Talking to the Dead (25 page)

Just as extravagant, outward manifestations of wealth—a marble mansion, expensive clothes, an extensive art collection—were longed for in the decades after the Civil War, so too were extravagant, outward
manifestations of the spirits. The full-form apparition of Estelle, which appeared through the mediumship of Kate Fox, set a standard for what was expected and desired at seances, a standard that would become increasingly difficult for mediums to meet without engaging in blatant acts of fraud. In the decades after the war, the pressure on mediums to perform miracles at every seance, exerted by Spiritualists and skeptics alike, gradually began to take a toll not only on Kate but on the movement itself.

Kate, in the wake of her parents' death, followed Maggie's tragic example by turning to alcohol for comfort or release. There's a theory that mediums are prone to alcohol and drug addiction; it's been suggested that they turn to these substances to block out the overwhelming stimulation of sensations that bombard them from without and within and against which they have no defenses. Others argue that alcoholic spirits, far from being a sedative, have always been used and abused in the search for spiritual knowledge when other, higher paths have remained elusive or closed. Kate's and Maggie's alcoholism most likely originated in a predisposition inherited from their father, but it was a condition exacerbated by the tensions, longings, temptations, and disappointments of their lives as mediums.

Although Leah had turned her back on her sisters, evidencing little compassion for their problems, many of Kate's old friends tried to help her, blaming her rapid descent into alcoholism on the postwar age and on the rise of increasingly wealthy curiosity seekers who trifled with her powers and courted her with champagne. As early as the 1850s, however, Elisha Kent Kane had noticed that both sisters had a taste for liquor and had warned Maggie, “Tell Katie to drink no champagne, and do you follow the same advice. It makes your nose red and is a bad custom for young ladies….”
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To keep Kate from deteriorating as severely as Maggie, Dr. Edward Bayard, former trustee of the Kane love letters, arranged for her to board as a patient at Dr. George Taylor's Swedish Movement Cure, a situation that either Bayard himself, the Underhills, or Charles Livermore discreetly paid for. Taylor and his wife now became Kate's second family. He was a craggy-faced medical practitioner in his midforties who had stud
ied at Harvard and New York University. His wife, Sarah, was about a decade younger than her husband and an impressive figure in her own right, having served as a high school principal before her marriage. She was plump and pretty, with a determined set to her chin rather like Leah's and a motherly manner not unlike Margaret's.
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In 1858 George Taylor had visited Sweden to investigate techniques of massage or “passive gymnastics,” methods that he understood could relieve the symptoms of chronically ill patients. On his return he had opened his own establishment. Housed in two handsome, adjacent townhouses on Sixth Avenue and West Thirty-Eighth Street, Dr. Taylor's health sanitarium became one of the most popular and respected institutions of its day, a time when the wealthier middle classes, much like those of today, retreated to spas to benefit from regimens of water cures, exercise, massage, vegetarian diets, and—something that is offered rarely today—vibratory stimulation. Many of the treatments spawned by the craze for health reform were designed to cure neurasthenia and hysteria, along with symptoms such as listlessness and paralysis.

Victorian attitudes toward sexuality were one factor contributing to a range of nervous disorders, as both women and men wrestled with conflicting messages and feelings. Most ministers of mainstream churches continued to advise that sex was for purposes of procreation only. In response—and for many other reasons too—some middle-class women tended to abjure intercourse while their husbands sought guilty pleasure in masturbation or with prostitutes. Both sexes found that healthful pursuits such as hydrotherapy and exercise—activities that sometimes served as substitutes for, or alternative means to, sexual release—expended nervous energy and relaxed tension.

It was one of Dr. George Taylor's contributions to the health of the nation to create new and improved steam-powered massage and vibratory equipment for curative purposes. Many of his machines were intended to treat “female pelvic complaints.” One piece of equipment consisted of a padded table with a large opening through which a vibrating sphere massaged the patient's pelvis. The healthful afterglow generally left patients invigorated, although it's not entirely clear they always acknowledged to themselves the exact nature of the relief they felt.
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Kate began to board and receive treatments at the Taylors soon after her parents died in 1865, her stay sometimes interrupted by days or even weeks when she would disappear without warning. No one knew where she went, but she generally returned gravely ill, and Sarah worried with good reason that Kate kept bad company. The wealthy and fashionable people who lived in Fifth Avenue mansions, Sarah complained, plied the medium with liquor.

Although a resident at the Taylors' for many years, Kate was never allowed to take her meals at the public table shared by the other boarders. Her isolation may have been to protect her delicate health or to prevent the Taylors' other clients either from witnessing her dissolution or succumbing to her spell.

When financial support for Kate was withdrawn in 1867, the Taylors allowed her to stay on for free as their own charge. Later the situation changed again: Kate began holding seances for Sarah and George Taylor in 1869, an arrangement that may not have served exactly as a quid pro quo but that worked for all concerned. Kate retained access to the Taylors, their comfortable home, their companionship, and presumably occasional treatments. In lieu of a fee, they received communications from their two dead children: Frankie, who had died several years before at age three of tubercular meningitis, and Leila, who had contracted scarlet fever in 1867 at eighteen months old. Kate had known Leila for most of the child's short life and surely felt personal grief over the little girl's death as well as compassion for the bereaved parents.

The Taylors also had another son, William Langworthy, who was ten when the seances began. He often took part in the sittings and, more than half a century later, reflected as an aging man of seventy on the wonders he had witnessed as a boy.

According to the Taylors' accounts, Kate conveyed messages to them not just from their departed children, but also from a whole circle of otherworldly beings: the mysterious Professor K., Uncle Albert, the ubiquitous Benjamin Franklin, various grandparents, Sarah's brother Olin, and others. Olin served as a guide, ushering the spirits in and out, summarizing their thoughts, organizing the sittings, imparting wisdom, and gently overseeing Frankie and Leila.

The children remained as mischievous and charming in immortal dress as they had been in their mortal bodies.

“The children played about us,” Sarah wrote after one sitting. “Frankie pulled his Papa's long beard…. The Doctor spoke of it and wondered what the child was doing…. When we opened our eyes we saw the Doctor's beard had been and was then braided in three separate, three stranded braids, and a comical sight it was. We believed Frankie then laughing over his exploit.”
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When more than one spirit was present, a lively ensemble of raps, which the Taylors called echoes, ensued. Kate usually transcribed the messages with her left hand, writing in reverse on long sheets of brown paper. Dr. Taylor or another mortal participant would then read the reverse writing aloud by holding a hand mirror up to it, as Sarah Taylor faithfully copied the messages into legible journals.

The combined troupe of visible and invisible beings often behaved exactly like a squabbling tribe of old friends and relatives. The professor's spirit kindly advised Sarah that she needed to hire more household help. His wife, on the other hand, treated Sarah rudely, and Kate didn't care for either of the two spirits. “When I described [the professor],” Sarah wrote, “[Kate] finally recalled having seen him here and said that she did not like him.”

The Swedish Movement Cure overflowed with mortals—sick and well—who came for the treatment and who were eager on discovering Kate's presence to benefit from her services too. Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of Dr. Taylor's occasional patients, attended several sittings and confessed a few years later to the author George Eliot that Kate was “a very peculiar beautiful interesting girl” who astonished her.

Stowe compared Kate to Undine, the sea nymph who could acquire a soul only on her marriage to a mortal man. The comparison in retrospect seems more poignant than Stowe could have known, for Undine was also the heroine of the book that Elisha Kent Kane had sent to Maggie more than a decade before.

“[Kate] is apparently without a nature of her own but is only a medium of reflecting others,” Stowe wrote, but at the same time she described the traits of a real-life woman: Kate was “Sensitive, wilful, irritable, affectionate.”
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Then Stowe reiterated, “She fulfills my idea of a fay or wood sprite.” Even in the eyes of the sympathetic and caring author, Kate was nonexistent apart from her role as a cipher.

Stowe described in detail a sitting that took place one evening in Sarah Taylor's sewing room. Seven people were present, including Stowe's husband, Calvin. As the participants held hands around a center table, Stowe recalled, “Phosphorescent lights arose and floated about among us—They were like the dear light of a glow worm. They touched me on my arm and I felt that they had a strong resistant force—one of them struck the table with a loud report like the firing of a pistol….”

Her husband, Calvin, was asked to hold a handkerchief in his hand; to his surprise, “one of those globes of light rested in it—in this glove was a hand which displayed itself first on one side and then on the other….” Then the disembodied hand—playfully, one has to assume—snatched the renowned author's pencil and paper and used them to write a message. Equally astonishing, two-hundred-pound Calvin “was moved back from the table four feet to the wall, chair and all, and then placed again at the table.” It confounded Harriet that these feats were accomplished in a room she knew well, in a boardinghouse occupied upstairs and down “by boarders who knew nothing of what we were doing, and while Katie was held between two of us.”

As to what produced the manifestations, Harriet Beecher Stowe could offer no answers, although the demonstrations seemed to her to be “matters quite beyond doubt as facts.” Adopting a line of reasoning that went back to Spiritualism's earliest days, she suggested that a scientific explanation would one day be discovered, and in this she compared the manifestations to the aurora borealis and Darwin's studies on natural selection.

Just as Kate had produced an innovation for Livermore—two full-form apparitions at once—she added a new manifestation to her personal repertoire for the Taylors: spirit pictures that emerged on blank paper. Accomplishing the task, however, proved excruciatingly difficult; spirits and sitters collaborated on the project for almost two months early in 1870. The routine remained much the same at each session. A clear, electrical atmosphere was the first requirement. Nothing could be accomplished in damp weather.

The mortals usually sat in double darkness—eyes closed, gaslights turned down—for several hours. They were advised not to listen to anything that transpired during that time. Night after night Sarah, George, and Kate valiantly struggled to keep up a conversation. Chatter helped them avoid listening to the spirits' rustlings and rattlings.

At the end of this waiting period, the spirits would command the sitters to take a variety of repetitive actions, ones that were bound to distract mortals from anything else that was happening: to rise and go to the door, to return to the table, to go back and forth to the window, to open and close it. The sitters were often asked by the spirits to move about the room four or five different times as well as to fetch specific items such as pencils, knives to sharpen them, crayon board, and linen handkerchiefs. All of these objects would mysteriously vanish from the room.

Finally, on February 10, the process neared completion; a missing sheet of crayon paper, neatly covered with a cloth, was returned to the seance table. As instructed by the spirits, Sarah dutifully tucked the paper away, still covered, in a bureau drawer. The next day, “echoes” told her that the time had come for unveiling the portrait. “Meet tonight at eight,” Benjamin Franklin commanded.
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That evening, despite rain, there was activity.

“At eight,” Sarah wrote, “I placed the crayon paper with the cloth upon it, on the little table, turned off the gas, and before I could get to my seat was told to open the window. Scarcely was the sash entirely up, when the pencils touched the Doctor and Katie and rattled upon the table. We now sat for a little time when the Doctor and Katie were sent by the door as usual. There was a good deal of moving of the table and the treading about of feet not our own.”

The Taylors and Kate sang hymns until, at last, the echoes said, “Get light.”

With joyful anticipation, Sarah uncovered the crayon paper and saw “the purest, sweetest, most spiritual likeness” of her little son, “who had been more than five years in heaven.” She and her husband gazed upon the image “through fast falling tears and in speechless wonder.”

Olin ordered Sarah to bring more drawing paper and pencils to the next session; the process would resume with Leila.

The day after the picture of Frankie appeared, however, Sarah wrote a disturbing entry about Kate's health: “Katie was very sick and the air was thick with dampness, still the echoes would have us sit. We sat down by the table, Katie resting in my arms. They as usual sent the ‘Doctor and Katie by the door.' He had to about carry her she was so very sick, he brought her back and put her in the chair and my arms, she
perfectly unconscious.
”