Talking to the Dead (17 page)

And she was plotting revenge: “But if I meet him face to face, I will never speak to him, never notice him, now I am as firm as a Rock, ask the Spirits if I am not right.”

It's difficult to guess what the spirits, given the chance, might have answered, since Kate had already violated her own vow to snub Robinson. She behaved exactly as he had asked her not to do. “I wrote him a long letter,” she said, “asked his forgiveness…
but no answer, no answer.
”

Maggie too was feeling the strain of constant investigations and had grown frankly bored in Cincinnati. Whereas Kate tended to melodrama, Maggie was ironic in venting her complaints and briskly informed Amy,
“We are still in Cincinnati, leave for Louisville in two weeks, and as Byron says I shall leave it without regret. I shall return to it without pleasure.”
¹⁰

Frederick Douglass happened to be in Cincinnati during part of her stay, and his presence cheered her up considerably. “O how glad we were to see his sweet face once more,” she wrote Amy; “he is liked here
very much indeed.
I wish he would give a Lecture here,” Maggie continued, “it would make the people
crazy.
” She made a cursory reference to the spirits, mentioning almost offhandedly how they were doing “wonderful things all the time.” But her interests clearly were focused on mortal men.

“Frederic [sic] is as fine looking as ever. I think he is the finest looking gentleman I have seen since I have been in Cincinnati,” she announced to Amy, adding that she had insisted on his accompanying her back to her hotel. Perhaps it's no wonder that the wives of Troy worried about Maggie's influence over their husbands. Clearly the teenage Fox sisters had an eye for the gentlemen—and didn't always take pains to disguise their admiration.

After the “Ohio Campaign,” Kate and Maggie visited St. Louis, Missouri, in January 1852. As in other cities, they submitted to examinations by various investigators, one group composed of three physicians, as the previous year's Buffalo committee had been. Dr. A. J. Coons, chair of the St. Louis trio, reported that he and his colleagues had successfully exposed “the Rochester Knockings” but that despite this achievement—which he never fully explained—the mediums had converted a troubling number of his fellow citizens to a belief in spirits.

Back home in Rochester, Leah—now Mrs. Brown—was planning yet another move, a strategy that, like the Ohio tour, had the potential for widening the Fox sisters' circle of support. She took no credit for the decision to relocate but instead attributed it to pressure from others.

“Many friends to the new cause urged their advice that we should establish ourselves in one of the great centres of population and movement,” Leah wrote.
¹¹

In the early months of 1852 Leah, Calvin, and Lizzie left Rochester for good and moved into a large brownstone at 78 West Twenty-Sixth Street in Manhattan. Leah's fourth residence in four years quickly became
famous for the seances the Fox sisters held there. Kate and Maggie lived with her when they weren't traveling or staying as the houseguests of notable investigators. Margaret spent much of her time there too, providing her daughters with love and comfort and becoming almost as much a fixture at seances as they were. John remained in Arcadia, living in the house that he had built next to David's, unshakable in his Methodist faith and apparently indifferent to or disapproving of the spirits.

 

And the controversy continued, generating a growing body of alternative explanations for the raps and related phenomena. Some writers speculated that the manifestations were the product of the individual's fevered imagination, played upon by the medium and perhaps enhanced by hallucinogens such as opium, which were widely available in medicines of the day.

Or, it was argued, electricity created the manifestations. Like physics today, electricity at the time seemed to promise a scientific explanation for the dazzling prospect of an alternate, coexisting reality.

Or, it was suggested, a theoretical substance known as the Odic Force, said by some scientists to permeate the universe, produced the raps, table tiltings, and floating orbs of light.

Or, a deliberate combination of collusion, ventriloquism, and conjuring tricks did so.

Or, the unconscious, involuntary movement of the medium's muscles or joints…

Or, were certain mediums' singular powers of mind—what today we might call psychic powers—the mysterious force that enabled them to read the thoughts of others, even to move objects without touching them? If so, were such exceptional powers either attained or heightened through mesmerism?

Later in the century the burgeoning fields of psychology and neurology would begin to redirect interest in spirit communication toward the human mind itself, with hypnosis, thought transference or mental telepathy, and syndromes such as the one today called multiple personality disorder emerging as areas of study.

While the public debated the causes of alleged spirit demonstrations, critics worried about the damaging effects of belief. Those who fell sway
to mediums were said to be courting sin and adultery in the intimate half light of the seance room. Sensitive souls were cautioned against the madness that might result from the feverish visions of their own overwrought minds. The Reverend H. Mattison tallied up “the number of inmates treated in different insane asylums in the country during the year 1852, who lost their reason by ‘spirit-rapping,'” and he arrived at the number ninety.
¹²

Neither had arguments about the Fox sisters subsided. Were the mediums, as Amy Post believed, brave pioneers, martyrs in the name of a noble cause? Or were they mountebanks who toyed with people's most cherished beliefs? Mature Leah tended to be categorized at one end of the spectrum or the other: as the saintly protector of her siblings or the mastermind behind them. But to many of those who met or read about them, Kate and Maggie seemed more difficult to place; the girls continued to pose a tantalizing mystery. How could anyone so young and apparently so guileless be adept in the arts of deception?

“[Kate] is certainly a witch, for you cannot help looking into the dreamy depths of those sweet violet eyes till you feel magnetized by them,” reflected Susanna Moodie, an author who lived in Canada near the girls' sister Elizabeth. “I do not believe that the raps are produced by spirits that have been of this world, but I cannot believe that she, with her pure spiritual face, is capable of deceiving.”
¹³
Not long after meeting Kate in the mid-1850s, Moodie converted to a belief in the spirits.

Defying taboos in so many ways, particularly for young girls of their day, Kate and Maggie had shown a capacity to stir up trouble, to get themselves into predicaments, and then to emerge unscathed. That remarkable resilience, coupled with their reputation as the “original rappers” in childhood, raised persistent questions for many of their contemporaries: under the scrutiny to which the two girls had been subjected, how could they possibly just be frauds or con artists? What if they
were
what believers claimed for them? Messengers of the divine spirits? Or agents of the devil?

Cloaked in an aura of the other world but living very much in this one, Kate and Maggie, like the trickster figures of myth and literature, seem to have eluded definition. Were they innocent or calculating? Seri
ous or mischievous? Soulful or irreverent? Active or passive? Answers abounded, but as a twosome the girls seem to have embodied the trickster's appeal and double-sided nature.

Like tricksters as well, Kate and Maggie crossed borders. Fluent in the language of the pragmatic, materialistic, everyday world of their time, the girls were steeped as well in the poetry of the spiritual world, where people mused about second sight, prayed with the fierce enthusiasm of revivalist Methodism, and worried about heaven and hell. The two young mediums' ease and background in both worlds either may have made them ideal receptors for the spirits or exquisitely attuned them to the material and spiritual concerns of their culture.

In the 1850s so much seemed bifurcated: heaven and hell, separate spheres for men and women, North versus South, material and technological progress juxtaposed with spiritual doubt, families uprooted and divided. The impulse to create a harmonious whole, although not universal, was powerful, and those who straddled the border between worlds—children, tricksters—and who, like Kate and Maggie, seemed propelled by a wish to bring everyone, spirits and mortals, together, possessed great appeal. The Fox sisters vibrated to invisible waves of thoughts and feelings—whether from mortal or immortal beings—and they transmitted melodies and messages that pleased their listeners. Although they needed neither the spirits nor mental telepathy to do so, perhaps they were blessed with both.

Or at times, perhaps, they believed they were.

Arguments on the subject notwithstanding, by 1852 the nation's passion, both for the spirits and for the pleasures of the spirit circle, had grown. Westward migration, urbanization, immigration, and the rise of a market economy had created a society that was more anonymous and atomized than in the past. Circles of mortal investigators, holding hands, clustered around a table, felt connected: with one another and with the spirits, with the past and with the future.
¹⁴

Visits from Benjamin Franklin and other heroic spirits, simulated or real, served a twofold purpose. The encounters seemed to provide continuity with the idealized values of the early American republic, conceived of as a simpler time, in retrospect if not in reality more unified than the
present. Yet these historic, otherworldly figures simultaneously lent their imprimatur to a technologically exciting future. The raps and other manifestations also promised to dissolve the contradictions that had emerged between science and religion by supplying the evidence of immortality that science demanded and that faith desired.

Benjamin Franklin probably visited more often than any other famous spirit. Given the multiple identities he had assumed in his lifetime—inventor, trickster, magician, founding father, and diplomat—he was an ideal representative from the other world.

The spirit circles themselves were appealing as democratic, participatory, and theatrical events, with manifestations that were generally audible or visible to one and all. No longer were the thundering minister and the isolated mystic the only ones with knowledge of a transcendent reality.

The other world emerged as democratic, too. All spirits had the capacity to progress in virtue. All had the ability to communicate with the friends and relatives they had left behind and to impart to them their newfound spiritual wisdom. Since hell was essentially banished, there was little to fear from the afterlife. The other world was a great leveler.

To attend a circle was exhilarating, however, not only in the promise held forth for eternity but also in the intensity of the experience. To an individual immersed in the sustained gloom of sentimental grief, the seance provided a rush of adrenaline, emotional release, and a provocative challenge to probe for truth. No longer was it necessary to wait until death to be freed from depression or despair. A good seance stirred the blood, proving one's own vitality in the here and now. It brought the living and the dead equally to life.

 

In the brief four years since the peddler's Hydesville visit, the Fox sisters had forged the way in founding a popular movement based on a belief in spirit communication. Tens of thousands of men and women across the nation were said to share the faith. The influential New York Circle, formed late in 1850, expanded its membership and changed its name to the New York Conference. In 1852 the conference began holding lectures and meetings open to the public at a chapel on Broadway. Philadelphia boasted sixty or more circles of investigators. Providence,
Rhode Island, was credited with forty or fifty mediums. One newspaper editor estimated that twelve hundred mediums had emerged in Cincinnati in the wake of the Fox sisters' visit there. The trend was so popular that the
Spirit Messenger
suggested guidelines for establishing an ongoing spirit circle of one's own:

Manifestations also were becoming more diverse. Mediums performed ever more astonishing feats of levitation: white-haired Henry Gordon was seen floating in the air across a sixty-foot space, balanced on nothing but one of Charles Partridge's fingers. Trance mediums delivered inspiring addresses to large audiences on the pressing issues of the day, such as perfecting the body through diet and exercise or rehabilitating criminals through prison reform. Some mediums danced, others spoke in tongues. The number of healing mediums multiplied.

To speed the process of spelling messages during seances, mediums began writing down the alphabet then pointing to specific letters rather than calling them out. In a room built by a man named Koons solely for the purpose of otherworldly communications, several spirits seemed to speak in their own voices, their words projected through a small trumpet.