October 9, 2019 • 46 mins
A Harmonial Philosophy was one thing. But Rochester, New York, was about to become the cradle for so much more. The city wanted more than just words. They wanted a demonstration of power.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcomed, unobscured a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.
It was six blocks from Amy's house to the publishing office.
In the morning, she and Isaac would even walk together.
His pharmacy was only one block farther. I like to
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picture them walking side by side, Isaac's neatly trim beard
worn in what today might be called an Amish style,
and with a winter as cold as the one in
February of eighty eight, Amy no doubt would have worn
a heavy rap when they reached Buffalo Street, today's main
street in Rochester. We might imagine Amy holding a gloved
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hand up to wave. As Isaac continued on to open
the pharmacy, where he filled prescriptions from Rochester's doctors and
sold oils, paints, dyes, salves, and various instruments. Amy would
have stepped into the publishing office for the North Star.
There was plenty of work to do. Through the doors,
Amy passed the office where Frederick Douglas and his business
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partner William c Nell were preparing the print the next issue.
The summer before, Douglas had traveled west through Pennsylvania as
far as Ohio, where he had been mocked attacked and
run off stages by white mobs. But across the Midwest
he had also been welcomed by black communities, and Douglas
knew he needed to continue supporting them. Rather than retreat
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to Boston, Douglas moved to Rochester, the point between the
coast and the frontier where the message could fly out
to a nation. When Amy stepped into the printing office,
she could have asked Douglas how his family was doing.
His wife, Anna had just arrived in Rochester with their
three boys. Isaac had even helped them move into their
small apartment downtown, where they would live until they found
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a suitable house. After a chat with Frederick, Amy most
likely climbed the stairs to the second floor and unlocked
the new reading Room, an office for the Western New
York Antislavery Society. It was part library, part consignment shop,
where Amy worked with friends to plan meetings, supply local families,
and raise funds for anti slavery projects. Because she supported
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Frederick's cause at every turn, and he supported hers as well.
You see, while Amy was working with the Anti Slavery Society,
she was also on the cusp of something new. She
and her friends like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth County Stanton
were about to put out a call for a convention
to discuss equal rights for women. Frederick Douglas would immediately
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print their announcement in The North Star. From the beginning,
the papers front page carried the declaration that right is
of no sex, truth is of no color. God is
the father of us all. The North Star embodied the
fusion of movements at the center of Rochester life, and
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Frederick Douglas and Amy Post both knew that they were
working at an amazing time. Thanks in no small part
to their efforts, the year would leave its mark on history.
Here's historian Molly McGarry. In the year alone, revolutions ignited
across the world, from France to Brazil, but also from
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Sicily to the Austrian Empire, and revolutions swept the globe
during that year. Also in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
published the Communist Manifesto, opening with the line a specter
is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. And in that
same year, two young girls heard communicates from a very
different sort of specter, giving rise to great different revolution.
(03:39):
Had been a year full of surprises for many people,
but there was still one more on its way. This
is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey. It started as a small
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frontier village. In fact, the majority of its first settlers
were black when it was founded by Nathaniel Rochester and
the twelve people he kept in slavery. In fact, less
than two decades before Amy and Isaac arrived, Rochester had
been home to just over one thousand people, surrounded by
fertile land. Though Rochester was a bread basket, grain mills
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popped up in clouds of fresh flower, and by eighteen
thirty four, when it was officially chartered as a city,
Rochester had become home to thirteen thousand people. The city
was booming, and that was due in large part to
the Erie Canal. Here's author and journalist Nancy Ruben Stewart
Upstate New York in particular, it was a very prosperous
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area because the every canal had opened, and so all
the produce and all the furs and all kinds of
other things that were coming from the north could now
come down through the canal into the Hudson and down
to New York City. The farmland in the region made
it ideal for communities like the Quakers who wanted a
place where they could live on their own. So as
Rochester shipped out new tons of flower, the radical ideas
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growing in that same soil traveled with them. Here's Molly
McGarry once again. Douglas's North Star Circle in Rochester was
a key center in a global movement for freedom, and
that newspaper is crucially important. Douglass organizing was important, but
there are also figures like Harriet Jacobs, who went on
to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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who landed in Rochester. At the same time, while Isaac
and Amy worked with Frederick Douglas at home in Rochester,
Isaac's brother served as the North Stars reporter on Long Island.
Through growing networks of friends, family, and correspondence, the cities
around the Northeastern United States were becoming more and more connected.
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Of course, boomtowns don't make for the most stable homes.
When communities along the Erie Canal swelled with the ranks
of new residents moving inland, it made life around Rochester
difficult for families who wanted to establish farms and make
a life for themselves. People like John and his wife Margaret.
When they put down stakes in the eighteen twenties, John
fell in with a crowd of other men who arrived
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hoping to strike it rich, and he picked up their
habits too, liquor cards, gambling on horse races. What little
money John and Margaret brought with them vanished into the night,
and soon enough John along with it. Now abandoned, Margaret
had retreated to Rochester, where her sister offered her a
room to stay in. She did her best to raise
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four children without their father, including the oldest Leah, and
a son named David, but it was a hard life.
Margaret's heart broke as Leah was entrapped by an older
man when she was just fourteen. He only stayed long
enough for Leah to take his last name Fish and
give birth to their daughter, before he tossed Leah aside
and traveled farther west. Eventually, John returned, arriving in town,
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and he had a new outlook on life. A revival
preacher had swept through the countryside, and it brought the
man to his knees. He rejoined his wife and children
in Rochester, determined to rekindle their dream of farming their
own plot of land. David and Leah stayed behind in
Rochester while John and Maggie crossed Lake Ontario into Canada.
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This time, John was determined not to get sidetracked, and
they started that new farm, but they started a new
family as well. Margaret gave birth to two more daughters
in the eighteen thirties, who they named Maggie and Kate.
But the fire of John his new religious devotion couldn't
thaw that cold earth. After scraping out what they could
from the Canadian soil and missing their older children, they
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returned to Rochester's embrace in eighteen forty four. That's when
they found themselves welcomed by Isaac and Amy Post, who
hosted them on Sophia Street. The families became fast friends.
Maggie and Kate also got to know their older sister, Leah,
and Maggie bonded with Amy Post. The older Quaker woman
working so hard to bring a new world into being,
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somehow found time in the midst of organizing to offer
attention to the younger daughters of an unstable family. For
a while, John was able to support the family as
a blacksmith, but the lure of working the land continued
to call, and by the mid eighteen forties, John and
Margaret's son, David, was a man with a family of
his own. After growing up in the city with Margaret,
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he'd inherited a farm from an uncle in Arcadia, New York,
and eventually moved there with his wife and three children.
A host of relatives live within only a few miles.
A new center of gravity for the family began to form,
and it drew John and Margaret out into the countryside
more and more often. It did, not, however, have the
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same appeal for young Maggie and Kate. During one visit
in eighteen forty seven, John and Margaret sat down with
David to discuss life in the country. Despite all their setbacks,
their eyes still lit up when they thought about living
in the rolling pastures. From her chair in the corner,
Maggie saw how much this dream meant to her father,
but for her it only despired creeping dread those rolling hills.
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To her, they were crushingly dull. To her friend and mentor,
Amy Post. Maggie eventually wrote, I love the noise and
confusion of the city. I am like the woman who
becomes so accustomed to her husband snoring that I could
not go to sleep without it. If their mother saw
any of Leah in fourteen year old Maggie, the girl's
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talk of husbands would only have made Margaret more determined
and to move the family out of the city. So
Maggie must have been upset when David told the family
that the Hides, who owned most of the land around
David's farm, needed a new blacksmith. In December of that year,
John and Margaret packed up fourteen year old Maggie and
ten year old Kate, alongside what furniture and tools they had,
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and took a wagon out on Wayne country Road, and
in doing so, they left the Posts and their circle
of radical friends behind for now, at least. It was
already winter. There was plenty of land on David's farm
to build a second house for his parents, but there
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just wasn't time. So John and Margaret made a fateful decision.
They rented a little house from the Hides to wait
out the season. It was hardly more than a single
story box, but it would suit the family's needs for
the few cold months. John liked that it was conveniently
located near the Hides Forge and the rest of the
family appreciated the two stone is that would keep the
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house warm. There was even a basement and attic and
a buttery off the kitchen, which meant a few nooks
and crannies to keep their belongings out from underfoot while
they hunkered down under the New York's nose. But the
girls there were also new chores, hauling water and wood,
helping their parents clear the snow. Other than that, though,
there was very little else for a teenager like Maggie
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to do besides attend the local Methodist Episcopal church and
the red clabored schoolhouse in the neighborhood. Those long cold
days left her dreaming of city life, dreaming of some company.
Here's Nancy Stewart once again. The whole family had come
from Rochester. So you have this fifteen year old board
Maggie Fox. She wants to be back in Rochester. She's
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a teenager, obviously, uh and Katie who will a little
sister will follow her. And the mother is so superstitious,
and they'd live in this old farmhouse and they start
thinking about, well, who lived there before? People lived here before?
Did people die here before? Maggie's loneliness Maybe why John
and Margaret decided to add one more to their household.
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Sometime after they arrived, they brought Leah's teenage daughter to
come stay with them in Hydesville. She was only slightly
older than Maggie herself, so maybe she could keep the
girls occupied. And it was on one of those first
nights during their cousins stay in Hydesville that the Fox
family first heard the strange sounds. Creaking eaves and running
mice were all sounds they would have been familiar with,
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but the sounds they began to hear at night were
something different, something strange that they couldn't quite place. A
series of thumps in the room where the family would
lay down to sleep, almost as if someone was walking around.
Then the sounds moved into the wall. It was as
if someone was standing beside the beds where they slept,
knocking on the bed frame with an invisible hand. At
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one point, while trying to figure out where the sounds
were coming from, John stood outside the bedroom while Margaret
stood inside. Suddenly the knocks rang out again, this time
from the door between them. A few months later, Maggie
would tell a lawyer that on the first night they
heard the rapping, they all got up, lit candles and
searched the house from top to bottom. The noise continued
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while they were hunting, always coming from the same place
in the bedroom. It wasn't loud, but it was as
real as anything she'd ever heard. It shook the beds
and chairs too. In fact, when she held her hands
against the bed frame, she said, there was a feeling
of what she described as tremulous motion. But that was
only the beginning. In mid March, Maggie and Kate said
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goodbye to their cousin, who went back to her mother,
Leah in the city. Just before things exploded into action
on the night of Friday, March thirty one. Margaret said
that the family was determined to get a good night's rest,
so they decided to go to bed early. She was
anxious about the strange noises, but she set her jaw
and pulled up the covers. They were all still awake
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when the noises began. At Margaret later described it. Kate
was the first to sit up in bed, and she
decided that when the knocks came, she would snap her
fingers in response. Come they did, and right on cue,
Kate snapped her fingers then, and this is what began
to really startle Margaret, the rapping sounds replied. Maggie sat
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up too, and said out loud into the air, now
do as I do, count one, two, three, four, clapping along.
In time, the knocking sounds obeyed her, which left Maggie
frozen by fear and the girls silent. And that's when
their mother took over. She asked aloud that if the
sound was a spirit, it should knock twice. After a breath,
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two knocks rang out, with the girls silent in the
opposite bed, Margaret haltingly asked a series of questions, and
each time the knocks answered her. Through these responses, they
learned that the specter had once been a thirty one
year old man. And as more and more details followed,
I can only imagine the panic that caught in Margaret's throat.
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He'd been killed just two years before, he claimed, right
there in their house. When John stepped into the room,
he found his daughters paralyzed by fear and his wife
shouting questions to the wall. But he heard it too,
her questions, the knocking sounds answering back all of it,
and the couple knew that whatever they were witnessing it
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was beyond them, so John bundled up and set out
to fetch the nearest neighbors. When he returned, he and
the neighbor found the girls still in bed, still terrified,
and still clinging to each other. With more witnesses in
the room, Margaret asked the same series of questions and
got the same answers as before. By the end of
the night, a total of four families had been called
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to the Fox's house, including the Hides and their adult son, David,
and before long they were all communicating with the knocking sound.
Through their questions, they sketched out a picture of the
man life and his death. The listeners crowded into the
room as the spirit wrapped out that he had been
a traveling pedlar, and that he had been murdered in
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that very bedroom, his throat cut with a butcher's knife
before his body was buried beneath the dirt floor of
the cellar. The information set the group in motion. They
did with so many following waves of spiritualists would do too.
They put the spirit to the test. John, his son David,
and the Hides all went down to the cellar to
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start digging. But the first weeks of spring of eighteen
forty eight had been wet. Their shovels sank into the
damp cellar floor and water oozed up, making any attempt
at discovery impossible. For the moment. With a story of
such a gruesome crime hanging in the air, the mood
that first night must have been somber. Fear and curiosity,
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fascination and confusion, attired and dirty circle of neighbors asking
themselves if they'd really been speaking with the spirit, what
had they witnessed in the middle of that spring night.
It didn't take long for it to become clear that
something irresistible had burst forth. Word got out. Less than
two weeks later, John said that hundreds had already visited
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the house. Among them was a lawyer who rushed to
Hydesville on April eleven and started taking statements from the witnesses.
John told him that curious visitors were coming so often
that he couldn't even work at the forge, and his
family no longer had time to cook, clean and live
their daily lives. Maggie, though, must have loved it, but
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John was still at a loss regarding the eerie phenomenon.
After two weeks of deep consternation, and scrutiny. He still
couldn't make up his mind about the sounds. He desperately
wanted to view them as something natural and explainable, which
was certainly the more sane path to take. The alternative, though,
while a lot less believable, was also more frightening. Something
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supernatural was at work. Leah Fish hovered over the piano
bench her students plunked out the basics that she was
teaching them upright. Pianos were the centerpiece of every middle
class parlor, and Leah had carved out a living for
herself and her daughter by guiding the children of aspiring
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Rochester families through the foundational elements of music. It was
a respectable profession for a single mother, one of only
a few that were. On that morning in May, the
music lesson was interrupted when a student's mother rushed into
the room and pulled Leah aside. She was followed by
a man who had just come from a visit to
see Leah's parents in Hydesville. With the introduction barely made,
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he flipped open a fat notebook and started peppering her
with questions. But Leah had no idea what the man
was talking about. To answer her he introduced a set
of freshly printed pages. It was a pamphlet with the
headline Mysterious Noises, which reported on the various statements that
he had taken in Hydesville. It was the first that
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Leah had heard of the uncanny visitation. Within a few hours, though, Leah,
her daughter, and two friends were all on an overnight
package delivery boat steaming down the Erie Canal towards Hydesville.
Leah found her parents home abandoned. They had taken up
shelter at David's house nearby, and when Leah arrived, she
saw a ragged Margaret with a bible clutched to her chest.
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The family had been thrown out of the local Methodist
Episcopal church. Word had gone around that Little Kate said
the spirit's name was Mr. Splitfoot, and the story had
shocked the minister. Blasphemy, he had said, devil worship. The
whispers were flying throughout the neighborhood. The blacksmith had brought
hammer and tongs to Hydesville, they all said, But he
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had also brought something else too, his two daughters and
their bond with Satan. The church had accused the family
of witchcraft before telling them to leave and not come back.
Perhaps there wasn't much distance between Rochester and sale him.
After all, Leah and her parents put their heads together,
they all agreed that the girls should be split up.
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If the spirit was real, maybe he was attracted to
one of the sisters in particular. Guessing that it was Kate,
they decided she would be the one to leave the farm.
Leah worked quickly, taking her youngest sister back to Rochester
with her. Separating the sisters didn't stop the troubles, though
years later Leah would publish an account of what happened
when they reached the city. The girls, she said, were
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too scared to sleep alone that night, so Lea brought
them both into her bed before she could fall asleep,
though their screams of fear broke the silence. With Kate
in the bed beside them, her daughter said a cold
hand had passed over her face, and then another crept
down her back. Leah leapt for her Bible and began
to read it out loud, but as she would later recall,
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the girls continued to feel something unseen touch their bodies.
When Leah put out the light and slid the Bible
under her pillow, something pushed it back out and onto
the floor. They had no peace and no sleep until
the light of dawn started to filter through the window
and the room fell blissfully silent. But other voices would
fill that silence as the Fox family tried to adjust
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to their new life. That energetic lawyer wasted no time
distributing his pamphlet throughout the city. He had the sense
that a printed report of the rumors, full of eyewitness
interviews that he himself had recorded, would fly off the shelves,
and his instincts proved correct. His pamphlet, called Report of
the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D.
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Fox in Hydesville, poured fuel on the whispers, helping the
news spread like wildfire. But when Amy and Isaac Post
first heard the rumors about the hauntings in Hydesville, they laughed.
In a letter from that November, Isaac would tell a
relative that at first he and Amy paid no more
heed to the news than to the old Salem witch stories.
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He said. Leah would write that the Posts had and
I quote, no little amusement at our expense. In reality, though,
Amy and Isaac were torn between two opinions because their
dismissive chuckles were slowly giving way to concern. Was it possible,
They asked themselves that the girls and their mother were
suffering under some psychological delusion, But they changed their tune.
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A short while later, when Isaac and Amy dropped by
Leah's house to check in on their young friend, they
found the household in a panic. You see that piano
where Leah taught her music lessons. Well, the instrument was
closed and locked because it was the evening, and yet
it was somehow still playing music. One sound in particular too,
a low base key solemn and distinct, slowly tolling like
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a death kneel. It shot the Posts so much that
they went out and brought back another couple to observe
the scene. Close friends, fellow abolitionists, and fellow Quakers. These
were the post's most trusted advisors, just kind of people
Isaac and Amy would want helping out in such a
sort of mystery. When they arrived, they settled in to
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watch the piano, and then they listened as the note
continued to play. In response, they fell to their knees
and started to pray, their hands opening to Leah and
the girls as they said out loud, sustaining this family.
Oh God, you're chosen instruments for the benefits of mankind.
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The dead have never really been silent. From the beginning.
Spiritualists were quick to point out that miraculous visitations, spirit messages,
and bedroom apparitions were nothing new. As we discussed in
the first episode, the fox sisters weren't even the first
people in the eighteen forties to speak with the spirits
of the dead. Far from it, here's historian Kathy Gutierrez.
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Scholars do like to throw down about dating spiritualism to
the Foxes. There are always women in transits, right. That
is one of the few cross cultural truisms, and that
is clearly a way for women to find a way
to speak powerfully from the margins. What makes Nidsville important, right,
It's it's a haunting, It's a poltergeist. There were plenty
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of people like the foxes own Hydesville minister who responded
in their own time worn way with fear, and that
was just as true in the bigger community of Rochester.
As the story grew from a whispered rumor to something
more persistent, local pastors continued to declare that these were
stories of witchcraft and demonology. Critics who didn't know the
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Foxes the way Isaac and Amy did, well, they had
their own reaction. They laughed off the stories as a joke.
But it wasn't just friendship with Leah and Maggie that
made Amy willing to listen to the spirits. It was
also her Quaker beliefs. Here's historian and Browdie. Quakers in
particular had already a notion that the individual contains within
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themselves a perfect transcript of ultimate truth, so we should
look within ourselves to know the mind of God. And
that notion of what Quakers call the inner Light was
very close to what spiritualists would do when they looked
to individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits. So
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the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting, where
Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God.
That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a
spirit voice. In fact, you might even say that it
was these particular Quakers, Amy and Isaac Post who gave
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spiritualism the flavor of Quaker spirituality, because in the days
after they heard the death knell from Leah's p n
know they may have heard the echoes of their own losses,
their own grief. The friends who advised them well, they
had also have been pushed out of their Presbyterian congregation
for campaigning against slavery, and all of them had started
to spend more time with the Fox sisters. One afternoon,
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when they were all gathered at Amy and Isaac's home,
they tried to have a deeper conversation with the spirits
or spirits that were following the girls. Amy would later
recall watching her friends, a middle aged couple seated beside
Maggie in rapt attention. She said, it was as though
they stood before the judgment seats of God. They were
asking gentle questions, and the thumps and knocks were answering back.
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A new form of devotion was beginning to take shape.
Amy and Isaac were beginning to see things in the
same way as their friends. We do not get answers
without one of the sisters present, Isaac wrote in a letter.
The girls were indeed the instruments of some spiritual power.
So Isaac said about devising a system to link the
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tapping sounds to the alphabet, And that's when something even
more uncanny happened. You see. Leah had started suffering from headaches.
Isaac guessed that he could offer her some relief through
one of the common remedies he prepared every week as
a pharmacist. Amy was also known by her friends to
have a knowledge of herbal and traditional medicines. But nothing helped.
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Leah continued to groan in pain until Isaac decided to
try the new science of the mind. He decided to
magnetize her. It should come as no surprise that when
Isaac followed the directions for mesmerism, Leah fell into a
trance in the dark. She suddenly found that she was
surrounded by the spirits of the posts, dead loved ones.
Their young children appeared, a son who had died in
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eighteen forty four, and a daughter dead since eighteen thirty seven,
and then Amy's dead sister, And this sister had a
message to share with Isaac. She wanted him to know
that she was pleased by their marriage, by their love
for each other. It was right and good, and we
can only guess how much this meant to him. But
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the questions came to Amy, and Isaac wanted to believe
these messages, and wanted to believe that their children were
content and happy in the spirit world. But how and
why were these spirits speaking now? What made it possible
that in past ages spirit visitors were so rare and mysterious,
while in the spirits could hold such easy conversations, and
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the spirits didn't mind answering. In fact, in one of
the first seances, Isaac got an answer to this question
from the spirits of his dead mother. A reformation is
going on in the spirit world, she told him. These
spirits seek the company of honest men. They had messages
to deliver, and they were reaching out to reformers who
would be willing to act on their plans. Amy and
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Isaac knew just the people. They gathered a small group
of friends to meet weekly and take down the messages
from the other I, Kate, and Maggie would open themselves
up to the spirits, who would flood the room with
knocking sounds. Leah would serve as an interpreter. Over the
next two years, a host of spirits marched into Amy
and Isaac's home and spoke to them. Through the Fox Sisters.
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They heard messages from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They
heard from Quaker leaders like George Fox, and William Penn.
Benjamin Franklin even showed up too, and he filled in
another piece of the puzzle. Death hadn't stopped him from inventing,
he said, and he had discovered a reliable way for
the dead to reach out to the living. Back in
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seventeen forty eight, when he was still alive, Franklin had
sent electrical pulses through a wire across a river outside Philadelphia.
Exactly one century later, his work had bridged a deeper divide.
It had only required human instruments who were suitable to
carry their messages into the land of the living. Instruments
like Kate and Maggie Fox. These ghostly figures the founders
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of the nation and the religious tradition that gave the
Posts their place in the world. They brought a message
and a challenge. They were dead, but not gone, because
the Posts who had inherited their work still had much
to do. In a time when Amy Post, Frederick Douglas,
and so many others were working diligently to reform society
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in the material world, it somehow made sense to these
radicals that they would also be greeted by a great reformation.
Among those living after death. Frederick Douglas even published reports
about these new spiritual investigations in his paper The North Star.
Powerful news was heading out into the world. The spirits
were awake, and they had something to say. The telegraph
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reached Rochester in eighty six. Sure, it was a system
under the control of inventors and investors who had profit
in mind, but to a city shaped by the religious
revivals of the Second Great Awakening, well, it was as
much a miracle as it was a machine. In fact,
Rochester was the center of interest in building telegraph systems
all across the United States, especially for stagecoach operators who
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lost their living with the new canal opened up. Gravity
and electricity were new marvels, proved to exist but barely understood.
Communication over telegraph lines came in code, a series of
pulses that needed to be interpreted by operators who knew
the cipher and mesmerists were revealing the previously untapped potential
of the human mind. What could be better suited to
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these new horizons of science than the tapped out messages
of the spirits. Right from the start, Isaac post saw
the similarity. Soon enough, he and his fellow believers were
calling the Fox Sisters their spiritual telegraph, and they didn't
fail to connect the spirit rappings to the trans visitations
that Andrew Jackson Davis was receiving in New York City.
(32:00):
His book was on sale in Rochester bookshops. By making
it clear that the spirit of revelation hadn't limited itself
to one place. The spirits were everywhere on the move.
When the news of the mysterious noises reached Andrew Jackson Davis,
he was hardly surprised. In fact, he would later claim
that on March thirty one, when the spirits of the
(32:21):
dead Pedler revealed itself to Kate and Maggie, a voice
had spoken to him, saying, brother, the good work has begun. Behold,
a living demonstration is born. Here's Kathy Gutierres once again.
When he here's about the Fox Sisters and the so
called mysterious wrappings, he melds his world view with their
(32:47):
experiential ritual, if you will, and that was the marriage
that needed happening. He gave theology to their ritual, and
they brought ritual to his philosophy. As the post practice
that ritual new manifestations of spirit power appeared. Not only
did the circle of friends hear rapping sounds, but the
(33:09):
spirits grew powerful enough to start making the tables move,
rocking and rotating as the visitors asked questions. The spirits,
you see, wanted revolution, and they got it too. That July,
Amy Post and Frederick Douglas joined their friends and allies
like Elizabeth Caddy Stanton and Lucretia Mott at the Seneca
Falls Convention, where they made a landmark declaration of the civil, political,
(33:33):
and religious rights of women. They were just as concerned
with their rights in their religious spheres as in the
civic and political spheres. They cared about whether they could
vote in their churches as much as whether they could
vote for the school board or the Senate. That's an
(33:56):
browdie once again. The very table they right the famous
Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence that
gives the first real statement of women's rights in North America.
That table, which is now in the Smithsonian, had been
rocked by spirits at the convention. Frederick Douglas was the
(34:21):
only black attendee and the only black signer of the
Declaration of Sentiments. He published a report on that convention
in The North Star, probably declaring that winning equal rights
for women would be simple justice. It was news that
drew more and more new neighbors to Rochester who wanted
to serve the cause, including a young woman named Harriet Jacobs,
who had escaped from slavery in North Carolina. Here's Molly
(34:44):
McGarry in Harry Jacob's moved to Rochester to help run
the anti Slavery Reading Room, which was located above the
offices where Frederick Douglas published The North Star and at
that time and probably in that place, Jacobs also be
gan a lifelong friendship with Amy Post. In fact, Harriet
(35:05):
had recently left New York City when word reached her
there that mercenaries were on the way to recapture her.
When she arrived in Rochester, she was welcomed into Amy
and Isaac's home, and she joined them around the table
both for meals and for spiritualist seances. At Amy's urging,
Harriet began working on her memoir. When it was published,
(35:25):
her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would
be a landmark in American literature and a boost to
the abolitionist cause. But the Rochester circle also shared the
conviction that the living and the dead were working together
to launch a new age of spiritual reform. The Spirits
agreed with them. If they were going to really make
a change in the world, though, they needed to address
(35:46):
the public. It started small. Isaac and Amy helped to
organize sittings with the Fox Sisters, filtering out the unsavory characters,
of course, but also keeping the setting harmonious and the
attendants limited. At demand kept growing. More and more seekers
were making their way into Rochester, all while other religious
experiments were falling flat and communities along the canal were folding,
(36:11):
looking for guidance, for connection and for the next step
to take in their lives. People knew to the city
were open to something that could be seen and heard,
something that could be witnessed. After a year of closed sittings,
the Spirits spoke up. They were ready for a wider
audience in a private seance just for the Posts. The
(36:31):
Spirits spoke through Leah, telling Isaac to rent Rochester's Corinthian
Hall for a whole three nights for the first time ever.
They were going to throw the doors open wide to
a paying crowd. It was time for the Spirits to
take the stage. They had no trouble getting the word out.
(36:55):
When November four arrived, over four hundred people crowded into
Rochester's Corinthian Hall. They'd come to hear for themselves whether
the mysterious noises were a divine revelation or just a
back country ruse. The first person to take the stage
was Eliab Caprin, another excommunicated Quaker as well as a
friend of the Posts, a utopian socialist, and a fellow
(37:16):
member of the anti slavery movement. It was his task
to describe in full what had happened around the Fox
Sisters from Hydesville to the Post's home, and to prepare
the way for Amy and the girls. Amy Post waited
in the wings while he spoke. It was a time
when women still couldn't speak in public without first being
introduced by a man, and I can imagine the words
(37:37):
of the Declaration of Sentiments echoing in her mind. Compelled
to submit to law in the formation of which she
had no voice, Amy was doing everything she could to
change that. After Eliob finished speaking, Amy Post stepped to
the front. She was no stranger to crowds in that city,
whether hospitable or hostile, and Moments later, Leah Fish joined
(38:01):
her with her sisters Kate and Maggie Fox in tow
Then they took their seats around Eliob and began their demonstration.
Here's Nancy Stewart, the press is there, one of Horace
Greeley's reporters there from New York. There are other reporters
there from the Rochester papers an elsewhere upstate New York.
And there's a committee appointed to examine the girls, particularly
(38:24):
Leiah and Maggie at this point, to find out they're
making these sons with their body. The audience themselves selected
their own skeptics for the committee. They included doctors, lawyers,
and even a judge who had attended the meeting. The
panels would observe private sciences in the afternoons and report
back to the audience in the evening. One group committee
(38:47):
of ladies was chosen to take the Fox sisters into
a room where the girls were stripped and subjected to
minute examination, like a jury of seventeenth century Salem women
looking for witch marks. Even as the girls were bundled
and bound in various uncomfortable positions, the knocking sounds continued
to fall on the floor all around them each night.
(39:09):
The panels announced that they were and I quote, unable
to discover any fraud or trick by which the girls
produced the raps. In fact, they began to witness even
more unsettling things. Once, when the committee had gathered around
the table with the girls, it started to turn beneath
their hands, just as Isaac and Amy had witnessed before.
(39:29):
One of the men, thinking that it was a simple trick,
asked everyone to leave the table and stand against the walls.
Then he asked the spirits to turn the table again.
At his request, it began slowly to spin, as if
it were being moved by unseen hands. Naturally, it all
made for quite a show. Reports were splashed across the
(39:50):
regional papers. Elliot Capron began begging Margaret Fox to let
him take her daughters on the road and share their
revelation with the world. When the spirits were asked, they
knocked their approval. For years, the news from Rochester and
the Frontier Farms had reached New York with the latest
on radical organizing and new arguments for women's equality in
(40:12):
black freedom. Now, though the political and intellectual reputation of
Rochester rested in the hands of three young women and
a new phenomenon that demanded attention at the crossroads of science, spirituality,
political philosophy, and not least of all, entertaining spectacle. If
they decided to travel with Capron purely because he had
(40:34):
a flair for the dramatic, they didn't choose wrong. Under
his guidance, the Foxes rented rooms at A. S. Barnum's
Hotel in New York City. Then he launched the marketing blitz,
peppering New York's streets with advertisements for public demonstrations, which
would be held three times a day, and the price
for admission just one dollar. Aidan Blue rejoiced. He welcomed
(41:00):
the arrival of spiritualism to his utopian community, Hopedale. In fact,
it's not so much that spiritualism became a movement, but
rather that it came into one. The first groups to
get word of the revelations were the Quaker communities in
Long Island, Nantucket, Philadelphia, and across New York State. Elliot
Capron's Auburn Circle, for instance, had long been home to
(41:21):
an interest in mesmerism and magnetic healing. In the years
before those spiritual instruments recruited him as a stage manager.
The other early adopters across the US were other utopian communities,
North Star subscribers, and others who had already had connections
to Rochester through speaking tours, newspapers, and abolitionist visions. But
(41:41):
that was only the beginning. News of the spirit contact
in Rochester spread along the channels between like minded communities
of reformers, disaffected ministers, and religious innovators in the United States,
channels that have first been opened by Andrew Jackson. Davis's
transvisions of divine harmony were quickly spread west, reaching towns
(42:02):
in Indiana, Ohio, and beyond from his home in Massachusetts.
In Hopeedale, Aidan Balu tracked this progress. He was still
writing those sermons and essays that rallied others to his cause.
Any and every subject that fell in front of the
radical x universalist received a lengthy treatment, and in time
spiritualism was no different. It offered his community a fresh wind,
(42:26):
a new source of truth, and a beacon fire around
which the hungry souls of his flock could gather. Among
them were a couple named David and lo Denzis Scott,
who had been charmed by Aiden's vision of living out
a practical Christianity. They were in Hopedale when the community
started to experiment with trance sittings and attempts to contact
the spirits of the dead, and strange things started to
(42:48):
happen when the believers gathered together at the same time.
Though Aiden came to David with an idea, Hopeedale, you see,
was full. In fact, they were running out of land
for all the new peace bolt trickling in. So the
two men drew up a plan to launch a new
branch of Hopeedale farther to the west in the state
of Wisconsin. It was rich with oak groves and well
(43:09):
watered meadows, so they had heard, and David and Lodenza,
along with their children in tow, would serve as Hopeedale's
advance party. When winter finally cleared in early eighteen fifty one,
they boarded a steamer called the Globe and headed toward
the town of Waterloo to put the plan in motion.
That plan, though it was about to change. You see.
(43:31):
David and Lidenza's children were along for the ride, including
their youngest daughter, Cora, and her life was in many
ways like those of the Fox girls. A ten year
old who had been carried from town to farm and
then back to town as her parents had tried to
find their place in the American landscape. But in the
fall of eighteen fifty one, a visitation would strike her
(43:52):
like lightning, an unexpected power that would transform her into
something new. Going forward, she would be a guiding voice
and a central figure in the world of spiritualism, and
would be for the rest of the century. That's it
for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this
(44:15):
short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store
for next week. Next time on Unobscured, suddenly the table
started to turn beneath their hands. Some of the guests
were startled and ducked under the table to see if
anyone was pushing it around. Even though the table was
(44:36):
large and heavy, it rotated smoothly until the group lifted
their hands off of it, and then it stopped. William Hayden,
convinced it was a trick, gripped the table with his
hands and tried to turn it using his own strength,
but it wouldn't budge until he let go. That is, then,
even though no one was touching it anymore, the table
(44:57):
resumed spinning, this time faster than before. William tried to
grab the table to make a stop, but when that
didn't work, he climbed underneath it and wrapped his arms
around the table legs. It dragged him in a slow
circle across the floor. Unobscured was created by me Aaron
(45:30):
Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh
Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing
for this season is all the work of my right
hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed
the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians,
source material and links to our other shows over at
History unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Yeah.
(46:03):
Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcomed, unobscured a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.
It was six blocks from Amy's house to the publishing office.
In the morning, she and Isaac would even walk together.
His pharmacy was only one block farther. I like to
(00:21):
picture them walking side by side, Isaac's neatly trim beard
worn in what today might be called an Amish style,
and with a winter as cold as the one in
February of eighty eight, Amy no doubt would have worn
a heavy rap when they reached Buffalo Street, today's main
street in Rochester. We might imagine Amy holding a gloved
(00:42):
hand up to wave. As Isaac continued on to open
the pharmacy, where he filled prescriptions from Rochester's doctors and
sold oils, paints, dyes, salves, and various instruments. Amy would
have stepped into the publishing office for the North Star.
There was plenty of work to do. Through the doors,
Amy passed the office where Frederick Douglas and his business
(01:04):
partner William c Nell were preparing the print the next issue.
The summer before, Douglas had traveled west through Pennsylvania as
far as Ohio, where he had been mocked attacked and
run off stages by white mobs. But across the Midwest
he had also been welcomed by black communities, and Douglas
knew he needed to continue supporting them. Rather than retreat
(01:26):
to Boston, Douglas moved to Rochester, the point between the
coast and the frontier where the message could fly out
to a nation. When Amy stepped into the printing office,
she could have asked Douglas how his family was doing.
His wife, Anna had just arrived in Rochester with their
three boys. Isaac had even helped them move into their
small apartment downtown, where they would live until they found
(01:47):
a suitable house. After a chat with Frederick, Amy most
likely climbed the stairs to the second floor and unlocked
the new reading Room, an office for the Western New
York Antislavery Society. It was part library, part consignment shop,
where Amy worked with friends to plan meetings, supply local families,
and raise funds for anti slavery projects. Because she supported
(02:10):
Frederick's cause at every turn, and he supported hers as well.
You see, while Amy was working with the Anti Slavery Society,
she was also on the cusp of something new. She
and her friends like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth County Stanton
were about to put out a call for a convention
to discuss equal rights for women. Frederick Douglas would immediately
(02:32):
print their announcement in The North Star. From the beginning,
the papers front page carried the declaration that right is
of no sex, truth is of no color. God is
the father of us all. The North Star embodied the
fusion of movements at the center of Rochester life, and
(02:52):
Frederick Douglas and Amy Post both knew that they were
working at an amazing time. Thanks in no small part
to their efforts, the year would leave its mark on history.
Here's historian Molly McGarry. In the year alone, revolutions ignited
across the world, from France to Brazil, but also from
(03:13):
Sicily to the Austrian Empire, and revolutions swept the globe
during that year. Also in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
published the Communist Manifesto, opening with the line a specter
is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. And in that
same year, two young girls heard communicates from a very
different sort of specter, giving rise to great different revolution.
(03:39):
Had been a year full of surprises for many people,
but there was still one more on its way. This
is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey. It started as a small
(04:27):
frontier village. In fact, the majority of its first settlers
were black when it was founded by Nathaniel Rochester and
the twelve people he kept in slavery. In fact, less
than two decades before Amy and Isaac arrived, Rochester had
been home to just over one thousand people, surrounded by
fertile land. Though Rochester was a bread basket, grain mills
(04:48):
popped up in clouds of fresh flower, and by eighteen
thirty four, when it was officially chartered as a city,
Rochester had become home to thirteen thousand people. The city
was booming, and that was due in large part to
the Erie Canal. Here's author and journalist Nancy Ruben Stewart
Upstate New York in particular, it was a very prosperous
(05:10):
area because the every canal had opened, and so all
the produce and all the furs and all kinds of
other things that were coming from the north could now
come down through the canal into the Hudson and down
to New York City. The farmland in the region made
it ideal for communities like the Quakers who wanted a
place where they could live on their own. So as
Rochester shipped out new tons of flower, the radical ideas
(05:34):
growing in that same soil traveled with them. Here's Molly
McGarry once again. Douglas's North Star Circle in Rochester was
a key center in a global movement for freedom, and
that newspaper is crucially important. Douglass organizing was important, but
there are also figures like Harriet Jacobs, who went on
to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(05:56):
who landed in Rochester. At the same time, while Isaac
and Amy worked with Frederick Douglas at home in Rochester,
Isaac's brother served as the North Stars reporter on Long Island.
Through growing networks of friends, family, and correspondence, the cities
around the Northeastern United States were becoming more and more connected.
(06:17):
Of course, boomtowns don't make for the most stable homes.
When communities along the Erie Canal swelled with the ranks
of new residents moving inland, it made life around Rochester
difficult for families who wanted to establish farms and make
a life for themselves. People like John and his wife Margaret.
When they put down stakes in the eighteen twenties, John
fell in with a crowd of other men who arrived
(06:39):
hoping to strike it rich, and he picked up their
habits too, liquor cards, gambling on horse races. What little
money John and Margaret brought with them vanished into the night,
and soon enough John along with it. Now abandoned, Margaret
had retreated to Rochester, where her sister offered her a
room to stay in. She did her best to raise
(07:01):
four children without their father, including the oldest Leah, and
a son named David, but it was a hard life.
Margaret's heart broke as Leah was entrapped by an older
man when she was just fourteen. He only stayed long
enough for Leah to take his last name Fish and
give birth to their daughter, before he tossed Leah aside
and traveled farther west. Eventually, John returned, arriving in town,
(07:25):
and he had a new outlook on life. A revival
preacher had swept through the countryside, and it brought the
man to his knees. He rejoined his wife and children
in Rochester, determined to rekindle their dream of farming their
own plot of land. David and Leah stayed behind in
Rochester while John and Maggie crossed Lake Ontario into Canada.
(07:46):
This time, John was determined not to get sidetracked, and
they started that new farm, but they started a new
family as well. Margaret gave birth to two more daughters
in the eighteen thirties, who they named Maggie and Kate.
But the fire of John his new religious devotion couldn't
thaw that cold earth. After scraping out what they could
from the Canadian soil and missing their older children, they
(08:08):
returned to Rochester's embrace in eighteen forty four. That's when
they found themselves welcomed by Isaac and Amy Post, who
hosted them on Sophia Street. The families became fast friends.
Maggie and Kate also got to know their older sister, Leah,
and Maggie bonded with Amy Post. The older Quaker woman
working so hard to bring a new world into being,
(08:29):
somehow found time in the midst of organizing to offer
attention to the younger daughters of an unstable family. For
a while, John was able to support the family as
a blacksmith, but the lure of working the land continued
to call, and by the mid eighteen forties, John and
Margaret's son, David, was a man with a family of
his own. After growing up in the city with Margaret,
(08:51):
he'd inherited a farm from an uncle in Arcadia, New York,
and eventually moved there with his wife and three children.
A host of relatives live within only a few miles.
A new center of gravity for the family began to form,
and it drew John and Margaret out into the countryside
more and more often. It did, not, however, have the
(09:12):
same appeal for young Maggie and Kate. During one visit
in eighteen forty seven, John and Margaret sat down with
David to discuss life in the country. Despite all their setbacks,
their eyes still lit up when they thought about living
in the rolling pastures. From her chair in the corner,
Maggie saw how much this dream meant to her father,
but for her it only despired creeping dread those rolling hills.
(09:36):
To her, they were crushingly dull. To her friend and mentor,
Amy Post. Maggie eventually wrote, I love the noise and
confusion of the city. I am like the woman who
becomes so accustomed to her husband snoring that I could
not go to sleep without it. If their mother saw
any of Leah in fourteen year old Maggie, the girl's
(09:57):
talk of husbands would only have made Margaret more determined
and to move the family out of the city. So
Maggie must have been upset when David told the family
that the Hides, who owned most of the land around
David's farm, needed a new blacksmith. In December of that year,
John and Margaret packed up fourteen year old Maggie and
ten year old Kate, alongside what furniture and tools they had,
(10:18):
and took a wagon out on Wayne country Road, and
in doing so, they left the Posts and their circle
of radical friends behind for now, at least. It was
already winter. There was plenty of land on David's farm
to build a second house for his parents, but there
(10:40):
just wasn't time. So John and Margaret made a fateful decision.
They rented a little house from the Hides to wait
out the season. It was hardly more than a single
story box, but it would suit the family's needs for
the few cold months. John liked that it was conveniently
located near the Hides Forge and the rest of the
family appreciated the two stone is that would keep the
(11:00):
house warm. There was even a basement and attic and
a buttery off the kitchen, which meant a few nooks
and crannies to keep their belongings out from underfoot while
they hunkered down under the New York's nose. But the
girls there were also new chores, hauling water and wood,
helping their parents clear the snow. Other than that, though,
there was very little else for a teenager like Maggie
(11:22):
to do besides attend the local Methodist Episcopal church and
the red clabored schoolhouse in the neighborhood. Those long cold
days left her dreaming of city life, dreaming of some company.
Here's Nancy Stewart once again. The whole family had come
from Rochester. So you have this fifteen year old board
Maggie Fox. She wants to be back in Rochester. She's
(11:43):
a teenager, obviously, uh and Katie who will a little
sister will follow her. And the mother is so superstitious,
and they'd live in this old farmhouse and they start
thinking about, well, who lived there before? People lived here before?
Did people die here before? Maggie's loneliness Maybe why John
and Margaret decided to add one more to their household.
(12:04):
Sometime after they arrived, they brought Leah's teenage daughter to
come stay with them in Hydesville. She was only slightly
older than Maggie herself, so maybe she could keep the
girls occupied. And it was on one of those first
nights during their cousins stay in Hydesville that the Fox
family first heard the strange sounds. Creaking eaves and running
mice were all sounds they would have been familiar with,
(12:26):
but the sounds they began to hear at night were
something different, something strange that they couldn't quite place. A
series of thumps in the room where the family would
lay down to sleep, almost as if someone was walking around.
Then the sounds moved into the wall. It was as
if someone was standing beside the beds where they slept,
knocking on the bed frame with an invisible hand. At
(12:49):
one point, while trying to figure out where the sounds
were coming from, John stood outside the bedroom while Margaret
stood inside. Suddenly the knocks rang out again, this time
from the door between them. A few months later, Maggie
would tell a lawyer that on the first night they
heard the rapping, they all got up, lit candles and
searched the house from top to bottom. The noise continued
(13:11):
while they were hunting, always coming from the same place
in the bedroom. It wasn't loud, but it was as
real as anything she'd ever heard. It shook the beds
and chairs too. In fact, when she held her hands
against the bed frame, she said, there was a feeling
of what she described as tremulous motion. But that was
only the beginning. In mid March, Maggie and Kate said
(13:33):
goodbye to their cousin, who went back to her mother,
Leah in the city. Just before things exploded into action
on the night of Friday, March thirty one. Margaret said
that the family was determined to get a good night's rest,
so they decided to go to bed early. She was
anxious about the strange noises, but she set her jaw
and pulled up the covers. They were all still awake
(13:57):
when the noises began. At Margaret later described it. Kate
was the first to sit up in bed, and she
decided that when the knocks came, she would snap her
fingers in response. Come they did, and right on cue,
Kate snapped her fingers then, and this is what began
to really startle Margaret, the rapping sounds replied. Maggie sat
(14:20):
up too, and said out loud into the air, now
do as I do, count one, two, three, four, clapping along.
In time, the knocking sounds obeyed her, which left Maggie
frozen by fear and the girls silent. And that's when
their mother took over. She asked aloud that if the
sound was a spirit, it should knock twice. After a breath,
(14:44):
two knocks rang out, with the girls silent in the
opposite bed, Margaret haltingly asked a series of questions, and
each time the knocks answered her. Through these responses, they
learned that the specter had once been a thirty one
year old man. And as more and more details followed,
I can only imagine the panic that caught in Margaret's throat.
(15:05):
He'd been killed just two years before, he claimed, right
there in their house. When John stepped into the room,
he found his daughters paralyzed by fear and his wife
shouting questions to the wall. But he heard it too,
her questions, the knocking sounds answering back all of it,
and the couple knew that whatever they were witnessing it
(15:26):
was beyond them, so John bundled up and set out
to fetch the nearest neighbors. When he returned, he and
the neighbor found the girls still in bed, still terrified,
and still clinging to each other. With more witnesses in
the room, Margaret asked the same series of questions and
got the same answers as before. By the end of
the night, a total of four families had been called
(15:48):
to the Fox's house, including the Hides and their adult son, David,
and before long they were all communicating with the knocking sound.
Through their questions, they sketched out a picture of the
man life and his death. The listeners crowded into the
room as the spirit wrapped out that he had been
a traveling pedlar, and that he had been murdered in
(16:08):
that very bedroom, his throat cut with a butcher's knife
before his body was buried beneath the dirt floor of
the cellar. The information set the group in motion. They
did with so many following waves of spiritualists would do too.
They put the spirit to the test. John, his son David,
and the Hides all went down to the cellar to
(16:28):
start digging. But the first weeks of spring of eighteen
forty eight had been wet. Their shovels sank into the
damp cellar floor and water oozed up, making any attempt
at discovery impossible. For the moment. With a story of
such a gruesome crime hanging in the air, the mood
that first night must have been somber. Fear and curiosity,
(16:49):
fascination and confusion, attired and dirty circle of neighbors asking
themselves if they'd really been speaking with the spirit, what
had they witnessed in the middle of that spring night.
It didn't take long for it to become clear that
something irresistible had burst forth. Word got out. Less than
two weeks later, John said that hundreds had already visited
(17:12):
the house. Among them was a lawyer who rushed to
Hydesville on April eleven and started taking statements from the witnesses.
John told him that curious visitors were coming so often
that he couldn't even work at the forge, and his
family no longer had time to cook, clean and live
their daily lives. Maggie, though, must have loved it, but
(17:32):
John was still at a loss regarding the eerie phenomenon.
After two weeks of deep consternation, and scrutiny. He still
couldn't make up his mind about the sounds. He desperately
wanted to view them as something natural and explainable, which
was certainly the more sane path to take. The alternative, though,
while a lot less believable, was also more frightening. Something
(17:57):
supernatural was at work. Leah Fish hovered over the piano
bench her students plunked out the basics that she was
teaching them upright. Pianos were the centerpiece of every middle
class parlor, and Leah had carved out a living for
herself and her daughter by guiding the children of aspiring
(18:18):
Rochester families through the foundational elements of music. It was
a respectable profession for a single mother, one of only
a few that were. On that morning in May, the
music lesson was interrupted when a student's mother rushed into
the room and pulled Leah aside. She was followed by
a man who had just come from a visit to
see Leah's parents in Hydesville. With the introduction barely made,
(18:42):
he flipped open a fat notebook and started peppering her
with questions. But Leah had no idea what the man
was talking about. To answer her he introduced a set
of freshly printed pages. It was a pamphlet with the
headline Mysterious Noises, which reported on the various statements that
he had taken in Hydesville. It was the first that
(19:02):
Leah had heard of the uncanny visitation. Within a few hours, though, Leah,
her daughter, and two friends were all on an overnight
package delivery boat steaming down the Erie Canal towards Hydesville.
Leah found her parents home abandoned. They had taken up
shelter at David's house nearby, and when Leah arrived, she
saw a ragged Margaret with a bible clutched to her chest.
(19:25):
The family had been thrown out of the local Methodist
Episcopal church. Word had gone around that Little Kate said
the spirit's name was Mr. Splitfoot, and the story had
shocked the minister. Blasphemy, he had said, devil worship. The
whispers were flying throughout the neighborhood. The blacksmith had brought
hammer and tongs to Hydesville, they all said, But he
(19:46):
had also brought something else too, his two daughters and
their bond with Satan. The church had accused the family
of witchcraft before telling them to leave and not come back.
Perhaps there wasn't much distance between Rochester and sale him.
After all, Leah and her parents put their heads together,
they all agreed that the girls should be split up.
(20:07):
If the spirit was real, maybe he was attracted to
one of the sisters in particular. Guessing that it was Kate,
they decided she would be the one to leave the farm.
Leah worked quickly, taking her youngest sister back to Rochester
with her. Separating the sisters didn't stop the troubles, though
years later Leah would publish an account of what happened
when they reached the city. The girls, she said, were
(20:30):
too scared to sleep alone that night, so Lea brought
them both into her bed before she could fall asleep,
though their screams of fear broke the silence. With Kate
in the bed beside them, her daughter said a cold
hand had passed over her face, and then another crept
down her back. Leah leapt for her Bible and began
to read it out loud, but as she would later recall,
(20:51):
the girls continued to feel something unseen touch their bodies.
When Leah put out the light and slid the Bible
under her pillow, something pushed it back out and onto
the floor. They had no peace and no sleep until
the light of dawn started to filter through the window
and the room fell blissfully silent. But other voices would
fill that silence as the Fox family tried to adjust
(21:14):
to their new life. That energetic lawyer wasted no time
distributing his pamphlet throughout the city. He had the sense
that a printed report of the rumors, full of eyewitness
interviews that he himself had recorded, would fly off the shelves,
and his instincts proved correct. His pamphlet, called Report of
the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D.
(21:35):
Fox in Hydesville, poured fuel on the whispers, helping the
news spread like wildfire. But when Amy and Isaac Post
first heard the rumors about the hauntings in Hydesville, they laughed.
In a letter from that November, Isaac would tell a
relative that at first he and Amy paid no more
heed to the news than to the old Salem witch stories.
(21:55):
He said. Leah would write that the Posts had and
I quote, no little amusement at our expense. In reality, though,
Amy and Isaac were torn between two opinions because their
dismissive chuckles were slowly giving way to concern. Was it possible,
They asked themselves that the girls and their mother were
suffering under some psychological delusion, But they changed their tune.
(22:20):
A short while later, when Isaac and Amy dropped by
Leah's house to check in on their young friend, they
found the household in a panic. You see that piano
where Leah taught her music lessons. Well, the instrument was
closed and locked because it was the evening, and yet
it was somehow still playing music. One sound in particular too,
a low base key solemn and distinct, slowly tolling like
(22:45):
a death kneel. It shot the Posts so much that
they went out and brought back another couple to observe
the scene. Close friends, fellow abolitionists, and fellow Quakers. These
were the post's most trusted advisors, just kind of people
Isaac and Amy would want helping out in such a
sort of mystery. When they arrived, they settled in to
(23:06):
watch the piano, and then they listened as the note
continued to play. In response, they fell to their knees
and started to pray, their hands opening to Leah and
the girls as they said out loud, sustaining this family.
Oh God, you're chosen instruments for the benefits of mankind.
(23:30):
The dead have never really been silent. From the beginning.
Spiritualists were quick to point out that miraculous visitations, spirit messages,
and bedroom apparitions were nothing new. As we discussed in
the first episode, the fox sisters weren't even the first
people in the eighteen forties to speak with the spirits
of the dead. Far from it, here's historian Kathy Gutierrez.
(23:55):
Scholars do like to throw down about dating spiritualism to
the Foxes. There are always women in transits, right. That
is one of the few cross cultural truisms, and that
is clearly a way for women to find a way
to speak powerfully from the margins. What makes Nidsville important, right,
It's it's a haunting, It's a poltergeist. There were plenty
(24:18):
of people like the foxes own Hydesville minister who responded
in their own time worn way with fear, and that
was just as true in the bigger community of Rochester.
As the story grew from a whispered rumor to something
more persistent, local pastors continued to declare that these were
stories of witchcraft and demonology. Critics who didn't know the
(24:40):
Foxes the way Isaac and Amy did, well, they had
their own reaction. They laughed off the stories as a joke.
But it wasn't just friendship with Leah and Maggie that
made Amy willing to listen to the spirits. It was
also her Quaker beliefs. Here's historian and Browdie. Quakers in
particular had already a notion that the individual contains within
(25:07):
themselves a perfect transcript of ultimate truth, so we should
look within ourselves to know the mind of God. And
that notion of what Quakers call the inner Light was
very close to what spiritualists would do when they looked
to individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits. So
(25:30):
the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting, where
Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God.
That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a
spirit voice. In fact, you might even say that it
was these particular Quakers, Amy and Isaac Post who gave
(25:53):
spiritualism the flavor of Quaker spirituality, because in the days
after they heard the death knell from Leah's p n
know they may have heard the echoes of their own losses,
their own grief. The friends who advised them well, they
had also have been pushed out of their Presbyterian congregation
for campaigning against slavery, and all of them had started
to spend more time with the Fox sisters. One afternoon,
(26:17):
when they were all gathered at Amy and Isaac's home,
they tried to have a deeper conversation with the spirits
or spirits that were following the girls. Amy would later
recall watching her friends, a middle aged couple seated beside
Maggie in rapt attention. She said, it was as though
they stood before the judgment seats of God. They were
asking gentle questions, and the thumps and knocks were answering back.
(26:41):
A new form of devotion was beginning to take shape.
Amy and Isaac were beginning to see things in the
same way as their friends. We do not get answers
without one of the sisters present, Isaac wrote in a letter.
The girls were indeed the instruments of some spiritual power.
So Isaac said about devising a system to link the
(27:02):
tapping sounds to the alphabet, And that's when something even
more uncanny happened. You see. Leah had started suffering from headaches.
Isaac guessed that he could offer her some relief through
one of the common remedies he prepared every week as
a pharmacist. Amy was also known by her friends to
have a knowledge of herbal and traditional medicines. But nothing helped.
(27:24):
Leah continued to groan in pain until Isaac decided to
try the new science of the mind. He decided to
magnetize her. It should come as no surprise that when
Isaac followed the directions for mesmerism, Leah fell into a
trance in the dark. She suddenly found that she was
surrounded by the spirits of the posts, dead loved ones.
Their young children appeared, a son who had died in
(27:47):
eighteen forty four, and a daughter dead since eighteen thirty seven,
and then Amy's dead sister, And this sister had a
message to share with Isaac. She wanted him to know
that she was pleased by their marriage, by their love
for each other. It was right and good, and we
can only guess how much this meant to him. But
(28:07):
the questions came to Amy, and Isaac wanted to believe
these messages, and wanted to believe that their children were
content and happy in the spirit world. But how and
why were these spirits speaking now? What made it possible
that in past ages spirit visitors were so rare and mysterious,
while in the spirits could hold such easy conversations, and
(28:30):
the spirits didn't mind answering. In fact, in one of
the first seances, Isaac got an answer to this question
from the spirits of his dead mother. A reformation is
going on in the spirit world, she told him. These
spirits seek the company of honest men. They had messages
to deliver, and they were reaching out to reformers who
would be willing to act on their plans. Amy and
(28:53):
Isaac knew just the people. They gathered a small group
of friends to meet weekly and take down the messages
from the other I, Kate, and Maggie would open themselves
up to the spirits, who would flood the room with
knocking sounds. Leah would serve as an interpreter. Over the
next two years, a host of spirits marched into Amy
and Isaac's home and spoke to them. Through the Fox Sisters.
(29:16):
They heard messages from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They
heard from Quaker leaders like George Fox, and William Penn.
Benjamin Franklin even showed up too, and he filled in
another piece of the puzzle. Death hadn't stopped him from inventing,
he said, and he had discovered a reliable way for
the dead to reach out to the living. Back in
(29:38):
seventeen forty eight, when he was still alive, Franklin had
sent electrical pulses through a wire across a river outside Philadelphia.
Exactly one century later, his work had bridged a deeper divide.
It had only required human instruments who were suitable to
carry their messages into the land of the living. Instruments
like Kate and Maggie Fox. These ghostly figures the founders
(30:02):
of the nation and the religious tradition that gave the
Posts their place in the world. They brought a message
and a challenge. They were dead, but not gone, because
the Posts who had inherited their work still had much
to do. In a time when Amy Post, Frederick Douglas,
and so many others were working diligently to reform society
(30:22):
in the material world, it somehow made sense to these
radicals that they would also be greeted by a great reformation.
Among those living after death. Frederick Douglas even published reports
about these new spiritual investigations in his paper The North Star.
Powerful news was heading out into the world. The spirits
were awake, and they had something to say. The telegraph
(30:52):
reached Rochester in eighty six. Sure, it was a system
under the control of inventors and investors who had profit
in mind, but to a city shaped by the religious
revivals of the Second Great Awakening, well, it was as
much a miracle as it was a machine. In fact,
Rochester was the center of interest in building telegraph systems
all across the United States, especially for stagecoach operators who
(31:15):
lost their living with the new canal opened up. Gravity
and electricity were new marvels, proved to exist but barely understood.
Communication over telegraph lines came in code, a series of
pulses that needed to be interpreted by operators who knew
the cipher and mesmerists were revealing the previously untapped potential
of the human mind. What could be better suited to
(31:38):
these new horizons of science than the tapped out messages
of the spirits. Right from the start, Isaac post saw
the similarity. Soon enough, he and his fellow believers were
calling the Fox Sisters their spiritual telegraph, and they didn't
fail to connect the spirit rappings to the trans visitations
that Andrew Jackson Davis was receiving in New York City.
(32:00):
His book was on sale in Rochester bookshops. By making
it clear that the spirit of revelation hadn't limited itself
to one place. The spirits were everywhere on the move.
When the news of the mysterious noises reached Andrew Jackson Davis,
he was hardly surprised. In fact, he would later claim
that on March thirty one, when the spirits of the
(32:21):
dead Pedler revealed itself to Kate and Maggie, a voice
had spoken to him, saying, brother, the good work has begun. Behold,
a living demonstration is born. Here's Kathy Gutierres once again.
When he here's about the Fox Sisters and the so
called mysterious wrappings, he melds his world view with their
(32:47):
experiential ritual, if you will, and that was the marriage
that needed happening. He gave theology to their ritual, and
they brought ritual to his philosophy. As the post practice
that ritual new manifestations of spirit power appeared. Not only
did the circle of friends hear rapping sounds, but the
(33:09):
spirits grew powerful enough to start making the tables move,
rocking and rotating as the visitors asked questions. The spirits,
you see, wanted revolution, and they got it too. That July,
Amy Post and Frederick Douglas joined their friends and allies
like Elizabeth Caddy Stanton and Lucretia Mott at the Seneca
Falls Convention, where they made a landmark declaration of the civil, political,
(33:33):
and religious rights of women. They were just as concerned
with their rights in their religious spheres as in the
civic and political spheres. They cared about whether they could
vote in their churches as much as whether they could
vote for the school board or the Senate. That's an
(33:56):
browdie once again. The very table they right the famous
Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence that
gives the first real statement of women's rights in North America.
That table, which is now in the Smithsonian, had been
rocked by spirits at the convention. Frederick Douglas was the
(34:21):
only black attendee and the only black signer of the
Declaration of Sentiments. He published a report on that convention
in The North Star, probably declaring that winning equal rights
for women would be simple justice. It was news that
drew more and more new neighbors to Rochester who wanted
to serve the cause, including a young woman named Harriet Jacobs,
who had escaped from slavery in North Carolina. Here's Molly
(34:44):
McGarry in Harry Jacob's moved to Rochester to help run
the anti Slavery Reading Room, which was located above the
offices where Frederick Douglas published The North Star and at
that time and probably in that place, Jacobs also be
gan a lifelong friendship with Amy Post. In fact, Harriet
(35:05):
had recently left New York City when word reached her
there that mercenaries were on the way to recapture her.
When she arrived in Rochester, she was welcomed into Amy
and Isaac's home, and she joined them around the table
both for meals and for spiritualist seances. At Amy's urging,
Harriet began working on her memoir. When it was published,
(35:25):
her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would
be a landmark in American literature and a boost to
the abolitionist cause. But the Rochester circle also shared the
conviction that the living and the dead were working together
to launch a new age of spiritual reform. The Spirits
agreed with them. If they were going to really make
a change in the world, though, they needed to address
(35:46):
the public. It started small. Isaac and Amy helped to
organize sittings with the Fox Sisters, filtering out the unsavory characters,
of course, but also keeping the setting harmonious and the
attendants limited. At demand kept growing. More and more seekers
were making their way into Rochester, all while other religious
experiments were falling flat and communities along the canal were folding,
(36:11):
looking for guidance, for connection and for the next step
to take in their lives. People knew to the city
were open to something that could be seen and heard,
something that could be witnessed. After a year of closed sittings,
the Spirits spoke up. They were ready for a wider
audience in a private seance just for the Posts. The
(36:31):
Spirits spoke through Leah, telling Isaac to rent Rochester's Corinthian
Hall for a whole three nights for the first time ever.
They were going to throw the doors open wide to
a paying crowd. It was time for the Spirits to
take the stage. They had no trouble getting the word out.
(36:55):
When November four arrived, over four hundred people crowded into
Rochester's Corinthian Hall. They'd come to hear for themselves whether
the mysterious noises were a divine revelation or just a
back country ruse. The first person to take the stage
was Eliab Caprin, another excommunicated Quaker as well as a
friend of the Posts, a utopian socialist, and a fellow
(37:16):
member of the anti slavery movement. It was his task
to describe in full what had happened around the Fox
Sisters from Hydesville to the Post's home, and to prepare
the way for Amy and the girls. Amy Post waited
in the wings while he spoke. It was a time
when women still couldn't speak in public without first being
introduced by a man, and I can imagine the words
(37:37):
of the Declaration of Sentiments echoing in her mind. Compelled
to submit to law in the formation of which she
had no voice, Amy was doing everything she could to
change that. After Eliob finished speaking, Amy Post stepped to
the front. She was no stranger to crowds in that city,
whether hospitable or hostile, and Moments later, Leah Fish joined
(38:01):
her with her sisters Kate and Maggie Fox in tow
Then they took their seats around Eliob and began their demonstration.
Here's Nancy Stewart, the press is there, one of Horace
Greeley's reporters there from New York. There are other reporters
there from the Rochester papers an elsewhere upstate New York.
And there's a committee appointed to examine the girls, particularly
(38:24):
Leiah and Maggie at this point, to find out they're
making these sons with their body. The audience themselves selected
their own skeptics for the committee. They included doctors, lawyers,
and even a judge who had attended the meeting. The
panels would observe private sciences in the afternoons and report
back to the audience in the evening. One group committee
(38:47):
of ladies was chosen to take the Fox sisters into
a room where the girls were stripped and subjected to
minute examination, like a jury of seventeenth century Salem women
looking for witch marks. Even as the girls were bundled
and bound in various uncomfortable positions, the knocking sounds continued
to fall on the floor all around them each night.
(39:09):
The panels announced that they were and I quote, unable
to discover any fraud or trick by which the girls
produced the raps. In fact, they began to witness even
more unsettling things. Once, when the committee had gathered around
the table with the girls, it started to turn beneath
their hands, just as Isaac and Amy had witnessed before.
(39:29):
One of the men, thinking that it was a simple trick,
asked everyone to leave the table and stand against the walls.
Then he asked the spirits to turn the table again.
At his request, it began slowly to spin, as if
it were being moved by unseen hands. Naturally, it all
made for quite a show. Reports were splashed across the
(39:50):
regional papers. Elliot Capron began begging Margaret Fox to let
him take her daughters on the road and share their
revelation with the world. When the spirits were asked, they
knocked their approval. For years, the news from Rochester and
the Frontier Farms had reached New York with the latest
on radical organizing and new arguments for women's equality in
(40:12):
black freedom. Now, though the political and intellectual reputation of
Rochester rested in the hands of three young women and
a new phenomenon that demanded attention at the crossroads of science, spirituality,
political philosophy, and not least of all, entertaining spectacle. If
they decided to travel with Capron purely because he had
(40:34):
a flair for the dramatic, they didn't choose wrong. Under
his guidance, the Foxes rented rooms at A. S. Barnum's
Hotel in New York City. Then he launched the marketing blitz,
peppering New York's streets with advertisements for public demonstrations, which
would be held three times a day, and the price
for admission just one dollar. Aidan Blue rejoiced. He welcomed
(41:00):
the arrival of spiritualism to his utopian community, Hopedale. In fact,
it's not so much that spiritualism became a movement, but
rather that it came into one. The first groups to
get word of the revelations were the Quaker communities in
Long Island, Nantucket, Philadelphia, and across New York State. Elliot
Capron's Auburn Circle, for instance, had long been home to
(41:21):
an interest in mesmerism and magnetic healing. In the years
before those spiritual instruments recruited him as a stage manager.
The other early adopters across the US were other utopian communities,
North Star subscribers, and others who had already had connections
to Rochester through speaking tours, newspapers, and abolitionist visions. But
(41:41):
that was only the beginning. News of the spirit contact
in Rochester spread along the channels between like minded communities
of reformers, disaffected ministers, and religious innovators in the United States,
channels that have first been opened by Andrew Jackson. Davis's
transvisions of divine harmony were quickly spread west, reaching towns
(42:02):
in Indiana, Ohio, and beyond from his home in Massachusetts.
In Hopeedale, Aidan Balu tracked this progress. He was still
writing those sermons and essays that rallied others to his cause.
Any and every subject that fell in front of the
radical x universalist received a lengthy treatment, and in time
spiritualism was no different. It offered his community a fresh wind,
(42:26):
a new source of truth, and a beacon fire around
which the hungry souls of his flock could gather. Among
them were a couple named David and lo Denzis Scott,
who had been charmed by Aiden's vision of living out
a practical Christianity. They were in Hopedale when the community
started to experiment with trance sittings and attempts to contact
the spirits of the dead, and strange things started to
(42:48):
happen when the believers gathered together at the same time.
Though Aiden came to David with an idea, Hopeedale, you see,
was full. In fact, they were running out of land
for all the new peace bolt trickling in. So the
two men drew up a plan to launch a new
branch of Hopeedale farther to the west in the state
of Wisconsin. It was rich with oak groves and well
(43:09):
watered meadows, so they had heard, and David and Lodenza,
along with their children in tow, would serve as Hopeedale's
advance party. When winter finally cleared in early eighteen fifty one,
they boarded a steamer called the Globe and headed toward
the town of Waterloo to put the plan in motion.
That plan, though it was about to change. You see.
(43:31):
David and Lidenza's children were along for the ride, including
their youngest daughter, Cora, and her life was in many
ways like those of the Fox girls. A ten year
old who had been carried from town to farm and
then back to town as her parents had tried to
find their place in the American landscape. But in the
fall of eighteen fifty one, a visitation would strike her
(43:52):
like lightning, an unexpected power that would transform her into
something new. Going forward, she would be a guiding voice
and a central figure in the world of spiritualism, and
would be for the rest of the century. That's it
for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this
(44:15):
short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store
for next week. Next time on Unobscured, suddenly the table
started to turn beneath their hands. Some of the guests
were startled and ducked under the table to see if
anyone was pushing it around. Even though the table was
(44:36):
large and heavy, it rotated smoothly until the group lifted
their hands off of it, and then it stopped. William Hayden,
convinced it was a trick, gripped the table with his
hands and tried to turn it using his own strength,
but it wouldn't budge until he let go. That is, then,
even though no one was touching it anymore, the table
(44:57):
resumed spinning, this time faster than before. William tried to
grab the table to make a stop, but when that
didn't work, he climbed underneath it and wrapped his arms
around the table legs. It dragged him in a slow
circle across the floor. Unobscured was created by me Aaron
(45:30):
Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh
Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing
for this season is all the work of my right
hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed
the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians,
source material and links to our other shows over at
History unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Yeah.
(46:03):
Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Unobscured News
Hosts And Creators
Aaron Mahnke
Matt Frederick
Alex Williams
Carl Nellis
Chad Lawson
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