Talking to the Dead (12 page)

 

In the winter of 1849–50 the Fox sisters retreated from the public arena of the stage—it had proved a dangerous forum—to a private arena where women of the day typically exercised power and wielded spiritual authority, the parlor. There they pursued the more typically masculine activity of earning an income and making a living.
¹¹

When Kate returned from Auburn, the three sisters began holding large gatherings for the general public at Leah's cottage on Troup
Street. In response to the recent publicity, visitors packed every room upstairs and down, sitting on the stairs when necessary. Although the word itself wasn't used widely until the Civil War, the
seance
as we know it had been born.

The Fox sisters now presented themselves as a public threesome. Although accounts differ, at this point Leah apparently neither was attended by raps nor called herself a medium but instead guided the communications with gentle but leading questions. “Spirit, do you know this person?” she frequently asked as a way of introducing a new visitor.

In the course of the winter the sisters also began accepting payment on an informal basis for their seances, possibly at Amy Post's worried suggestion. They had never needed financial support before, Leah wrote, managing on food David sent from the farm and her savings from teaching. But with her nest egg gone and no time for piano students, she was grateful for monetary gifts “offered in kindness and good faith.”
¹²

A wealth of anecdotes and reminiscences provide a picture of what the early months of 1850 were like for the Fox sisters and those who visited them. While this material offers little insight into what Kate, Maggie, and Leah were thinking and feeling, it illustrates how they and the spirits behaved with their public and what strangers and friends alike experienced in the sisters' presence. The passage of time, an individual writer's inclination to believe or disbelieve, and a tendency to exaggerate events for the sake of publication surely colored what was said. Nonetheless, the witnesses' accumulated observations help create a vivid portrait.

The spirits, at least those on the lower spheres, couldn't always be counted on for reliability. The author and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was so incensed at one gathering by the spirits' failure to respond that he later apologized to Amy Post for his behavior.

“You misunderstood me in supposing that I applied the term
atrocious
to the company,” he earnestly explained. “That term was applied to the
rapping
when it refused to
answer
the question…when that question was the only one put which would
test
the intelligence of the agent by which the rapping was made.”
¹³

As Augustus H. Strong realized, participants at the same seance could experience very different things and so emerge with opposite opinions
about what had taken place. Strong, the son of a Baptist deacon named Alvah Strong, had met the spirits when he was a boy of fourteen in 1850. As an adult he reminisced about the encounter, which was initiated by two of his father's out-of-town guests. The couple, “a tall and stately man, a Presbyterian Elder,” and his wife, had asked to be introduced to the Fox family, a request that the disapproving Deacon Strong was too polite to ignore.
¹⁴

When the deacon and his guests visited the Troup Street house, Margaret informed them there was no more room that day. Would the sisters be willing to schedule a future appointment? Margaret bustled down the front steps to the brick walk, followed by Kate, and posed the question to the spirits. The visitors were promptly showered with affirmative raps in a spontaneous outdoor demonstration, which surely surprised them.

When and where could the meeting take place? The raps announced, much to Deacon Strong's shock, that they would meet him at his own house that very evening. Deacon Strong again allowed etiquette to get the better of him and agreed to the date.

The evening was a memorable one for young Augustus Strong. “It began very solemnly, with the wheeling out of a heavy mahogany center table into the middle of the parlor,” he recalled. “Then the company gathered tremblingly around it and formed a closed circle by clasping hands about its edge. Then we waited in silence. Katy Fox was opposite me. I thought I observed a slight smile on her face,” Strong wrote. “I was less observant of the proprieties at that time than I have been since, and I ventured, alas, to wink at Katy Fox. And I thought that Katy did something like winking in return. She was a pretty girl, and why shouldn't she? But she soon composed her countenance. The seance proceeded solemnly to the end. But for me there was no more solemnity or mystery. All the rest of the performance seemed a farce.”

Although Strong heard loud, clear raps, he felt the answers to his questions were “ambiguous or commonplace.” His father's guests, however, disagreed, and the courtly Presbyterian sank to his hands and knees to examine the underside of the table. On rising, he pronounced himself satisfied that the mediums were above reproach. He and his wife soon converted to a belief in the spirits, while Deacon Strong, according to
his son, “never forgave himself for leading those two innocents into temptation.”

Augustus Strong also reported on a gathering attended by Miss Mary B. Allen, the preceptress “of the best Rochester school for young ladies,” and possibly one of Kate's former teachers. On hearing raps, purportedly from her grandmother, Miss Allen promptly asked her invisible relative to spell
scissors.

“S-i-s-s-e-r-s,”
rapped the obliging spirit.

“Oh”—and the teacher seems to have pounced with glee—“that is just the way Katy Fox spelled ‘scissors' when she was a scholar in my school.”

Whether or not Kate actually attended Miss Allen's school, which opened only in 1847, the spirits' spelling mistakes troubled others. A defender of the Fox sisters, a man simply called “P-,” commented on the spirits' failing grades: “I had at several times received communications in which the words were misspelled,” P-wrote, “and persons sitting at the table made the remark: ‘Well I don't believe in spirits that can't spell right.' These remarks would cause some merriment,” P-continued, “and at one time the alphabet was called by the usual signal and the sentence spelled out: ‘You need not laugh at him. He never learned how to spell.'”
¹⁵

Other witnesses mentioned spats between mortals and spirits. One evening the invisible beings refused to answer questions for a friend of Isaac Post who had tested the sisters a number of times. Finally Leah overruled the spirits, who fervently wanted the visitor banished for some unexplained reason, and invited him to stay. The spirits, according to the gentleman, “immediately called out for the alphabet and spelled: ‘Leah has done wrong—he must go.'”
¹⁶

Moments of levity, rare squabbles, spelling mistakes, wrong answers, confused milling here and there between different rooms, and a habit of asking strangers to go away and return on another day: these are part of the pattern of the early, hectic seances held by the Fox sisters. So too, however, are moments that levelheaded men and women found inexplicable, emotional, and miraculous, instances that seemed to them to defy human capability.

William McDonald, one of the editors of a publication called the
Excelsior,
swore to having exercised his utmost ingenuity to solve the mystery, only to fail. Although he continued to withhold final judgment, McDonald admitted, “We have seen and heard things to us wonderful and unaccountable….”

Charles Hammond, a Universalist minister, attended a gathering of about twenty people at the Troup Street house in January 1850. He reported that the three sisters struck him as more cheerful than he had expected; he had anticipated solemnity, given that they engaged in hourly conversation with “the spirits of the revered dead.”
¹⁷

The spirits rapped answers to some participants' questions but to his disappointment refused to answer his. They promised to do so, however, if he returned the next day. And when he did, the spirits seemed so familiar with every detail of his life that Hammond dismissed any idea of fraud. The possibility that the sisters had used the extra time to research his background seems not to have occurred to him. He was inclined instead to credit the answers he received, not to the spirits, but to the sisters' clairvoyant powers or to the heightened sensibilities he attributed to mesmerism. The immortal beings promised further demonstrations to erase his doubts.

On his third visit he sat alone with “the ‘three sisters' and their aged mother” at a table with a lighted candle on it. Margaret and Kate were on his right, Leah and Maggie on his left. After a cacophony of loud and violent raps, the table seemed to him to float up and then to pass “out of the reach of us all—full six feet from me, and at least four from the nearest person to it.” He swore that “not even a thread” connected the sisters to the buoyant piece of furniture and that when the sitters summoned the table to come back, “back it came, as though it were carried on the head of some one, who had not suited his position to a perfect equipoise, the balance being sometimes in favor of one side, and then the other.”

Other manifestations followed, some part of a now-familiar repertoire. While the family sang, the spirits marked time on the table; a transparent hand wafted across Hammond's face; fingers pulled the hair on the left side of his head; his right leg was tugged underneath the table.

Then, most unnerving of all, the room sprang to life, as in a haunted house nightmare: a window curtain rolled up and down, a lounge shook
violently, bureau drawers slammed open and shut, and “a common spinning wheel seemed to be in motion, making a very natural buzz of the spindle—a reel articulated each knot wound upon it, while the sound of a rocking cradle indicated maternal care for the infant's slumbers.”

Many of the Fox family's visitors over the next few years would echo Hammond's conclusion: “That any of the company could have performed these things, under the circumstances in which we were situated, would require a greater stretch of credulity on my part, than it would to believe it was the work of spirits.”

Though the spirits could be playful, they could also be sensitive and astute. John E. Robinson, a Rochester clerk and bookkeeper, recalled an evening when a mother received a message from her child's spirit. “That mother left the room in tears,” Robinson wrote, “but they were not the outburst of sorrow. Gladness was in her heart, (as she said,) for the first time since she laid her darling child—her first born—down to sleep on the bosom of its elder mother, earth.”
¹⁸

A bachelor in his thirties who became a close friend of the Fox family, Robinson fiercely defended the sisters' honor and respectability. So too did many of the other witnesses who visited. Leah's hand was at work in some cases, gently sculpting an irreproachable image for herself.

“The elder sister, Mrs. Fish, is a widow lady,” William McDonald of the
Excelsior
commented.
¹⁹
In fact it's not clear that the husband who had deserted her, Bowman Fish, had traveled by that point beyond Illinois to the spirit world. But for Leah to claim widowhood certainly sounded better than to admit to desertion or divorce.

In an effort to position the sisters within a genteel context, Robinson stressed that they had never behaved in an inappropriate fashion by pursuing the spirits or “set up the false claim that they, as individuals…have a mission from the Deity to this world.

“They are
merely
the
passive media
through whom these communications are made to us from the world of spirits.” His emphasis on the words
passive media
may have been intended to protect the sisters from the imputation that they were far too assertive for respectable women.

Other visitors, while accepting in principle the theory of passive mediumship, recognized that Kate and Maggie seemed to exercise
greater control over their circumstances than did mesmeric subjects. In fact, Kate and Maggie were beginning to rival the spirits for attention. One visitor, an editor of the
Merchant's Day Book,
discussed the two separately rather than simply referring to them, as many people did, as “the girls” or “one of the girls” or “the youngest” or “the older.” To him, they weren't just mediums for the spirits but individuals in their own right.

“One of them is only 12 years of age, and evidently has no more conception of the rapping than a canary bird,” he remarked, painting a picture of Kate as a naive child. Like subsequent observers, he added a year or two to Maggie's age, commenting on her poise and frank demeanor: “The other is a young lady, apparently 17 or 18 years old; her manners are rather prepossessing, and although not decidedly a beauty, she has a mild and gentle expression of countenance, a face indicative of no superior cunning or shrewdness, but on the contrary one that any person at all acquainted with human nature would pronounce artless and innocent.”
²⁰

With an astute eye for detail, the editor related an anecdote about Kate that highlighted certain lifelong traits: her childlike, breathy verbal expression, her wish to please others, her distress when she failed to do so. “The youngest one in fact appeared innocent of even a suspicion that she had any agency in it,” he observed, “and with that earnest simplicity peculiar to children, expressed a wish that it
would do
something just to let me see how strange it acted sometimes, and went on to relate in a hurried manner—when we were leaving—how it sometimes took the books off the table and piled them up in her lap, how it drew out the piano and played tunes, &.”

At twelve, Kate was pretty and flirtatious, if the tale of her winking at young Augustus Strong can be believed, and she behaved as though wholly engaged with the spirits—whether fabricated or real—whose feats she assured visitors were remarkable and whose failures she took personally. Maggie, already sixteen, seemed on the surface more poised; others would comment in years to come on her air of gentle reserve in public. Her demeanor suggests formidable willpower for, given her love of “the rattling of Carriages and the ringing of bells,” her composure most likely concealed an excited response to the tumultuous events of which she was part.