Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (15 page)

 
As religion rapidly lost ground to rationality, the endgame seemed inevitable. Indeed, some writers were happy to declare the battle already over, with perhaps the most unequivocal statement coming from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ Predictably, believers were somewhat more optimistic. Although well aware that their creator was on the critical list they hoped that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.
 

Feeling increasingly under attack, the religious did what they had always done in difficult times. They put their heads down, placed their hands together and prayed for a miracle. On 31 March 1848 God appeared to answer their prayers.

Hydesville is an unassuming hamlet about 20 miles east of Rochester, New York
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In December 1847, John and Margaret Fox moved into a small house on the edge of the hamlet with their two daughters, 11-year-old Kate and 14- year-old Margaretta. Within a few months the Fox family life was disturbed by a series of odd events. Bedsteads and chairs started to shake, ghostly footsteps were heard moving through the house, and on occasion the entire floor of the property vibrated like a giant drum skin. After John and Margaret’s investigations failed to provide an explanation for these apparent supernatural happenings, they found themselves forced to conclude that their new home was haunted by an ‘unhappy restless spirit’.
 

On 31 March 1848 the family had gone to bed early in an attempt to get a good night’s rest, without any ghostly shenanigans. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Within a few moments of them settling down, the disturbances started. Rather than simply enduring another night of endless shaking and knocking, young Kate decided to attempt to communicate with the spirit. Making the rather pessimistic assumption that their unwelcome guest may be the Devil himself, Kate spoke into the darkness and asked ‘Mr Splitfoot’, as she'd decided to name him, to copy her actions. She clapped her hands three times. A few seconds later three raps mysteriously emanated from the walls of the house. Contact had been made. Intrigued, Margaret Fox then nervously asked the entity to rap out the ages of her children. 11 knocks were heard for Kate. Pause. Then 14 knocks for Margaretta. Pause. Then three knocks. Three knocks? The entity was well informed – Margaret had had a third child who had died several years before, aged three.
 

The spiritual chit-chat continued long into the night, with the family eventually developing the now infamous ‘one rap for yes, two raps for no’ code, and then using it to establish that the entity was a 31-year-old man who had been murdered in the house a few years before their arrival, and whose remains were currently buried in their cellar. The following night, John Fox attempted to dig up the cellar floor in search of bones, but was forced to abandon the work when he reached the water level.
 

Word of the strange happenings quickly spread to surrounding towns, resulting in hundreds of people coming to Hydesville to experience the raps for themselves. Many of them got to communicate with the spirit, which only served to further feed the ghostly gossip now rapidly moving across New York. Within a few months the constant stream of visitors and rapping took its toll, with Margaret Fox’s hair turning white through worry and her husband being unable to work. Eventually they decided that it was in everyone’s best interests to move their children away from the spirit-infested house. Kate was sent to nearby Auburn and Margaretta to Rochester. But the seeds had already been sown that would change the course of history.

The various spirits conjured up by Kate and Margaretta followed the two young girls, with rapping breaking out in their new locations. In Rochester, a long-standing family friend and committed Quaker named Isaac Post had an idea. The rapping code was proving a rather time-consuming, and sometimes confusing, way of eliciting information from the spirit world. Would it be possible, Isaac wondered, to create a more accurate type of communication? One evening he invited Margaretta to his house and asked whether she would mind experimenting with a new system. He drew the letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper, and explained to the spirits that he would ask a question and then point to each piece of paper in turn. To communicate whatever was going through their discarnate mind, the spirits simply needed to rap when he was pointing to an appropriate letter. Isaac’s instant messaging with the dead proved a hit and soon resulted in the first fully-formed communication from beyond the grave. Not one for small talk, the spirits issued a firm and frank directive: 

"Dear Friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era. You must not try to conceal it any longer. When you do your duty God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you."

Convinced of the genuineness of the messages, Isaac enthusiastically embraced the new religion of ‘Spiritualism’ and set about converting his fellow Quakers.
 

From a psychological perspective, the creation of Spiritualism was a stroke of genius. Whereas the established churches had tried to combat the rise in rationality by stressing the importance of faith, Spiritualism changed the very nature of religion. In an age that was obsessed with science and technology, Spiritualism not only offered proof of an afterlife but, on a good night, allowed people to apparently communicate with their deceased loved ones
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Other religions promised the tantalizing possibility of life after death. Spiritualism delivered the goods. This combination of rational and emotional appeal proved overwhelming and within just a few months the new religion was sweeping across America.
 

The Fox sisters quickly gained celebrity status and received invitations to demonstrate their amazing mediumistic abilities in public shows and private gatherings. They chatted with the spirits about any topic put to them, with newspaper reports describing how one moment they were being consulted on the weightiest of philosophical and religious issues while the next they were discussing railway stocks and love affairs.
 

From the very start, Spiritualism shared many of the central tenets of Quakerism, including support for the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement and women’s rights. The new religion also adopted the Quakers’ non-hierarchical structure. Out went the idea of high priests and untouchable clergymen, and in came the notion of spiritual democracy, with followers being encouraged to gather together and experiment with different ways of talking to the dead. And gather they did. In parlours across America and Europe small groups of Spiritualists would meet up and try to make contact with their deceased loved ones (or indeed any other spirit who might be kind enough to drop in).
 

When it proved difficult to replicate the raps produced in the presence of the Fox Sisters, the groups started to experiment with more reliable forms of communication. By far the most popular technique to emerge was that of table-turning. In a typical session, people would sit around a small table, place their fingertips lightly on its surface, turn down the gaslight, sing a few hymns, and start to summon the spirits. After a while everyone would start to feel the wooden tabletop creak and shiver beneath their hands. A little more hymn singing and the table would suddenly start to tip and move, as if being pushed and pulled by spirits. According to reports from the time, on a good night the table appeared possessed, dancing around the room, climbing affectionately onto people’s laps, and sometimes even aggressively pinning them up against the wall. Table-turning spread like an epidemic and soon hundreds of thousands of people were passing their evenings transforming a common piece of household furniture into a conduit to the afterlife.
 

 
‘I was the First in the Field and I Have a Right to Expose it’

With the rapid growth in the number of mediums, the pressure of trying to make ends meet in an increasingly crowded market place eventually took its toll on Kate and Margaretta Fox. The two of them gradually formed a somewhat different kind of bond with the spirit world and by the late 1880s both were drinking heavily. In October 1888 they decided that enough was enough and travelled to New York City to make a dramatic announcement.
 

Selling her story to the
New York World
for an alleged $1,500, Margaretta came clean and confessed that the two of them had faked the entire affair
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A new convert to the Catholic Church, she could take the guilt no longer. According to her, the strange noises initially experienced at Hydesville were actually due to nothing more than an apple, a piece of string and a naive belief in the honesty of children:

"When we went to bed at night we used to tie an apple to a string and move 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. Mother listened to this for a time. She would not understand it and did not suspect us as being capable of a trick because we were so young."

Margaretta went on to explain that the ‘apple on a string’ technique was only effective in darkness and so the sisters quickly devised a different way of creating raps in daylight:
 

"The rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that is not commonly known . . . With control of the muscles of the foot, the toes may be brought down to the floor without any movement that is perceptible to the eye. The whole foot, in fact, can be made to give rappings by the use only of the muscles below the knee. This, then, is the simple explanation of the whole method of the knocks and raps."

After reflecting on the stress that she had endured as a result of a life of deception, Margaretta provided an unequivocal statement about the nature of the new religion that she had helped create:

"Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description . . . I want to see the day when it is entirely done away with. After my sister Katie and I expose it I hope Spiritualism will be given a death blow."

Later that week Margaretta silenced those Spiritualists who had been sceptical about her confession by appearing before a packed auditorium at the New York Academy of Music and demonstrating her remarkable ability to produce raps at will. Did her dramatic confession have the desired effect? Did the estimated eight million Spiritualists in America alone throw up their hands in horror and desert their new-found faith? Sadly, the only real impact of the confession was to distance the sisters from their supporters. The vast majority of Spiritualists were eager to cling to the comforting thought that they might survive bodily death, and they were not going to let a couple of rambling alcoholics stand in the way of immortality.But although Margaretta tried to retract her remarks shortly after confessing all, for the Fox sisters at least, the damage had been done. Increasingly distanced from the movement that they helped to create, both sisters died in poverty a few years later and were buried in pauper’s graves. Neither made contact from the spirit world.

By now, the genie was out of the bottle. Tables were turning all across America and Britain. Even more impressively, some of them were starting to actually talk.

Interview with historian Peter Lamont

http://www.richardwiseman.com/paranormality/PeterLamont.html

The Devil’s Mouthpiece

The idea was simple enough. If a table could be moved by spiritual energy, surely it could also be used as a way of actually getting a message from the other side? Initially people started asking questions during table-turning sessions and employing a variant on the Fox sisters’ code to interrogate the spirits – one tip for yes and two for no. When this proved somewhat time-consuming, people followed in the footsteps of Isaac Post, calling out the letters of the alphabet and asking the spirits to spell their message by tipping the table at appropriate points. Accounts suggest that these sessions could be highly emotionally charged affairs, as the following description from Edinburgh in 1871 shows:

"At a particular stage of the proceedings the table began to make strange undulatory movements, and gave out a curious accompaniment of creaking sounds. Presently my friend remarked that the movement and sound together reminded him of a ship in distress, with its timbers straining in a heavy sea. This conclusion being come to, the table proceeded to rap out: ‘It is David.’ Instantly a lady burst into tears, and cried wildly: ‘Oh, that must be my poor, dear brother, David, who was lost at sea some time since’."
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