knocked.”
