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May 9, 2022 • 66 mins

This week, Jamie goes to a table tipping class — a Spiritualist tradition that uses tables to connect people with their dead. Elsewhere in the past, the Fox sisters go on tour, where the skeptics put increasing pressure on the teenagers to meet their hype.

 

Further Reading:

Talking to the Dead, Barbara Weisberg

Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances by Lisa Morton

The Road to Seneca Falls by Judith Wellman

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
In eighteen fifty two, a paper called The Spirit Messenger
told people new to spiritualism how to hold their very
own seance. Who right, Okay, let's get some seance music going.
Huh nice? Okay. A seance or a spirit circle requires
this of the sitter, according to the publication quote, First,

(00:23):
let none join your circle but those who feel attracted.
Invite none but those who feel a desire to search
for truth and would be congenial with you. Second, when
you have a medium present, communications are promised conditionally. If
you come with candid minds and a desire to know
the truth, the spirits will endeavor to communicate with you. Third,

(00:46):
let one among you be appointed to repeat the alphabet. Fourth,
your meetings should be opened with singing, and clothes with singing,
and all should pray, ferishing an inward desire to have
good spirits with you or those who are the most progressed. Five,
in the absence of a medium, the circle should be

(01:07):
formed with the same harmonious feelings, and the spirits be
with you and impress with truthful thoughts. Six. Those who
unite with the circle must not indulge in inharmonious feelings, strife,
or bitterness, but follow the example of Christ in doing
good seven all strive to live cheerful or happy, and

(01:28):
there will be a corresponding harmony between you and the
spheres unquote. Now, obviously, the mid nineteenth century wasn't the
first time that people had tried to make contact with
the dead in human history. They had been at it
first centuries. Ancient mythology and history is full of accounts

(01:49):
of contact with the dead through necromancy, which shares qualities
of the seance, but is not the seance. Necromancy, unlike
the mediums who are inspired by the Fox Sisters of Hydesville,
New York in the forties, often involved violence in its
early history, featuring a combination of ritualized words spells if

(02:12):
you will, and an action, often a sacrifice. Necromancy appears
in some of the most famous early stories we have.
So just kick it back to your middle school brain
for a second and think of Odysseus, who talks to
a witch who is able to conjure the spirit of
a crewman in odissease his mother and even the mythic

(02:34):
hero Hercules for him to get advice. And yes, they
all drink the blood of sheep it's the whole thing Orpheus.
This whole story involves going down to the spirit world
to rescue his wife from the underworld, and Hercules himself
goes down there too. In ancient Rome, the stories were
even louder and more violent. One of my favorite is

(02:56):
when a witch screams, do I ever jet? These spells
out consuming human and trails incredible energy. Let's let's bring
up back. Some Roman emperors actually employed necromancers, most notably
Emperor Nero, which is interesting because I feel like he
was a pretty chill guy. Otherwise, there's also records of

(03:17):
necromancy and killed the history and myths. It is featured
throughout the Middle Ages in early Christianity, where some of
the earliest cautionary tales exist. One that comes right to
mind is King Saul outlawing the practice of necromancy and
then seeking out a spirit guide anyways, and action that
leads to the loss of a huge battle as well

(03:38):
as the life of him and his son. These appear
alongside uh good Christian ghosts, which are different for reasons.
I mean Easter ghost holiday Phononically, there's actually a lot
of ghost holidays. There is Dia de los Muertos in Mexico.

(03:59):
So when in the Celtic tradition the Hungry Ghost festival
or Yulawn in China, Oban in the Japanese Buddhist tradition
gaid in Haiti or Easter where Jesus is famously dead.
But there's one important element that distinguishes the seance from
virtually all of these holidays and many of these myths.

(04:21):
In these holidays, the ghosts come to us. We are
on their schedule. In a seance, we are the ones
calling them. In these stories, the person who seeks out
contact with the dead for their own personal comfort as
opposed to the interest of others or to serve their
own God are usually punished in seances. That's the whole point.

(04:46):
It's a small distinction, but an important one. The seance,
as spiritualists use it was one of the first major
innovations of the faith. But the history of spiritualist rituals
came to be so much more, some of which has
fallen by the wayside, and other practices that are still
used in Cassadega today. Today is all about turning it

(05:08):
up to an eleven. We're going to go to Cassadega
to check out the colossic spiritualist ritual of table tipping,
and check in with the Fox Sisters who invented the
practice of the science on their first national tour, and
see what happened during their first brush with public backlash. So, okay,

(05:28):
we're starting our science. Now, let's get this going. Step three,
let's get singing. Somebody once told me the world is
just kidding. Start the theme song wore. All right, I'm

(06:39):
back in Cassadega, Florida, and I'm waiting for a friend. Yeah,
I have friends. I'm walking around looking for snacks, of
which there are none to be found. But on my
walk around the neighborhood, I do spot this beautiful candy
colored lavender house, four bedrooms and a small gazebo on

(07:03):
sale for a kind of stunningly reasonable price. But it's
a nonstarter. You need the approval of the Southern Cassadega
Spiritualist Camp to live there, due to its status as
a protected official campgrounds home. This approval process is referenced
extensively on the Cassadega, Florida and lily Dale, New York websites.

(07:26):
Sure you can live in a gorgeous house for a
low price, But you first need to prove that you
are worthy and involved with the community, and in a
move that is a little exclusionary but makes sense to
me in the circumstances. Mediums who have completed the equivalent
of a three or more year university course slash unpaid

(07:49):
internship to live there will get preference. But I let
myself have the fantasy for a minute. Anyways, a friend
and I come down to Cassadega. We learned to immune
with the dead. We live a minute's walk from a
gorgeous public park and community, and well, I guess we
would need to get a car because the only place

(08:09):
to get food in all of Cassadega is a place
called Sinatra's Restaurante, and it's open five days out of
the week. But the ear here smells so fresh, and
it's attempting idea. But to quote the man who I
am taking today, is able tipping class from the reverend doctor.

(08:29):
I know another reverend doctor, the reverend doctor Lewis Gates.
He will say to me in a reading I get
from him a couple of days later, you have no
business in Florida. Okay, he's probably right, but that's a
little harsh but I don't know he's going to say
that yet. At this point, Reverend Doctor Lewis Gates is

(08:51):
little more than a name on a website to me.
But unlike most reverends and mediums at the camp, he's
got deep roots here. He's a third generation medium, raised
by a medium mother and a Baptist priest father. And
he'll tell us that he still uses the deck of
tarot cards that belonged to his grandmother. Now, one of

(09:12):
the defining traits of modern spiritualism is its seemingly intentional
lack of central figure. But for my money, if Cassadega
at present has one defining figure, it appears to be
Reverend Dr Lewis. He's virtually everywhere during my time there.
He's at services, he's doing healings, he's headlining the message

(09:35):
service as it were, he's going on walks, he's attending services,
he's not even technically participating it. And he's got a
big personality. He's a real animated guy and probably the
best candidate to show us how tables can connect us
with the spirit realm, both because he has a lot
of experience and because he has this unique ability to

(09:58):
sell a group of people mostly new to the religion
of Spiritualism on one of its more esoteric experiences. Another
of these more obscure ideas that he specializes in that
I find particularly fascinating is trance mediumship, a form of
mental mediumship where a spirit communicates through a medium using

(10:21):
their own voice and mannerisms. Reverend Dr Lewis writes on
his website about a spirit that he channels most often,
whose name is Lucerne, who he identifies as quote being
from another dimension unquote. Lucern started coming to him many
years ago, so for comparison, Reverend Dr Lewis Gates, sounds

(10:44):
like this, we have a fear of leaving people behind.
I'll leaving our life behind, our vibration. We are the
fear kind of what we're going to see when we
open our eyes on the other side. And Locern sounds
like this, when you actually despaired world to come here,
you pick your place in the city and state of

(11:07):
your bath, in the city and country of your bath,
my kingdom for a single meeting with Ucern. But unfortunately
Lucern is not making an appearance in Cassadaga today. Instead,
my friend and I are taking a class in the
Reverend Dr Lewis's physical mediumship through table tipping. My friend

(11:28):
is from Orlando, about a half hour away, and she
is coming in completely cold, so buckle in right away.
She has this combination of wonder and conviction about how
the world works that is fascinating to me. I've never
actually met this friend in real life before. We met

(11:50):
around six months ago through unionization efforts for podcasters, which listener,
let me tell you worked out unionize your workplaces. But
this is the first time we've actually met in a
time where I sometimes forget that I haven't met people
in person in a while. She parked in front of
the bookstore and doesn't know whether to comment on how

(12:12):
bizarre it is that this place exists so close to
where she grew up, or to just kind of take
in the experience. She starts by telling me that I'm
so much taller than she thought, which is something I
get a lot. You know, Jamie, I didn't expect you
to be this tall. Well, guess what, I'm six ft
tall and my personality is hard five six all right,

(12:35):
I don't have to disclose that to you. Nice to
meet you too. She comes into the gift shop with
me as the class is about to start, and immediately
picks up on one of the more obvious and polarizing
aspects of Cassadega and of American spiritualism on the whole.
It's extremely white, she says, quote, what is this? Is

(12:58):
this white people culture? I look around nervously, already feeling
like my most recent encounter with the Spiritualist had left
me a bit at a disadvantage. My goal for today
is to be here, be present, try not to piss
anyone off, and show that I'm genuinely interested so that

(13:19):
the board of the Spiritualists who control public relations don't
tell me to go fuck myself. But it feels weird.
So I lean over to my friend and I tell
her I don't really know what table tipping is, but
surely Reverend Dr Lewis is going to tell us what
it is. At the beginning of the two hour table

(13:40):
tipping session, right, I noticed a few things about the
Andrew Jackson Davis Educational Room that I didn't at the
message service earlier in the day, particularly this one poster
sized papyrus font graphic reading proclamation beneath Cassadega's signature, some
flower loco everything is significant here, and so it stands

(14:03):
to reason that the sunflower is as well. I wasn't
able to trace the history of who decided that the
sunflower was the symbol of the spiritualists, but it's one
that has always symboled constancy and can be found on
nearly every branded item in the camp. There's maybe about
forty people at the afternoon table tipping class. Our chairs

(14:27):
are surrounding Reverend Dr Lewis Gates and his fellow Cassadega
medium and spouse Marie Gaines. They stand in the center
of the meeting room with three tables of various sciences,
all of which have three legs. I'm about to learn
way more about the other people in this room than

(14:47):
I thought I was going to. Within minutes, I will
know that there's a man whose father had died just
weeks before, who he was desperate to make contact with
in spite of his disc belief in the great beyond.
I would learn about the old woman who comes every
time this workshop is held in an attempt to make

(15:08):
contact with her dead pets. I would meet the Cassadega
regulars who want to say hello to their dead relatives
that they speak to on the tables all the time.
I meet the curious goth girls making a day trip
together after the first one of them got their driver's license.
The German tourist girls on a semester abroad who gets

(15:28):
scared and leave in the middle. The middle aged women
who are there to support their friend as she embarks
on the goal of becoming a medium and maybe going
to night class question mark. And I'm there with my
friend too, So let me give you a feel for
Louis and Marie Gates. He wears a Hawaiian shirt, more

(15:50):
casual than the Sunday dressing of just an hour before.
And Marie, who grew up as a Quaker, and I
later noticed walks of real footsteps behind her husband on
their morning walks as they take their cat around in
a stroller. Iconic love that for them. They both have
very distinct personalities. His is booming and hers is observational

(16:16):
and at a few choice points a little quietly sarcastic
towards her husband. They act as if we all know
exactly what table tipping is, which is a huge mistake,
if the confused faces of most of the people in
the room are any indication. But they banter like a
married couple because they are a married couple. Here's Louis

(16:40):
Gates being introduced at a Sunday service in Cassadega the
week after I left by Marie at a service where
because the Valentine's Day, a number of spiritualists had just
renewed their wedding vows. At this time, I would like
to bring up our pastor, Reverend Dr Louis Gates, pastor, medium, healer, teacher,

(17:02):
an awesome husband. Yeah, I wanted to speak today about
our commitment to each other, our commitment to the universe,
our commitment to our own being within our lives. A

(17:23):
lot of times we forget ourselves as we move into
different situations. Today we committed our connection to the individual
that we married as our renewal vows. Again, we had
a few connect to their higher connection to themselves. But
we always have to realize that we have to nurture

(17:43):
our being in this lifetime. We have to nurture ourselves.
We have to connect ourselves to this higher sense of consciousness. So, yeah,
they're a team and they practice out of the same
building around the corner. But today we are table tipping
and they get right into it without explaining to you
what the funk is going on. This seems to be

(18:04):
the general practice in the area, though, these assumptions that
you understand what's happening, things like yes, spirit is real, Yes,
you're going to talk to the spirit. Yes, right now, Okay,
let's go. Oh this table. Yeah, it's made with the
house of George Colby, the man who founded Cassadega. Yes,

(18:26):
of course his house burned down, and of course we
retrofitted the banister into a table. What question could you
possibly have? It's your turn. We hope you thought about
who you wanted to hear from from the great Beyond
before you arrived. Louis does do us the service of
introducing the three tables he's brought with him. One of

(18:47):
a pretty small coffee table that falls far below his
I would say about six ft five frame. One is
a medium sized TV dinner table that your grandma would
set her coffee on, which tween episodes of soap operas.
And then there's this larger table, this pale blue George
Colby table that will be using today, one that has

(19:10):
been made specifically to Louis Gates's body's specifications, and which
his wife Marie can make work as well as in
use the table to get in touch with the ghosts.
He says this of the George Colby table, where I,
in just a couple of minutes will be speaking with
my dead brother. I need one so I don't have

(19:32):
to stoop down, you know. Louis Gates gave a speech
at Gala Day in Cassadega just the day before about
an equally esoteric spiritualist practice called spirit trumpets, essentially an
older spiritualist tradition in which spirits will make instruments move
and play. Today, he tells us that the tables for

(19:56):
table tipping need to have three legs for the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. Something about three legs just works,
he says, and that any table will do, but the bigger,
bulkier ones are his personal preference. He says that he's
blessed the space before we entered. This involves his saying
a prayer in each corner of the room to clear

(20:18):
negative energy, and being the one who said the prayer
automatically makes him the alpha of the workshop. He is
responsible for our spiritual safety. Rooms can hold onto energy
positive and negative, he explains to us, So you have
to be very careful. He uses the example of the
way that you can enter a space where something horrible

(20:41):
has happened and you can somehow just feel it, feel
that something isn't right, or to borrow an example of
the room that we're currently standing in, a hall where
there were fundraising dances during both World Wars and where
mediums say they can hear music and joyful foots steps
while they're on nighttime walks. It's not that these spirits

(21:04):
are haunting the space, he tells us, it's the energy
of the event and things that happened there, which means
that my virginity is haunting a dirty hotel room in Annapolis, Maryland. Actually,
if you apply this rule to any hotel room, they
become uninhabitable. Anyways, Reverend Dr Lewis says this, I've been

(21:28):
doing this since I was five years old. It took
me years to get in touch with all of this.
He says, this with the swagger I'll come to associate
him with, as he introduces the tables, saying it takes
years of practice to get them to quote unquote fly
the way they do for him. Hell, he says, even
Marie has trouble getting the tables going. Sometimes sometimes their

(21:50):
own cat has more success getting the table to move
than Marie, and it's like, jeez, man, she's standing right
there after all. Reverend Dr Lewis explains he's been practicing
mediumship to some degree for over half a century, one
of the only people at the camp to be a
generational member of Spiritualism. Yes, he says he's seen tables levitate. Yes,

(22:14):
he says he hears the tables rattle around he and
Marie's house at night. He points to one table and
says he found it rattling in the back of an
antique store and the dealer said, I don't like that table.
Something's not right with it, and so Reverend Dr. Lewis
bought it because it was jumping out at him. He's
got the kind of charisma that makes you glad that

(22:36):
Spiritualism has no interest in being a cult, because this
guy could sell a cult the same way that the
early Spiritualists of the eighteen hundreds could sell the religion.
But we'll get back to them now that we've met

(23:00):
the tables. The table tip in class begins. Reverend Dr
Lewis asks for six people to get up. They do
and get around the big wooden table with Lewis and Marie,
and everyone is instructed to put their hands on the
edges of the table very lightly, no grip. The rest

(23:22):
of us stay on the perimeter of the circle in
our chairs as the group of six begin to move
the table around the interior of the room, and I
don't know what to tell you. After a second, the table,
which is huge, does begin to move, and it seems

(23:43):
to kind of take the eight people surrounding it to
the left side of the circle we've created as the
less initiated, like myself and my friend look on kind
of in bafflement. Now, I want to be clear, this
isn't a table movie, as in levitating, This isn't a
conjuring movie. It's not this what's going on, ladies, please

(24:07):
remove your glove believe we're about to commuting with the spirit.
His lips are red like blood from a coop when
you took his teeth, a sharp black yours when you
bit a coot. And it's so cold and dark and
wet like the jungle, like tears. I am crying. I
am sorry. Fright, father, find me, find me, save me,

(24:29):
Save me. Uh. There was a clip from Penny dreadful.
But it is a table dragging across the floor, not lifting,
but moving quickly and not appearing to be pulled by

(24:51):
anyone in particular. And for skeptics listening, I promised to
take this class seriously. But of course I'm watching Lewis
and Marie's forearms to make sure that they're not flexing
with every movement that the table makes, and it doesn't
look that way. But okay, they're both wearing long sleeves,

(25:12):
and maybe I'll have a better idea when my turn
around the table comes. For now, all I know is
that the six not gates is are chasing the table
around as it lifts towards its first victim, a woman
who has been here before. So once the table stops,
it tends to tip towards one person, and it sways

(25:37):
back in this jerky, seasick kind of way while it
waits to make contact. So Reverend Dr Lewis nods at
the woman the table is tipping towards, saying, that's you, sweetheart.
And what takes place is this stressful game of yes
or no questions that happens rapid fire. She's a little nervous,

(26:01):
but she tries an easy question. Is this spirit a man?
The table goes still, its legs go back on the ground.
That means no, is this spirit? Uh? Woman? The table
leans towards her. Yes, that means yes, okay, is it

(26:22):
her mother? No? She thinks harder. The other five people
around the table are looking at her intently. There is
this kind of pressure to perform when the table is
talking to you. If you lose the rhythm of the thing,
it gets less exciting. So the woman thinks fast. She says,
is this her biological mother? Interesting? Now everyone in the

(26:45):
room knows that she's adopted. The table says yes, yes,
it's rocking back and forth. That's an hiological mother. So
the woman nods, as Lewis and Marie keeps staring at
her as if to say, what question are you going
to ask? Now? Uh? The woman gets nervous ask her

(27:05):
a question, So the woman asks the spirit are you okay?
And the table rocks back and forth. Yes. The woman says,
I love you, and the table tips towards her slowly.
Louis says, that's a hook. And this woman who is
talking to her biological mother via table says a little awkwardly, oh, thanks,

(27:34):
And the table, as if sensing that things are starting
to get weird, goes still. Everyone in the room takes
a breath. Was that it is? That all there is
to a tipping table? And after a second, the table
takes off again. It moves to the left, this big

(27:55):
fucking Quiji board, and the group of six starts to
follow it again, and it starts all over. My friend
looks over at me a little confused. She mounts to me,
was that real? And as I sit here, I feel
more skeptical than I was wanting to. It all feels

(28:18):
a little forced and performative. But I'm not here to
decide if ghosts are real. I'm here to watch other
people decide if they think ghosts are real. Many of
the table tipping interactions are similar to this first one.
There are people who are a little nervous and struggle
to think of questions. There are people who end up

(28:39):
connecting with a spirit other than the one they had
clearly been hoping to. There are skeptics that were brought
with believers who are only taking it half seriously and
kind of slowing down the proceedings. And there's a million
Hi Grandma, miss She's but like the message they're resk

(29:00):
that took place before it. There are moments around the
table that are extremely intense and even pull tears from
people who came here to talk to someone who they
loved and lost. Table Tipping is something of a rarity
in Cassadega and in modern spiritualism in general, and it

(29:21):
makes sense that a legacy spiritualists like Reverend Dr Lewis
Gates is the one to show it to us by
in large physical mediumship like table tipping and spirit trumpets
have been abandoned by spiritualists over the years, but the
majority of mediums ratings in Cassadega now being done intuitively

(29:44):
or only with the mind. I mentioned this in our
first episode, but because there is such a misconception on
this topic even within Cassadega, mediums trained in Cassadega, Florida
do not use tarot cards and rarely use physical tools
at all. It's not that they're banned by any means.

(30:05):
I mean, you can take an occasional table tipping class
like this. There are things like spirit photography walking tours
marketed mainly at tourists, that encourage you to walk around
with a camp sanctioned guide and capture orbs on camera,
but these events are in the minority, and Cassadega mediums

(30:25):
have actively distanced themselves from the tarot card readers who
operate in the camp, particularly the ones who work at
the Cassadega Hotel where I'm staying. Dot dot dot. That's
a drama for another day. But one reason that spiritualists
on the whole seem to have distanced themselves from larger

(30:46):
physical demonstrations over the years may have to do with
the extreme controversy that surrounds some debunked methods of the
nineteenth century spiritualists. Again that dichotomy. In the world of
sciences in the nineteenth century, there was often this demand
for more, more contact, more proof of life after death,

(31:09):
a demand that pushed early practices like spirit wrappings and
table tipping even further towards things like quote unquote spirit
hands that sitters could touch from the beyond, full on
body materializations, levitation, spirit photography, ectoplasmic mouth ejaculate. I can't

(31:32):
talk to you about that right now. That's going to
have to wait. But it's as gross as it sounds.
But the more theatrical of a presentation, generally the swifter
it would be debunked by skeptics, and so to protect
their own religion and beliefs, most mediums today elected to
tap into spirit using their minds and no clunky objects.

(31:56):
That is to say, it's interestingly old school that friend
Dr Lewis Kates does teach physical mediumship as he does
and also engages in trance mediumship, because these tend to
be the elements of spiritualism that draw far more skepticism.
Here's a quick smattering of early examples of physical mediums

(32:18):
getting debunked. These examples come from Barbara Weisberg's biography of
the Fox Sisters Talking to the Dead, as well as
the book Calling the Spirits a History of Sciences by
Lisa Morton. Early spiritualists Ira and William Davenport, the teens
seancers I call him, began as stage magicians before pivoting

(32:41):
to spiritualist seances, where they were eventually caught performing tricks
with elaborate spirit cabinets where they'd be tied up and
shoved inside, only for quote unquote spirits to begin playing
musical instruments while they were While Ira was said to
be a practicing spiritualist, he also sat Harry Houdini down

(33:03):
and showed him how he and his brother pulled off
the spirit cabinet illusion shortly before he died. Next up
one of history's most famous mediums, the Scotsman D. D. Home,
who was often referred to as a medium who never
got busted, an impressive figure who was said to be
able to levitate and produce physical manifestations of spirits, and

(33:27):
he never was publicly exposed for sure, but there were
several rumors and accounts that detailed things like a found
fake spirit hand, or in a well circulated rumor about
a seance attended by writers Robert and Elizabeth Browning, a
glowing appendage in the dark was grabbed by Robert Browning

(33:49):
and revealed to be Holmes's own foot. And finally, the
first popular spirit photographer, William Mummler, who was brought to
court for fraud, although to his at it after three
weeks of testimony, including P. T. Barnum testifying against him,
that's really saying something. No one could definitively show how

(34:10):
Mumbler had created the spirit photographs, and so he went
on to take one of the most famous of all time,
one of Mary Todd Lincoln and what appears to be
the spirit of her assassinated husband. Maybe you've heard of him. Now,
Some of what I just described still does remain in
the murky world of allegation. So physical mediumship, whether you

(34:34):
believe in it or not, it's riskier. Just because there
were smoking mirrors demonstrably at play in the examples I
just gave doesn't necessarily mean that the people doing it
didn't believe or didn't think that these things weren't possible.
I mean, does the priest in a confession box really

(34:54):
believe that they are providing divine forgiveness? Probably not always,
but often when it comes to things like this, literal
magic tricks, a wet glove, a slipped knot to play
spirit instruments. I mean, it's very hard to defend, but
some accusations of fraud are more difficult to parse. And

(35:16):
I also include the Fox Sisters, who we are overdue
to check in on. So let's go back to the
late eighteen forties. After becoming locally famous in upstate New
York for spirit rappings in their own home said to
be from a famous murdered shoe peddler named Charles Rosna,

(35:36):
the sisters Maggie and Kate Fox, both still children, moved
to the city of Rochester with their older sister Leah,
herself a single mother, to begin the process of becoming
public religious figures. I mean, can you blame a kid
for wanting to so? Where do we leave our gals?

(35:59):
The Fox sister oh, right, per their account, they're having
the ship slapped out of them by the ghosts of
Rochester in the summer of eight I mean, my God,
the way that Leah Fox, the eldest, describes Slappy the
ghost my nickname, not hers. I will not give her
credit for my amazing ghost nickname, but the way that

(36:22):
she describes this malevolent spirit in her book The Missing
Link is very intense. The youngest sister, Kate Fox, was
in particular targeted and tormented, at one point, appearing to
be slapped to the point that she was unconscious, only
to come to reciting poetry saying to be with Christ

(36:43):
is better far. This stage of the Fox sisters lives
is extremely difficult to verify, in part because the presence
of spirit in the world, like all things I've become
hyperfecated on, pends to be pretty difficult to speak of
with any sort of jectivity. I firmly believe that this
is a topic that's almost impossible to come at with

(37:06):
any clear sort of mind, because a person's perspective on
the afterlife is usually connected to deeply personal parts of themselves,
how they grew up, their relationship or lack thereof, with faith,
people that they've lost, and the people that they've lost beliefs.
I will say that Leah Fox's accounts in particular are

(37:28):
tough for me. She functioned not only as a Fox
medium during her career, seriously, just give her a year
or so, but Leah also worked in the unofficial capacity
of Maggie and Kith's manager, part time guardian, and family
myth maker, who would soon be taking their show on
the road. Like a book of letters that Maggie would

(37:51):
publish later in her life. The contents of Leah's book
was heavily contested by her own sisters later in their lives,
as the relationship between the three of Margaret Fox's daughters
exploded both their personal lives and their religion in a
very public way, a moment for Leah here. Barbara Weissberg

(38:13):
does an amazing job in her biography of Maggie and
Kate Fox of showing all sides of their sister Leah,
including the hard to deal with sides. In her day,
Leo would be considered some sort of saint le mother
figure in the spiritualist movement, as the public opinion of
her younger sisters tended to wildly fluctuate as their lives

(38:34):
went on, But there's indication pretty early on of Leah
having some volatile tendencies. One example in particular stands out
regarding how Leah treated her own daughter in these early
months of spiritualism. A local man hoping to make contact
with his daughter who was thought to have been murdered
by her own husband but whose killer was acquitted, met

(38:56):
with Maggie, Kate, Leah, and Leah's teenage daughter Lizzie for
a seance. So they conducted this early version of a
seance with all the sisters present, but no spirit raps came,
and Leah began to brate and blame her own daughter
for the raps not materializing. Lizzie began to cry and
it became clear that she had expressed after witnessing her

(39:20):
niece Kate pass out seemingly possessed by Slappy the ghost,
that she wished that the spirits would go away. Oh no,
she said, she didn't like when her twelve year old
niece was possessed. What a bit. But in this public forum,
Leah demanded that Lizzie apologize, humiliating her in front of

(39:40):
her own family and strangers, and Lizzie sobbed quote I
was sincere. I don't know how to repent unquote. Finally
she relented to her mother's verbal accosting and sunk to
her knees and apologized to the spirits, and suddenly the
rapping began again. Shortly after, Lea sent Lizzie away to

(40:01):
live with her father for over a year in Illinois,
banishing your team daughter, not very saintly behavior. The summer
of eighteen forty eight found the Fox sisters slowly discovering
their place within Rochester society, first by making an important
connection through befriending influential couple Amy and Isaac Post. There's

(40:24):
probably a whole other podcast to be had about these two.
They were radical Quaker abolitionists and feminists. They held organizational
meetings for local abolition advocates. They provided safe harbor for
fugitive slaves. After the fugitive slave Act of eighteen fifty
made it so that white Southerners could capture any black

(40:44):
person on free soil and claimed them as their slave,
and the federal government played a much more active role
in the recapturing of enslaved people. They were also close
friends of Frederick Douglas of Susan b. Anthony of Sojourner Truth,
and after realizing that the Spiritualist kids who kept popping

(41:05):
up in the news were actually kids from their own neighborhood,
the Posts became some of the first true believers in
the fledgling Spiritualism religion. Like many early and subsequent adopters,
it's likely that their willingness to give it a chance
was at least in part motivated by the fact that

(41:25):
they had lost a child in the past, one that
they very much wanted to make contact with from beyond
the grave. Maggie and Kate, still kids themselves, were more
than happy to oblige. The summer of eighteen forty eight
was huge in Rochester, New York. In July of that year,

(41:46):
the girls lived a stone's throw from the Seneca Falls Convention,
the first major women's right convention in the United States history.
Amy Post was in attendance along with Frederick Douglas and
Elizabeth Katie's anton. I won't rehash the event for you here.
There are plenty of places where it's been done far
more effectively, and I will link them in the episode description.

(42:09):
But the short story is that the Seneca Falls Convention
Hicks started the first wave of American feminism, while laying
bare the inequities within this movement, particularly between white women
and women of color. But another topic whispered around this
convention was that of spirit communication. The Fox Sisters were

(42:31):
not present at the Seneca Falls Convention, but they were
sort of there in spirit. No I can't, I'm bailing
on the joke. The Sisters, either in a move of
smart networking or smart networking from spirit, were some of
the first to predict that Frederick Douglas's newspaper, The North
Star would be a success, the first of many interactions

(42:53):
with Douglas that indicate that while he wasn't a full
convert to spiritualism, he was deeply interested in it and
many of the people who supported it. Barbara Weisberg describes
it like this in her biography of the Fox Sisters,
called Talking to the Dead quote many of those in attendance,
such as Frederick Douglas and Elizabeth Katie Stanton, had also

(43:16):
heard about the possibility of spirit communication through their Rochester acquaintances,
and others soon learned of it. Wrapped were reported to
have struck the very table at which Stanton and her
colleague Lucretia Mott had drafted the Conventions resolutions unquote, as
it would for their entire career. The whiffs and accusations

(43:37):
of Humbug as it were, followed talk of spiritualism wherever
it went, But many progressives who were strong proponents of
science were actually inclined to advocate for spiritualism in a
time where it felt like with some study and some time,
anything could be proven as true. And in the late

(43:57):
eighteen forties, negative press was no man for the public's
curiosity in spirit communication, either in the interest of science
or as would be true time and time again. Into
the very recent past, there was a lot of death
and a lot of people that they're grieving wanted to
get in touch with in addition to the normal culprits.

(44:20):
In a time where life expectancy still hovered somewhere around
forty a cholera epidemic swept Europe and the US in
eighteen forty nine, bringing with it a new crowd of
grieving who were eager for closure with relatives and loved
ones they had suddenly lost. By the end of the decade, Hate,
Maggie and Leah were notorious communicators with spirit In eighteen

(44:45):
forty nine, Leah had promoted herself from manager Mommy to
Manager Mommy Medium Live Left Love with some trademark Fox Drama.
The Spirits are said to have threatened to leave the
Sisters permanently during the fall of eighteen forty nine if
the Sisters didn't comply with a very specific desire of

(45:05):
spirits that wish to take their show on the road,
and after a little bit of rehearsal, they did just that.
In November of eighteen forty nine, the Sisters performed in
the largest theater in Rochester, New York, officially taking spiritualism
to the next level. November eighteen forty nine. Price of

(45:29):
admittance cents fifty cents amidst one man and two ladies
Good to Know. Four people attend in all, including Amy Post,
lending the events some bonus credibility. Kate Fox remained in
the audience for the demonstration, which was attended by both
the curious and the skeptical, and Maggie came on stage

(45:51):
in a pale blue dress. In all likelihood, those in
attendants would have had some familiarity with the concept of
the supernat troll. Outside of Christianity, there were well known
figures who navigated this area, people like Emmanuel Swedenborg, the
Swedish Swedenborgish philosopher turned Christian mystic from the late sixteen hundreds.

(46:14):
There was also Anton Mesmer, the German physician and friend
of Mozart, who theorized about quote unquote animal magnetism, which
stated that there was a super fine, invisible fluid in
the body that could be amplified. More recently, there was
the Poughkeepsie seer Andrew Jackson Davis, who had revived interest

(46:36):
in clairvoyance in New York, and interestingly enough, the whole
that the table tipping class I took in Cassadega is
named after him. But these figures were all grown men,
many of them well educated. None of these figures were
as underestimated or disrespected as a teenage girl as ordinary
seeming as Maggie Fox. After a lecture from the journalist

(47:00):
who had chronicled the events at the Hydesville House, Eliab Capron.
Maggie entered with Leah Fox, who was now claiming mediumship herself.
To the shock of the audience, the spirit raps came
and the crowd was immediately split. Many were just as
blown away as the people who would come to the

(47:20):
Hydesville House, but the skeptics organized quickly. When the demonstration
was complete, and by all accounts, Maggie pulled it off,
the audience grew restless and in the room demanded that
there be a committee of five men assigned to investigate
the phenomena, and nominated them before they let anyone leave.

(47:42):
The Foxes did not see this coming, understandably, but the
newly formed committee demanded that the sisters submit themselves to
testing the next morning, which they did at the Sons
of Temperance Hall in Rochester the next day, with the
committee declaring that there would be a second show at
Corinthian Hall that night to reveal the results. This time,

(48:05):
and even bigger crowd arrived. Caprine published an account of
night to along with a fellow journalist. So consider the source,
they are biased in the Fox sisters favor But the
long and short of it was that the committee had
not been able to bust them, even after reportedly putting
their hands on the feet and joints of the girls

(48:26):
as the rappings took place, And that still wasn't enough.
A second investigation was called for, followed by a third
night of shows to indicate the results. This committee was
even physically harsher on Maggie and Leah. Their feet were
bound and their dresses were groped, while the committee demanded

(48:48):
that the sisters summoned the wrappings. And again the committee
was unable to find fraud. So on the third night
of shows, yet another committee was called for. And it's like, guys,
it's eighteen forty eight. We've got bigger fish to fry here.
But this time the committee called for would be only

(49:08):
composed of women, so that the Fox sisters could be
physically humiliated even further. Barbara Weisberg describes the inspection like
this quote. With the sister's reluctant consent, a subsidiary committee
of ladies took them into a separate room, then stripped
and searched them, examining both quote their persons and clothing unquote,

(49:32):
in search of noisy devices such as leaden balls mortified.
Both sisters wept through much of their ordeal, until their
sobs reached such a pitch that Amy Post burst into
the room and brought the investigation to a halt. Unquote. Now,
no matter how you feel, this is a fucking Guantanamo

(49:52):
style physical humiliation of two women, one of whom is
a minor. Maggie did not want to return to corint
i in Hall after this abusive third investigation, but Amy
Post convinced both her and Leah to attend in protest
of how they'd been treated. And again the committee found
no fraud, and the Fox Sisters Kate included, were now

(50:16):
considered legit enough to continue their work, but at what cost.
Understandably freaked out by how the public had demanded to
strip search them multiple days in a row, the sisters
spent the next stretch of time perfecting their spirit rapping
seances in Rochester in privately arranged sessions. An interesting shift

(50:37):
here is that they now charged a fee for these seances.
Frederick Douglas was said to frequently attendees. He once got
so frustrated that it was taking so long for the
ghosts to show up that he called the display atrocious
and apologize to Amy Post about it in a letter
written later. Good stuff, And yeah, that's a really funny story,

(51:00):
but it lends itself to the predicament that the Foxes
and the newly minted mediums who were beginning to crop
up all around the country and even overseas, found themselves in.
People sitting with mediums wanted instant ratification, They wanted to
talk to specific spirits, and in some cases it seems

(51:21):
like more than anything else, they wanted a bit of
a show. And depending on your perspective, no one could
put on a show or a ritual white like a
spiritualist medium could. All right, we're back in Cassada, back

(51:44):
in the Andrew Jackson Davis building. Yes, that Andrew Jackson Davis,
the Poughkeepsie seer himself well spotted. Group after group are
going up to the table in our table tipping class,
and I feel so self conscious waiting again, wondering if
there's any chance that Lewis and Marie Gates already know

(52:05):
who I am, And does that mean that they could
just take a stab at who I would want to contact.
That's a classic fraudulent medium technique the hot reading, meaning
that a medium would research who you are before they
arrive and then miraculously bring through relevant information across the
room and around the table. One old man connects with

(52:28):
his father and surprises himself by starting to cry. Another
woman comes in with a very specific agenda. She connects
with her father's spirit and then launches into a hyper
specific line of questioning. She says she loves him and
misses him, but she's still mad at him about that thing,
and tells him on the table that she still doesn't

(52:51):
forgive him. She then goes up a second time a
little later on to speak with her mother's spirit and
seems to connect, bursting into tears and asking if she
was wrong not to forgive her father. It's intense, it's specific,
it's technically cheaper than therapy. And then finally it's my turn.

(53:11):
I go up with a group and have a vague
plan of what I'm going to do, try to make
contact with one of my dead grandma's and hope for
the best. I'm pretty nervous at this point because not
only is this something I very much want to believe in,
I also feel very aware of wanting Louis and Marie
to like me. I'm being appraised here to some extent

(53:34):
observed by the mediums of Cassadega, and so I'm both
interested and performing being interested. It's like being on a date,
except the means to the end is the great beyond
and the approval of a small community of aging mediums
and healers. So we stand around the table, me right
next to Lewis. He's huge and feels huger when I'm

(53:56):
next to him, And so when the table takes off,
I kind of hope that it will all suddenly become clear,
something like I knew it. He's dragging the table or
Marie is dragging the table. Something very obvious is going on.
But it doesn't seem that way at all, And in fact,
the gates Is seem to intentionally keep their touch on

(54:17):
the table pretty light. But Lewis narrates the experience like
a sportscaster as the table takes off and leaned to
the mom across the table from me. Standing around the
table is a completely immersive experience. It's nothing like watching
from the perimeter. You smell everyone, smell everyone's breath. You

(54:38):
feel very self conscious about how tightly or not tightly.
You're gripping the table like am I dragging it? Am
I a part of the problem? Are we confirmation biasing
this table around? Or is this real? But I don't
have time to think about it because suddenly the table
is tipping towards me. So I start to speak to

(55:01):
the dead. Are you a woman? Please say you're a woman.
I don't know what to do if you're not a woman.
The table goes still, that's a no, it's not a woman.
I'm fucked. I'm so fucked. So I asked, is this
not a woman? Because yes or no questions can be
really gendered. But the table moves again. The answer is yes,

(55:22):
it's a male spirit talking to me, a dead man.
I'm pretty lucky. I haven't really lost many men in
my life, Is it, Papa? No? Is it will no fun?
I'm blowing it. No one has gotten this many nose
in a row in the entire time this has been
going on. So I panic and I ask, is this Matthew?

(55:48):
And the table starts to nod yes. And that's really
weird because I don't technically know Matthew. My mom had
two miscarriages and we were raised to think of them
as is our siblings, and to talk to them. Even
our middle names are their names, Matt and Beth, and
I used to like draw these weird pictures of what

(56:09):
I thought my cool teenage siblings would look like if
they were alive. They're not people I've actually met. They're
kind of like these characters to me, I guess, but
it made my parents feel better that me spoke life
into an experience that have been so painful for them.
But I ask is this Matt? And the answer comes
back as yes, which leads me to what would I

(56:31):
say to someone who I've never met and is mainly
the object of my weird child fan fiction. So I
think for a second and I asked, are you good?
I sound like a total dumbass, but he says yes.
The table rocks back and forth, and I swear to God,
I'm not touching it. I ask is he with bethany

(56:56):
my other siblings who passed away? The answer is yes.
Has he been watching me? Yes? And I feel Louis
gates his eyes on me and he says, there's a
man from your work here too. He says, you're funny.
This kind of stops me in my tracks because this
doesn't really track for me at all. I can't think
of a man who I've worked with who's died that

(57:18):
i'd be close enough with to say that I'm funny.
But Louis Gates does know that I'm a comedian. You know,
it's not inconceivable that he could be taking an educated
guess on something that I would want to hear. But
I shift my focus back to the table. I'm talking
to Matt, and I'm really feeling the pressure to stick
the landing on this conversation. But I can't think of anything,

(57:42):
and I hear myself blurting out, were you upset about
what grandma did? And look, listener, what my grandma did
or did not do is none of your business. But
I was curious if I could communicate with him what
he thought. But the table goes still. The answer is no,
and Marie Gates looks at me and says, they don't

(58:03):
bring anger into the spirit realm. They really don't. And
then the table takes off again. My turn is over
and my friend begins a stilted, nervous conversation with her
grandfather she only met a few times as a kid.
And that's my first experience speaking with the dead maybe.
This session continues for two hours, and it's strange but

(58:26):
not unpleasant, except for this one moment that sticks out
to me. A man who was sitting across the circle
from me had a tearful yes or no conversation with
his father about an hour before on the table, and
he hadn't said much sense, even as most of us
were whispering with our friends or the regulars to the

(58:48):
camp laugh and catch up with each other. But this
guy has been keeping to himself, looking down at his
hands that are kind of shaking. He wants to believe
that he's talking to his dead father Bade, but he
clearly has doubts, and finally he breaks and looks to
Louis and makes a proposition. He asks them, can the

(59:10):
two of them get on the table, one on one
and have a conversation with his father. He's half desperately
wanting to make contact and half wanting to reassure himself
that there is some chance that all of this might
be real. He tells us all that he was with
his father when he died, and breaks down here for

(59:31):
a minute because it was just a couple of weeks ago,
then bounces back. He continues, saying his father was extremely
Christian when he was alive, while he was more open
to alternatives like spiritualism. That's why he wanted the one
on one on the table. He wanted to ask his
dad what he thought about the afterlife and whether it's

(59:55):
squared with what he very firmly believed when he was alive.
And now I'm watching like a sports commentator, like how
is Lewis going to handle a request this direct? These
interactions can be difficult to watch because here is a
man who is clearly in pain and seeking out answers
that could very well be unknowable, and it's one person's

(01:00:19):
job Louis Gates to assure us that they are knowable.
Is this okay? I I don't know. It depends on
so many things, On if you believe in it, on
if the person is profiting from it, which it doesn't
seem really like this camp is on whether the medium
believes in what they're doing. Louis definitely does not take

(01:00:43):
the man up on the one on one table request. Instead,
he says that there is a period of adjustment in
the spirit realm in a way that almost sounds matrix e,
but he says that people in spirit go to a
place where they feel comfort and acceptance. He says, it's
possible that this guy's father is able to attend Christian

(01:01:04):
ceremonies in the spirit realm, and enough time hasn't passed
for the deceased dad to understand the real truth of
what being in spirit is. The guy doesn't know what
to say. He doesn't push Reverend Dr. Lewis further, and
Louis takes the opportunity to share a personal anecdote, revealing

(01:01:25):
that his father was a Baptist priest who firmly believed
in what he preached, and that his mother was a
spiritualist and that's whose path Lewis decided to follow. Louis
continued saying that even in the spirit realm, his father
retained his Baptist beliefs, but that they spoke together often.

(01:01:45):
He even goes on walks in Cassadega with his deceased
father and at this the man seems comforted or maybe
he's just stumped, and that's the whole class. Lewis releases
us through the gift shop, but tells us before we
go that you don't need to buy a lot of
stuff to be a spiritualist. And actually, you shouldn't buy

(01:02:07):
a lot of stuff to be a spiritualist. All you
need is a couple of courts crystals, he says, and
a lot of practice. And then he laughs and he
gestures to the door and says this by whatever you want, though,
and we do, and so ends my journey in the
art of Cassadagan table tipping. After we leave, my friend

(01:02:30):
wants to provide me with a true, authentic Floridian experience,
so we get subs from Publics, which is a grocery
store for the uninitiated. It's a go to that she
coaches me through ordering, and we sit and we talk
about the tables. I asked her how she felt about
the whole experience, and she says, she isn't really sure

(01:02:50):
what to believe, but she was deeply affected by the
people who really felt they'd made a connection to a
recently lost loved one and expressed some embarrassment and asking
her dead grandmother if she should text her ax again.
It was like the table was screaming, don't do it,
and its legs like clattered to the ground, and it

(01:03:13):
was incredible comedic timing on the part of spirit or
the table, or Reverend Dr Lewis, or some kind of
combination of the three. She had a good time, but
she has no idea what to make of it, and
I share the story of the Fox Sisters with her
because as I've been putting this show together, I find

(01:03:34):
myself telling my family and friends the story of spiritualism
pretty often, because that's what most religions are. It's a
series of stories. Stories you believe in, stories you attach
moral significance to, and so on. But after a while
of doing this, I realized that I was doing something

(01:03:54):
a little bizarre. I was always sharing the same story,
the story of the Foxes. There's the story of my
experience in Cassadega, But the way that I was framing
it very much dependent on the person I was talking to.
The people I knew who had faith as a part
of their lives. I tended to frame the story of

(01:04:14):
the Fox Sisters as a religious story, and they reacted
to it with more reverence. But if I told this
same story framed as something a little weird that got
popular in the nineteenth century also true, people reacted very
very differently. It was funnier, it was more bizarre, but

(01:04:35):
it's the same exact story. So far, Ghost Church has
been a lot of me taking you through my early
experiences in spiritualism through my eyes, and to be quite honest,
after this table tipping class, I found myself kind of
struggling more than ever on how much I was willing

(01:04:56):
to believe, which was a surprise to me. When I
arrived in Sadega, I honestly thought I would become more
and more secure in feeling connected with the spiritualist faith.
But a couple of days in and I was very
much struggling, and more than anything else, I wanted to
know how the mediums who practice at the camp now

(01:05:16):
were able to find faith like that. So next week
we're going to hear from four members of the Cassadega
community and get a feeling for how they became the
modern spiritualists, as well as learning tragic ending to the
story of the Fox Sisters, the first to be faithful
to the religion or were they next week on Ghost Church.

(01:05:42):
Ghost Church is a Cool Zone Media production created, written
and hosted by me Jamie Loftus special thanks to Robert
Evans for voicing the Reverend Dr Lewis Gates. The show
is produced by so E Lichterman, edited by Ian Johnson.
Our theme song is by Speedy or Tease That's CD Klea,
Andy Loholt, Audries, Whitesides and Joey Dubeck. Music is by

(01:06:05):
Zoe Blade m hm hm
Advertise With Us

Host

Jamie Loftus

Jamie Loftus

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