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April 25, 2022 • 49 mins

American Spiritualism is a frequently invoked, rarely understood religion that hinges on speaking with spirit through mediums. In our first episode, Jamie Loftus puts your little baby brain at rest -- it's not a cult. But what is it?

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Speaker 1 (00:07):
When I get on the bus that goes from Tallahassee
to Orlando, Florida, I don't think I've been inside a
church in eight years. And just to put your mind
at ease from the jump, this isn't a show about
my journey to religion. But I am taking the bus
to Orlando on a late January morning this year, headed

(00:27):
for one of the only spiritualist camps in the American South,
And in my head, I'm calling it Ghost Church. Oh,
name of the show already getting spicy. The coach bus
I'm on costs a little too much money, but it's
only four hours and it's pretty quiet, and no one
sits next to me, so it's fine. I don't think

(00:50):
anyone else on this bus is going to Ghost Church,
strictly based on the fact that the bus driver himself
praise before we get on the bus. He said, is
this so if you couldn't hear, he's saying, Amen, ride

(01:11):
the bus, Mr Gregory, ride the bus, And so we do.
We ride the bus all the way to the tourist
capital of the world, along with a camp of mystics
about a half hour off. The camp um heading to
is called Cassadega. It's just outside of Orlando and is
a spiritualist camp, a place where mediums commune with the
dead and have developed their own community since the late

(01:33):
eighteen hundreds. The people around them find it to be
the devil's work or at best a little weird. The
tourists find it intriguing, and I want to know who
ends up in a place like this and why. I
was brought up between many religions and we kind of
believed in this stuff, but not completely. It's definitely not

(01:56):
the kind of stuff that Mr Gregory would approve of.
The religion and called Spiritualism, occasionally referred to as American Spiritualism,
has been around in the official sense beginning in eighteen
forty eight, although it's central concept that the dead don't
die has been around for centuries. Their newer idea is

(02:16):
this that wanting to communicate with the dead is a
good thing. So in this show, I'm taking you on
two different trips. The first is how spiritualism got to
where it is now as a religion that came up
with the Shakers and the Mormons, but never really caught
on in a meaningful way due to repeated scandal or
a religion that was begun completely by accident by two

(02:39):
preteen sisters, as either divine intervention or, as many, including
the sisters themselves, have suggested, a prank that turned into
one of the only ways that an unmarried, lower middle
class woman could make a name for herself. The second
journey is the one I took to Cassadega this year,
where I got a chance to meet people in person,

(03:00):
interview them, get to know what it's like to be
a medium, and figure out what the funk is going
on there and how in the short history of American
spiritualism so much has changed, And of course I get
to talk to the ghost. What I will disclaim at
the beginning of all of this is that I don't
not believe in the concept of spirit. It's called spirit

(03:23):
in the West, or chi or sock t in the East.
I'm open to it. So this podcast isn't an endorsement,
but I do find it important in my work and
in my life in general to be open to things
and take them seriously and report what I'm seeing and
noticing and feeling as I go through that process. So
there's a lot of ship I don't like about spiritualism,

(03:43):
but there's a lot of ship that I do, and
most of it I want to just present to you
to draw your own conclusions. I don't particularly care what
you believe, and I won't force or harp anything that
I believe on you or don't. This is a show
about an endangered American legion, how it came to exist,
who's drawn to it, and whether there's really any chance

(04:05):
that will stick around. If you don't like it, you
can take it up with the ghosts. Oh no, do
I believe in ghosts? The show is starting good. That
closes o for reasons I don't completely understand myself. All

(05:13):
roads have been pulling me to Florida for months, and
when one is pulled to Florida, it's natural to want
to pull back. There's this feeling of are you fucking
kidding me? That's not very nice? Have I not suffered
enough in this life? But the thing is, the places
that are a common punchline in the way that Florida
is are usually pretty interesting places with pretty fucked up people,

(05:37):
and not for nothing, almost always have free popcorn in
their bars. I'm from a place like that too. Unfortunately,
for Death and for Florida, it was in just a
funked up enough headspace to consider going. So let's get
started with some ground rules. What is spiritualism and what
isn't spiritualism. I've been to Cassadego once before with my

(06:01):
mom in It's not something I would talk about much
where I live in Los Angeles, and in part because
it's such a Southern California cliche, and in part because
it is the best way to start a conversation with
someone extremely frustrating. I try not to be self conscious
about it. You know, it's my It's my personal belief
that as long as you don't literally run your life

(06:22):
by tarot cards and crystals, they're really no more harmful
than a hobby like journaling or video games, or my
favorite toxic trait that you're not allowed to say anything
about having a lot of guitar pedals. I like a
level with you. I've spent way too much money about
once a year getting my cards read, sometimes by someone
who I felt was really attuned to me, and more

(06:44):
often a failed actor aggressively pivoting into their new method
role of being fine with it. There's even years I've
gone twice. If I'm going through a breakup, you know,
I'll go twice. There's something comforting about it about imagining
your life in an order. Oh no, here's the tower
cards sudden of people. But okay, here's the Star card
that's renewal and and rest. You're right, I should go

(07:07):
across the street to the place where they serve eggs
like that. It's what the card said. During my last breakup,
I found going to online videos of cards read by
these upbeat young women who are cheering you on was
really comforting. They kind of sound like this, this is
Aso Taro. And in today's pick a card reading, we
are going to be looking at how your person is

(07:28):
currently feeling about you. And so by your person, I
mean ideally the person that you are thinking of. You
might find another person comes through, or you might find
I'm describing your feelings. Okay, fine, that's maybe maybe it's
a little embarrassing, but you need it sometimes to cope,
you know. But none of this is spiritualism. I want
to be clear on that the general woo woo of

(07:51):
it all intersects with spiritualism, but I'm not talking about
something that broad because the idea has sort of spiraled
out in the last several decades. It's to the point
where the phrase I'm more spiritual than religious is kind
of a line that you hear from lapsed Catholics, but
spiritualism itself is actually very specific. This series will address

(08:12):
some of the cultures and ideas they pull from, going
back hundreds of thousands of years, the lore behind seances,
the appropriation of indigenous culture. The camp that I'm going
to considers itself uniquely American. Whether you consider that a
pejorative or not is up to you. I well, I'm
trying to put my opinions in this list, but obviously

(08:34):
it is. My name is Jamie Loftus, and I love
a freaky little American corner to wedge myself into. I
grew up between a lot of different religions. I was
baptized Catholic in a way that felt pretty mandatory, being
raised by two lapsed Catholics in New England. And well,
actually I've been sorting through my archives recently. This is

(08:56):
what it sounds like to be baptized in New England.
I'm glad to you, becker Father. Okay, who is this, Jamie, Jamie,
that's right, come right in, Please come right in, reach out,
all right, and this is Jamie Bethany. Jamie Bethany, I

(09:20):
baptize you in the name of the Father, and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But by the
time I was forming sentient memories, we had already switched.
My dad left the church in the weekly sense when
his dad passed away, or transitioned to spirit in the
terms of spiritualism of ghost Church. So my mom and

(09:43):
I sort of hop scotched over to a Protestant Congregational
church that my cousins went to, and I liked it there.
It was one of the only churches in town where
queer people were welcome, where there was a gay priest.
It was fun, everyone was nice. I asked my mom
as she liked our church more than the one she
grew up in once and she sort of sighed and

(10:04):
was like, at least they have the lights on here
Jesus Christ, which I think is the second most two
thousands eras scathing takedown of the Catholic church in Massachusetts,
second only to Spotlight. But after about a decade of that,
we were bored, and my preteen frustration with the concept
of a confirmation class happened to line up with my

(10:26):
mom's midlife crisis where she got a tattoo and more relevant,
wanted to start exploring the spiritualist ideas that her childhood
best friend, my Annie Karen, had been exploring for years
with her husband, my uncle Dennis. I love my Auntie
and uncle. They had a house with a backyard that
just kind of smelled really good, and they had tarot

(10:49):
cards and runs and this huge cabinet that was carved
to look like a wizard. And these ideas were just
so different from anything that I'd ever heard about religion
or faith. And so once a year for my birthday,
I would get to go see my uncle Dennis and
get a reading. Sometimes he'd use runs, sometimes he'd use cards,
and I would sit quietly, like you do with relatives

(11:11):
you only see once a year, and I would just
listen to what each card meant and what that had
to do with what the fifth grade was going to
be like. One time we went to a pagan church
that they recommended that was outside. There were these rituals
that were led by women who talked to trees. And
maybe it was the harsh way that your eyes have
to kind of adjust from a completely dark church where

(11:33):
God is mad at you to standing outside where the
trees are giving you advice about middle school. But it
was a little overwhelming and we only went once and
after that we quit church altogether. But around this time,
in the mid two thousands, something was going on in
the US. There was this sudden increased interest in the
concept called spirit, the idea that we didn't die permanently

(11:57):
like atheist thought, but we also didn't go to heaven
or hell or were born into sin like the Catholic
Church said. The alternative was that after you die, you
sort of stay local. You watched the people you cared
about in life, you guide the living. There's a possibility
that you could even live again, take some time off,

(12:18):
and then live again and again and again. There were
suddenly these celebrity psychics, big names like James Van Prague
that it materialized in the late nineties, followed by your
TV personalities like Sylvia Brown and for me, John Edward
and crossing Over brought a medium from Long Island, not
to be confused with the Long Island medium into our

(12:39):
living room via this guy in a tight sweater and
glasses telling women who looked like my mom that the
dead aren't dead and that it's not scary. In pop culture,
the idea of spirit was kind of all over the place.
There were these more benevolent spirits. You know, you've got
Devin Sawa showing up to your dance at the end
of cal for with this vaguely Christian unfinished business, or

(13:05):
you've got the Catholic interpretation of spirit just absolute scumspewing
possession movies where your head turns around three hundred sixty
degrees and you yell at a poor Catholic priest, what
did they ever do? Well? Uh, you can google that.
In the religions I grew up around, the dead would
be judged and God was piste off. They tend to

(13:26):
view children as being born into sin and compel them
to spend their whole lives pulling themselves out of it.
But spiritualism takes the opposite tack. According to them, children
are born into infinite potential and love, and his potential
is only helped or harmed through their own actions in life.

(13:51):
So what is Ghost Church? That's what I wanted to
learn going into this series. What I knew is that
it's a religion, and it's a small all religion and
one that combines more elements of Christianity than I realized.
I was surprised to hear that, lacking a seminal text
of their own, spiritualists list the Bible ever heard of

(14:12):
her as their text. But most importantly, spiritualists don't believe
in heaven or hell. According to them, the dead remain
among us, rejoining the energetic flow of the universe that
surround us, and spiritualist mediums and healers are able to
see clairvoyance here Clare audience feel Clare Touch. I love

(14:35):
that one. It sounds like just like a cartoon character,
Claire touch and receive mental messages from spirit. They do
believe that Jesus existed, but not that he was a god. Instead,
he's repeatedly referenced as one of history's great spiritual healers
and mediums, referencing biblical canon like his returning to Earth

(14:58):
in spirit, is, ability to communicate with angels and ghosts,
and the very concept of the Holy Spirit as proof
that their religion is a part of the Christian expanded universe.
You may not be surprised to hear that a lot
of Christians are really not thrilled to hear this, but

(15:18):
as it evolved, American spiritualism went beyond diet Christianity minus
heaven and help plus ghosts. Nowadays, spiritualists come to the
religion from all kinds of religious backgrounds. Since the nineteen sixties,
Eastern religions have influenced modern spiritualists and slowly introduced reincarnation concepts,

(15:40):
with at least one medium working at Cassadaga now who
converted from Hinduism. There's also the New Age movement that
layers onto spiritualism very well, and that's an important thing.
The vast majority of spiritualists came from other religions, ones
that they were either traumatized by or didn't incorporate the
way they saw the afterlife, or didn't believe in mediumship.

(16:04):
I'll be talking to a number of mediums and community
members who range from lifelong former Atheists to former hardcore
Southern Baptists and what that transition looked like for them.
Spiritualism doesn't tend to be multigenerational. It's just as individual
and experience as the individual spirits that come through after

(16:25):
they're fascinatingly Christian feelings Sunday services. And yet they also
insist that there is a scientific basis for the religion
when I'm still trying to wrap my head around. This
is a quote from the National Spiritualist Association of Churches
Spiritualist manual quote. Spiritualism is a science because it investigates, analyzes,

(16:50):
and classifies facts and manifestations demonstrated from the spirit side
of life. Unquote. Ghost church is a holdover from the
industrial illusition in nearly every way. It has one foot
in classical religious ideas, the other in aspirational sort of
half proven scientific ideas. There's something about it that's optimistic

(17:12):
and a little half baked all at once. Okay, so
what isn't ghost church? Because when you bring up spirits
and you bring up a small community in Florida, the
first reaction you're going to get from most people is, well,
that sounds like a cult. And stay with me here.
It's not a cult, or at least not any more

(17:33):
of a cult than any other religion. And honestly, if
spiritualism was a cult, they'd probably be doing better numbers
in terms of membership and income. Spiritualism is a fringe religion,
and I hear you cult cult, It's not a cult.
I hear you again saying not a cult. Means cult,
and usually you'll be right. But Spiritualism is not a cult,

(17:55):
although it's formal numbers are small cult sized, one could
say small enough in fact, that the manual I was
just reading from admits on one of its first pages
that there aren't a lot of people involved, and that
there's really no concerted effort going on to change that.
It says, quote, this manual is designed to be a

(18:16):
handbook for ministers, speakers, and students. It is hoped that
spiritualists generally will find it helpful in presenting the teachings
of spiritualism, and that in sections of our country where
there are few spiritualists and no mediums or speakers, it
will be an aid to willing workers in holding regular
meetings or other services. Unquote, this rhetoric is just too

(18:40):
chill to be a cult, but you don't need to
take my word for it. In her Cultish, Amanda Montell
breaks down the mechanics of language and classical recruiting techniques
of cult like atmospheres, religious or otherwise, ranging in severity
from really intense peloton instructors and multi level marketing schemes
all away to Jonestown and Heaven's Gate and she narrows

(19:03):
down these classic cult red flags, including things like quote
unquote truth telling, ceremonies to give the leaders as much
information about each individual as possible, complete immersion in the cult,
no clear time when rituals have begun or ended, behavioral
control think sleep deprivation, diet changes, schedule, dictation, the whole

(19:27):
nine yards. A charismatic central leader, usually a man, and
usually attracting young white women to the fold, where spiritualism doesn't.
There's a lot of white ladies, but there's no young
people really at all. Doomsday rhetoric when a leader's power
starts to slip, withholding information by minimizing or discouraging access
to non cult information, threats or forced isolation if one

(19:51):
tries to leave, and all of these emotions, stopping techniques
to suppress any doubt, and whether the ghost aspect of
all of this freaks you out or not. None of
these red flags really apply to Spiritualism at all, so
verdict not occult. There's a world in which I could

(20:20):
see them becoming a cult. I mean, after all, we're
kind of in this cultural moment where interest in communicating
with the dead, with mysticism, with pick a card, tero
readings on YouTube are at an all time high, and
the spiritualists who commune all over the country, mostly in
lily Dale, New York, and Cassadega, Florida, tick literally all

(20:40):
of these boxes. Spiritualism even blends a combination of religions
and buzzwords that should mean it's thriving. They borrow Eastern
principles like chakras, indigenous ideas like spirit guides on this
bedrock of diet, Christianity, and a belief in Jesus. Granted,
they don't use many of these beliefs particularly well, but

(21:02):
their batting average isn't any worse than a Gwyneth Paltrow type.
But as it is, Spiritualism has no interest in being
a cult, and they don't really have the runway to
make it that way anyways. A lot of the mediums
in Cassadega have day jobs. Most of them live in
the community but regularly leave to see outside family and friends,
go shopping, see movies, move about the world as regular people.

(21:25):
They don't have much of an alternative. There's no food
store in Cassadega, and the only restaurant there is open
four and a half days out of the week. Something
that becomes very problematic during my time. They're mediums make
their own schedules, and for regular attendees of the Spiritualist temple,
the parameters of when they are on and off ritual

(21:46):
wise are pretty clear. They go to weekly services, they
go to individual readings or scheduled classes. Members of the
church tend to join and leave the religion pretty often.
At one spiritualist church in Massachusetts, a vice president of
a dwindling congregation was the first to comfortably admit that
the people who come to our church tend to float

(22:08):
in during a difficult time in their lives, often when
they are a loved one, are struggling with illness mental
or physical, or while they're struggling with a loss, and
then they tend to leave, sometimes never heard from by
the church again. And so you got kind of the
opposite of a cult. You get a religion that appears
to be on a very slow decline. Those most involved

(22:31):
in spiritualism are the mediums themselves. In Cassadega, this means
taking part in a three to four year education process
that can't be done remotely. It means establishing yourself in
the community consistently for at least a year before qualifying
to live on campgrounds. It means demonstrating healing or mediumship
capabilities in public under supervision. They don't make it easy

(22:56):
to have this job, and so the majority of mediums
are either local to Florida with some free time after
work or around their families, or, as I would soon learn,
had left their previous lives to become mediums. A job
that here doesn't result much in the way of financial
stability or cultural acceptance. So why do people do it?

(23:18):
It's a question that I have had a somewhat difficult
time getting answered because for a small community, Cassadega is
very protective of their members from the press, meaning me.
There's this pr screening team that seems to consist of
basically everybody in town, all of whom must approve of
your presence before they will talk to you. I contacted

(23:43):
the camp several weeks in advance, and by the time
I was getting on a plane to Florida, they had
yet to decide whether they wanted me to come at
all or not. I was sitting at the airport eating
a very sad looking donut the week before Valentine's Day
to indicate yeah, things are going great, and my phone rings,
and for the first but not the last time, I

(24:05):
have this nervous response to see an area code from Florida.
On the other line is Pastor Deb, a woman from Jacksonville, Florida,
who serves as in this order, a pastor in Cassadega,
the head of public relations for the Cassadega Spiritualist Camp,
and an I T specialist in Jacksonville who looks after

(24:25):
her elderly mother. We've been emailing back and forth for
around two weeks. Hi, I'm Jamie. I'm going to be
visiting the camp in early February. Would it be possible
to speak with someone? The answer was somewhat ambiguous. Can
I call you? Um? Sure, and so Deb calls me
twenty minutes before I get on a plane. She has

(24:46):
a thick but kind Southern accent, one that comes from Louisville, Kentucky,
where she grew up, not Florida. Mediums in Cassadega are
kind of like struggling character actors in Los Angeles, Like
barely any of them are from their most of them
moved with a desire to completely turn their lives around,
and they all kind of give the area this like
weird reputation. Deb is sweet but firm when she gives

(25:10):
me the rundown. Getting approval at Cassadega is not going
to be easy, which is an amazing thing to hear
when you're literally about to get on a plane. I
put my phone on mute and deep throughout the rest
of the brownie batter doughnut while she gives me the
standard rundown of who she is and where she is.
She has past her deb She has been in Cassadega

(25:31):
since two thousand and six, she became a certified medium
in and she's currently vetting three different press requests. So
she apologizes for the delay and getting back to me.
Who am I? What am I doing? Comedian? Interesting? How
does that factor into things? The camp, she says, is
run by volunteers. They have a library, but it's only

(25:52):
open two hours a week. The camp doesn't want to
give anyone ongoing support with their little spiritualism project, thank
you very much. And there's a whole public relations committee
that doesn't meet until four days after I leave. So
there's absolutely no way that I will be approved to
talk to anybody or experience anything on the record at

(26:14):
this time. Essentially, I'm fucked. So Pastor deb gently sets
some ground rules with me. Of course, she can't prevent
me from visiting, but the mediums at the camp want
to get a better feeling of who I am before
they approve my presence whole sale. She encourages me to
experience Cassadega, meditate in Seneca Park, get a few readings

(26:37):
of the record. Of course, walk the historical path through
Colby Alderman Park, where the state of Florida recently installed
historical landmarks to tell the partial story of American spiritualism.
Take their historical tour, meet tourists in the nighttime spiritual
Encounter or photography tour real Thing, see Colby Lake at sunrise.

(27:00):
She's very passionate about her religion and tells me in
this amazing soft voice, continuity of life, connecting with spirit
is very important to us. Did I know that this
weekend was their Gala day fundraiser and that there would
be mediums speaking on everything from ghosts to self esteem
to a lighthearted recap of the Chinese New Year? I

(27:23):
assure her I do know this, and then I'll be
watching on zoom while a shuttle bus takes me from
a talk in Tallahassee to the Super Eight in Orlando.
I'll be staying at the night before visiting her church.
She seems gently optimistic about me. It doesn't sound like
there's a lot of journalists looking to report on the
camp in a positive sense with an open mind, But

(27:44):
her recommendations are all made to me very much at
arm's length, generously. Her message was this, have a nice trip.
We're watching you. Good luck. I don't wish the experience
of feeling that your character is being quietly judged by
a group of psychics, healers and mediums who buy their

(28:04):
very job description, believe that they know whether your intentions
are good or not, and based on my initial reception,
it's unclear if Spirit is sending them the message that
I am. Pastor. Dub doesn't think of this as psychic surveillance,
though she assures me that the experience will be a
very relaxing one. She says, this will give you an

(28:25):
opportunity to just be well sure being under light surveillance
is still being technically, we do that all the time.
I want to circle back to one of the important
distinctions that keeps American spiritualism from being a cult that
lack of charismatic central leader, again ranging in harm from

(28:46):
the terrifying the Jim Joneses is the Keith rn aias
the Donald Trump's or in the non death cult sense,
your peloton instructor millionaires, you'r Gwyneth Paltrow's, your Bezos is
your Elon Musks. There is no real central figure in
modern spiritualism, which is unusual. Most major religions have central

(29:07):
figures and founders, and the crop of religion that Spiritualism
came up with. You've got Joseph Smith of the Mormons,
Elder White of the Seventh day Adventists, and Lee of
the Shakers, and on and on into today. Most religions
still have a top brass figure, whether that's the literal
pulpe of the Catholic Church, the chairman of the board

(29:27):
in scientology, the Dalai Lama. The list goes on. Spiritualism
has its founders, but no current leader, and that is
something that is very deliberately done. There's a lot of
figures that had a hand in making American spiritualism the
media frenzy turned religious fad, turned public joke turned low
key ghost church. It is now, but I'm going to

(29:48):
start with its two most central figures, Maggie and Kate Fox.
Here's how spiritualists acknowledge these figures. According to the National
spirit List Association of Churches, Spiritualist manual quote, spiritualism has
no beginning. Infinite intelligence is eternal, without beginning or end unquote.

(30:13):
But then they say this quote. We are gathered here
to celebrate a most important event that happened in a
humble cottage in the obscure village of Hydesville in the
state of New York, on the thirty one of March
in the year eighty eight, an event that was the
beginning of the now worldwide religious and scientific movement known
as modern spiritualism. It was on this day and in

(30:37):
this home, as you well know, that intelligent communication was
established between the young Fox sisters, who were mediums and
who were then living in this cottage with their parents,
and the discarnate spirit of a man who some years
before was murdered there unquote. And here's the real story
with less generalization and more citations. Huge shout out to

(31:00):
Barbara Weissberg here, author of the wonderful book Talking to
the Dead, The definitive Biography of Maggie and Kate Fox.
So let's get into it. There's a ton of information
available on the Fox Sisters, which is already a massive
feat for women of their time, or rather girls of
their time, because the founders of spiritualism were both very

(31:22):
young when the religion took off, because they weren't trying
to start the religion that would grow, consume, and destroy
their lives. The more showy, more money driven Spiritualism of
the eighteen hundreds once claimed over seven hundred thousand publicly
associated members. For reference, there's around four thousand in the

(31:44):
u S today. Prominent members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Mary Todd Lincoln, Horace Greeley, and those who interacted ranged
from Henry Butler Yeats to Frederick Douglas to Harriet Beecher
Stowe to Harry Houdini. The Fox Sisters, who all of
these cultural figures would have known and many knew personally,

(32:05):
aren't brought up by New American spirituals very often, and
it's with good reason. By many they're remembered as irredeemable frauds.
The original debunked celebrity mediums. Maggie Fox full name Margaretta
was born in October of eighteen thirty three, and Kate

(32:25):
Fox full named Catherine in March of eighteen thirty seven,
so fourteen and a few days shy of eleven on
March thirty one, eighty eight. They were the youngest of
six born in Canada and recently having moved back to
the US. In the small community of Hydesville, New York,
a suburb of Rochester that no longer even exists, they

(32:48):
were staying in temporary housing while their father, John and
older brother David worked on constructing a permanent home nearby.
Maggie and Kate were the product of a second act
in their parents marriage. Their four older siblings, Leah, Maria, Elizabeth,
and David were all adults with families of their own.

(33:09):
Their parents, John David Fox and the sweet and eccentric
Margaret Smith then Fox, had had their first four children
between eighteen thirteen and eighteen twenty, later separating when John's drinking, gambling,
and philandering pushed Margaret to the edge and she left him.
She moved back in with her sister and continued to
raise the kids, telling them about their grandmother's seeing power.

(33:33):
Maggie and Kaith's Grandma was said to have slept walk
often in the middle of the night to stock spirits
she saw in a graveyard nearby, and was sometimes followed
by her husband. While Margaret raised the kids, John began
the work of trying to get his family back. The
kids all moved away as they aged into adulthood one
by one, but their father remained in touch and eventually

(33:56):
returned as a sober, disciplined, and enthusiastic Methodist, essentially an
intense Bible Christian with an emphasis on reformation and sobriety.
His effort at self improvement worked and Margaret took him back.
She had originally really regretted getting married as a teenager,
but she was impressed with the work that John had

(34:17):
done on himself, and the two moved across the border
from upstate New York to a small farm in Canada,
where they had two last children, Maggie and Kate. The
farm failed and the family moved back, leaving one of
their children, now married, Elizabeth Fox, behind in Canada. Interestingly enough,
Elizabeth also claimed that she had second sight and is

(34:39):
said to have correctly predicted that she would die at
only seven. Although in the eighteen forties how big of
a swing is that really? Anyways, Back in New York,
the kids were thrilled to be living near their older siblings,
their brother David, who had a wife and kids, their
sister Maria, who had married a cousin because eighteen forties,

(35:00):
and their oldest sister Leah, a single mom in her
mid thirties with a teenage daughter named Lizzie living nearby
in Rochester. It's kind of funny how siblings can have
the same parents but also have completely different experiences of them.
Leah was over a decade and a half older than
Maggie and Kate and had grown up with a single

(35:21):
parent and an absent alcoholic father, while Maggie and Kate
had grown up in a stable, sober, nuclear unit. But
their parents are the same people, just in very different
phases of their lives, and this same decade and a
half was marked by slow but steady social progress in
the historically progressive Rochester area. Leah had gotten married and

(35:42):
pregnant at fourteen, the age Maggie was in eighteen forty eight,
but the interceding years had made it socially acceptable for
kids to be kids longer, with more of an emphasis
on education and less of an emphasis on getting married young.
The Fox family was close and would remain us for
a long time, but it was complicated. They were lower

(36:04):
middle class. They were able to survive, but really only
check to check. And Maggie and Kate had this level
of education, stability, curiosity, and confidence that their older siblings
just hadn't had access to. So Maggie and Kate are
at the house on March one. The weather is bad,

(36:25):
the kids are bored, and one night their mom has
woken up by the girls crying out that there was
a spirit in the room. She believed what her daughter
had said about second sight, but she understandably treated her
youngest kids with some skepticism. After all, it was the
night before April Fool's Day. But the girls wouldn't let up,
saying that there was a spirit in the room with

(36:47):
them who had been banging on their walls and floorboards
in these sharp wraps. The raps were disorganized and inconsistent,
but scary, and Maggie and Kate said that this spirit
had replied to them when asked questions in this Morse
code like way. It didn't take long for Margaret to
become convinced that they were telling the truth, and John

(37:09):
quickly was too. I always think this part is funny
because it's a it's a risk to call your neighbors
over so soon after moving to a new town about
there being a ghost upstairs. But the Foxes, they're just
built different. They don't care. They're going to call you.
So they call their neighbor Mary over to get her
opinion on whether there is or is not a ghost

(37:31):
haunting their teen girls. The neighbors were, to put it, kindly,
not into it. Maybe this all sounds a little weird
and old timing, you know, sure, people in the eighteen

(37:51):
forties in a rural area believing in ghosts. But we're
talking about a very specific moment in history here. We're
in up state New York, three months and mere miles
from where the Seneca Falls convention is going to take place,
becoming the seminal moment in starting the first wave of
feminism in the US with all of the white feminist

(38:11):
problems that came along with it. In this year, slavery
was still legal in the American South, and many in
Rochester were advocating for abolition, and Frederick Douglas would start
his paper The North Star. It was a time where
science was becoming a more normalized part of life, and
inventions like sewing machines and ice cream, and ideas that

(38:34):
had less staying power and objective truth behind it, like
the skull measuring eugenic scam that is, phrenology, and the
concept of electromagnetic fluid, a new theory about how spirit
could exist within your own blood and create all of
the matter that surrounds you. And at this same time,

(38:54):
there was a lot of religious changes going on. New
religions like Shakerrism, Mormon as a and Christian science became
popular during a second Great Religious Reformation in the US.
The concept of spirit communication had been in the popular
consciousness here and there, particularly through the idea of Mesmerism,
a concept developed by a man named Anton Mesmer that

(39:17):
leaned into the electromagnetic fluid theory and life after death,
and was popular enough during the eighteen forties that it's
likely that the Fox Sisters would have encountered this idea.
It was this dual time of progress and extreme anxiety
in the Rochester area. Religious enthusiasts were worried that science
would undercut faith, and scientists worried that religion would resist

(39:40):
empirical evidence over traditional ideas and values, and spirit communication
became this rare opportunity to marry these two. It wasn't
quite a religion, and it had the possibility to intrigue
the scientific community as they were trying to figure out
exactly what was going on in place. Is like the foxhouse,

(40:02):
So the neighbor Mary comes over and is like, guys,
Maggie and Kate are bored. It's a rainy day, and
they're fucking with you. But upon getting there, she is
genuinely struck by how scared the girls seem. When she
comes upstairs, Mary humors them and is a little freaked
out when she does hear the raps herself. She asks

(40:23):
the spirit if it knows how old she is, and
it wraps out the correct answer, thirty three knocks in
a row. She later told a local journalist quote, By
this time I became much interested unquote. Redfield invited her
husband Charles over to investigate as well, and focused on

(40:43):
calming the girls, who seemed afraid that the spirit speaking
with them wanted to hurt them and thought that they
had done something wrong. In a statement that would inform
the direction of the religion would go in. Mary told
the girls that they've done nothing wrong by speaking with
the spirit, and that it didn't want to hurt them,
a far less scary interpretation than religions that push that

(41:04):
children are born into sin and have to pull themselves
out of it. Mary later described one of the girls
as replying, quote, we're innocent. How good it is to
have a clear conscience unquote. In the Fox Sisters biography
by Barbara Weisberg, the author makes special note of another
contributing factor that would have been a motivator for the sisters,

(41:27):
the fact that death was a far more common reality
of daily life than than it is for modern Americans.
Life expectancy hovered somewhere around forty About half of the
children born didn't survive to their first birthday, and illnesses
like typhus, malaria, yellow fever, infections, accidents, and on and on.
These were the olden times. On it people were dropping

(41:48):
like flies, and the industrial revolution creating jobs and factories
brought progress and shared ideas, and yeah, a bunch of
new ways to die very unpleasantly. The spirit rappings continued
through Kate Fox's eleventh birthday and the whole neighborhood grew curious.
Their brother David began staying at the house to keep

(42:09):
the growing crowds outside. The Fox home at Bay, and
the sisters heard rappings nearly every single night. As attention
expanded in the community, some writers and locals agreed that
maybe this was an April Fool's prank, but much of
the neighborhood held the line because at this point they
had heard the rappings. Insisted that the girls weren't manifesting

(42:31):
the noises on their own, and that Maggie and Kate
had been terrified by what was happening for too many
nights for the prank juice to be worth the prank squeeze.
Dozens of people began gathering at the house every day
to hear the rappings from the young girls themselves. The
situation hovered somewhere between local sensation and free sideshow act
in a sleepy town where nothing really ever happened. Within

(42:54):
the week, local reporter E. E. Lewis had taken it
on himself to chronicle and distribute first and accounts of
what was going on, producing a forty page pamphlet called
A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the house
of Mr John D. Fox in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County,
authenticated by the certificates and confirmed by the statements of

(43:15):
the citizens of that place and vicinity. Come on, we've
got to get a better title. Louis spoke quite a
bit to Margaret Fox, the girl's mother, who was characteristically flustered, enthusiastic,
and defensive of her youngest children. Here's how Margaret described
what was happening in her home. Quote. The first night
we heard the wrapping, we all got up and laid

(43:37):
a candle and searched all over the house. It was
not very loud, yet it produced a jar on the
bedsteads and chairs, one that could be felt by placing
our hands on the chair or while we were in bed.
It was a feeling of a tremulous motion, more than
a sudden jar. The girls who slept in the other
bed in the room heard the noise and tried to

(43:57):
make a similar noise by snapping their fingers. The youngest
girl is about twelve years old. She's the one who
made her hand go As fast as she made the
noise with her hands or fingers. The sound was followed
up in the room. It made the same number of
noises that the girl did. The other girl, who was
in her fifteenth year, then spoke in sport and said,
now do this just as I do. Count one, two, three, four,

(44:21):
et cetera, striking one hand and the other at the
same time. The blows which she made were repeated as before.
It appeared to answer her by repeating every blow she made.
She then began to be startled unquote. At this time
it appeared that it was the same spirit returning to
the Fox house every single night, a spirit that the

(44:43):
family didn't know, but who seemed to know plenty about them.
And yet he didn't seem angry in the way that
your average movie Poltergeist would be. He was trying to
tell them something, and it seemed important. What materialized in
the communication over the next days was that the spirit
had been murdered. He'd been killed by a man named Mr.

(45:04):
Bell on a Tuesday at midnight. He was a man
whose throat had been cut. He'd been taken down to
the cellar and not buried until the next night, when
he was buried ten ft below. Margaret Fox continued telling
the local reporter quote. I then asked if it was
a human being that was making the noise, and if
it was to manifest it by the same noise. There

(45:26):
was no noise. I then asked if it was a
spirit and if it was to manifest it by two sounds.
I heard two sounds as soon as the words were spoken, unquote.
By the first week of April, word had reached the
other Fox siblings, not through letters from their family, but
by the press and popular discussion. Leah Fox caught wind

(45:48):
of what her little sisters in Rochester were up to
via one of her piano students, and she canceled the
lessons that she had scheduled for the week, and so
she told her teen daughter and two friends that they
were going to go to Hydesville and see what the
hell was going on. Full disclosure, I had this episode

(46:09):
almost ready to go when less than two weeks than
this series began, my grandfather died. I really loved my grandfather.
Um he was a real pain in the ass of
a person, and for all of his faults, he really
loved us. We didn't have a service. There's this thing
with nineties some things where everyone they know is already dead,
and if you make it far enough, you might just

(46:32):
want to have your family spend that money paying off
your medical bills. But I went home and I saw
my family because I just wanted to be with them
and talk about him. And there are all these things
you can learn about your dead grandfather when you go
to Chile's with your family. Did you know that he
was a shipyard engineer for thirty years? Uh? Honest to God,
I didn't know. It's been a strange and painful time,

(46:54):
in part because he didn't believe that anything happened to
you once you die. It was his feeling one that
was shaped by being a prisoner of war and growing
up without religion himself. The times that were good were earned,
not divinely given, and after the first three decades of
his life were shaped by poverty and struggle in life

(47:15):
in a cage, he didn't think that there was anyone
really looking out for us when he died. That was
it is what my papa thought, and continued to think
even after he wasn't in full control of his own thoughts.
His younger brother died a few years before he did,
and every day he would tell people how much he
missed him and that he didn't think that he would

(47:37):
see him again. When he died. The show has been
hard for me to put together because of how things
are right now. You know, things are moving really quickly.
People are being thrown back into the world without any
quality control of who you meet, who you talked to,
who you get to be after being lucky enough to
have survived the plague. For now, I don't know what

(47:57):
I believe in most days, but today, when I'm recording
this my bedroom, I can tell you for sure that
I really hope that my grandfather was wrong, and that
hope is what Ghost Church is built on. And so,
to quote a very phrase, now, more than ever, I

(48:17):
want to give Ghost Church a chance. This season, we're
going to be taking a look at all of it.
The rise and fall of the Fox Sisters, the scientific
movement behind spirit communication, the founding of Cassadeica, rivalries among mediums,
the uncanny number of celebrities who became involved in the movement,
being whisked away in the night to a Perkins restaurant,

(48:38):
and why people are willing to sometimes give up their family,
their friends, and their former life to communicate with spirit.
I don't know what I believe, but I know that
I would like to understand, and so I will see
you next week. Ghost Church is a Cool Zone Media

(48:58):
production created, written, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus. The
show is produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Ian Johnson.
Our theme song is by Speedy or Tease That's Sadie
du Qui, Andy Moholt, Audrey Z Whitesides and Jolly Dubeck
and music is by Zoe Flade
Advertise With Us

Host

Jamie Loftus

Jamie Loftus

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