SYMHC Classics: The Sisters Fox - They Talked to Dead People

This 2011 episode from Sarah and Deblina features the Fox family, which began hearing strange noises in 1848, and sisters Maggie and Kate started communicating with spirits. They built a career as mediums, and today they're credited with launching the modern spiritualist movement. But was it all a hoax?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and

(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Hi, everybody, Happy last
Saturday in October. We are taking one last chance break
classic Halloween episode before the end of this month, and

(00:42):
this one is from from host Sarah and Bablina. It
is all about the Sisters Fox and the modern Spiritualist movement.
So happy early Halloween and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,

(01:07):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm to Blaine A Chuck
Reboarding and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you've listened to
this podcast for a little while, you've probably heard us
refer to something called spiritualism. A lot of the historical
figures we discuss we're spiritualists, which basically means that they
believed that people who have physically died continue to exist
in a kind of spirit world. Furthermore, the spiritualists also

(01:29):
believe that people who have passed onto the spirit world
can and do continue to communicate with us in the
material world, usually through special people called mediums. So even
if you haven't heard of spiritualists, you've probably heard of
mediums from TV shows and movies. Yeah, they're pretty common
in pop culture. But we should also mention that adherents

(01:49):
of this philosophy or this religion differ quite a bit
in their exact beliefs or their world view. But you know,
we give you the gist here. You have the basic understanding,
and a lot of high profile people throughout history were
actually spiritualists, and we've talked about some of them before.
March podcast subject Victoria Woodhall was one kind of her

(02:11):
famous pre political career and even made her living as
a medium for a while. Another one of our favorites,
a guy who just pops up in podcast after podcast.
Arthur Conan Doyle was famously a spiritualist and even wrote
about it. But what is known as the modern spiritualist movement,
the one that took place in the us UM in

(02:33):
the mid eighteen hundreds or so, wasn't launched by celebrity
or an influential religious leader of some kind. It was
actually kicked off by two regular little girls, Margaret and
Catherine Fox. Margaret and Catherine Fox, they were also known
as Maggie and Kate or Kathy more casually. They were
born in eighteen thirty three and eighteen thirty seven, respectively.

(02:55):
Their parents were John and Margaret Fox, a couple who
had four children together and and separated for a time
because of John's alcoholism. So when John got his act
together and was working as a respectable blacksmith again, they
got back together and had kind of their second brood
of children, of which Maggie and Kate were apart. So
we're going to tell you a little bit about these

(03:15):
sisters lives and their involvement in launching spiritualism. But to
do so, we have to give you a little ghost
story first. So in the winter of eighteen forty seven
eighty eight, the Foxes moved. They moved to the hamlet
of Hydesville, New York, which is about twenty miles west
of Rochester. And they're in Hydesville, John and Margaret rented

(03:38):
a house for them and their younger kids, Maggie and Kate,
who are about fourteen and eleven years old at the time.
But this house was not your ordinary rental. It came
with a little bit of a reputation. It was said
around town to be haunted. So things started to suggest

(03:59):
that maybe that was the case pretty quickly. Yeah, So
things went fine for a little while, and then around
March of the Foxes started to hear these strange sounds
around the house at night, creepy knocking noises, thumps on
the ceiling, bumps on the walls and doors, and sometimes
the wrapping sounds were violent enough to shake the furniture.

(04:20):
So not just the little mouth scurring through the walls
or something. Yeah, really creepy stuff. The girls, though, didn't
seem to be that bothered by it, strangely enough, but
their mother, Margaret, who was very superstitious was. She lost
sleep over it. They checked the house, they didn't find
anything amiss, and then on March thirty one, Margaret was
so tired and just needed some rest she tried to

(04:42):
get her family to get to go to bed early
when it was barely dark, but the rapping noises started
again when they were getting into bed, so she got
up and she took a look around, and when she
made it to the girls room, Kate was looking into
the darkness and she bravely called out, Mr Splitfoot, do
as I do, and then she proceeded to snap her

(05:05):
fingers in a way that mimicked the noises that they
had heard. But the strange thing happened next. When Kate
finished this call out to Mr split Foot, those sounds
from somewhere in the house imitated her. And then Maggie
clapped her hands four times, so it answered back yes.

(05:27):
And according to most accounts, Kate then said, oh, mother,
I know what it is. Tomorrow is April Fool's Day
and someone is trying to fool us. So, uh, it
sounds a little suspicious but also a little cool at
this point intriguing. Yeah, and Margaret wasn't buying Kate's explanation.

(05:48):
She decided, Hey, my kids are talking to these noises,
these strange whatever they are as Mr split Foot. So
she decided, I'm going to try to chat with this
eerie thing my self. So she said count to ten,
and it made ten noises, and then she asked whatever

(06:08):
was making the noise to wrap out the ages of
all of her children successively, and it did so correctly,
pausing between each one long enough to set each child's
age apart all the way through Kate's age, and then
even weirder after that, there was a longer pause and
then three more wraps, and those corresponded to the age

(06:30):
of the Fox's child who had died in infancy. So
by this point Margaret thinks that she's dealing with something real,
and she asked this thing um if it was a
human being making the noise, and her question was met
by total silence, no wraps, And then she asked, was
it a spirit? And if so, manifests itself by making

(06:54):
two sounds. Margaret then just started asking a lot of
other questions because she was thinking, all right, it is
a spirit. And she later, by the way, relayed these questions,
these original statements in a published work, and she started
asking it was it an injured spirit? Was it injured

(07:16):
in this house? And then more questions like was the
person living who had injured it? Now we're getting into
kind of TV territory. I yeah. So she went on
that way for a while, and then she decided, I
gotta show this to people, So she started inviting the
neighbors over to check out this phenomenon too. So that
night about a dozen neighbors had come over and become

(07:38):
convinced of the spirit's presence in the same way by
asking questions that it answered correctly with an appropriate number
of raps. They asked questions like the number of kids
they had in the ages of the kids, similar things
to what Margaret had asked, and eventually by asking yes, no,
and nu miracle questions. They later also came up with
a code system, by the way, so that the raps

(07:58):
could actually spell out words been to some more detailed
questions perhaps right. And they found out from this line
of questioning the details of the spirit story it had
been a thirty one year old peddler, a father of five,
who was brutally murdered in the home's basement like a
couple of years two to five years prior long earlier.
So to test the truth of the story, which by

(08:21):
this point you know, they had these cold hard facts
to work with, the neighbors decided that they would excavate
the home seller, but unfortunately heavy spring rains got on
the way and filled up the excavation pit and delayed
the project for many weeks. But still, even without that
proof or or the neighbors actually getting to look for something,

(08:43):
rumors about the haunting in the Foxes home started to
spread far and wide, and hundreds of people, some of
them skeptics of course, some of them believers, would flock
to Hidsville over the next few weeks to check it
out for themselves at least try to evaluate for themselves
what was going on, And during that time, the spirit
seemed to become bolder. Rather than these regular light wraps,

(09:06):
it started producing louder noises, even ones that mimicked a
death struggle when it was telling the story of how
it died um and people began to notice that Maggie
and Kate were always around when those spirit noises were
going on. Skeptics, of course, wondered if the girls were

(09:32):
somehow the source of the noises, but others began to
see them as the mediums through which the spirits communicated,
and this had a couple of different effects for the girls.
Some people in the neighborhood regarded them with awe because
of this, as kind of divinely inspired or chosen individuals,
and others thought of them as unholy, perhaps even witches.
So once word of the Hydesville haunting started to get around,

(09:56):
Maggie and Kate's oldest sister and a fox fish showed
up in town went to visit the girls, and Leah,
at this point was divorced. She lived in Rochester. She
taught music lessons to support herself and her daughter, but
after she learned about her younger sister's roles as local
mediums pretty prominent local mediums by this point, she took

(10:19):
Kate back to Rochester with her, and apparently Maggie and
Margaret soon followed along, and they weren't the only ones
who made this family move though. Apparently the spirits also
followed the girls to Rochester and started haunting their home Mayor.
But it wasn't really like they were trying to escape

(10:39):
from them, no, not at all. Actually, according to an
article by Nancy Reuben Stewart in American History, Leah claimed
in her memoir that the ghost had followed them to
Rochester and quote so disturbed her household that she was
forced to move, but apparently Leah's next home was actually
next to a cemetery, which is kind of a weird
place to move if you want to get away from ghosts,

(11:01):
as Stewart points out, maybe like you're looking for new work. Actually,
and maybe that's actually probably a smart thing to do,
now that we think of it. But the spirits continued
to hang around the sisters, and in fact, they became
more energetic, and soon Lea decided it was time to
share them with other people, so they started holding seances
in Rochester. Maggie and Kate conducted them, and Leah set

(11:22):
herself up as the interpreter of the raps. She was
kind of the impresario of the whole thing. So here's
how they worked the seances. That is, the guests would arrive,
they'd sit around a table and say a prayer and
then sing. Then they'd hold hands and sit for a
while in silence until eventually Maggie or Kate would fall
into a trance. Then the rapping noises would begin. And

(11:45):
people loved going to these. Demands for the sciences grew,
even people like congressmen and judges, prominent folks in the
community wanted to take part, and they eventually became known
as the Rochester Rappings, which some a little different than
what it really is. But then in November of eight

(12:05):
Leah made a big announcement. She said that the Spirits
it wasn't enough to just keep doing these stances. The
Spirits wanted them to go public to publicize spiritualism, and
so they rented out Corinthian Hall, which was the largest
auditorium in Rochester, and charged in mission for the very
first time cents ahead to those who wanted to hear

(12:28):
the wraps in person. And Leah and Maggie Kate was
away at the time, I think visiting someone. I think
appeared on the stage at this huge Corinthian Hall four
nights in a row that month, and they weren't really
met with a enthusiastic crowd though. There were a lot
of skeptics and a pretty hostile crowd in fact, jeering

(12:53):
and um. A lot of the people in the audience
just thought that they were coming to see the Sisters
exposed and frauds, and they didn't know how Leah and
Maggie would try to keep it up four nights in
a row in this in this huge venue, so for
three days. During the stretch of four performances, Maggie and
Leah agreed to submit to investigations by different committees that

(13:15):
were actually chosen by the previous night's audiences. According to
an article by Barbara M. Weisberg in American Heritage, they
were basically man handled during these episodes. Their feet were held,
they were placed in different positions. They were made to
stand on glass plates with their skirts tied tightly around
their ankles. A committee of women even took the sisters

(13:36):
into a room and disrobed them to examine them and
their clothing to see what was causing these rapping sounds.
So the rapping sounds did keep going as those examinations
were taking place, so the committees ended up acquitting the
sisters of any sort of fraud. They all were convinced. This, however,
did not help persuade the angry mob that showed up

(13:56):
on the fourth night. Maggie and Leah actually needed a
police escort to get out of their safely, but their
star and modern spiritualism was officially born. Yeah. I mean,
this seems like it would have only added to their
fame around town and people want to go out and
see them, both the detractors and the supporters. But there

(14:18):
were a lot of factors that actually helped spiritualism catch
on quickly. There was a recent bestselling book called The
Divine Principles of Nature by seer Andrew Jackson Davis, and
that was based in turn on the writings of the
eighteenth century philosopher and former podcast subject Emmanuel Swedenburgh and Um,

(14:39):
these writings seemed to predict the opening of communication with
the spiritual world, so gave people some something concrete to
look at. It was good timing. It was very good timing. Um.
There was also popular interest in mesmerism and that might
have helped paved the way, and we talked about that
for last year's Halloween podcasts. And another aspect which we've

(15:00):
kind of in a strange way, talked about two in
the Victoria Woodhull podcasts. Spiritualism also supported reforms such as
abolition and women's suffrage, which we're really gaining steam at
the time. And then one final thing going on at
the time, or one extra thing relating to new technology

(15:21):
and science. The telegraph had become a central metaphor for spiritualism.
Mediums were like a spiritual telegraph in a way. So
you have this great concrete thing, not just the book
to look at, but um, a scientific a piece of
technology to compare something that seemed really abstract too. Yeah,

(15:41):
they could look at it and say, hey, if you
can talk in an instant to someone in a different city,
why can't you talk to someone in the spirit world
so easily. So there was a lot going on. Yeah,
and obviously bringing a lot of past podcast material together.
So by eighteen fifty four, according to spirit List estimates,
the movement had somewhere from one to two million followers

(16:03):
in the US. And as the movement grew, the spectacles
just got more and more complicated. It wasn't just simple
knocking or rapping noises anymore. There were phosphorescent, glimmering clouds
around people, levitating furniture, heavenly music, and something called spirit writing,
which occurred when a medium was in a trance and

(16:24):
then the spirit would try to communicate through her. She
would actually write on a piece of paper or something
a little bit from her spirit, sophisticated than the wrapping
alphabet system. Yeah, it was definitely a more elaborate way
to get your message more information across quickly. That way. Yeah,
But the Fox Sisters were only getting more and more

(16:45):
famous in all of this too. They went to New
York City, they conducted really lucrative seances for some well
known folks there. Um. One famous seance included the New
York Tribune editor Horse Greeley, who was a big, big
proponent of the Sisters. Um. It also included William Cullen, Bryant,
George Ripley, George Bancroft, and James S. Ventimore Cooper too. Yeah,

(17:09):
and according to Weisberg's article, Cooper blessed the Fox Sisters
on his deathbed for having prepared him for quote this hour.
I mean, that's a pretty good customer testimonial, I'd say
it is. And of course, though, as spiritualism's popularity grew,
skeptics grew more vocal about it too, And some of
the points they raised were really funny. I mean, if
you think about it, some of the things they brought

(17:31):
up were like, Okay, if you're a spirit in the
spirit world, why are you spending all your time knocking
or why yeah, or levitating furniture and moving it around.
I mean, wouldn't you find a better way to communicate
or you know, something else to do with your time. So,

(17:56):
as you might imagine, a lot of mediums were exposed
as for odds during this time, and Debunker's kept trying
to expose the Sisters the Fox Sisters as well. There
were a couple theories put out there as to how
they could be pulling this off. One was something called
toe ology. So just to explain this, some people thought
that the sisters had been making the wrapping sounds by

(18:17):
cracking their toes, which Doublina and I have had a
thorough conversation of this, and I'm just cure. I mean,
does anybody out there is anyone out there really able
to crack their toes to a super loud volume like
an ace audience hall would be able to hear it
enough to make it sound like wrapping on walls or floors,

(18:38):
because we do not have that power. Yes, thank goodness.
But there was another theory too, which sounds a little
more believable to me. It came from a trio of
doctors in Buffalo. They said that the rapping noises sounded
just like noises produced in the knee joints. So the
Fox Sisters allowed them to test this theory in one
and the doctors considered the us to success. When a

(19:01):
sister's knees were restricted, no raps occurred. So the sisters
claimed though that the environment was just too hostile for
the spirits and that's why they didn't show up during
this test. Answer. But regardless, it didn't hurt their popularity.
No again, it's it's any publicity is is sort of
good publicity for these sisters. And as successful as Maggie

(19:24):
and Kate though were as mediums, they didn't fare so
well in their personal lives. And the eighteen fifties, Maggie
became involved to some extent with a very well renowned
famous Arctic explorer named Dr Elisha Kent Kane, and there's
not a whole lot of evidence about their relationship, but

(19:44):
what evidence there is suggests that there was some connection
between them. They were very likely in love, but because
of her profession, he didn't really see her as a
proper prospect. He thought that she was fraud probably, and
he tried to transform her to make her somebody who
he could be with a more suitable match. She lived

(20:06):
with his family for a little while to get an education,
but ultimately he would not publicly claim a connection with her,
So that's kind of a sad life story there for
for Maggie it is. And after his death in eighteen
fifty seven, Maggie said that they had been secretly married
or maybe common law married, it differs depending on which

(20:27):
source you look at, and he she also said that
he left her a small inheritance, but his family really
fought this and she ended up publishing a book of
letters from him to her later, but we're not really
sure to what extent she edited that or how accurate
they are. In eighteen fifty eight, though, she did follow
Kane's wishes and retired and converted to Roman Catholicism. Maggie's

(20:48):
older sister, Leah retired the same year. She married her
third husband, who was a wealthy businessman and a spiritualist
conveniently enough around this time and really just didn't need
money from seances anymore. And then Kate continued to stay
in the scene to be visible in the movement for

(21:10):
several more years after her sisters had both retired, but
in the eighteen sixties both she and Maggie began to
succomb more and more to their problems with alcoholism, and
eventually Kate moved to England in eighteen seventy one hoping
to beat that addiction, and was able to for for
a time at least yep. She married wealthy barrister and

(21:33):
spiritualist Henry D. Jenkin and had two kids with him,
But when Jenkin died in the early eighteen eighties, she
lost her battle with alcoholism and ended up moving back
to the States as her condition just continued to worsen.
But the Fox sisters did have one more big moment.
Their lass big moment in the Spotlight really occurred in
October eight eight. At that time, Leah tried to have

(21:56):
Kate's children taken away because of her alcoholism, and so
in her defense, Maggie kind of decided to lash out.
Before an audience at New York's Academy of Music, Maggie
confessed that the sister's communication with the spirits had been
a hoax, and removing her right shoe, she confirmed that
to ology theory that we told you about earlier by
creating sharp raps with the first joint of her big toe.

(22:19):
She basically said the whole thing started as the girls
trying to play a prank on their superstitious mom way
back in Hydesville, and ended with Leah turning them into
her own money making tools, asking them how how they
did it? Essentially a year later, though Maggie were canted
this confession. She said that she had been pressured into
it by powerful people because she needed the money. Both

(22:40):
she and Kate tried to continue holding seances to make money,
even though Kate also tried to confess over the years
and prove that it had been a hoax, and then
would go back now and again to be in a medium,
But neither of them were as successful as they had
been earlier in their career. They spent their last years
in poverty, and Leah died in eight in eight and

(23:02):
finally Maggie in eighteen ninety three, and by that point
spiritualism had already started to wane in the United States,
but it's popularity was still growing elsewhere, and it still is,
of course, around today. The Fox sisters are still credited
with launching the modern spiritualist movement, although there are probably

(23:22):
a variety of opinions out there about their actual ability
to communicate with spirits. We do have one last note, though,
We would like to leave you on a spooking note
for a Halloween Podcast. Yes, of course. Uh, it's a
note that relates to that variety of opinions about their
actual ability to communicate. So remember that original communication of

(23:44):
theirs with the Spirit of the Peddler. Well, when the
water did finally drain out of that excavation pit in
the seller in eighteen forty eight, some partial remains were found,
some hair and a few bones. Of course, skeptics at
the time thought that it was a plant, but according
to Weisberg's article, in the early nineteen hundreds, a skeleton

(24:04):
was found behind the cellar wall, and experts later estimated
that it had been there for about fifty years, so
right around the time that the spirit told the sisters
it had been murdered. Something to think about. Thank you
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since

(24:26):
this is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U R L or something
similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now.
So here is our current contact information. We are at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then
we're at Missed in the History. All over social media
that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram.

(24:48):
Thanks again, for listening. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.