Talking to the Dead (23 page)

Leah had an enthusiastic audience in Robert Dale Owen, an American philosopher, diplomat, and social reformer who, by the time he met her in 1859, had abandoned atheism to investigate Spiritualism. In his first book on the movement,
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World,
published in 1860, Owen examined phenomena such as poltergeists and apparitions, and he retold the story of the Fox family in a version undoubtedly influenced by Leah. Kate was only nine and Maggie twelve in 1848, he asserted, making the girls not only more childlike when the raps began but also more innocent in 1852, when Maggie met Kane.

Other revisions heightened the Fox family's genteel respectability. As children, according to Owen, Kate and Maggie had slept in their own bedroom rather than in their parents'. By 1860 middle-class families valued the privacy—and demonstrable appearance of financial well-being—afforded by separate bedrooms.

In October 1860 Owen accompanied Kate, Leah, Daniel, and several other friends on a mission that would have satisfied the thrill-seeking ghost hunter hidden in the heart of any dignified Spiritualist. The group visited a large old house in the country, a rambling and decrepit place reputedly haunted by a former owner, Peter Livingston. In life, Owen wrote, Livingston had been lame and had used a small invalid's carriage to propel himself about. It was whispered that his carriage now careened through the house's dark corridors at night.

That evening Owen, Leah, and their little group huddled around a small table in the ghost's former bedroom and put out the lights. A minute afterward, “such a clatter began,” as if “heavy substances of iron, such as ponderous dumb-bells or weights,” were rolling across the floor. Pounding, like that made by a heavy mallet, followed.

“Then,” Owen wrote, “was heard a sound precisely resembling the rolling of a small carriage on a plank floor.” As the invisible carriage raced frantically around the floor, someone suddenly, without warning, lit a candle. The room fell instantly silent.

The group tried the experiment again and again, always with the same result. “The sudden transition, without apparent cause, from such a babel of noises to a dead silence,” Owen wrote, “was an experience such as few have had, in this world.”
¹³

Three nights later, on October 25—two and a half years after her conversion to Catholicism—Maggie joined Owen, Kate, and her mother for a private seance. With windows and doors locked and the room dark, Owen felt the power of “a tremendous blow on the centre of the table; a blow so violent that we all instinctively started back. By the sound it was such a stroke, apparently dealt by a strong man with a heavy bludgeon, as would have killed any one….”
¹⁴

Perhaps the blow reflected Maggie's growing rage at the Kane family
or the anger of lower spirits on her behalf. To drown her grief and frustration over the course her life had taken, she had started drinking heavily, and her letters to Robert Kane were becoming more aggressive and desperate. Although he was still sending occasional gifts of money, her gratitude had turned to frustration at feeling she had to beg.

Maggie felt trapped. She had no husband or inheritance, and few options were available to her for earning a living unless she resumed holding public seances. But she desperately wished to honor Kane's wishes, so powerful was the hold he exercised over her even after his death. For their part, the Kanes continued not only to demand Elisha's love letters back but also to refuse to pay her the five-thousand-dollar inheritance that she believed had been left specifically for her care.

A few months before attending the seance with Owen, Maggie had begged Robert Kane to bring her the little locket engraved with Willie's name that Elisha had carried with him to England. “I will remember the kindness eternally,” she said. “The Doctor gave me the locket and I fastened it again to his watch chain.”
¹⁵

Denied that, she had asked Robert for a lock of her lover's hair, sending along one of Elisha's letters “that you may know how sacred the love between the doctor & myself was….”
¹⁶

In September 1860, a month before she attended the seance with Owen, she had scrawled a note to Robert Kane in huge drunken letters, promising to deliver all of his brother's letters if he would only help her out and send her a little more money.
¹⁷

By now Maggie had moved from the Greeleys' house to a small apartment of her own on West Forty-Sixth Street in Manhattan. There, more like a traditional mourner than a medium, she established what others later called a shrine to her dead lover, a place filled with mementos of what, despite the painful turmoil of her romance, she chose to remember as happier days. She remained relatively isolated, seeing only her family and close friends, and passionately denied rumors that she still held seances. Kane had despised everything associated with Spiritualism, she said, and now so did she.

 

Robert Dale Owen required one final piece of evidence to convince him of the spirits' authenticity. One summer afternoon, on an excursion with the Underhills and another friend, he drove to a seaside village, and from there the foursome set out for a walk along the nearby rocky beach. The view was a sublime one of the sort that many painters of the day tried to capture.

“The portion of rock whither we repaired was not an isolated block, detached from the rest,” Owen explained, “but part of a large, flat mass of rock, covering at least half an acre and running back into a bluff bank that rose beyond it: there were also several underlying ledges. We were about thirty feet from the sea and, as there was a moderate breeze, the surf broke on the rocks below us.

“But yet,” he continued, “standing on the ledge beside Mrs. Underhill and asking for the raps, I heard them quite distinctly above the noise produced by the surf. This was several times repeated, with the same result.”

He clambered over the boulders, down to a lower ledge, and placed his ear against the bottom of the outcrop on which Leah and her companions were seated. “I felt,” he wrote, “simultaneously with each rap, a slight but
unmistakably distinct vibration or concussion of the rock.
”
¹⁸

In the vastness of that natural setting, in a location that no medium could control, the spirits seemed to Owen at that moment to have provided authoritative proof of their existence. From then on he found it unnecessary to conduct further tests.

O
F THE THREE
F
OX SISTERS
, Kate alone now held seances for paying clients; indeed, her life had grown increasingly dedicated to, or circumscribed by, her work on the spirits' behalf. In 1861 she was almost twenty-four years old, five years older than Maggie had been on first meeting Elisha Kent Kane. Apart from her schoolgirl crush on John E. Robinson, Kate had never shown any sign of interest in a suitor, and in fact no public suitor had courted her. She lived with her parents at the Greeleys' house, she met with clients, and she visited Maggie, whose drunken despair terrified and saddened her. Only in her work did Kate seem to move forward. The most astonishing manifestations yet to appear in the history of Modern Spiritualism were about to be produced through her mediumship. These were accomplished in her sessions with Charles Livermore, a wealthy thirty-one-year-old banker in mourning for his wife.

A man on whom fortune seemed to shine, the handsome Livermore had cofounded the powerful financial firm of Livermore, Clews, and Company in 1859.
¹
But tragedy struck soon enough; within a year his
wife, Estelle, was on her deathbed, where she wondered aloud whether she could promise her grief-stricken husband she would return. Her physician, the prominent Spiritualist Dr. John Gray, eventually grew so concerned about the intensity of Livermore's suffering in the months after Estelle's death that in January 1861 he urged the banker to seek Kate's help.

She was now translating messages in a variety of ways: by spelling words aloud, letter after letter, as the invisibles rapped; through automatic writing, transcribing messages with her left hand in reverse script; sometimes communicating two messages simultaneously, scrawling one in large, looped letters while speaking the other. In her sessions with Livermore she also brought blank cards on which spirit writing seemed to materialize spontaneously.

During their first meetings, which were sometimes held at the Greeleys' house and sometimes at Livermore's, the banker experienced phenomena that had become routine to many Spiritualists: loud raps, the touch of spirit hands, the levitation of a heavy table. At his twelfth session he received a message purporting to come from Estelle and promising that she would soon be visible if he persevered. A meteor shower of dazzling phosphorescent lights followed. Several weeks later, at his twenty-fourth sitting in mid-March, Livermore glimpsed the faint outlines of a face and figure that he took to be Estelle's, the form illumined only by the crackling glow of spirit lights.
²

Kate and Livermore had been meeting on average every other day. His forty-third sitting, held on April 18, most likely took place in the Greeleys' parlor, since he often noted specifically when he was at home.

“Having absolutely secured the doors and windows,” he wrote in his journal, “we sat in perfect quiet for half an hour, my faith becoming weak. Then we were startled by a tremendous rap on the heavy mahogany centre-table which, at the same time, rose and fell. The door was violently shaken, the windows opened and shut: in fact everything in the room seemed in motion.”
³

His patience and desire appeared to have triumphed, as the awestruck Livermore wrote, “Then an illuminated substance like gauze rose from the floor behind us, moved about the room and finally came in front of us.
Vigorous electrical sounds were heard. The gauze-like substance assumed the form of a human head covered, the covering drawn close around the neck.”

The luminous substance evolved into a recognizable figure that touched him, then “receded and again approached…. it was Estelle herself—eyes, forehead, and expression in perfection.”

Estelle laid her head on his; he felt his wife's long hair cascading over his face. As she moved away, a brilliant light was projected against one of the walls. In its glow he saw “an entire female figure facing that side of the room, the light apparently in one of her hands.” After remaining there, fully in sight, for more than half an hour, Estelle sent the message: “‘Now see me rise….'

“And immediately,” Livermore wrote, “in full brightness, the figure rose to the ceiling, remained there a few moments suspended; then gently descending, disappeared.”

Estelle returned again and again; in Livermore's eyes she grew ever more like herself. In the darkness and excitement, Kate sometimes seemed to fade away as if she were the ghost and the shining Estelle the vital woman.

At one sitting in June, in response to a kiss on his forehead, Livermore looked up to see Estelle's radiant face poised in front of a light that “now vibrated rapidly, throwing its fitful gleams upon such beauty as, in beings of this world, it is not possible to witness.”
⁴
Kate reacted with exclamations of “wonder and delight,” a reaction that seemed to perturb the figure, for it retreated until the medium grew calm.

On another occasion, however, Kate responded with apparent alarm. As Estelle approached Livermore, a second figure materialized behind her: a short, thickset man, dressed in black even to his velvet cap.

“Here the medium became very nervous,” Livermore reported, “and I have no doubt prevented his making his face more distinctly visible.”
⁵
The dark figure returned a number of times and soon announced by writing on a card that he was Benjamin Franklin.

Often Livermore and Kate sat in silence and darkness for close to an hour before even a single spirit light was seen. Yet when the manifestations began, they more than fulfilled his expectations. On October 20,
1861, Estelle stood in front of him, enveloped in her gossamer robes, her arm bare except for its transparent drapery.

“I asked to be touched,” Livermore told Benjamin Coleman, an English Spiritualist with whom he maintained a correspondence, “[and] when she advanced, [she] laid the arm across my forehead and permitted me to kiss it. I found it as large and as real in weight as a living arm…. She held up the little finger and moved it characteristically and while we were looking at that—let her hair fall loosely down her back. The manifestation was concluded by her writing a card, resting it
upon my shoulder,
caressing me upon the head and temple and kissing me for good night.”
⁶

Estelle surprised him with a gift an evening or two later. After draping a veil over his face, she held up spirit flowers—she often wore a white rose in her hair—allowing him to inhale their sweet perfume, far more exquisite than any earthly blossom that he knew. Before returning to the spirit world, she placed “her finger enveloped in gossamer several times” in his mouth, an erotic and intimate gesture.
⁷

On a Wednesday evening shortly before Thanksgiving, Kate and Livermore waited patiently in the parlor, the room warmed by a coal fire and with the last hint of daylight seeping through the curtains. The bulk of the mahogany table, the chandelier and lamps, the couch and side chairs stood out in gray relief. Then a brilliant light rose from the floor, brighter than the natural illumination of the fire and the waning day; bathed in its glow was a disembodied hand. It seemed to him to be “as perfect a human hand as was ever created.”
⁸
Although the hand was covered in gossamer, and Livermore wore a glove, touch rekindled love.

“And thus,” he wrote, “we again grasped hands with all the fervor of long parted friends, my wife in the spirit land and myself here. The expression of love and tenderness thus given cannot be described for it was a reality which lasted through nearly half an hour…. I examined carefully that spirit hand, squeezed it, felt the knuckle joints and nails, and kissed it, while it was constantly visible to my sight.”

In his journal Livermore often used language suggestive of a magic lantern show to evoke what he saw; for example, he described how the spirit light on one particular evening rose “in a cloud” across the heavily curtained windows, “a portion of [the light] overhanging from the top;
while the face and figure of my wife, from the waist, was projected upon it with stereoscopic effect…. We were told to notice her dress, which seemed tight-fitting….”
⁹

But just as often the figures who appeared seemed as tangible as any mortal being. Estelle took to wearing “a perfect bow-knot of white silk ribbon [that] was attached to her breast diagonally.” The second time she wore this dramatic accessory, Livermore held it between his fingers, finding it as real as silk. As his hand moved across the fabric, he heard “a low murmuring sound…something like the buzzing of a bee.

“I listened carefully,” he said, “and noticed that it came from the lips of the spirit. This was an unsuccessful attempt to speak….” Or perhaps the soft murmurs he heard were those of an aroused spirit, responding to his caress.

It's possible, of course, that in the darkened room Kate herself sometimes impersonated Estelle. With his full attention riveted on the illuminated figure, Livermore may not always have noticed the medium. On those occasions, however, when Benjamin Franklin sharply chastised Kate for her exclamations of delight or surprise, she clearly was reacting genuinely. If a mortal collaborator created the apparitions, Kate either may have lost herself in the drama or perhaps was not always prepared for what happened next.

Livermore's brother witnessed some manifestations, as did Dr. Gray, who observed “the production of lights, odors and sounds; and also the formation of flowers, cloth textures, etc., and their disintegration and dispersion. These phenomena,” Gray stated, “including the apparition of Dr. Franklin have all been shown me…. Mr. L. is a good observer of Spirit phenomena, brave, clear, and quick sighted….” Gray complimented Kate as well, praising her for comporting herself “with patient integrity of conduct, evidently doing all in her power, at all times to promote a fair trial and just decision of each phenomenon as it occurred.”
¹⁰

 

The first year, 1861, that Kate and Livermore met in the half light of one parlor or another coincided with the start of the Civil War. The prominent medium Emma Hardinge recalled how spirits had warned her of the catastrophe months before it began, showing her a vision in which
“innumerable forms who seemed to shiver and bend, as if in the whirl of a hidden tempest” had prophesied the “fratricidal struggle.”
¹¹
Her vision seems to have been more realistic than clairvoyant, however, evoking what to many mortals increasingly seemed inevitable. In 1859 John Brown had led his historic raid on Harper's Ferry, hoping to incite a slave insurrection but succeeding instead in making himself a martyr among abolitionists in the North and a demon to the slaveholding South. In the fall of 1860 Abraham Lincoln had been elected president of the United States on a Republican platform that promised not to interfere with slavery where it already existed but to limit its expansion in the territories. The next month South Carolina had seceded, followed by other Southern states, and in February 1861 the Confederacy had been born. In April—the same month the luminous apparition of Estelle first appeared to Livermore—Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, a federal garrison in Charleston harbor, South Carolina, and the war officially began.

Charles Livermore's firm boomed with the war fever and soon emerged as the second largest marketer of federal bonds. Known to be a busy man and a practical one, with heavy responsibilities weighing on him in the midst of the national crisis, the banker nevertheless found time for his sessions with Kate.

Most Spiritualists accepted Lincoln's leadership, although they regretted his failure to call for an unconditional ban on slavery throughout the nation. Horace Greeley, long a friend to the Spiritualist movement if not a believer himself, expressed the views of many reformers when he sharply criticized the president for his “mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery.”

Lincoln famously replied, “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
¹²

The
Banner of Light,
eventually to become Spiritualism's longest running newspaper, urged readers to enlist on the side of the Union, and many apparently did so. Emma Hardinge lamented that no regiments were comprised entirely of Spiritualists but attributed that fact to a famil
iar cause. “In martial as in all other forms of associative action,” she observed, “no organization could be effected among the Spiritualists.” She did note that “Spiritualists' total unconcern on the subject of death made them the bravest of soldiers…,” an assertion of course difficult to prove.
¹³

While Spiritualists worked for whichever cause they supported—Union or Confederate—in conventional roles such as officers and soldiers, doctors and nurses, fund-raisers and factory workers producing goods for the front, they also contributed in less tangible ways. Many forwarded letters, said to have been dictated by spirits, to officers in the field with suggestions for battle strategies and information on the enemy's plans. The spirits were credited too with influencing speeches and policies. When the president drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the Confederate states as of January 1863, it was suggested that otherworldly beings helped shape his eloquent message.
¹⁴

In the South, where Spiritualists were suspected of abolitionist sympathy, their public meetings were largely curtailed. Of course, not all Spiritualists were against slavery, and neither did antislavery advocates even in the North, whatever their religion, necessarily promote full racial equality. Racism was to prove far more difficult to eradicate even than slavery. A few Spiritualists debated whether the spirits of black individuals would be able to advance sufficiently through the spheres to associate at the higher levels with otherworldly whites.