5: Apples, The Manipulator, and The Curse of Spiritualism

This week, Jamie visits a legendary Cassadaga medium and traces the story of spiritualism's Fox sisters to its end -- where the sisters abandoned the religion that had defined their lives.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Let's take a walk. On my fourth day at the
Cassadeca Spiritualist Camp, I take a walk around Colby Alderman Park,
sprawling affair that's now a nationally recognized historic district and
added in the waterproof historical markers to match. Today we're
gonna be talking about the decline of the Fox Sisters
and one of my most significant readings at Cassadeca. But first,

(00:29):
let's take a stroll through Cassadeca, beginning at the intersection
of and I'm not getting Mediumship Way and Psychic Road.
I know, and I took a lot of audio as
I was just wandering around this neighborhood for consecutive weeks,
so to give you an idea of the vibe. There's
no side box here. Feels very npr of me to do.

(00:51):
It feels very this American life. I feel like a
fucking dork. When you get to Cassadega, you pass these
white cement pillars on Cassadeca Road, and to your left
is the Cassadega Hotel where I'm going to be staying.
It's this big, haunted looking building that got rebuilt in
the twenties after burning down, but has been out of
the hands of the Cassadega camp Proper for many decades now, which,

(01:14):
as we've discussed before, has led to a lot of
confusion and drama in the community because there are readings
done at the hotel, but not ones that are sanctioned
by the Spiritualist Proper. In many ways, having this hotel
bought out from under them due to their own kind
of chronic brokenness is one of the hardest hits Cassadega
has ever taken. The hotel is really important. It shares

(01:36):
a name with the community and has the only amenities
and restaurant, which you need to know is called Sinatra's Restaurante,
where karaoke nights get a little too loud for the
proper mediums across the street's taste. On the days the
restaurant isn't open, you can either survive on chocolate bars
from the bookstore or walk to the nearest gas station

(02:00):
half hour away. I opt for both of these at
multiple points in my trip, and as we've heard several times,
the mediums who were trained at Cassadega don't have the
highest opinion of the mediums and tarot readers who work
out of the hotel. Across the street is a more
sanctioned area, the Andrew Jackson Davis Building, this white, one

(02:22):
floor wooden structure that serves as both DeCamps, bookstore, administrative office,
and activity center where I've already been to message services
and a table tipping class, and sat in on a
class called Healing one oh one with Reverend Dr Phil.
I was not allowed to record this class, but they
were very welcoming and we learned all about our chakras

(02:42):
and Eastern concept not originally associated with spiritualism. We love it.
And I spoke to a particularly gossipy student who told
me that she knew that spiritual healing wasn't a substitute
for medicine, but the healers at Cassadega had done more
than her physical therapist of her had. Let's keep moving,
as I learned from the bookstore manager selling a green.

(03:04):
The bookstore is a moneymaker for the camp. It's one
of the few places where the mediums can capitalize on
the average tourist's interests, selling rarer spiritualist texts for the
true student, but also overpriced crystals T shirts declaring Cassadega
where Maybury meets the Twilight Zone. Two references that make
it no wonder. They're struggling to recruit younger members. They

(03:27):
sell candles and magnets and those chocolate bars I was
telling you about. This is where the spiritualists make good
on people seeking mediumship as comfort and self help. The
walls are lined with tarot cards that their religion doesn't
technically endors. There are self help guides, relationship manuals, guides
to the phases of the moon, one local book about

(03:49):
a boy who died of rabies. I don't know did
not look into this. Further on the other side of
the pillars are non camp sanctioned crystal shops, stores that
have prices is jacked up into Los Angeles territory. These
unsanctioned shops are even more low ceilinged affairs with ten
dollar clear courts, crystals and tarot reading rooms with walls

(04:11):
so thin that you can hear the college girl crying
about why her boyfriend won't take her back while paying
seventy five bucks for a twenty minute reading. Walk down
a little further and you'll hit Sea Green's Ghost Museum
ten dollars for admission, a business originally called the Cassadega
History museum, but was then rebranded into a Haunted House

(04:31):
due to lack of interest in history. And my favorite,
the tiny post office in Cassadega, one that at every
point seems to be barely holding onto its justification for existing.
I walked back into the camp. Down Stephens Street. You
pass a few double decker houses and apartments. A big
one is called Harmony Hall. It's a ten apartment ramshackle

(04:55):
structure with a big sign out front. Some of the
mediums live here, others just actice hear. What I do know,
because I know you're wondering, is that people fuck in
Harmony Hall, or at least they have fucked, because I
received roundabout word of at least two babies that have
been conceived within its walls. I walk all the way
up to the biggest park on this side of the

(05:17):
camp called Seneca Park, named for who founder George Colby
claimed was his indigenous spirit guide who led him to
the stolen indigenous land he bought and converted into Cassadega,
a likely story that will be unpacking next week. I
try to meditate and be present, but it's hard because
all I can hear is the sound of roosters in

(05:40):
the distance. There are so many roosters at this camp.
I've run out of things to explore, and I realized
that I'm kind of killing time. I'm nervous because I'm
about to get a reading with the Reverend. Dr. Lewis,
a medium raised by mediums, who doesn't just encourage you
to record your reading. He records for you, handing me

(06:01):
a high quality c D ram upon payment. Do you
know what I had to go through so that you
could hear this audio? Have you hand the met before? Kay? Uh?
Send me your stats where you just stop me? Want
you get take it for you? For you? It's time

(06:21):
We've got to talk to Reverend Dr Lewis. I'm going
in so this week, not only am I going to
give you a look and to listen to what a
one on one spiritualist reading is like, We're also going
to close out the story of Spiritualism's founders, the Fox Sisters,
at the inflection point where the ideas they popularized belonged
to the world and no longer to themselves. How are

(06:43):
you feeling? I feel like we should get a theme
song going. I okay, it's starting awesome. Shodakay. Welcome back, listener,

(07:45):
we have so much to discuss. In our last episode,
we took a little detour to speak with the people
who run Cassadega today, from the mediums themselves to people
who run the camps day to day operations. And next
week we're going to take look at the camp's origin
story and all of the American appropriative mess that comes
with it. But before we can get there, we've got

(08:07):
to follow the story of American Spiritualisms founders, the Fox sisters, Leah, Maggie,
and Kate Fox to their stories end and take a
look at how their religion didn't just outlive them, but
sort of killed them too. We left off in eighteen
fifty two and the Foxes Leah now thirty nine, Maggie nineteen,

(08:28):
and Kate fifteen went to Philadelphia and it was there
that Maggie met a boy, and not just any boy,
a thirty two year old man, and so not a boy,
a very rich man. His name was Alicia Clark Kane,
an Arctic explorer from a wealthy Philadelphia family, you know,
like one of those rich guys that's like I can

(08:50):
have a job like like. But anyways, that was what
he was doing by the time he met Maggie. Kane
was a successful explorer and he took an interest in
Maggie Fox. Definitely not spiritualism. He asked her out and
took her on a date to his brother's grave. A
little weird, but I guess a good place to bring

(09:11):
a Fox sister, and she did become pretty interested in him.
Things he did up quickly, and soon enough he was
professing his love for her, vowing to end his engagement
that his parents were forcing him into. All while knowing
that they would never approve a match with a middle class,
new money girl with no generational assets who made her
living talking to ghosts. Kane kept her a secret from

(09:33):
his family and gave her the first of many ultimatums. Yes,
he loved her, but he could only accept her as
his wife if she gave up the religion that she'd
founded with her sisters. Of course, Leah Fox despised him
to some extent. This was sister Lee protectiveness, but it
could also be seen as a power struggle between Leah

(09:54):
and Alicia Caine to retain control over Maggie Fox's life.
Kane's letters, Uh will not endear you to him. He
says things like this, Oh, how much I wish that
you would quit this life of dreary sameness and suspected deceit,
he would say to her in a series of deeply
nagging letters. In another, he says this, I need hardly

(10:16):
say that I am gratified to find that you write
so ably. You have more brain than I gave you
credit For just one more, I promise you could never
lift yourself to my thoughts and my objects. I can
never bring myself down to yours. What a dream boat.
And around this time, the Fox sisters were securing some

(10:37):
of their biggest supporters ever, including their very first president.
During a trip to d C, President Franklin Pierce and
First Lady Jane Pierce saw their eleven year old son
die before their eyes when a train they were on derailed.
Jane Pierce w later do a mediumship session with Maggie Fox,

(10:57):
and the sisters also met with a number of congressmen
and other DC locals. The religion was catching on in
a huge way, in spite of charges of fraudulence and
the fluctuating reputations of the sisters themselves. The next spring,
Maggie's new boyfriend Kane left for another Arctic expedition, but
not before Maggie gave into his wishes and agreed to

(11:19):
leave spiritualism and get an education according to his specifications.
While he was gone. Maggie's departure from the fold put
extra pressure on a sixteen year old Kate Fox, who
was understandably getting pretty burnt out from being worked so
hard as a kid, in spite of the fact that
they were making more money than ever, more than seven

(11:40):
times the annual salary of the average female factory worker.
A few years passed as Spiritualism continues to expand independently
of the Sisters. By this time, it was estimated that
there were several hundred thousand spiritualists in the US, and
many high profile spiritualists were trying to get the phenomena

(12:01):
experienced within the religion investigated and validated by petitioning Congress
for a government committee. This was at a time where
many spiritualists were especially enthusiastic about the scientific promise of
the religion, but most government officials were still very dismissive.
A former Wisconsin governor's request for a government committee was

(12:23):
privately mocked as a cult science and quickly dismissed. In
eighteen fifty five, the first volume of spiritualist history called
Modern Spiritualism, Its Face and Fantasies, Its Consistencies and Contradictions,
was published by Eliab Kaprin, and it was also this
year that Kane returned to Maggie Fox. Maggie was understandably thrilled.

(12:46):
She was pretty bored, wasn't loving school, and missed conducting
sciences with her sisters, but she was determined to marry
Alicia Clark Kane. But instead of doing that, he showed
up at her home several days after back from his
mission with the document. He wanted her to sign disclaiming
any relationship they'd ever had together and demanded that she

(13:08):
returned all his love letters. I this motherfucker came back
and said, just kidding, the engagement is off. Signed this
n d A like he was writing a Marvel movie
or something. It makes me mad, because at this point
both of them were very public figures. Kane's memoir of

(13:28):
his most recent expedition would become a best seller that
was second only to the Bible when it was published,
and Maggie Fox was the founder of this on the
Rise religious movement. But in Kaine's view, she was a
reputational liability new money, so he gives her this n
d A. She agrees to sign it, but he changes
his mind and Maggie forgave him for maybe one of

(13:51):
the meanest things I've ever heard of someone you were
supposed to marry doing to you. They began to see
each other again, something that didn't affect his reputation but
certainly affected her as an unmarried woman who was supposed
to be having sex before marriage. The Fox family was
not thrilled about this, but Kate and their mother, Margaret,

(14:11):
were said to be in attendance when Maggie and Kane
were unofficially married in a private ceremony. It was a
rushed circumstance. Kane was said to be leaving for a
book tour in England the next day and allegedly said
to the family, Maggie is my wife and I am
her husband. Wherever we are, she is mine and I
am hers. This ceremony's authenticity was disputed later, and that

(14:35):
is important because Kane became ill on the way to
London and died shortly after arriving. Death of a himbo.
You hate to hear it. Maggie was very upset She
fell into a nervous collapse when she learned this, and
the Kane family was swift to cut her out of
their bottom line, claiming that their marriage was not legitimate

(14:56):
and any money that Kane had appeared to have left
behind for her care was not intended for her at all.
It's around this time that Maggie became plagued with increasing
struggles with alcoholism and finances. She wrote this to Kaine's
brother after his passing. I know that the Doctor must
have left some message for me, and know that you
will not refuse to deliver it, even though it gives

(15:17):
you much pain in recalling the name of him whose
memory is and ever will be sacred. I have always
held a religious faith in the deep sincerity of the
Doctor's love. Meanwhile, Leah and Kate struggled with a series
of blows in their religion. In June of eighteen fifty seven,
they participated in another highly publicized investigation, this one by

(15:39):
the Boston Courier to prove the existence of spirit communication.
Harvard Study and Spiritualism had taken down famous spiritualist adjacent figures.
The Davenport brothers to be nothing more than excellent magicians,
who could appear and disappear and create music from seemingly
disembodied places. Leah and Kate prevail in this investigation, but barely.

(16:03):
The results of the study said that there was quote
a little rapping by the Foxes, easily traceable to their persons,
and easily done by others, without the pretense of spirit,
nor a table or piano lifted, or anything moved a
single hair's breadth. So ends this ridiculous and infamous imposture unquote.

(16:25):
As always, there are two sides to this. It was
speculated that at least one Harvard man disliked the Fox
sisters in particular because they were a friend of the
deceased Alicia Kane, and thought that his involvement with Maggie
Fox had led to his downfall. You know how Harvard
guys are always bonding over ship that makes no sense.

(16:45):
Maggie had managed to hold on to the only proof
she had of her relationship with Kane, these love letters,
and converted to Catholicism in eighty eight in Kane's honor.
Leah soon married a rich Quaker who was obsessed with
her good for her, which allowed her to retire from
public sciences after ten years of public pressure, Suddenly Kate

(17:07):
Fox was the last sister standing to carry the religion
on her back, and they were not going to make
it easy for her. All Right, We're back in Cassadega
to a different kind of medium carrying a different kind
of spiritualism on his back. When I get to the

(17:28):
Reverend Dr Lewis Gates's door, I've already gotten a few
readings done at the camp. The first was a tarot
reading at the Hotel Cassadega, where I'm staying. The camp
trained mediums don't seem to have a ton of respect
for the card readers at the hotel, and sure the
readings are maybe a little overpriced, but there are Casadeca

(17:50):
mediums who charged comparably, and the rivalry itself seems kind
of silly. Once you actually see a medium or a
psychic from both parties, they're both good. And I got
to see a terror reader just inches from my hotel room,
which was, for the record, tiny haunted feeling and a
bathroom the size of a closet that I soon learned

(18:12):
does not get hot water. Oh, in the best part,
a sign that says do not let cats into the hotel.
Our hotel does not allow animals on the premises, and
beside that sign, without fail, there were always two cats
mewing at the top of their lungs trying to get
into my room from the outside. One of the better

(18:34):
things about Cassadega is it has a community stray cat
feeding program called can You figure cats Adega? It's called
cats Adega. That is truly one of the only bridges
between the Camp Association and their local counterparts. My terror
reader at the hotel was with a woman about my
mom's age early sixties, and like most of the psychics

(18:57):
and mediums who work at the hotel, she had us
this pretty cool sweetheart deal. They get to practice upstairs
in this hundred year old haunted hotel. They're given their
own hotel room to give readings in, and they get
to design it as they choose. The room I walk
into is covered in pastel's, there a ton of light,
and I have a tarot reading that I would say

(19:18):
is pretty solid. It's funny to me that so many
spiritualists dismissed tarot cards as strictly a parlor game, not
because it's technically incorrect, but you might recall the seance
was considered a parlor game for many years, and many
spiritualists used early versions of the talking board, which would

(19:39):
become the Uiji board, which was also a parlor game.
The modern spiritualist movements relationship with tarot cards is kind
of interesting to me at the camp. Formally, it is
not something that is used or done, and seems to
even be kind of looked down on by some mediums.
My theory of why they no longer tend to appear

(19:59):
in modern spiritualism, which is much more focused on the mental,
is because of how many tools were proven to be
fraudulent in their era. But it's a good reading. The
terror reader pulls cards and asks me about myself and
interprets what's happening. She pulls the world card, she pulls
the three of sorts, the four of sorts, a need

(20:21):
to rest after getting stabbed in the heart three times,
And like any good reading experience, some of it is
just weird. She says things like this spirit wants you
to hear living in the past makes you dead in
the present. That was by Bill Belichick, the football coach.
I also got a reading done with a formal Cassadeca

(20:43):
medium before I go see Louis Gates. I meet with
a former Wall Street employee who moved to Cassadega after eleven.
She has me sanitize my hands and the pen and
the pad of paper she gave me to take notes,
no recording allowed, and the reading is hit and miss,
like many readings are. I don't think I'm going to
be a fashion designer. I wear like three shirts and

(21:05):
one pants. But she does channel my grandmother incredibly well,
giving specific details down to the red scarf that she'd
wear to a church on Sunday, the fact that she
secretly smoked cigarettes to the point that she was only
caught with them on the day she died out of nowhere,
the fact that my dad was around the same age
his dad was when he passed away. So by the

(21:28):
time I get to Reverend Dr Lewis Gates, I'm a
little guarded at this point of seeing him all over
the camp healing it Sunday services, giving spirit messages, and
teaching the table tipping class I took. He's a third
generation medium, so he knows American spiritualism probably better than
almost anyone practicing in the country. When he opens the

(21:49):
door to greet me, he just starts the second he
opens the door. I entered the house he practices in
with his wife, Marie Gates, and he guides me right inside.
Waste no time. He's got a ton of energy and
he's recording the whole thing on this CD ROM recorder,
which I wasn't even aware was a thing that existed.

(22:10):
But that means you can hear it too. If I'm
not looking at you, I'm not. I'm not ignoring you
on where you're there. I just watched what they're doing
your stuff. I'm looking over there somewhere else, not ignore you.
Know you're there. I've heard on like four reces and
so a little wired, and yeah, he's a little wired.
I've never heard so many ideas channeled and thrown out

(22:32):
there from a medium so quickly in what seems to
be this effortless motion that felt kind of jarring and
kind of cool. Not everything resonated or made sense to me.
In fact, listening back to this, even less made sense
to me than I thought did in the moment, but
some of it felt true and resonant. You're just kind
of pelt it with information and ideas, and even if

(22:55):
something isn't making sense to you, as he looks past
your head to the wooden floorboards to describe something like this,
a gentleman sitting up there on the floor. I haven't
figured out what he's doing yet. I just don't fear
what he's doing yet. I feel like this passing was
extremely suddenly, extremely quickly passed, a quick pass, but I
feel like he was quite sick. He was sick, he says,

(23:16):
his body was giving up on it. You barely have
time to register it before he's moved on to something else,
in which he and I'm paraphrasing, Loki says, I'll never
get married. He says this a lot. If you're married,
I don't see it. So if you're married, I don't
see it in the path behind yourself, okay. Also, he says,
I don't belong in Florida, have no business, and the
state of Florida. I'm not going to kick him out

(23:37):
and a business here? Do you live here? Thank God?
It's interesting because the reverend doctor is going back and
forth between psychic abilities and medium ship abilities here. As
I've been told by pastor not pastor dead before, all
mediums are psychics, but not all psychics are mediums. Psychic

(23:58):
work as I understand in it is more of the
prediction of the future, reading your energy, talking about the
fact that you're never gonna get married. Mediumship is the
guy sitting on the floor who died suddenly, not channeling
something from the generalized universe, but a message from a
specific individual spirit. Both of these practices line up cleanly

(24:22):
with themes that spiritualists have followed forever, themes of self improvement,
general optimism, the Golden Rule, and comforting messages from this
group of spirits that are meant to be your guides
through life. And spiritualists have always used this very American
individualist idea that it's not just about hearing from the dead,

(24:44):
it's about hearing from your dead personality. And all during
my time with Louis, he throws a lot out there.
There's a guy named Don following me around. There's a
lady named Helen following me around. There are several archangels
with him from people in your vibrasion. You have a gentleman,
two of them sitting over there. Now, Yeah, you heard

(25:05):
that we have two guys in the room. You have
a guy in your viversion. You have a guy in
your vibration named don God guide for you, guide for
use false people times, definitely guide for you. If you
warking to Michael with you right now, to archangels, you
are for you. Two guys in the room. He keeps
throwing stuff out there, and he doesn't seem to care
or notice if it hurts my feelings. You're not looking

(25:27):
to do calm. You work for the rest of your life.
You're not Molly Homemaker. You not Florence Nightingale. But they
need to know that. People may know that I'm not
that I tell people something's in your life. It's not
your surface, not your monkey, which you shouldn't be on
the first name basis of the clowns. There's a lot
of midsized dogs sitting underneath your chair walking in here,

(25:48):
sitting underneath your chair. It's information, information information. My spirit
guides want me to buy a comedy club. There's a
woman in my vibration who says I swear too much.
Someone's putting the Star of Day of the necklace on me.
Am I Jewish? No, I'm not Jewish. Well they put
that necklace on me. This is the Casadega way. The
skeptics will tell you that this is a combination of

(26:11):
hot and cold reading tactics. Hot readings being a technique
where a medium uses what they could know about you
before you enter the room. In my case, it's not
hard to learn that I am a comedian, for example,
and cold reading techniques where no previous information is known,
and the psychic or medium throws a lot of stuff

(26:32):
at the wall and either backs off or goes in
further on one detail, depending on the physical or verbal
affirmations the sitter gives them. And sure that will make sense.
But when a piece of information hits from a medium,
any of that logic goes completely out the window. In

(26:54):
those moments, it's all real. And I mean that no
matter how much you know, no matter how many times
the reverend doctor tells you you're never gonna get married, Well,
you meet somebody to walk the faculty. And that's me
really looking for when it hits, when there's no explaining it,

(27:16):
no amount of conventional logic is going to talk someone
who believes in it out of it even a little.
And this phenomenon of belief had a huge effect on
the final days of the Fox Sisters. So let's check
in with them. The last twenty five years of the

(27:42):
Fox sisters Lives is at times baffling and other times tragic.
While interest in spiritualism continued to rise in the US,
especially when the absurdly high number of Civil War casualties
starting in eighteen sixty one created this understandably increased interest
in speaking with the dead, Maggie and Kate in particular,

(28:04):
began to suffer more and more. Spiritualists in the US
at this time generally accepted Abraham Lincoln's leadership, but because
the religion was popularized by Rochester abolitionists, Spiritualism waned in
popularity in the American South during the war, but in
the North it surged in a major way. Spiritualist papers

(28:27):
really pushed supporters of their religion to enlist in support
of the Union. Spiritualist historian Emma Hardened wrote, quote spiritualists
total unconcern on the subject of death made them the
bravest of soldiers unquote. The spiritualists also got their second
first Lady supporter after losing her eleven year old son

(28:48):
Willie to typhoid fever in eighteen sixty two. First Lady
Mary Todd Lincoln became the latest White House residents to
engage with spiritualism, and was said to have held as
many as eight seance as in the White House. Their
interests in spiritualism and spirit photography, a physical spirit manifestation
that shows you you're dead in ghost form in a

(29:10):
compact souvenir. Pick continued after her husband's assassination as the
war continued. In eighteen sixty four, one of the most
significant moments in the attempts to organize American Spiritualists took
place at their first national convention in Chicago. There had
been some previous attempts throughout the eighteen fifties, but as

(29:30):
with all things Spiritualists, and I'll say it most leftist
groups in general, they were plagued with an inability to
agree on anything, and their inherent resistance to declaring leadership
and hardline rules made it very difficult to all get
on the same page, which stagnated growth. The Fox Sisters
did not attend this first national convention, but the Spiritualists

(29:54):
did manage to unify on one issue, rehabilitating the image
of their religion from al gations of fraud. A statement
from the convention read this, American Spiritualism means something more
than table tipping and trumpet blowing, trance, speaking, and size,
seeing that the highest conditions it imposes are not abnormal
states of beautified unconsciousness, but a vigorous, healthful working state

(30:18):
for the practical attainment of physical and spiritual freedom, purity,
and growth. In the eighteen sixties, twenty something, Kate was
now the only sister who practiced in public. She was
still innovating science techniques and was now working in automatic writing,
a process that involved transcribing messages with her left hand
in reverse script while verbally channeling as normal. It's around

(30:42):
this time in the eighteen sixties through the early twentieth
century that public demand for more theatrical manifestations of spirit
came into practice. Other examples included full body manifestations, something
that Kate was said to do for a wealthy banker
client who had lost his wife. Again, this brings up

(31:02):
simultaneous questions of whether Kate was responding to public pressure
for larger physical manifestations, or, as spirits are often accused of,
if she was exploiting the grief of a wealthy man
by claiming that she could physically make is dead return
who boy. By the end of the Civil War, more

(31:24):
Americans were killed than in World Wars one and two combined.
President Lincoln was assassinated, and the extremely fraught period of
reconstruction in the US began. According to Emma Hardinge, the
war resulted in two million additional Spiritualist converts, a huge
moment for the religion, although there was no guarantee that

(31:46):
the movement would continue to align with the times. It
was around this time that both of the Fox sisters
parents John and Margaret, passed away, further fracturing the sister's relationship.
And the loss of her mother drove Kate Fox to
begin drinking to excess. Her sister Maggie was already too
sick to help her, and eldest sister Leah strategically kept

(32:09):
her distance interesting sidebar here. In an attempt to intervene
with Kate's alcoholism, a doctor friend arranged to have her
be checked into the facility of one doctor George Taylor,
an American who would go on to invent something called
the manipulator in eighteen sixty nine, essentially a huge machine

(32:29):
designed to make women come I'm not getting it's a
big old vibrator. The attitude towards the Victorian vagina was
both misogynists in the expected way and kind of roundabout
progressive by mistake. In a society known for litigating the
bodies of marginalized people, the post Civil War era saw

(32:50):
women like Kate, those with some of the most privileged
in the nation, diagnosed with hysteria. Now we're all familiar
with that, but one of the proposed cures for hysteria
was quote tellific massage to hysterical paroxysm coming u so

(33:10):
deviant behavior from the owners of Victorian vaginas could be
cured by coming, although of course the procedures didn't make
it sound as if this had anything to do with pleasure.
In a culture that famously assumed that pussy shunned squirt
without the guidance of good dick, and was predicated on
the idea that women were emotionally and intellectually inferior, Thus hysteria,

(33:35):
there were doctors whose job that was to make you come.
That's just history. Dr Rachel Maine's, a sex historian and
the author of the Technology of Orgasm, said this of
the good doctor George Taylor. Dr Taylor advised colleagues that
women would tend to want more treatment than they really needed.
They would overdo it if you let them. H These scamps,

(33:58):
these freaks, they're coming all over town. Hide your children.
Kate Fox's time with Dr Taylor was by all accounts,
really fun for her. He'd pioneered something called the Swedish
Movement Cure, which encouraged regular vibrator stuff along with exercise, massage,
and all vegetarian diet, and this worked for her for

(34:21):
some time, but of course it couldn't cure her financial
issues or her addiction. Kate would occasionally disappear for weeks
at a time to conduct seances for the Nuvaux Reach
of New York City, often being bribed with alcohol and
going on weeklong benders. Eventually, Dr Taylor and his wife
Sarah decided to protect Kate by allowing her to stay

(34:44):
at their facility free of charge in exchange for some
quid pro quo seances, once again meaning that Kate Fox
was paying her rent by keeping a couple in touch
with their dead children. Harriet Beetristowe, author of Tom's Happen,
was also a patient of Dr Taylor's and attended seances

(35:06):
where Kate continued to manifest more and more physical manifestations
disembodied hands, twinkling lights, spirit portraits, likely influenced by early
spirit photography. Still struggling with addiction that Kate would sometimes
channel medium's messages that seemed to be directed at herself.

(35:27):
Here's an example. Now, go and rejoice, Katie, and live.
There are two paths, one happiness and peace, one misery
and death. Choose the former, and great will be your
golden reward. By one spirit, had Kate informed the tailor's
that it was time for their medium and residence to

(35:47):
go abroad via a popular spirit that Kate would channel
named Benjamin Franklin. I'm serious. You might remember from a
few episodes ago that I was kind of jar when
finding out a present day Cassadega medium considered JP Morgan
to be one of his spirit guides. But there is

(36:08):
weirdly precedent for that kind of thing. American and English
spiritualists would often channel historical figures like this, that is,
ones highly glorified in their culture at the time who
are deeply entrenched in these colonial and imperialist myths. It's
yet another example of the spiritualist movement being generally progressive,

(36:30):
but still majority composed of middle class white Americans who
were frequently tone deaf and self centered, a major reason
that the religion has not diversified much today and why
as well discussed next week. Black and brown spiritualists felt
ostracized from the movement and would go on to form
their own churches and customs. The tailors weren't thrilled to

(36:52):
see the prone to relapse in Kate leave, but she
was now in her mid thirties and there wasn't much
they could do. She left for England in late eighteen
seventy one and was thrilled to see that spiritualism had
taken off in England significantly. By this time, England had
produced a number of legendary mediums since the religion was

(37:12):
brought to the country in the early eighteen fifties. There
was a deed Home, who I've mentioned on Ghost Church before,
who was known as one of the least debunked mediums
of the time, although skepticism ran rampant there as well.
My favorite example is Victorian writer power couple Robert and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning went to one of Holmes seances in England, ones,

(37:35):
intriguing Elizabeth but prompting Robert to write a brutal takedown
poem called Mr Sludge the medium, look at me, see
I kneel. The only time I swear I ever cheated,
Yes by the soul of her who hears your sainted mother, sir.
All except this last accident was truth. It's really long.

(37:56):
It's like this Victorian dis tract It's goodd Holme was
also notable for allegedly introducing spiritualism to a Russian woman
named Helena Blovotsky in the late eighteen fifties, who spent
a lot of time defending spiritualism for years, but was
off put by their fraud allegations. Eventually, using a number
of ideas she'd learned via her travels in Tibet, India

(38:20):
and all across the East, she brought concepts like karma
and reincarnation into existing spiritualist rhetoric and founded her own movement,
Theosophy in eighteen seventy five, a movement that was also
played by accusations of fraud. Queen Victoria was rumored to
have either attended or maybe even held spiritualist seances after

(38:42):
the death of her husband, Prince Albert in eighteen sixty one,
so it was an even bigger boon to the English
spiritualist movement. When v Kate Fox married an Englishman, now
thirty five years old, she met a widower named Henry
Dietrich Jenkin, who didn't just believe in spiritualists, so did
his parents. She had two kids with him, Ferdinand and

(39:04):
England and Henry Jr. While visiting her sisters in New York,
and her happy married life and ability to continue practicing
her religion kept Kate on the wagon for a long time,
but as always, things remained needlessly chaotic in America. In
eighteen seventy two there were two spiritualist adjacent failed presidential campaigns.

(39:26):
Longtime Fox family friend Horace Greeley, who Kate had spent
the summer getting an education from when she was just
a kid, had failed in his presidential bid against Ulysses S.
Grant and died shortly after in a sanitarium. More interesting way,
many American spiritualists were embarrassed when a medium named Victoria

(39:47):
Woodhull became the first woman to ever campaign for the
American presidency. Her campaign is considered to be pretty historic
now but was treated like a joke in its day.
Woodhull had as a women's rights advocate for years. She
had been pro abolition, She had been a pusher of
the concept of free love, which at this time only

(40:09):
meant the right to get married, divorced, or have children
without social restriction. And then there were some eccentric things.
She listed Frederick Douglas as her running mate, which I
guess she never told him about. All this to say,
the Spiritualists did not claim her, and her public presence
was considered to be an embarrassment to the movement, because sure,

(40:31):
ghosts are real, but a woman for president, I'm going
to be sick. I have to get on that big
scary vibrator again. By the mid eighteen seventies, Kayton Maggie's
relationship with their older sister Leah hadn't improved very much.
Kate wrote in a letter to fellow medium D. D.
Home that my sister, Mrs Underhill, who was more than
twenty three years older than myself, was always jealous of me,

(40:55):
and when my blessed mother died, we were not on
speaking terms, but she was working on forgiveness, explaining that
at times I find the shadows of her unkindness lingering
in my heart. I tried to remember that she is
a changed woman and a good woman, while the Fox

(41:21):
has continued to split hairs. Loosely organized spiritualist camps began
to pop up all over the country, including a camp
of hundreds of tents in Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, as well
as the Cassadega Lake Free Association in upstate New York
in eighteen seventy nine. Don't be confused, this is not
the same Cassadega that I visited this year in Florida.

(41:45):
This is a sister camp that was later named lily
Dale in nineteen oh six. Lily Dale is still considered
to be the most influential spiritualist camp in the country,
spanning over eighty acres and briefly being the site where
the Fox is. His cabin was relocated. Of course, like
all notable spiritualist buildings, it burned down under mysterious circumstances.

(42:08):
In Kate's husband died after they had a decade of
a happy marriage and two kids, and Kate almost immediately
falls off the wagon and begins drinking again. She traveled
to Russia briefly after being invited by a bureaucrat, and
is said to have held seances for the royal family,
but those times didn't last very Long eight four brought

(42:31):
another round of prominent mediums down with a study called
the Seabird Commission. It was an academic study funded with
money left behind by spiritualist Henry Siebert to confirm the
phenomena of the religion he dedicated his life too. Conducted
at the University of Pennsylvania. Maggie met with them, and
while her mediumship wasn't disproven, that was once again cast

(42:55):
on how the Fox spirit rappings were made, as well
as on other physical phenomena like spirit photography and automatic writing.
The sisters were thrown into conflict again when Leah published
her heavily editorialized memoirs called The Missing Link in Modern
Spiritualism in five, which Maggie and Kate did not like,

(43:18):
particularly because they were struggling financially and with alcohol as
their older sister lived this comfortable, wealthy life. In Everything
comes crashing down that may, Kate Fox was arrested and
held for three hundred dollars in the Harlem Police court
on child neglect charges. When the police showed up, the

(43:42):
boys were fined and healthy, but Kate was in fact drunk,
and the boys, who were fourteen and twelve, were sent
to a juvenile asylum. Once released, Kate was devastated and embarrassed,
admitting to having quote intemperate habits end quote, but strongly
denied that this had affected her parenting and the impact

(44:05):
that this arrest had extended beyond the personal. For other
prominent spiritualists, Kate's arrest was an embarrassment that further estranged
the religion's creators from the religion itself. Maggie was able
to get her nephews out of the juvenile asylum by
sending a cable posing as Kate's brother in law, Edward Jenkin,

(44:26):
reuniting Kate with the boys, but that was only the beginning.
At this point, Maggie and Kate Fox had been synonymous
with spiritualism for forty years, beginning when they were about
the same age as Kate's sons. Spiritualism had changed their
lives completely, for better and for worse. They had become
some of the most prominent women serving as religious figures

(44:49):
in the world, but had become so at the expense
of their privacy, their youth, and the majority of their
personal relationships. They were predisposed to alcohol is m via
their dad, but these issues were exacerbated by the stress
and pressure of constant investigations and their status at different
times in life as unmarried or widowed women definitely did

(45:13):
not help. By this time, Maggie had returned to occasionally
conducting seances for financial purposes, while maintaining that she was
technically a Catholic okay Messi. But forty years on, the
world still wondered did they really believe in what they
had spent their lives doing. Maggie Fox published an answer

(45:36):
via a column in the New York Heralds called The
Curse of Spiritualism, in which she said that it was
all a lie. She explained that she and Kate had
been reassured by Leah as children that their fraudulence was
okay and in service of something greater, that spirit communication
was real, and that she had proved it by having

(45:58):
spirit rappings that Leah her self produced assure her younger
sisters that they were doing the right thing. Her Maggie
Leah had exploited a prank that they'd played as board kids,
convinced them it was real, and spun it out into
a religion that had made her rich and respected, while
her kid's sisters remained deceived and increasingly destitute. Maggie takes

(46:22):
pot shots a lot of people in this column, particularly Leah,
but also the general public who were enthusiastic about spiritualism.
She indicates that she felt the public pressured mediums into
fraudulence with increasingly ridiculous demands. From her column, spiritualism is
a curse. God has set his seal against it. I

(46:44):
call it a curse for the vilest miscreants make use
of it to cloak their evil doings. Fanatics ignore the wrappings,
which is the only part of the phenomena that is
worthy of notice, and rushed madly after the glaring humbugs
that flood New York of Lellah. Maggie indicated that she
felt it was Leah who had gotten Kate arrested in

(47:05):
the first place. When she was interviewed in a follow
up by The Tribune in September, she went in, we
were but innocent, little children. What did we know? We
get to know too much. Our sister used us in
her exhibitions, and we made money for her. Now she
turns upon us because she's the wife of a rich man,

(47:26):
and she opposes us both wherever she can. Oh, I
am after her. You can kill sometimes without using weapons,
you know. When asked how the Foxes had produced the
wrappings all these years, Maggie promised she would show the
world at an upcoming lecture. And what gets me the
most out of this whole story is Maggie saying that
she never believed that her older sister was lying to

(47:48):
her about spirit communication being real until her own husband
died and never came back to talk to her. Maggie continues,
why I have explored the unknown as far as human
will can. I have gone to the dead so that
I might get from them some little token. Nothing came
of it, nothing nothing. Kate fully supported Maggie, saying that

(48:12):
the majority of Leah's book was fiction, and at a
public showing in October, Maggie showed the world how she
and Kate had been producing the wrappings all these years,
confirming a lot of speculation from the past four decades.
She says, at night, when we went to bed, we
used to tie an apple on a string and move

(48:34):
the string up and down, causing the apple to bump
on the floor. Or we would drop the apple on
the floor, making a strange noise. Every time it would rebound.
As people have been speculating since the early eighteen fifties.
Maggie said the raps were produced with their knuckles and joints,
fingers toes. Knees. Oh my god, that's so cruel. These

(48:57):
women's knees were just destroy roy. They were for sure
double jointed, but over time developed incredible control over the
motions of their bodies. It's pretty fascinating and kind of
grotesque to think about. It's not like athletic, but that
kind of mastery of your own tiny bodily movements is

(49:18):
just wild. Uh. Maggie said that no one ever caught
on or mistrusted them when spiritualism began, because they were
just kids, and that they were led on by my
sister intentionally and by my mother unintentionally. She called several
physicians to the stage and showed them how she did it.
She moved around her joints, and just as always, the

(49:40):
spirit raps sounded around the auditorium. The news called it
the death blow to spiritualism. Here were the two girls,
now women who had started everything, publicly stating that it
had been a lie, and they regretted it. All Spiritualism
should have ended right there and then. But that's not

(50:02):
really how believing in something works is it? By this time,
spiritualism was in some ways too big to fail. In
addition to large followings in the US and Europe, a
movement called a Spiritismo, which will discuss next week, had
combined with other spiritual traditions of enslaved African people in Brazil, Cuba,

(50:25):
and Puerto Rico, to name a few. So spiritualists did
what you might expect, once again, discredit and smear the
Fox Sisters by any means necessary. Maggie was accused of
disclaiming spirit for financial reasons, of being abandoned by spirit
by lack of faith, that she wasn't even relevant enough

(50:45):
to the movement for her opinion to matter. That Kate
was just falling into line with her lie, just as
she had fallen into line with Leah all those years.
Prominent spiritualists turned on them as they continued to tour
the j K spit Ritualism Is Fake lecture series. They
stuck by this for a good year. But here's the
part that's wildest of all. A year later they took

(51:09):
it back. Maggie apologized forever having said that spiritualism was
a lie, now saying that quote would to God that
I could undo the injustice I did the cause of spiritualism.
She said the Catholics had made her do it, and
certainly not that the wealthy spiritualists had pressured her to
recount her statements. Maggie implied that she would do another

(51:32):
lecture tour the j K. The JK spiritualism is fake
lecture tour is fake lecture tour. It didn't work. Leah
passed away peacefully at home in eight nine and her
late seventies, the child abuse accusations never really affecting her,
and in fact, the backlash against her younger sisters only

(51:54):
elevated Leah's status among long time spiritualists. Kate redacted all
of her denied aisles of her religion as well, and
once again started doing sciences for the Vibrator family the Tailors,
but would still disappear on drinking binges before passing away
mid binge at only fifty five in July. Shortly before

(52:16):
she died, she channeled the spirit of Benjamin Franklin for
the Tailor's one last time, saying there will be no loss.
God bless you now and forever. Maggie was poor and
living at a friend's apartment when she grew sick in eight,
dying in her sleep at fifty nine. There was no
money left, but a friend arranged for Maggie and Cake

(52:37):
to be buried beside each other. And that's the story
of the Fox sisters. They are tough cultural figures to parse.
On one hand, I'll be honest, Leah Fox feels like
a pretty standard girl boss of her era, a single
mom in her thirties, barred from most lines of work

(52:59):
and certainly most lines of power. She was a single
woman who couldn't even vote. When her little sisters stumbled
onto this local phenomenon, she saw an opportunity and exploited
it to create space for herself that didn't exist. But
Maggie and Kate Fox, that's a little harder. They were kids,
and it's much harder to understand what they believed and

(53:22):
what they didn't and for how long. To this day,
people generally cast Maggie and Kate as knowing that their
seances were a fraud the whole time. Here's a drunk
history clip to that effect. Spiritualism has taken off of
that point. And so basically, when Maggie Fox is done,
made her and her sister's irrelevant. So after Maggie realizes

(53:45):
that her life is nothing when she's not a meeting him,
she just drank a bunch of boost as she dined.
But I I don't know. I do believe that they
were playing a prank on their parents that got way
blown out of proportion. But I also believe that if
you're much older sister tells you something is true when
you're a child, you will probably believe it. Faith has

(54:07):
skull fucked so many people, often because of what they
internalized as true when they're very young. And if I
were an eleven year old told that not only did
a prank I pulled on April Fool's Day have accidental
religious significance, but that that significance made me a prophet
that was going to help my family, I don't know.

(54:29):
Every what would you do. I don't know what I'd do.
And however far down the line, when you learn that
things are not as you've been told, whenever that is,
and it seems like Maggie and Kate had those moments
throughout their lives. By that point, this deceit had determined
every area of their life and stood to rob people
of the comfort that they had previously felt morally confident

(54:52):
in giving. If Maggie or Kate truly knew that they
were fraudulent, that's up for criticism, and it should be
in particular. I don't think that any grieving parents should
be misled. But there's too much gray area from me here.
I'm a grieving person doing way too much of this
ship right now. I'm making a wholes show about shades
of gray and skepticism as it pertains to spiritualism. But

(55:14):
I still went to a medium last week, and I
don't know if I went for the truth, but I
do know that I went for comfort and I got that.
And if that medium has a crisis of self three
weeks from now and contacts me and says it was
all a hoax, I would say I still got what
I paid for. But I don't know. Everyone's different. Maggie

(55:35):
and Kate Fox were not perfect baby angel religious profits
that they were often framed as, But I think they're
worth empathizing with. Well, not so much on THEA for me.
She lived till eighty off their backs. As far as
I'm concerned, who cares faith is fucked up when you're
a kid and being lifted as a prophet while propping
up your older sister's fraud probably doesn't help. Over forty

(56:00):
five years after two sisters had heard wrappings in Hydesville,
the Fox Sisters were gone, but spiritualism was just getting started.
And just a year after that, the Cassadega Lake Free
Association decided it was time to open up a new
camp that would stay open year round in central Florida.
Speaking of which, let's see how the good referend Dr

(56:25):
Lewis lands this plane by September this year. Not think
you're in a relationship. I think you could be in
a very extremely powerful friendship. Yeah, he's still telling me
that he doesn't think I'll ever be in love my
entire life. But it's fine. We finish our session and
I pay him forty bucks for forty five minutes. And
for those not plugged into the going rate for mediumship,

(56:47):
this is low, about half of what the other Cassadega
medium might visit charges. That's another way that Reverend Dr
Lewis is old school. Past generations of Cassadega mediums never
won it to charge for their work at all, Implying
to do so would be to cheapen their gifts and
make spiritualism less generally accessible. Today's mediums do charge different

(57:11):
rates and a showing of respect for each other's labor,
although it still is a controversial issue. As I'm heading out,
I asked the Reverend doctor what the rest of his
day is like, and he tells me he has a
session coming up this afternoon he needs to get ready for.
It's a family of middle aged siblings who are looking
for buried treasure that a dead father said might be

(57:32):
buried somewhere in their house. Delightful. So no of the
three readings I have at Cassadega, two of which from
long time certified mediums, nothing completely blew me away. And
that's fine for people who come here. That's a calculated
risk you take. I think I saw them out and
not the other way around. Where the situation can get

(57:55):
predatory is when mediums and psychics work with the police,
for example, an issue we'll talk about in a future episode.
That's a hard line. If a medium is seeking you
to give false affirmative hope, run the other way. After
I leave my reading with Reverend Dr Lewis, I walked
past the library, around the corner, past the shop where

(58:15):
they charged ninety bucks to talk to you behind a
thin sheet and back to my hotel room where there's
no hot water. It's funny because I've walked around boast
of the camp at this point, around the parks, the
ferry trail, the huge Floridian forest where there's a few
marked bamboo poles that memorialize where either a hotel or
a sanitarium burned down, depending on who you ask, And

(58:37):
I've definitely been to the gas station. But one element
of the camp always stands out, something that's visually and
verbally referenced all the time because it is a critical
part of the founding myth of Cassadega, and that is
the Indigenous spirit Guide. But for all the talk of
respecting and referencing Indigenous culture, this is not a history

(59:00):
that's available in Cassadega any more than the tragic side
of the Fox Sister story is one that's ever referenced.
So next week we're going to tackle the next spiritualist myth,
the tangled colonial Mess, and we'll take a detour to
the world of espiritismo. All that and more on next
week's post Church. Ghost Church is a cool Zone Media production, created,

(59:25):
written and hosted by me Jamie Loftus. The show is
produced by Sophie Lichtman, edited by Ian Johnson. Our theme
song is by Speedy Ortiz, That's Sadie Duplead, Andy Loholt,
AUDREYSI Whiteside and Joey Dubeck. Music is by Zoe Bade.
Special thanks to guest voices this week Ian Johnson, Sophie Lichtman, Sharene,

(59:48):
Lonnie Units and Caitlin Drante