Talking to the Dead (9 page)

The spirits were equally reassuring to Isaac, for when he asked whether enjoyment in the afterlife would “be in accordance with our lives hear [sic],” he received “a very loud response.”
⁹
Well-intentioned men and women, it seemed, could feel confident of their immortal future.

Quakers such as Amy and Isaac, however, were inclined toward sympathy with spirit communication as much by the nature of their faith as by their rejection of orthodoxy. The couple had twice resigned from Quaker organizations after disputing the extent of the institution's authority over the individual; in the 1840s they and other like-minded Quakers had founded a new branch of the faith known as the Congregational Friends. Its members' unstinting devotion to the concept of an inner light—something deeper than but akin to individual conscience—not only supported their political activism but also underscored the notion that ordinary men and women could forge a profound connection with a transcendent spiritual realm. Faith in an inner light endowed even young girls like Kate and Maggie with radiant potential, making otherworldly inspiration seem a less heretical possibility.

Not that what the spirits had to say always seemed inspiring. One day, for instance, Kate attended a family tea with the Posts and other friends, an ordinary enough event until one of the adults objected to the lavish amount of molasses that Joseph Post, a boy no older than Maggie, was pouring happily on his pudding. An urgent shower of raps called for the alphabet, and the mortals laboriously decoded a message dear to any youngster's heart.

“Put on as much molasses as he likes,” the indulgent spirit advised.
¹⁰

Isaac recorded many aspects of the spirit sessions. Sometimes, he wrote, Kate and Maggie were magnetized when the raps occurred. He noted as well that the girls frequently spoke simultaneously with the sounds and that on occasion the raps raised subjects that no one in the room had asked or thought about. Such independent thinking had significance, for it implied that the girls weren't simply mind readers—an amazing enough feat in itself—but spoke instead on behalf of the spirits.

By the late autumn of 1848 the mysterious noises had been investigated, wrote Isaac, “by many” without trickery being discovered, so that he believed “every candid person admits that the girls do not make it.”
¹¹

But not every “candid person” agreed with him. Others who heard the raps continued to grapple with doubts. Who really made the sounds? Whose intelligence informed them? Were the Fox girls responsible or the spirits or some third force such as electricity or mesmerism?

Arriving at any definitive answers seemed, to the skeptical as well as to the hopeful of heart, to depend on investigations designed to prove the presence or absence of fraud. The challenge of the detective work undoubtedly excited some of the curious as much as did the notion of spirit communication itself.

Along with physical searches for mechanical devices and careful scrutiny of the girls,
test questions,
as they were called, became an essential investigative tool. No question was too trivial, for the specificity of information tested a spirit's authenticity. Whose spirit was speaking? What had been its occupation? Favorite color? Place of birth? The cause—accident, murder, disease, old age—that had carried it off to the spirit world?

One early investigator, Eliab W. Capron, like the Posts was a Congregational Friend dedicated to radical causes. Although Capron and his wife, Rebecca, lived in Auburn, New York, he was a native of Rhode Island where his relative, Dr. George Capron, was known for his research on mesmerism. Interested in such subjects himself, and an ambitious young journalist too, Eliab Capron traveled to Rochester in November 1848 to meet Kate, Maggie, and the increasingly newsworthy spirits.

On his first visit he found himself astonished by the spirits, who answered correctly not only questions he asked aloud, but also ones he either wrote down or asked mentally. On his second visit he challenged the sisters with what was literally a shell game.

“I tried the experiment of counting in the following manner,” he wrote. “I took several shells from a card-basket on the table (small lake shells), closed my hand and placed it entirely out of sight, and requested as many raps as there were shells. It was done correctly. As I knew how many shells there were in my hand, I resolved to test it another way, to see if there was a possibility of my
mind
having any influence in the matter. I took a handful of shells, without knowing how many I took myself. Still the answers were correct.”
¹²

Sometimes raps answered correctly, identifying a spirit to the investigators' satisfaction. Occasionally, however, answers were way off the mark. Weary or bored spirits didn't hesitate to announce “done” when they wished to retire.

Once, Leah recalled, “the word ‘done' was spelled.”
¹³

Not to be discouraged, the questioners continued to press for answers until a series of exasperated raps spelled out, “Why the devil do you ask questions after you have been told done?”

This, Leah noted, “was a terrible damper to us all.”

She explained that these instances of rudeness, along with misleading answers, confused the mediums as much as the investigators but that such troubling episodes only demonstrated the flawed nature of certain spirits.

“When manifestations and communications were consistent,” she said, “we believed them to come from good Spirits; but when they were to the contrary, we condemned them all as evil.”

The Christian establishment, not surprisingly, regarded the Fox family's otherworldly visitors as emissaries of the devil or the delusions of the sisters' fevered imaginations or the product of mischief and fraud. One young Methodist clergyman who visited Margaret offered to conduct an exorcism of the house. She permitted him to do so, but as he walked through the rooms, raps dogged his every step. Failing to rid the house of spirits, the clergyman departed with harsh things to say about the Fox family, an experience that effectively ended Margaret's churchgoing days.

Within a year after the peddler's first visit to Hydesville, Leah herself was delivering spirit messages, although only to a few close friends. The invisible beings didn't rap in her presence, as they did with her two younger sisters, but appeared to her instead while she was in a magnetic sleep. Like her sisters, she suffered from severe headaches, and Isaac, in his amateur role as a mesmerist—and perhaps also in his professional one as a druggist—was often on hand to help her.

“I went up to see Leah last evening, having heard of her being unwell,” Isaac wrote to Amy in the spring of 1849, when she was out of town. “I asked if I should put her asleep and perhaps I could cause relief. She was quite willing….”
¹⁴

In the usual way of mesmerists, Isaac gently passed his hand over the most painful side of Leah's head, and as he did so she began to speak.

Leah's range—or the spirit's—was large. She first offered soothing words of consolation, comforting Isaac with her vision of his deceased first wife and little Matilda, all now spirits in a better land. Then she moved on to the practical suggestion that Amy visit William Fishbough. Both
Fishbough and Samuel B. Brittan, his colleague, were early associates of the mystic Andrew Jackson Davis as well as editors of a short-lived but influential journal called
The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher.
Former Universalist ministers on a quest for an “interior and spiritual philosophy,” the two men believed in spirit communication; however, their philosophical focus had drawn little popular attention, particularly in contrast with the excitement generated by the theatrical raps. The magnetized Leah, or a politic spirit, was gently suggesting that the esteemed Amy Post could help forge an alliance between these formidable men and the Fox girls.
¹⁵

After predicting that Frederick Douglass's struggling newspaper, the abolitionist
North Star,
stood a good chance for survival, she concluded with a juicy bit of clairvoyant gossip. She confided that Dr. John Hardenbrook, a man accused of a murder splashed across all the newspapers, had actually tried to poison his victim, the husband of his lover, twice before succeeding. And there was more: the good doctor's lover had been his accomplice, Leah revealed, and the means had been arsenic rather than strychnine. As it turned out, this information was either so secret or so inaccurate that it never came out at Doctor Hardenbrook's trial.
¹⁶

In July 1849 Isaac's friend John S. Clackner wrote to him from Ohio to ask whether the spirits, as rumored, had expressed the wish to dictate a book to Leah, who would record it with the assistance of another friend from Rochester, Mrs. John Kedzie.

How do “Leah and the Spirit get along with the manuscript in Contemplation?” Clackner asked. Kate and Maggie's oldest sister had now laid her own claim to the spirits.
¹⁷

 

The spirit world that summer seemed filled with a promise reflecting the changes in the material world. At the conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848, Mexico had ceded land to the United States, territories that would become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Earlier that year prospectors had discovered gold in California. By the summer of 1849 news of the windfall had spread across the continent, and more people were heading west than in all of the nation's brief history. The term
manifest destiny,
coined by a journalist, justified expansion as something divinely ordained.

Expansion, however, exacerbated sectional conflict. With the balance of power between the agrarian South and the industrializing North dependent in part on whether new states were admitted to the union slave or free, the organizing of each new territory and the admitting of each new state became a battle. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise had established a boundary north of which slavery was to be banned, but Southerners argued that the settlers of each prospective state should have the right to make up their own minds. California was admitted as a free state, but the decision about the other territories acquired in the Mexican War was postponed.

If manifest destiny found an echo in the expansive world of the spirits, and if slavery's abolition was a common bond among many believers, cholera helped create the circumstances in which a movement that promised immortality could grow. In 1849 an epidemic broke out in Europe, and newspapers tracked the disease's advance as it moved across Canada and the United States. Although its impact in Rochester was less severe than expected, there were fifty deaths a week that summer in Albany, and in Cincinnati so many died that carts piled high with scores of bodies rumbled through the streets daily.
¹⁸

Whether in search of safe harbor from the plague or simply for a family visit, Kate, Maggie, and Leah returned to Wayne County that August, most likely staying at their father's house on the grounds of David's farm. It's also possible that the sisters temporarily lacked a home in Rochester, for Leah's kindly neighbor on Prospect Street, who had tolerated poltergeists with equanimity, had passed away. The new tenant blamed ventriloquists rather than the spirits for the turmoil next door, and he had insisted on Leah's eviction.

The three-week stay in Wayne County, Maggie wrote to Amy Post, felt more like three months.

“I promised to write to you and I should have written before if my health had been better,” she apologized. “My health has been very poor for the last few days.” The doctor had given her some medicine, as he suspected that she had an intermittent fever.
¹⁹

It had been raining all morning, turning the fields into rivers of mud and drowning Maggie in gloom. Apparently she was alone in the house, at least for a few hours, for the hush of her surroundings disturbed her.

“Oh how still and silent it is here today,” she mourned.

It's possible that she was remembering Ella, her two-year-old niece who had died the summer before. Without question, she was feeling “lonesome” for her mother, even though, as she told Amy, she understood that Margaret couldn't always be with her. Maggie didn't say where Margaret was, nor did she mention her father.

Complaints aside, Maggie went on to describe a surprisingly sociable time. For entertainment just the day before, she and Leah had visited Newark. “We had a fine time,” she wrote, confiding that they “stayed until nearly ten o'clock.” And as soon as the rain slowed down, Maggie continued, she would join friends in Palmyra.

But Newark and Palmyra paled when she thought of Rochester, which she called her “much loved home.”

“I am anxious to get back to Rochester again…” she confessed, and a few sentences later, she explained why: “I love the noise and Confusion of the city….”

To stress her point, or perhaps to alert her older, more mature friend to what felt like a dangerous passion, fifteen-year-old Maggie went on to tell a story: she compared herself to a woman who had become so used to her husband's snoring that she couldn't sleep without it.

“At length,” Maggie wrote, “he was required to attend Court some hundred miles distant. The first night after his departure she never slept a wink. The second night passed in the same way without sleep. She was getting in a very bad way and probably would have died had it not been for the ingenious Servant girl.” The servant girl, Maggie continued, cleverly took a coffee mill into her mistress's bedchamber and “ground her to sleep at once.”

“That's the way with me,” Maggie admitted.

“I have become so accustomed to the rattling of Carriages and ringing of bells that I am afraid I shall have to have the Coffee Mill as something to lull me to sleep.”

For Maggie, sound seems to have been linked with comfort, companionship, and excitement. Noise surely signified pleasure, but it may also have served as a distraction from boredom and depression, from thoughts that—absent city bells and coffee mills—lingered too long on separation and loneliness.