Talking to the Dead (28 page)

Such fanatics, she continued, wanted “the ‘spirit' to come to them in full form, to walk before them, to embrace them, and all such nonsense, and what is the result? Like old Judge Edmonds and Mr. Seybert of Philadelphia, they become crazed….”

The fools, she concluded, lost their money, their sanity, and often enough their lives.

Clearly she blamed her own and Kate's misfortunes as much on members of the Spiritualist movement as on outsiders. Between some Spiritualists' obsession with ever more explosive effects, the willingness of unscrupulous mediums to produce the desired pyrotechnics, and other Spiritualists' dread of scandal, there was little call, it seemed, for rapping spirits. The pressure to work effectively in such an atmosphere, Maggie intimated, could drive even an honest, sober medium to drink or to deception.

Maggie was far from finished with her denunciation of the Spiritualist movement, and she girded for a new attack. She and Kate suspected that Leah had been behind the zealous Gerry Society's seizure of Ferdie and Henry. Although Leah certainly had legitimate concerns about Kate's alcoholism, her younger sisters believed that she had acted purely out of jealousy and spite in an attempt to gain control of the boys and that she might dare to do so again. They also worried that other Spiritualists, friends of Leah's, had supported her. These alleged confederates, Maggie stated, were afraid she'd expose them in fraud and were using the boys as blackmail. The time had come, Maggie and Kate felt, to destroy Leah's power over their lives.

Maggie sailed for home in September 1888, arriving in New York late in the month. But before she could take any action, Kate got herself into more trouble by conducting a seance in England that non-Spiritualists mocked and that the Spiritualist establishment in London condemned, turning viciously on one of its own.

The seance was held at the house that had been Thomas Carlyle's before he died in 1881 and that had been purchased recently by a Spiritualist. A reporter who had known Carlyle in life attended the event and found the literary luminary's spirit messages unrecognizably insipid. He proceeded to describe the seance in a tongue-in-cheek article published in the popular magazine
Pall Mall.

An important Spiritualist publication in Great Britain,
Light,
promptly struck back, taking aim, however, not at the reporter but at Kate, arguing that for “the credit of Spiritualism” loyal Spiritualists had to disavow the kind of “pseudo-messages” printed by
Pall Mall.
These sorts of commu
nications,
Light
chastised, amounted to “clumsy parody,” even though they came through “the famous American medium.”
¹¹

Blows and counterblows. Now Kate and Maggie, long slighted by many middle-class Spiritualists for their alcoholism, had come under explicit attack from the British establishment if not yet from the American.

Back in the United States the drama continued to unfold. On Sunday, September 23, 1888, a reporter for the
New York Herald
visited Maggie in her apartment on West Forty-Fourth Street. Although he confessed to knowing little about her or her history—he was, after all, simply on assignment—he was struck by her intensity and magnetism. He also commented on her careless dress: the breezy negligence that Kane might have recognized and criticized, as he had chastised the beautiful young girl for forgetting to wear her undersleeves thirty years before.

Her face showed “sorrow and world-wide experience,” the reporter wrote. Despite her notoriety, he said, she had retained friends on both sides of the Atlantic, and in London she was “entertained by some of the best-to-do of the great and comprehensive middle class.”
¹²

As Maggie talked to him she paced rapidly back and forth, sometimes covering her face with her hands, sometimes sitting down suddenly at the piano to play “wild incoherent tunes.” Perhaps they were angry versions of the music that Leah had once taught her students or that the spirits had played on bells or guitars at long-ago seances.

The reporter's story about the sisters, published the next day under the headline “A Celebrated Medium Says the Spirits Never Return,” consisted of a lengthy interview with Maggie, one in which she took direct aim at Leah and the deceased Margaret Fox.

“When Spiritualism first began,” Maggie said, “Katie and I were little children, and this old woman, my other sister, made us her tools. Mother was a silly woman. She was a fanatic. I call her that because she was honest. She believed in these things.

“We were but innocent little children,” Maggie continued. “What did we know? Ah we grew to know too much. Our sister used us in her exhibitions, and we made money for her. Now she turns upon us because she's the wife of a rich man, and she opposes us both wherever
she can. Oh, I am after her! You can kill sometimes without using weapons, you know.”

To the reporter's surprise, Maggie demonstrated the raps, which he heard underneath the table, on the outside of the door, and rippling across the floor.

“How do you do it?” he demanded with a touch of admiration.

She told him that she wanted to keep her explanation a secret until the night she gave her lecture. But it was all trickery, she insisted, then turned the question around by asking with a twinkle, “Spirits, is he not easily fooled?”

A moment before she dazzled him with raps, Maggie presented him with a strange paradox. Though she knew how to make the raps—apparently had done so since childhood—her own knowledge and abilities hadn't been the source of her disbelief. She now knew for certain that spirits do not return, she said, only after trying futilely again and again to contact the dead. Like the people who came to her seances, she was a seeker herself; she had wished desperately for comfort after Kane's death.

“Why, I have explored the unknown as far as human will can,” she cried. “I have gone to the dead so that I might get from them some little token. Nothing came of it—nothing, nothing.” Her denunciation of Spiritualism, the animus of it, came not just from her rage at Leah and at her fellow Spiritualists, but also from her own profound disappointment at the spirits' failure to respond.

K
ATE RETURNED
to the United States from England in mid-October 1888, unquestionably to present a common front with Maggie in attacking Leah and Spiritualism, although she denied knowing anything about the brouhaha created by the article in the
Herald.
A reporter who followed her to Maggie's wrote that the two women “fell on each other's necks, in an ecstasy of affection and delight at being together once more.” Kate looked quite “comely,” he noted, adding that she had vowed “with heartfelt earnestness” that she “was done forever with her once-besetting vice.”
¹

Kate echoed Maggie's denunciation of Spiritualism as a tissue of lies, calling it “a humbug from beginning to end.” It was true that Horace Greeley had educated her, Kate told the reporter, but otherwise Leah's book on the Fox sisters' lives and work had been altogether a fiction.

Maggie had promised to make a public appearance exposing Spiritualism as a fraud, and the much-publicized event was held at the New York Academy of Music on October 21, 1888. That morning the
World
published a full-page story on the Fox sisters, accompanied by a lengthy
first-person statement by Maggie. Like the stories recounted in
The Love-Life of Dr. Kane
and in Leah's
The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism,
the substance of Maggie's confession was a confusion of fact, fabrication, and obfuscation.

One of its main goals was to discredit her oldest sister. Leah had dared to call Kate an unfit mother who mistreated her children? With all the zeal of the Gerry Society's child welfare reformers, Maggie turned the tables as adeptly as any spirit. It was Leah who abused innocent children, she claimed, who manipulated babes who knew no better and who were helpless under the treacherous influence of cruel and self-serving adults.

“My sister Katie and myself were very young children when this horrible deception began. I was eight, and just a year and a half older than she,” Maggie stated, subtracting about five years from their true ages at the time.

She and Kate were mischievous, she acknowledged, and liked to terrify their mother, who was a good woman and easily frightened. Later, Maggie would recall that they also had loved to tease Leah's daughter, the serious Lizzie.

How could such very
young
children, the medium implied, be responsible for their own behavior? Having established her mythic state of innocence, Maggie gave her version of how the raps began.

“At night when we went to bed,” she said, “we used to tie an apple on 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.”

Apple dropping was most likely an actual game played by the girls. It also was an image rich in irony, although Maggie may not have intended the twist. Newton's discovery of gravity had been a seminal moment in the history of science and in the conception of a mechanical universe, a universe antithetical to the notion of supernatural intervention. The discovery of gravity had occurred, according to legend, after Newton had witnessed an apple—dropping. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, famous by the 1880s both as a religious leader and as a sworn enemy of Spiritualism, had adopted the legendary image. She said that the inspiration for her faith had hit her like an apple—dropping.
²

Apple dropping, however, wasn't the only trick up the Fox sisters' proverbial sleeve, at least not according to Maggie's statement in the
World.
From apple dropping, Maggie continued, they had advanced to rapping with their knuckles and joints, a discovery that Kate had made first with her fingers and that both girls soon learned to reproduce with their toes.

“The rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee,” Maggie said, echoing the ponderous lingo of the Buffalo doctors and other exponents of the joint-and bone-cracking theory, “which govern the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that are not commonly known.”

The family's neighbors in Hydesville and Rochester had come to investigate the raps, Maggie recalled, but to no avail. “No one suspected us of any trick because we were such young children,” she stated in the
World.
“We were led on by my sister purposely, and by my mother unintentionally. We often heard her say, ‘Is this a disembodied spirit that has taken possession of my dear children?'”

Although she and Kate certainly had relished fooling the adults, Maggie insisted that Leah was the one who had forced them to continue doing so, taking them to Rochester, where they “were exhibited to a lot of Spiritualist fanatics…. Mrs. Underhill made as much as $100 to $150 dollars a night. She pocketed this.”

Leah had wanted to start a new religion, Maggie revealed. To that end, she not only had assured her younger sisters that she herself received spirit messages, but she also had tried to instill her professed belief in supernatural visitations in them. Yet at the same time, Maggie explained—and here she pointed out a bewildering contradiction—Leah had conspired in trickery, even supplying cues about when to rap yes or no at seances.

When she was thirteen, Maggie continued, turning to a new chapter in her life story, she had met Dr. Kane, to whom she had instantly confided her hatred of Spiritualism. Calling herself Kane's widow, as she had now for many years, she expressed her hope that if “those we love who have passed away before us can look down upon us from heaven—if we are ever to meet again—I know my dead husband is looking on me now and blessing me for my work.”

After his death, she said, poverty had driven her back to her life as a medium. She had seen so much deception, she concluded in her statement to the
World,
that she had made up her mind “to positively state Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description.” And she owed all her misfortune to Leah.

That night, October 21, 1888, the Academy of Music was packed to the roof with obstreperous combatants: staunch Spiritualists versus those who had come in triumph to hear the internationally famous medium, Margaret Fox Kane, deal what was being called a “death-blow” to the movement.
³

One of the event's promoters, Dr. C. M. Richmond, a portly dentist whose avocation was magic, also served as the evening's lecturer, assigned to speak on Spiritualism's evils, to expose common tricks of the trade, and to introduce Maggie. He was extremely nervous, never having faced such a large crowd. Mustering his courage, he performed various tricks for more than an hour, explaining how slate writing, spirit painting, and mind reading could be done as adeptly by a skilled magician as by an alleged supernatural being. The audience, rowdy to begin with, eventually grew impatient for the main event and started shouting for Maggie, rudely urging the dentist to “go and pull teeth.”

At last Maggie ascended the stage, described by one reporter “as a little compact woman, dark-eyed and dark-haired.” Kate was seated in a box in the audience, lending silent approval to what her sister was about to do.

Maggie was wearing a black dress and flowered hat. She was far more nervous even than Dr. Richmond and kept taking her eyeglasses on and off as she alternately read from her statement, then glanced up at the audience to repeat each sentence. Different contingents cheered and booed her as she spoke in an excited voice, denouncing Spiritualism.

When she finished her statement Dr. Richmond called several physicians onto the stage. Maggie slipped off one of her shoes and placed her stocking-clad foot on a small pine table. Sharp raps were heard resounding throughout the theater. The reporter for the
New York Tribune
wrote that the noises increased from faint to loud, “traveling up the wall and along the roof of the Academy.”

While the raps continued, the doctors solemnly examined Maggie's feet, a procedure that the audience met with suggestive laughter and ribald remarks. Then Maggie stood on the table for another examination, after which the doctors pronounced that the raps were indeed made by her big toe.

Nobody seemed to question whether the raps produced by Maggie's toe were supplemented by other means: whether Dr. Richmond himself might have had confederates in the audience willing to mount the kind of symphony for which the spirits had become famous.

The Buffalo doctors and C. Chauncey Burr in the 1850s had been right about the joints and muscles, ligaments and tendons, of the human leg and foot. Properly manipulated, they can certainly be noisy. In a theater with good acoustics, audience members sitting at the back of the balcony can hear actors crack their joints. But exactly how much noise does the human body have to make to evoke a chorus of spirit voices?

Just as elements of Maggie's confession can be questioned, it's tempting to ask whether Maggie, or Dr. Richmond, actually revealed at long last
all
of the exciting secrets of the mysterious noises.

 

Maggie's confession supplies important new pieces of the puzzle. Which pieces click into place with a satisfying snap? Which ones will not be coaxed into place at all? Did the Fox sisters in fact indulge over a forty-year period in deliberate fraud? If so, what were their motives, and how did they pull it off so well?

Maggie alleged in her confession that she and Kate were the victims of Leah's ambition and greed. There's no question that both children deserved to be better protected, but questions as to who could or should have provided that protection, and from what forces in an era of rapid change, remain more complex.

The girls' father, John Fox, failed his youngest daughters as he had failed in most other activities in his life. Recent speculation suggests that he may have reverted to alcoholism, perhaps even physically abused Kate and Maggie, a theory based in part on the idea that the spirits represented the sisters' imaginative response to mistreatment. The accounts of his contemporaries, however, seem to indicate that John did not drink
after reconciling with his wife. More likely the devoutly religious John, while an avowed enemy of the spirits, was too self-absorbed to intervene in his daughters' careers.

The most serious accusation that Maggie hurled at her mother may not have been that Margaret was superstitious but rather that she was a foolish and frightened woman. Margaret Fox always yielded to whomever pushed the hardest: the persistent poltergeist; her determined oldest daughter; the ambitious Eliab Capron; the charming Elisha Kent Kane. Although her devotion to her children was admirable and unquestionable, she failed to realize that times had changed since her own adventurous journey westward in her youth; in an era that valued modesty and gentility in its daughters, Margaret allowed Kate and Maggie a dangerous, if at times liberating, freedom.

Leah, closer in age to her mother than to Kate or Maggie, had grown up in the 1820s in a boomtown. Leah yearned for security, and she was willing to take risks to earn it. What she seems to have glimpsed in her two charming, inventive, and perhaps extraordinary younger sisters was the chance to create herself anew: the opportunity to trade in the marginal respectability of a single mother in Rochester, first for fame and fortune and then for a life of bourgeois comfort.

In the 1840s and 1850s, without a father or husband she could count on, strong-willed Leah did exactly what many men of her day were doing: she promoted a cause and made money as she did so. Women such as Amy Post surely gave her the impetus to conceive of herself as the leader of a movement; men like the mesmerist Stanley Grimes supplied the model for staging a performance and charging a fee. Leah lived in an age of enthusiastic prophets and quick profits; the word
speculate
means not only “to wonder about” but also “to take a risk on.” She managed to tap in to her era's appetite for both.

By promoting her younger sisters' gifts, Leah may not have envisioned herself as exploiting the girls or at least not solely for her own benefit. Instead, she may well have imagined she was rescuing them from the dismal alternatives that faced many a young woman without money or prospects: the existence of a farmer's wife or a factory worker. Inventing
a religion was a grand scheme in the American tradition of dreaming large, even if a little humbug was required to make the dream come true.

It's hard not to admire Leah for sheer gumption. However ironically and disdainfully, Emerson in 1855 had placed the profession of medium in the same category as that of railroad man, landscape gardener, lecturer, and daguerreotypist: all were careers newly minted in the nineteenth century.
⁴
The Fox sisters helped not only to found a new religion but also to establish a new line of work.

While no one can say for certain, it's likely that one or all of the Fox sisters at some point believed that the spirits of the departed manifest themselves to the living. As children, the three of them were told of relatives who possessed paranormal abilities such as precognition. From early childhood, Kate and Maggie had observed their Methodist father's daily prayers, watching in awe and amusement as he appealed to a deity who could summarily exile him to hell if he returned to his dissolute ways. The children may have heard tales of “Old Jeffrey,” the Wesley family poltergeist, or seen any one of a number of charlatans, performers, and visionaries at work on a circus stage or a Rochester street corner: a mesmerist magnetizing a subject, a clairvoyant extolling the spirits, or a magician creating illusions.

There's no reason to assume, however, that Leah, Kate, and Maggie all felt precisely the same way either about the spirits or about their own powers as mediums; neither is it likely that their ideas remained fixed over a period of forty years. As Kate and Maggie responded to their friends' desires for messages and manifestations that noisily denied death's silence, they may have convinced themselves that their powers had a supernatural dimension. Could they do so even as they delighted in fooling others, even as Leah taught them cues and tricks? Sometimes rational adults experience irrational fears of the dark; children clustered around a campfire may frighten themselves by telling ghost stories of their own invention. Most of us are familiar with the uncomfortable sensation of being of two minds, of holding two or more conflicting ideas at once.