Spiritualism The Birth Of A Lie?
In 1848, the Fox sisters, who lived in New York, began receiving spirit messages. As a result the sisters were proclaimed as mediums, and the spiritualist movement was born. It all started in a small house in Hydesville, New York – a small town that consisted of no more than three or four dozen houses.
John D. and Margaret Fox moved into their house on the 11th of December1847. Two of their four children, the youngest, Catherine (also know as Kate) and Margaretta (Margaret), lived at home with the couple. Almost as soon as the family moved into the house, they began hearing strange rapping's and other strange noises. When Mr Fox could not find a 'natural' explanation, the local neighbours started telling the Fox family that their house had a reputation for being haunted too.
Similar noises, as well as footsteps, had been heard by a former resident of the Fox's house, John Bell along with his employee, Lucretia Pulver, in 1843 / 1844. Michael and Hannah Weekman lived there for for two years before the Fox family, often heard knockings at the front door. Sometimes this happened even when the door was open and nobody was there!
One evening, on March the 31st 1848, a young Kate responded to the rapping's by snapping her fingers and asking “Mr Splitfoot” (a common nickname for the Devil) “ to repeat his actions. To the amazement of Mrs Fox, an identical number of raps were heard, and Kate delightedly informed her mother that the spirit must be able to see as well as hear.
Within days the noises were being heard day and night and word spread that an intelligent spectral presence was haunting the Fox family. The girls worked out a code, that they tapped, in order to communicate with the spirit and through this code they found out that the spirit that was haunting them was Charles B. Rosma, a peddler who had been murdered some years before and buried in the basement of the house. This prompted a lot of debate and nobody could agree if a travelling salesman had ever gone missing in the area, nor were any remains found in the basement of the Fox family home.
Imagine the sensation these events must have caused. Through these girls, proof had been established that there was life after death and that it is possible for the living to contact the departed.
Soon crowds were descending on Hydesville to hear for themselves the sounds of trumpeting and rapping's. Because of all this unwanted attention, Mr & Mrs Fox decided to send Kate to live with her brother, David and Margaret to live with her other sister, Leah. Interestingly, the noises in Hydesville stopped, but started up in Rochester and Auburn where David and Leah lived!
Both girls began to invite visitors to experience the phenomena for themselves. Kate conducted 'sittings', as she called her gatherings, in Auburn until the early 1890s. Margaret often referred to her gatherings as 'spirit circles'. In time, such assemblies came to be know as 'seances'.
In November 1849, Margaret received a spectral message that she was to provide a large public demonstration. Her sister Leah rented the Corinthian auditorium, the largest in Rochester, and spectators paid one dollar apiece to see and hear spirit visitations. It was during these demonstrations that Leah discovered that she, too, was a medium.
On three separate nights during Margaret's Rochester presentation, committees selected by the audience took part in the sitting on stage. None was able to detect any fraud. With Leah as their manager, Kate and Margaret went on tour across the USA. In the spring of 1850, Horace Greenly, the owner and publisher of the 'New York Tribune', invited the three sister to his home in New York city where they met and held sittings for his friends and celebrities. Many were converted to this new belief called 'spiritualism'. This was the real launch of the Fox sisters careers as mediums.
During their heyday, the Fox sisters held sittings for many famous faces. Kate even conducted a sitting for Mary Todd Lincoln, who wanted to contact her late husband, Abraham Lincoln, but there was never any proof that any contact was made.
Some Christians believed the sisters to be demonic, where as some other people believed them to be out-right frauds.
There was two early accusations of fraud and trickery.
In January 1850, a committee of doctors investigated Margaret Fox discovered that spirit sounds would not be heard as long as they held tightly onto her legs during the sitting. Then on April the 17th 1851, Mrs Norman Culver, a relative by marriage of the Fox sisters, told the New York Tribune that Kate confessed that she caused the snapping sounds by clicking the joints in her toes. Despite these exposures, spiritualists refused to believe that they were being duped.
Jumping forward 37 years to an 1888 (and missing out the details about how, in the mean time, Kate was married and moved to London, had two sons then became a widow then sadly a drunk and how she finally lost her kids) interview in the New York Herald that was published on the September the 24th she said “every effect produced by us was an absolute fraud”. A month later on October the 21st 1888, she also told the New York World that she was eight and her sister, Kate, was nine and a half years old when they started the rapping's as a game to terrify their mother.
They produced the first banging noises while in bed at night by tying an apple to a string and then bumping it on the floor. When people began to visit the house to see the sisters and hear the rapping's, the girls became frightened that they would be punished and so kept up the game for “self preservation.” Margaret explained that Kate first discovered that she could produce clicking noises with her joints “by swishing her fingers” and later found “that the same noise could be made with her toes”.
Margaret then went on to implicate her sister, Leah, by claiming that she had secretly fed the young mediums information about the people that participated in the sittings. Margaret believed that her elder sister wanted to use the girls to form a new religion. Margaret was making her late confession in an attempt to save her soul along with her sisters. When Leah heard of Margaret's confessions, she totally dismissed them. However, Kate was the first to respond to the claims.
On October the 21st 1888, and the same day that Margaret's New York World interview was printed, both Kate and Margaret took to the stage of the New York Academy Of Music and showed the public how they produced their spirit rapping's. Strangely, even though spiritualism was basically built around the Fox sisters, many believers would not change their opinion of their belief system and even in some cases went as far as making up excuses as to why the two sisters 'confessed'.
Some such excuses were:
- The sisters had been coerced by the Catholic Church
- They had been bribed by the Newspapers
- The confession was incoherent and delusional because of both the sisters were alcoholics.
- The Fox sisters were real mediums, they just didn't know it!
Some spiritualists who reluctantly accepted the Fox sisters confessions argued that just because they were frauds, not all mediums were.
In the end, after a tour exposing their own fake mediumship, in 1891 both Kate and Margaret ended up going back to perform sittings but the pair never again enjoyed any great success.
Leah Fox died in 1890, Kate Fox on 2nd of July 1892 and finally Margaret died in poverty on the 8th of March 1893. The original house where the Fox sisters began their life long game was moved to a spiritualists retreat in Lily Dale, New York in 1915. The retreat is still there today but the Fox sisters cottage was destroyed in 1950 by fire.
So that leaves us with some questions; Is the whole spiritualism movement all a just lie? Are our modern mediums and the people that believe in them being deluded by a game that the Fox sisters stared over 160 years ago?
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