October 12, 2011 • 27 mins
In 1848, the Fox family began hearing strange noises, and sisters Maggie and Kate started communicating with spirits. They built a career as mediums, and today they're credited with launching the modern spiritualist movement. But was it all a hoax?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
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History Stuff. That's Audible podcast dot com slash history Stuff. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblin and Chuck Reporting
and I'm Sara Dowdy. And if you've listened to this
podcast for a little while, you've probably heard us refer
(01:03):
to something called spiritualism. A lot of the historical figures
we discuss were spiritualists. Which basically means that they believed
that people who have physically died continue to exist in
a kind of spirit world. Furthermore, the spiritualists also believe
that people who have passed onto the spirit world can
and do continue to communicate with us in the material world,
(01:26):
usually through special people called mediums. So even if you
haven't heard of spiritualists, you've probably heard of mediums from
TV shows and movies. Yeah, they're pretty common in in
pop culture. But we should also mention that adherents of
this philosophy or this religion differ quite a bit in
their exact beliefs or their worldview. But you know, we
we give you the gist here. You have the basic understanding.
(01:49):
And a lot of high profile people throughout history were
actually spiritualists, and we've talked about some of them before.
March podcast subject Victoria Woodhall was one of her famous
pre political career and even made her living as a
medium for a while. Another one of our favorites, a
guy who just pops up in podcast after podcast, Arthur
(02:11):
Conan Doyle was famously a spiritualist and even wrote about it.
But what is known as the modern spiritualist movement, the
one that took place in the US um in the
mid eighteen hundreds or so, wasn't launched by celebrity or
an influential religious leader of some kind. It was actually
kicked off by two regular little girls, Margaret and Catherine Fox.
(02:35):
Margaret and Catherine Fox, they were also known as Maggie
and Kate or Kathy more casually. They were born in
eighteen thirty three and eighteen thirty seven, respectively. Their parents
were John and Margaret Fox, a couple who had four
children together and then separated for a time because of
John's alcoholism. So when John got his act together and
was working as a respectable blacksmith again, they got back
(02:57):
together and had kind of their second brood of children,
of which Maggie and Kate were apart. So we're going
to tell you a little bit about these sisters lives
and their involvement in launching spiritualism. But to do so,
we have to give you a little ghost story first.
So in the winter of eighteen forty seven eighty eight,
the Foxes moved. They moved to the hamlet of Hydesville,
(03:20):
New York, which is about twenty miles west of Rochester,
and they're in Hydesville John and Margaret rented a house
for them and their younger kids, Maggie and Kate, who
are about fourteen and eleven years old at the time.
But this house was not your ordinary rental. It came
with a little bit of a reputation. It was said
(03:42):
around town to be haunted, so things started to suggest
that maybe that was a case pretty quickly. Yeah, So
things went fine for a little while, and then around
March of eighteen forty eight, the Foxes started to hear
these strange sounds around the house at night, deepy knocking noises,
thumps on the ceiling, bumps on the walls and doors,
(04:05):
and sometimes the wrapping sounds were violent enough to shake
the furniture. So not just the little mouth scurring through
the walls or something. Yeah, really creepy stuff. The girls, though,
didn't seem to be that bothered by it, strangely enough,
but their mother, Margaret, who was very superstitious, was. She
lost sleep over it. They checked the house, they didn't
find anything amiss, and then on March thirty one, Margaret
(04:28):
was so tired and just needed some rest. She tried
to get her family to get to go to bed early.
When it was barely dark, but the rapping noises started
again when they were getting into bed, so she got
up and she took a look around, and when she
made it to the girl's room, Kate was looking into
the darkness and she bravely called out, Mr Splitfoot, do
(04:51):
as I do, and then she proceeded to snap her
fingers in a way that mimiced the noises that they
had heard. But the strange thing happened next. When Kate
finished this call out to Mr split Foot, those sounds
from somewhere in the house imitated her. And then Maggie
clapped her hands four times, so it answered back yes.
(05:16):
And according to most accounts, Kate then said, oh, mother,
I know what it is. Tomorrow is April Fool's Day
and someone is trying to fool us. So, uh, it
sounds a little suspicious but also a little cool at
this point intriguing. Yeah, And Margaret wasn't buying Kate's explanation.
(05:37):
She decided, Hey, my kids are talking to these noises,
these strange whatever they are as Mr split Foot. So
she decided, I'm going to try to chat with this
eerie thing myself. So she said count to ten, and
it made ten noises, and then she asked whatever was
(05:57):
making the noise to wrap out the ages of all
of her children successively, and it did so correctly, pausing
between each one long enough to set each child's age
apart all the way through Kate's age, and then even
weirder after that, there was a longer pause and then
three more raps, and those corresponded to the age of
(06:20):
the Fox's child who had died in infancy. So by
this point Margaret thinks that she's dealing with something real,
and she asked this thing um if it was a
human being making the noise, and her question was met
by total silence, no wraps, and then she asked was
it a spirit? And if so, manifest itself by making
(06:43):
two sounds. Margaret then just started asking lots of other
questions because she's thinking, all right, it is a spirit.
And she later, by the way, relayed these questions, these
original statements in a published work, and she started asking
it was it an injured spirit? Was it injured in
(07:05):
this house? And then more questions like was the person
living who had injured it? Now we're getting into kind
of TV territory. Yeah, So she went on that way
for a while, and then she decided, I gotta show
this to people, so she started inviting the neighbors over
to check out this phenomenon too. So that night about
a dozen neighbors had come over and become convinced of
(07:27):
the spirit's presence in the same way by asking questions
that it answered correctly with an appropriate number of raps.
They asked questions like the number of kids they had
in the ages of the kids, similar things to what
Margaret had asked, and eventually by asking yes, no, and
nu miracle questions. They later also came up with a
code system, by the way, so that the raps could
actually spell out words to some more detailed questions, perhaps right.
(07:52):
And they found out from this line of questioning the
details of the spirit story it had been a thirty
one year old Hudler, a father of five, who was
brutally murdered in the home's basement like a couple of
years two to five years prior long earlier. So to
test the truth of the story, which by this point
you know they have, these could hard facts to work with,
(08:13):
the neighbors decided that they would excavate the home seller,
but unfortunately, heavy spring rains got on the way and
filled up the excavation pit and delayed the project for
many weeks. But still, even without that proof or or
the neighbors actually getting to look for something, rumors about
the haunting in the Foxes home started to spread far
(08:37):
and wide, and hundreds of people, some of them skeptics
of course, some of them believers, would flock to Hidesville
over the next few weeks to check it out for themselves,
at least try to evaluate for themselves what was going on.
And during that time, the spirit seemed to become bolder
rather than these regular light wraps that started producing louder noises,
(08:58):
even ones that mimicked death struggle when it was telling
the story of how it died um and people began
to notice that Maggie and Kate were always around when
those spirit noises were going on. Skeptics, of course wondered
if the girls were somehow the source of the noises,
but others began to see them as the mediums through
which the spirits communicated, and this had a couple of
(09:20):
different effects for the girl. Some people in the neighborhood
regarded them with all because of this, as kind of
definely inspired or chosen individuals, and others thought of them
as unholy, perhaps even witches. So once word of the
Hidsville haunting started to get around, Maggie and Kate's oldest
sister and Leah fox Fish, showed up in town went
(09:43):
to visit the girls, and Leah, at this point was divorced.
She lived in Rochester. She taught music lessons to support
herself and her daughter, but after she learned about her
younger sister's roles as local mediums pretty prominent local mediums
by this point, she took Kate back to Rochester with her,
and apparently Maggie and Margaret soon followed along, and they
(10:06):
weren't the only ones who made this family move though.
Apparently the spirits also followed the girls to Rochester and
started haunting their home there. But it wasn't really like
they were trying to escape from them, no, not at all. Actually,
according to an article by Nancy Reuben Stewart in American History,
Leah claimed in her memoir that the ghost had followed
(10:28):
them to Rochester and quote so disturbed her household that
she was forced to move. But apparently Leah's next home
was actually next to a cemetery which is kind of
a weird place to move if you want to get
away from ghosts, as Stewart points out, maybe like you're
looking for new work, actually, and maybe that's actually probably
a smart thing to do, now that we think of it.
(10:49):
But the spirits continued to hang around the sisters, and
in fact, they became more energetic, and soon Lea decided
it was time to share them with other people. So
they started holding seances in Rochester or Maggie and Kate
conducted them, and Leah set herself up as the interpreter
of the wraps. She was kind of the impresario of
the whole thing. So here's how they worked the seances.
(11:09):
That is, the guests would arrive, they'd sit around a
table and say a prayer and then sing. Then they'd
hold hands and sit for a while in silence until
eventually Maggie or Kate would fall into a trance. Then
the rapping noises would begin, and people loved going to
these demands for the fances grew. Even people like congressmen
(11:30):
and judges, prominent folks in the community wanted to take part,
and they eventually became known as the Rochester Rappings, which
a little different than what it really is. But then
in November of eighty nine, Leah made a big announcement.
She said that the Spirits it wasn't enough to just
(11:51):
keep doing these dances. The Spirits wanted them to go
public to publicize spiritualism, and so they rented out Corinthian Hall,
which was the largest auditorium in Rochester, and charged in
mission for the very first time cents ahead to those
who wanted to hear the wraps in person. And Leah
(12:11):
and Maggie Kate was away at the time, I think
visiting someone visiting a friend. I think appeared on the
stage at this huge Corinthian Hall four nights in a
row that month, and they weren't really met with a
enthusiastic crowd though. There were a lot of skeptics and
a pretty hostile crowd in fact, jeering and um. A
(12:34):
lot of the people in the audience just thought that
they were coming to see the Sisters exposed and frauds,
and they didn't know how Leah and Maggie would try
to keep it up four nights in a row in
this in this huge venue. So for three days during
the stretch of four performances, Maggie and Leah agreed to
submit to investigations by different committees that were actually chosen
(12:57):
by the previous night's audiences. According to an art called
by Barbara M. Weisberg in American Heritage, they were basically
man handled during these episodes. Their feet were held, they
were placed in different positions. They were made to stand
on glass plates with their skirts tied tightly around their ankles.
A committee of women even took the sisters into a
(13:17):
room and disrobed them to examine them and their clothing
to see what was causing these rapping sounds. So the
rapping sounds did keep going as those examinations were taking place,
so the committees ended up acquitting the sisters of any
sort of fraud. They all were convinced. This, however, did
not help persuade the angry mob that showed up on
(13:37):
the fourth night. Maggie and Leah actually needed a police
escort to get out of there safely, but their star
and modern spiritualism was officially born. Yeah. I mean, this
seems like it would have only added to their fame
around town and make people want to go out and
see them. Both the detractors and the porters but there
(13:58):
were a lot of factors that actually helps spiritualism catch
on quickly. There was a recent bestselling book called The
Divine Principles of Nature by seer Andrew Jackson Davis, and
that was based in turn on the writings of the
eighteenth century philosopher and former podcast subject Emmanuel Swedenburgh. And Um,
(14:19):
these writings seem to predict the opening of communication with
the spiritual world, so gave people some something concrete to
look at. It was good timing. It was very good timing. Um.
There was also popular interest in mesmerism and that might
have helped paved the way, and we talked about that
for last year's Halloween podcasts. And another aspect which we've
(14:40):
kind of in a strange way, talked about two in
the Victoria Woodhull podcasts. Spiritualism also supported reforms such as
abolition and women's suffrage, which we're really gaining steam at
the time. And then one final thing going on at
the time, or one extra thing relating to new technology
(15:01):
and science. The telegraph had become a central metaphor for spiritualism.
Mediums were like a spiritual telegraph in a way. So
you have this great concrete thing not just the book
to look at, but um, a scientific a piece of
technology to compare something that seemed really abstract too. Yeah,
(15:22):
they could look at it and say, hey, if you
can talk in an instant to someone in a different city,
why can't you talk to someone in the spirit world
so easily. So there was a lot going on. Yeah,
and obviously bringing a lot of past podcast material together.
So by eighteen fifty four, according to spiritualist estimates, the
movement had somewhere from one to two million followers in
(15:44):
the US. And as the movement grew, the spectacles just
got more and more complicated. It wasn't just simple knocking
or wrapping noises anymore. There were phosphorescent glimmering clouds around people,
levitating furniture, heavenly music, and something called spirit writing, which
occurred when a medium was in a trance and then
(16:05):
the spirit would try to communicate through her. She would
actually write on a piece of paper or something a
little more from her spirit, sophisticated than the rapping alphabet system. Yeah,
it was definitely a more elaborate way to get your
messages information across quickly that way. Yeah, But the Fox
Sisters were only getting more and more famous in all
(16:26):
of this too. They went to New York City they
conducted really lucrative seances for some well known folks there. Um.
One famous seance included the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley,
who was a big, big proponent of the Sisters. Um.
It also included William Cullen, Bryant, George Ripley, George Bancroft,
(16:47):
and James Ventimore Cooper too yea, and according to Weisberg's article,
Cooper blessed the Fox Sisters on his deathbed for having
prepared him for quote this hour. I mean, that's a
pretty good customer testimony, all I'd say it is. And
of course, though as spiritualism as popularity grew, skeptics grew
more vocal about it too, and some of the points
(17:07):
they raised were really funny. I mean, if you think
about it, some of the things they brought up were like, Okay,
if your spirit in the spirit world, why are you
spending all your time knocking or why yeah, or levitating
furniture and moving it around. I mean, wouldn't you find
a better way to communicate or you know, something else
to do with your time, so as you might imagine
(17:30):
a lot of mediums were exposed as frauds during this time,
and debunkers kept trying to expose the Sisters the Fox
Sisters as well. There were a couple of theories put
out there as to how they could be pulling this off.
One was something called to ology. So just to explain this,
some people thought that the sisters had been making the
rapping sounds by cracking their toes, which Doublina and I
(17:52):
have had a thorough conversation of this, and I'm just cures.
I mean, does anybody out there? Is anyone out there
really able to crack their toes to a super loud
volume like an ace audience hall would be able to
hear it enough to make it sound like wrapping on
walls or floors, because we do not have that power. Yes,
(18:15):
thank goodness. But there was another theory too, which sounds
a little more believable to me. It came from a
trio of doctors in Buffalo. They said that the rapping
noises sounded just like noises produced to the knee joints.
So the Fox Sisters allowed them to test this theory
in one and the doctors considered the test of success
when the sister's knees were restricted, no wraps occurred. So
(18:38):
the sisters claimed though that the environment was just too
hostile for the spirits and that's why they didn't show
up during this test. But regardless, it didn't hurt their popularity. Again,
it's it's any publicity is is sort of good publicity
for these sisters. And as successful as Maggie and Kate
though were as medium, they didn't fair though all in
(19:00):
their personal lives and the eighteen fifties, Maggie became involved
to some extent with a very well renowned famous Arctic
explorer named Dr Elisha Kent Kane, and there's not a
whole lot of evidence about their relationship, but what evidence
there is suggests that there was some connection between them.
(19:21):
They were very likely in love, but because of her profession,
he didn't really see her as a proper prospect. He
thought that she was fraud probably, and he tried to
transform her to make her somebody who he could be
with a more suitable match. She lived with his family
for a little while to get an education, but ultimately
(19:43):
he would not publicly claim a connection with her. So
that's kind of a sad life story. There for for
Maggie it is, and after his death in eighteen fifty seven,
Maggie said that they had been secretly married or maybe
common law married, it differs depending on which where she
look at and he. She also said that he left
her a small inheritance, but his family really fought this,
(20:06):
and she ended up publishing a book of letters from
him to her later, but we're not really sure to
what extent she edited that or how accurate they are.
In eighteen fifty eight, though, she did follow Kane's wishes
and retired and converted to Roman Catholicism. Maggie's older sister, Leah,
retired the same year. She married her third husband, who
(20:26):
was a wealthy businessman and a spiritualist conveniently enough around
this time and really just didn't need money from seances anymore.
And then Kate continued to stay in the scene to
be visible in the movement for several more years after
her sisters had both retired, but in the eighteen sixties
(20:47):
both she and Maggie began to succomb more and more
to their problems with alcoholism, and eventually Kate moved to
England in eighteen seventy one, hoping to be that addiction,
and it was able to for for a time at
least yep. She married wealthy barrister and spiritualist Henry D.
Jenkin and had two kids with him, But when Jenkin
(21:10):
died in the early eighteen eighties, she lost her battle
with alcoholism and ended up moving back to the States
as her condition just continued to worsen. But the Fox
sisters did have one more big moment. Their less big
moment in the Spotlight really occurred in October. At that time,
Leah tried to have Kate's children taken away because of
(21:30):
her alcoholism, and so in her defense, Maggie kind of
decided to lash out. Before an audience at New York's
Academy of Music, Maggie confessed that the sister's communication with
the spirits had been a hoax, and removing her right shoe,
she confirmed that to ology theory that we told you
about earlier by creating sharp raps with the first joint
of her big toe. And she basically said the whole
(21:53):
thing started as the girls trying to play a prank
on their superstitious mom way back in Hydesville and ended
with Leah turning them into her own money making tools,
asking them how how they did it essentially a year later,
though Maggie were cant at this confession, she said that
she had been pressured into it by powerful people because
she needed the money. Both she and Kate tried to
(22:13):
continue holding seances to make money, even though Kate also
tried to confess over the years and prove that it
had been a hoax, and then would go back now
and again to be in a medium. But neither of
them were as successful as they had been earlier in
their career. They spent their last years in poverty, and
Leah died in eighteen ninety, Kate in eight and finally
(22:35):
Maggie in eighteen ninete. And by that point spiritualism had
already started to wane in the United States, but it's
popularity was still growing elsewhere, and it still is, of
course around today. The Fox sisters are still credited with
launching the modern spiritualist movement, although there are probably a
variety of opinions out there about their actual ability to
(22:59):
commune with spirits. We do have one last note, though,
we we like to leave you on a spooking note
for a Halloween podcast. Yes, of course, uh it's a
note that relates to that variety of opinions about their
actual ability to communicate. So remember that original communication of
theirs with the Spirit of the Peddler. Well, when the
water did finally drain out of that excavation pit in
(23:22):
the cellar in eighty some partial remains were found, some
hair and a few bones. Of course, skeptics at the
time thought that it was a plant, but according to
Weisberg's article, in the early nineteen hundreds, a skeleton was
found behind the cellar wall, and experts later estimated that
it had been there for about fifty years, so right
(23:45):
around the time that the spirit told the sisters it
had been murdered. Something to think about. So we're not
going to give our opinion on it either way, but
we'll just leave you guys with that. Move on to
listener mail. So we have an email here from John
and Kara, and they say, dear to Blin and Sarah,
my daughter high school sophomore, and I never missed an
(24:07):
episode of the podcast. She always asks if there's a
new episode when she gets in the car after school.
When at the beginning of the Radium Girls podcast, you
mentioned us Radium in Orange New Jersey. I told her
that I could fill in the end of the story
if you two didn't carry the story forward enough. I
grew up in a neighboring town to Orange called glen Ridge.
In the early to mid nineteen eighties, my old neighborhood,
(24:29):
together with the neighborhoods and a few other nearby towns,
was declared a super fund site due to radium contamination
in the soil, and US radium was one of the sources.
But the park behind our old house we moved from
that neighborhood to another in glen Ridge a few years prior,
was one of the prime sites designated for clean up.
It was surreal to seamen and has matt suits excavating
the top few feet of soil from the park and
(24:51):
sealing it in steel drums for disposal. All the neighborhood
kids played on that soil. The high school marching band
and soccer teams practiced on it. Little leagues spent many
summers on it. In addition, many houses were designated for remediation.
Some only had to have their yards stuck up, others
had to be supported on steel beams, while entire basements
were removed and backfilled. I believe a couple were even demolished. Today,
(25:15):
the neighborhood is back to normal. The park has been
restored and its facilities upgraded from the dusty ball fields
I remember. I'm not aware that the area was ever
recognized for having an unusual cancer cluster, so we seem
to have avoided the worst case scenario. Here are a
couple of websites that carry the story of US Radium
and the Radium Girls late twentieth century. And he included that,
so maybe we couldn't put that on our Facebook page
(25:36):
or something for people to check out. Well, I thought
it was interesting too to hear about a super fun fight.
I guess I'm used to thinking of them as the
old factory site or the old field or something. But
to hear about a super fun site that is a
whole town and you have your house lifted up, their
basement can be cleaned, that was pretty pretty remarkable. So
(25:59):
thank you John for telling us about that little connection
to your childhood, and to care for always listening after school.
If you'd like to share any of your own personal
connections to podcasts we've done, or suggests an idea to us,
please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook
or on Twitter at Myston History. And if you're planning
(26:21):
a little Halloween tour perhaps of haunted houses, we do
have an article for you called five Real Life Haunted
Houses and you can look for it on our home
page by searching for real life Haunted Houses at www
dot how stuff works dot com. This podcast is brought
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History Stuff. That's Audible podcast dot com slash history Stuff. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblin and Chuck Reporting
and I'm Sara Dowdy. And if you've listened to this
podcast for a little while, you've probably heard us refer
(01:03):
to something called spiritualism. A lot of the historical figures
we discuss were spiritualists. Which basically means that they believed
that people who have physically died continue to exist in
a kind of spirit world. Furthermore, the spiritualists also believe
that people who have passed onto the spirit world can
and do continue to communicate with us in the material world,
(01:26):
usually through special people called mediums. So even if you
haven't heard of spiritualists, you've probably heard of mediums from
TV shows and movies. Yeah, they're pretty common in in
pop culture. But we should also mention that adherents of
this philosophy or this religion differ quite a bit in
their exact beliefs or their worldview. But you know, we
we give you the gist here. You have the basic understanding.
(01:49):
And a lot of high profile people throughout history were
actually spiritualists, and we've talked about some of them before.
March podcast subject Victoria Woodhall was one of her famous
pre political career and even made her living as a
medium for a while. Another one of our favorites, a
guy who just pops up in podcast after podcast, Arthur
(02:11):
Conan Doyle was famously a spiritualist and even wrote about it.
But what is known as the modern spiritualist movement, the
one that took place in the US um in the
mid eighteen hundreds or so, wasn't launched by celebrity or
an influential religious leader of some kind. It was actually
kicked off by two regular little girls, Margaret and Catherine Fox.
(02:35):
Margaret and Catherine Fox, they were also known as Maggie
and Kate or Kathy more casually. They were born in
eighteen thirty three and eighteen thirty seven, respectively. Their parents
were John and Margaret Fox, a couple who had four
children together and then separated for a time because of
John's alcoholism. So when John got his act together and
was working as a respectable blacksmith again, they got back
(02:57):
together and had kind of their second brood of children,
of which Maggie and Kate were apart. So we're going
to tell you a little bit about these sisters lives
and their involvement in launching spiritualism. But to do so,
we have to give you a little ghost story first.
So in the winter of eighteen forty seven eighty eight,
the Foxes moved. They moved to the hamlet of Hydesville,
(03:20):
New York, which is about twenty miles west of Rochester,
and they're in Hydesville John and Margaret rented a house
for them and their younger kids, Maggie and Kate, who
are about fourteen and eleven years old at the time.
But this house was not your ordinary rental. It came
with a little bit of a reputation. It was said
(03:42):
around town to be haunted, so things started to suggest
that maybe that was a case pretty quickly. Yeah, So
things went fine for a little while, and then around
March of eighteen forty eight, the Foxes started to hear
these strange sounds around the house at night, deepy knocking noises,
thumps on the ceiling, bumps on the walls and doors,
(04:05):
and sometimes the wrapping sounds were violent enough to shake
the furniture. So not just the little mouth scurring through
the walls or something. Yeah, really creepy stuff. The girls, though,
didn't seem to be that bothered by it, strangely enough,
but their mother, Margaret, who was very superstitious, was. She
lost sleep over it. They checked the house, they didn't
find anything amiss, and then on March thirty one, Margaret
(04:28):
was so tired and just needed some rest. She tried
to get her family to get to go to bed early.
When it was barely dark, but the rapping noises started
again when they were getting into bed, so she got
up and she took a look around, and when she
made it to the girl's room, Kate was looking into
the darkness and she bravely called out, Mr Splitfoot, do
(04:51):
as I do, and then she proceeded to snap her
fingers in a way that mimiced the noises that they
had heard. But the strange thing happened next. When Kate
finished this call out to Mr split Foot, those sounds
from somewhere in the house imitated her. And then Maggie
clapped her hands four times, so it answered back yes.
(05:16):
And according to most accounts, Kate then said, oh, mother,
I know what it is. Tomorrow is April Fool's Day
and someone is trying to fool us. So, uh, it
sounds a little suspicious but also a little cool at
this point intriguing. Yeah, And Margaret wasn't buying Kate's explanation.
(05:37):
She decided, Hey, my kids are talking to these noises,
these strange whatever they are as Mr split Foot. So
she decided, I'm going to try to chat with this
eerie thing myself. So she said count to ten, and
it made ten noises, and then she asked whatever was
(05:57):
making the noise to wrap out the ages of all
of her children successively, and it did so correctly, pausing
between each one long enough to set each child's age
apart all the way through Kate's age, and then even
weirder after that, there was a longer pause and then
three more raps, and those corresponded to the age of
(06:20):
the Fox's child who had died in infancy. So by
this point Margaret thinks that she's dealing with something real,
and she asked this thing um if it was a
human being making the noise, and her question was met
by total silence, no wraps, and then she asked was
it a spirit? And if so, manifest itself by making
(06:43):
two sounds. Margaret then just started asking lots of other
questions because she's thinking, all right, it is a spirit.
And she later, by the way, relayed these questions, these
original statements in a published work, and she started asking
it was it an injured spirit? Was it injured in
(07:05):
this house? And then more questions like was the person
living who had injured it? Now we're getting into kind
of TV territory. Yeah, So she went on that way
for a while, and then she decided, I gotta show
this to people, so she started inviting the neighbors over
to check out this phenomenon too. So that night about
a dozen neighbors had come over and become convinced of
(07:27):
the spirit's presence in the same way by asking questions
that it answered correctly with an appropriate number of raps.
They asked questions like the number of kids they had
in the ages of the kids, similar things to what
Margaret had asked, and eventually by asking yes, no, and
nu miracle questions. They later also came up with a
code system, by the way, so that the raps could
actually spell out words to some more detailed questions, perhaps right.
(07:52):
And they found out from this line of questioning the
details of the spirit story it had been a thirty
one year old Hudler, a father of five, who was
brutally murdered in the home's basement like a couple of
years two to five years prior long earlier. So to
test the truth of the story, which by this point
you know they have, these could hard facts to work with,
(08:13):
the neighbors decided that they would excavate the home seller,
but unfortunately, heavy spring rains got on the way and
filled up the excavation pit and delayed the project for
many weeks. But still, even without that proof or or
the neighbors actually getting to look for something, rumors about
the haunting in the Foxes home started to spread far
(08:37):
and wide, and hundreds of people, some of them skeptics
of course, some of them believers, would flock to Hidesville
over the next few weeks to check it out for themselves,
at least try to evaluate for themselves what was going on.
And during that time, the spirit seemed to become bolder
rather than these regular light wraps that started producing louder noises,
(08:58):
even ones that mimicked death struggle when it was telling
the story of how it died um and people began
to notice that Maggie and Kate were always around when
those spirit noises were going on. Skeptics, of course wondered
if the girls were somehow the source of the noises,
but others began to see them as the mediums through
which the spirits communicated, and this had a couple of
(09:20):
different effects for the girl. Some people in the neighborhood
regarded them with all because of this, as kind of
definely inspired or chosen individuals, and others thought of them
as unholy, perhaps even witches. So once word of the
Hidsville haunting started to get around, Maggie and Kate's oldest
sister and Leah fox Fish, showed up in town went
(09:43):
to visit the girls, and Leah, at this point was divorced.
She lived in Rochester. She taught music lessons to support
herself and her daughter, but after she learned about her
younger sister's roles as local mediums pretty prominent local mediums
by this point, she took Kate back to Rochester with her,
and apparently Maggie and Margaret soon followed along, and they
(10:06):
weren't the only ones who made this family move though.
Apparently the spirits also followed the girls to Rochester and
started haunting their home there. But it wasn't really like
they were trying to escape from them, no, not at all. Actually,
according to an article by Nancy Reuben Stewart in American History,
Leah claimed in her memoir that the ghost had followed
(10:28):
them to Rochester and quote so disturbed her household that
she was forced to move. But apparently Leah's next home
was actually next to a cemetery which is kind of
a weird place to move if you want to get
away from ghosts, as Stewart points out, maybe like you're
looking for new work, actually, and maybe that's actually probably
a smart thing to do, now that we think of it.
(10:49):
But the spirits continued to hang around the sisters, and
in fact, they became more energetic, and soon Lea decided
it was time to share them with other people. So
they started holding seances in Rochester or Maggie and Kate
conducted them, and Leah set herself up as the interpreter
of the wraps. She was kind of the impresario of
the whole thing. So here's how they worked the seances.
(11:09):
That is, the guests would arrive, they'd sit around a
table and say a prayer and then sing. Then they'd
hold hands and sit for a while in silence until
eventually Maggie or Kate would fall into a trance. Then
the rapping noises would begin, and people loved going to
these demands for the fances grew. Even people like congressmen
(11:30):
and judges, prominent folks in the community wanted to take part,
and they eventually became known as the Rochester Rappings, which
a little different than what it really is. But then
in November of eighty nine, Leah made a big announcement.
She said that the Spirits it wasn't enough to just
(11:51):
keep doing these dances. The Spirits wanted them to go
public to publicize spiritualism, and so they rented out Corinthian Hall,
which was the largest auditorium in Rochester, and charged in
mission for the very first time cents ahead to those
who wanted to hear the wraps in person. And Leah
(12:11):
and Maggie Kate was away at the time, I think
visiting someone visiting a friend. I think appeared on the
stage at this huge Corinthian Hall four nights in a
row that month, and they weren't really met with a
enthusiastic crowd though. There were a lot of skeptics and
a pretty hostile crowd in fact, jeering and um. A
(12:34):
lot of the people in the audience just thought that
they were coming to see the Sisters exposed and frauds,
and they didn't know how Leah and Maggie would try
to keep it up four nights in a row in
this in this huge venue. So for three days during
the stretch of four performances, Maggie and Leah agreed to
submit to investigations by different committees that were actually chosen
(12:57):
by the previous night's audiences. According to an art called
by Barbara M. Weisberg in American Heritage, they were basically
man handled during these episodes. Their feet were held, they
were placed in different positions. They were made to stand
on glass plates with their skirts tied tightly around their ankles.
A committee of women even took the sisters into a
(13:17):
room and disrobed them to examine them and their clothing
to see what was causing these rapping sounds. So the
rapping sounds did keep going as those examinations were taking place,
so the committees ended up acquitting the sisters of any
sort of fraud. They all were convinced. This, however, did
not help persuade the angry mob that showed up on
(13:37):
the fourth night. Maggie and Leah actually needed a police
escort to get out of there safely, but their star
and modern spiritualism was officially born. Yeah. I mean, this
seems like it would have only added to their fame
around town and make people want to go out and
see them. Both the detractors and the porters but there
(13:58):
were a lot of factors that actually helps spiritualism catch
on quickly. There was a recent bestselling book called The
Divine Principles of Nature by seer Andrew Jackson Davis, and
that was based in turn on the writings of the
eighteenth century philosopher and former podcast subject Emmanuel Swedenburgh. And Um,
(14:19):
these writings seem to predict the opening of communication with
the spiritual world, so gave people some something concrete to
look at. It was good timing. It was very good timing. Um.
There was also popular interest in mesmerism and that might
have helped paved the way, and we talked about that
for last year's Halloween podcasts. And another aspect which we've
(14:40):
kind of in a strange way, talked about two in
the Victoria Woodhull podcasts. Spiritualism also supported reforms such as
abolition and women's suffrage, which we're really gaining steam at
the time. And then one final thing going on at
the time, or one extra thing relating to new technology
(15:01):
and science. The telegraph had become a central metaphor for spiritualism.
Mediums were like a spiritual telegraph in a way. So
you have this great concrete thing not just the book
to look at, but um, a scientific a piece of
technology to compare something that seemed really abstract too. Yeah,
(15:22):
they could look at it and say, hey, if you
can talk in an instant to someone in a different city,
why can't you talk to someone in the spirit world
so easily. So there was a lot going on. Yeah,
and obviously bringing a lot of past podcast material together.
So by eighteen fifty four, according to spiritualist estimates, the
movement had somewhere from one to two million followers in
(15:44):
the US. And as the movement grew, the spectacles just
got more and more complicated. It wasn't just simple knocking
or wrapping noises anymore. There were phosphorescent glimmering clouds around people,
levitating furniture, heavenly music, and something called spirit writing, which
occurred when a medium was in a trance and then
(16:05):
the spirit would try to communicate through her. She would
actually write on a piece of paper or something a
little more from her spirit, sophisticated than the rapping alphabet system. Yeah,
it was definitely a more elaborate way to get your
messages information across quickly that way. Yeah, But the Fox
Sisters were only getting more and more famous in all
(16:26):
of this too. They went to New York City they
conducted really lucrative seances for some well known folks there. Um.
One famous seance included the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley,
who was a big, big proponent of the Sisters. Um.
It also included William Cullen, Bryant, George Ripley, George Bancroft,
(16:47):
and James Ventimore Cooper too yea, and according to Weisberg's article,
Cooper blessed the Fox Sisters on his deathbed for having
prepared him for quote this hour. I mean, that's a
pretty good customer testimony, all I'd say it is. And
of course, though as spiritualism as popularity grew, skeptics grew
more vocal about it too, and some of the points
(17:07):
they raised were really funny. I mean, if you think
about it, some of the things they brought up were like, Okay,
if your spirit in the spirit world, why are you
spending all your time knocking or why yeah, or levitating
furniture and moving it around. I mean, wouldn't you find
a better way to communicate or you know, something else
to do with your time, so as you might imagine
(17:30):
a lot of mediums were exposed as frauds during this time,
and debunkers kept trying to expose the Sisters the Fox
Sisters as well. There were a couple of theories put
out there as to how they could be pulling this off.
One was something called to ology. So just to explain this,
some people thought that the sisters had been making the
rapping sounds by cracking their toes, which Doublina and I
(17:52):
have had a thorough conversation of this, and I'm just cures.
I mean, does anybody out there? Is anyone out there
really able to crack their toes to a super loud
volume like an ace audience hall would be able to
hear it enough to make it sound like wrapping on
walls or floors, because we do not have that power. Yes,
(18:15):
thank goodness. But there was another theory too, which sounds
a little more believable to me. It came from a
trio of doctors in Buffalo. They said that the rapping
noises sounded just like noises produced to the knee joints.
So the Fox Sisters allowed them to test this theory
in one and the doctors considered the test of success
when the sister's knees were restricted, no wraps occurred. So
(18:38):
the sisters claimed though that the environment was just too
hostile for the spirits and that's why they didn't show
up during this test. But regardless, it didn't hurt their popularity. Again,
it's it's any publicity is is sort of good publicity
for these sisters. And as successful as Maggie and Kate
though were as medium, they didn't fair though all in
(19:00):
their personal lives and the eighteen fifties, Maggie became involved
to some extent with a very well renowned famous Arctic
explorer named Dr Elisha Kent Kane, and there's not a
whole lot of evidence about their relationship, but what evidence
there is suggests that there was some connection between them.
(19:21):
They were very likely in love, but because of her profession,
he didn't really see her as a proper prospect. He
thought that she was fraud probably, and he tried to
transform her to make her somebody who he could be
with a more suitable match. She lived with his family
for a little while to get an education, but ultimately
(19:43):
he would not publicly claim a connection with her. So
that's kind of a sad life story. There for for
Maggie it is, and after his death in eighteen fifty seven,
Maggie said that they had been secretly married or maybe
common law married, it differs depending on which where she
look at and he. She also said that he left
her a small inheritance, but his family really fought this,
(20:06):
and she ended up publishing a book of letters from
him to her later, but we're not really sure to
what extent she edited that or how accurate they are.
In eighteen fifty eight, though, she did follow Kane's wishes
and retired and converted to Roman Catholicism. Maggie's older sister, Leah,
retired the same year. She married her third husband, who
(20:26):
was a wealthy businessman and a spiritualist conveniently enough around
this time and really just didn't need money from seances anymore.
And then Kate continued to stay in the scene to
be visible in the movement for several more years after
her sisters had both retired, but in the eighteen sixties
(20:47):
both she and Maggie began to succomb more and more
to their problems with alcoholism, and eventually Kate moved to
England in eighteen seventy one, hoping to be that addiction,
and it was able to for for a time at
least yep. She married wealthy barrister and spiritualist Henry D.
Jenkin and had two kids with him, But when Jenkin
(21:10):
died in the early eighteen eighties, she lost her battle
with alcoholism and ended up moving back to the States
as her condition just continued to worsen. But the Fox
sisters did have one more big moment. Their less big
moment in the Spotlight really occurred in October. At that time,
Leah tried to have Kate's children taken away because of
(21:30):
her alcoholism, and so in her defense, Maggie kind of
decided to lash out. Before an audience at New York's
Academy of Music, Maggie confessed that the sister's communication with
the spirits had been a hoax, and removing her right shoe,
she confirmed that to ology theory that we told you
about earlier by creating sharp raps with the first joint
of her big toe. And she basically said the whole
(21:53):
thing started as the girls trying to play a prank
on their superstitious mom way back in Hydesville and ended
with Leah turning them into her own money making tools,
asking them how how they did it essentially a year later,
though Maggie were cant at this confession, she said that
she had been pressured into it by powerful people because
she needed the money. Both she and Kate tried to
(22:13):
continue holding seances to make money, even though Kate also
tried to confess over the years and prove that it
had been a hoax, and then would go back now
and again to be in a medium. But neither of
them were as successful as they had been earlier in
their career. They spent their last years in poverty, and
Leah died in eighteen ninety, Kate in eight and finally
(22:35):
Maggie in eighteen ninete. And by that point spiritualism had
already started to wane in the United States, but it's
popularity was still growing elsewhere, and it still is, of
course around today. The Fox sisters are still credited with
launching the modern spiritualist movement, although there are probably a
variety of opinions out there about their actual ability to
(22:59):
commune with spirits. We do have one last note, though,
we we like to leave you on a spooking note
for a Halloween podcast. Yes, of course, uh it's a
note that relates to that variety of opinions about their
actual ability to communicate. So remember that original communication of
theirs with the Spirit of the Peddler. Well, when the
water did finally drain out of that excavation pit in
(23:22):
the cellar in eighty some partial remains were found, some
hair and a few bones. Of course, skeptics at the
time thought that it was a plant, but according to
Weisberg's article, in the early nineteen hundreds, a skeleton was
found behind the cellar wall, and experts later estimated that
it had been there for about fifty years, so right
(23:45):
around the time that the spirit told the sisters it
had been murdered. Something to think about. So we're not
going to give our opinion on it either way, but
we'll just leave you guys with that. Move on to
listener mail. So we have an email here from John
and Kara, and they say, dear to Blin and Sarah,
my daughter high school sophomore, and I never missed an
(24:07):
episode of the podcast. She always asks if there's a
new episode when she gets in the car after school.
When at the beginning of the Radium Girls podcast, you
mentioned us Radium in Orange New Jersey. I told her
that I could fill in the end of the story
if you two didn't carry the story forward enough. I
grew up in a neighboring town to Orange called glen Ridge.
In the early to mid nineteen eighties, my old neighborhood,
(24:29):
together with the neighborhoods and a few other nearby towns,
was declared a super fund site due to radium contamination
in the soil, and US radium was one of the sources.
But the park behind our old house we moved from
that neighborhood to another in glen Ridge a few years prior,
was one of the prime sites designated for clean up.
It was surreal to seamen and has matt suits excavating
the top few feet of soil from the park and
(24:51):
sealing it in steel drums for disposal. All the neighborhood
kids played on that soil. The high school marching band
and soccer teams practiced on it. Little leagues spent many
summers on it. In addition, many houses were designated for remediation.
Some only had to have their yards stuck up, others
had to be supported on steel beams, while entire basements
were removed and backfilled. I believe a couple were even demolished. Today,
(25:15):
the neighborhood is back to normal. The park has been
restored and its facilities upgraded from the dusty ball fields
I remember. I'm not aware that the area was ever
recognized for having an unusual cancer cluster, so we seem
to have avoided the worst case scenario. Here are a
couple of websites that carry the story of US Radium
and the Radium Girls late twentieth century. And he included that,
so maybe we couldn't put that on our Facebook page
(25:36):
or something for people to check out. Well, I thought
it was interesting too to hear about a super fun fight.
I guess I'm used to thinking of them as the
old factory site or the old field or something. But
to hear about a super fun site that is a
whole town and you have your house lifted up, their
basement can be cleaned, that was pretty pretty remarkable. So
(25:59):
thank you John for telling us about that little connection
to your childhood, and to care for always listening after school.
If you'd like to share any of your own personal
connections to podcasts we've done, or suggests an idea to us,
please email us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook
or on Twitter at Myston History. And if you're planning
(26:21):
a little Halloween tour perhaps of haunted houses, we do
have an article for you called five Real Life Haunted
Houses and you can look for it on our home
page by searching for real life Haunted Houses at www
dot how stuff works dot com. This podcast is brought
(26:44):
to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider
of audio books, with more than eighty five thousand downloadable
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(27:07):
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