American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (14 page)

Annie Abbott, performing her levitation act.

Courtesy of Susan J. Harrington.

A
nnie Abbott was a diminutive, graceful woman from Georgia “noted for miraculous strength,” Bertha wrote in her diary, “which lies not in physical force but in some hidden power. Nobody knows what.” Annie—her real name was Dixie Annie Jarratt Haygood—was a traveling performer who executed uncanny feats of strength and gravity. “She lifts a chair with six gentlemen upon it
by applying the open palms of her hand to the chair,” Bertha wrote. “They insert an egg between her hand and chair and she does not break it—wonderful.” Audiences and scientists alike were baffled by Annie’s power. It was thought to be magnetic, or perhaps electrical. “Some of them say I am possessed of the Devil,” Annie wrote in a letter to a Georgia newspaper in 1893, “and others say I am another saint.” She considered herself a Spiritualist—one who communes with powers from beyond.

It is convenient that Bertha ran across Annie Abbott, a wandering Victorian Spiritualist, and that I learned of their intersection as I considered the story of Julia, a wandering Victorian spirit. Because Julia’s story fulfills a certain tradition: a woman, not a man, who appears late at night in a black or white high-necked gown, her hair piled elaborately on top of her head, and possessing an “aura of sadness,” thanks to a life cut short, or things left undone and unexplained, or passions left unresolved. It is not a coincidence, I suspect, that this particular brand of ghost story—not the keening ghost in the white sheet, but the materialized human spirit in Victorian dress speaking lucidly from just beyond—emerged during Julia’s lifetime. It was a time when Victorian spirits roamed the world.

Annie first performed her act in 1885 in her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. The next year, her husband died, leaving her with three children to support. She adopted the stage name Annie Abbott (“The Little Georgia Magnet”) and took her act on the road, traveling the South and then the Northeast, captivating ever-larger crowds with feats of magnificent female power. Her act involved resisting male force; men could not move her. In New York, she faced off with the strongman Eugen Sandow, a brawny bodybuilding pioneer. “I put forth strength enough to lift eight men clear off the floor,” he said, “yet I failed to shift this little fragile creature one inch from her position.” Here and there a newspaper article would claim to expose the trickery
behind her (the crafty use of leverage, illusion, and charm). No matter, the crowds kept coming. She traveled to Canada, California—where Bertha saw her—and Europe, where she packed theaters for weeks and performed before the German kaiser, the Austro-Hungarian emperor, the Russian tsar, Queen Victoria (whom she helped to locate a missing pearl), and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire (who watched the show, “but did not smile,” because he believed her to be a witch).

Soon, other “Annie Abbotts”—imitators—sprang up, three or four or five of them in competition. Some dressed like little girls, others like Spanish flamenco dancers, others like proper Victorian ladies. But all of them were small, and all of them hefted men many times their weight, claiming powers that lay beyond our comprehension.

Spiritualist performers could be found everywhere in the years when Julia lived in Santa Fe: young and old, men and women, in small towns and large cities. Their “talents” varied—some read minds, some talked to spirits from beyond, some, like Annie Abbott, exhibited feats of paranormal strength. Forebears to the psychics I met in my search for Julia’s supernatural side—Misha with her tarot cards, Sarina with her lost son—they claimed to channel the powers of the dead. Julia might have consulted with such mediums in Santa Fe after she lost Henriette. It wouldn’t have been unusual.

All of them—from Annie Abbott to the Stanley Hotel’s ghost hunters—came out of a tradition born four years after Julia’s birth. In March 1848, two teenage girls reported hearing a series of fearsome “rapping” sounds inside their bedroom in a rented house in the small town of Hydesville, New York. Maggie Fox was fourteen years old; her sister Kate was eleven. The rapping noises were so loud, wrote the girls’ mother, Margaret, in an affidavit, that it shook the bedsteads and the chairs. Sometimes the raps sounded like knocking on walls, sometimes
like the moving of furniture, sometimes like a person walking. The noises resumed the next night. “We heard footsteps in the pantry, and walking downstairs; we could not rest . . . ,” Mrs. Fox wrote in an affidavit she signed a few days later. She declared that she was not, by nature, “a believer in haunted houses or supernatural appearances.” But the noises were impossible for her to ignore, and she concluded that the house “must be haunted by some unhappy restless spirit.”

On the third night—March 31, 1848—the family went to bed exhausted from the previous sleepless nights. “I had been so broken of my rest,” wrote Mrs. Fox, “I was almost sick.” She had just “lain down,” when the noises commenced. Her daughters, sleeping in the room with her, heard them, too, and Kate, the younger one, began snapping her fingers in response. “Do as I do,” Kate said to the unseen noisemaker. She clapped her hands: “The sound instantly followed her with the same number of raps,” wrote Mrs. Fox. It stopped when she stopped. Kate repeated her clapping, varying the number, and the noisemaker followed suit each time. Mrs. Fox then gave the noisemaker a test. “I asked the noise to rap my different children’s ages, successively.” It did. It then informed the Foxes, through a sort of simplified Morse code of yes-or-no raps, that it was a spirit—a man, aged thirty-one, named Charles B. Rosma, who had been murdered in the east bedroom of the home five years earlier, cut through the throat with a butcher’s knife and buried ten feet under the buttery below the house. Thus began a communication with “Mr. Splitfoot”—the girls’ nickname for their visiting spirit—that first wowed the neighbors, then consumed the nation.

Hydesville, which no longer exists, was a hamlet about twenty miles from Rochester, in the heart of the “burned-over district,” the region of upstate New York famously swept by wave after wave of evangelical religions in the 1830s and 1840s, from which emerged Mormonism, Christian Science, Millerism (which predicted Jesus’ return on October,
22, 1844), and the Oneida Community (the silverware-making commune that encouraged sexual congress between postmenopausal women and teenage boys). The area was so heavily evangelized, it was said, that there was “no fuel left to burn.” The Fox girls’ story was one of those embers. They are credited as founders of Spiritualism, a movement that rested on the basic premise that humans could communicate with the dead.

As news spread of their communications with Mr. Splitfoot, the family was tortured by the ceaseless, sleepless rappings. The hair of the girls’ unnerved mother went briskly white—Julia was not the only woman whose tresses succumbed to nineteenth-century traumata; it seemed to be a Victorian tradition. Only after Mr. Splitfoot informed the girls, via what must have been a rather elaborate series of raps, that they should “proclaim this truth to the world” did he let them sleep. The girls began to speak of their sensational communion with the spirits. Aided by a group of radical Quaker suffragist abolitionists and accompanied by their older sister Leah, Maggie and Kate traveled the state and then the country, visiting the homes of the wealthy and powerful and conducting public séances that were attended by such luminaries as William Lloyd Garrison, James Fenimore Cooper, Horace Greeley, and Sojourner Truth—sessions in which they conveyed messages from the dead on such weighty afterlife subjects as railway stocks, love affairs, and the existence of God.

It’s not as if people didn’t think about ghosts before the Fox sisters came along. In New Mexico, Spanish and Indian legends teemed with spirits: murderous mothers, vanquished Indians, and Kokopelli tricksters. Julia’s village of Lügde, too, produced its share of ghosts: malicious wood spirits, grunting swine phantoms, a tax collector turned hellhound, and Sister Irmgard, a mad nun betrayed by a false lover, whose spirit wandered restlessly along a nearby stream, “shadowy and bloody,” according to a book of local ghost tales. There are ghosts of
legend and literature—Bloody Mary, the Headless Horseman, the Headless Nun, Banquo, Jesus, Hamlet’s father.

Across the ages and across all cultures, people have claimed to hear from the dead. These tales remind us that there were people here before us and that others will take our places. But the dead of ancient legend did not, typically, communicate back and forth with the living quite so readily as they did in the Victorian era. Until the nineteenth century, ordinary people rarely boasted of speaking to specific dead relatives; their extrasensory perceptions weren’t so finely grained. Victorians, on the other hand, held regular posthumous counsel with dear departed ones. The practice of mediumship—of the dead speaking through the living, as through psychics today—was something new.

In the years that followed the Fox girls’ revelations, mediums emerged from every cabinet and closet. By 1853, there were more than thirty thousand in the United States alone. The Civil War, which left so many American families bereft, made communication with the dead only that much more appealing. The world was afire with talkative ghosts. Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House in the hopes of talking to her dead son, reaching across the “very slight veil [that] separates us from the ‘loved and lost’” (the president was in attendance); Queen Victoria is rumored to have tried to reconnect with the spirit of her beloved Prince Albert at Windsor Castle. Leo Tolstoy and Tsar Alexander II communed with mediums; Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fictional Sherlock Holmes was such a devotee of deduction, attended regular séances and wrote a book on the subject; Harriet Beecher Stowe reported that she had written
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
under the guidance of spirits. Spiritualism infiltrated the fabric of everyday life. “It came upon them like a smallpox,” the British logician Augustus De Morgan wrote in 1863. “And the land was spotted with mediums before the wise and prudent had had time to lodge the first half-dozen in a madhouse.”

By the 1890s, when Annie Abbott traveled the world and Bertha Staab watched her perform, the Spiritualist movement was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe, drawn mostly from the upper and middle classes. All across America and throughout Europe, perfectly respectable citizens opened their homes to Fox-like mediums who fell into trances and produced ghostly “spirit guides,” many of them clad in turbans and bearing Hindu-sounding names like Abdula Bay, Bien Boa, Uvani, Feda, Afid, and Nepenshis. The visiting ghosts, in turn, summoned other spirits—the Victorian dead—who indicated their presence by tilting and turning tables, levitating flower vases, writing on walls, clog dancing, exuding “ectoplasm” (the spirit ooze so memorably popularized in the Ghostbusters movies) from various orifices, and ultimately, if the spirits were so kind, “materializing” hands, or heads, or even full-fledged bodies clad in frilly high-necked dresses. Spiritualist mediums held trance lectures, teacup readings, and demonstrations of automatic writing. They sold aura photography, in which clients sat for photographs with their dead friends and relations. And they conducted vaudevillian displays of paranormal powers such as those claimed by Annie Abbott.

Not everyone accepted these claims without scrutiny. The most popular mediums found themselves examined extensively by doctors and researchers. Scientists at the time didn’t shy away from such pursuits; such intellectual luminaries as Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, the physicist Sir William Fletcher Barrett, and the British chemist William Crookes all dabbled in paranormal research at one time or another. In America, the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James founded the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), a spin-off of a British group aiming to prove—or refute—the validity of paranormal phenomena by subjecting claims of table tipping and telepathy to the withering light of scientific method. All one needed to prove that ghosts could exist in general, James explained in a famous 1890 lecture, was to prove that
one ghost existed in specific. “To upset the conclusion that all crows are black,” he said, “there is no need to seek demonstration that no crows are black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow; a single one is sufficient.” One real ghost would be enough.