The Fox Sisters’ Rappings

In the spring of 1848, in a small farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, two young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, announced that they could communicate with the dead. Strange rapping noises had troubled the house; the girls, they said, had learned to speak with the unseen presence that made them, calling it by the nickname Mr Splitfoot and devising a code by which it answered questions with knocks. The spirit, it was claimed, was that of a murdered pedlar buried in the cellar.

From this modest beginning grew a movement. Managed by their elder sister Leah, the girls gave public demonstrations, and the notion that the living might converse with the dead across a tapped-out alphabet spread with astonishing speed. Within a few years Spiritualism had become a genuine religious phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, with séances, mediums and darkened parlours numbering its followers in the hundreds of thousands. It drew in the grieving and the eminent alike, and it flourished for decades.

The reckoning came in 1888. Margaret Fox, by then estranged from Leah and in poor circumstances, appeared before a paying audience in New York and publicly confessed the whole thing a fraud. The rappings, she demonstrated on stage before physicians, had been produced by cracking the joints of her toes against the floorboards, a trick the sisters had perfected as children to frighten their mother. Kate was present and did not contradict her.

The confession should have ended matters, yet it did not. Margaret later recanted her recantation, believers dismissed the admission as the desperate act of a poor and drinking woman, and Spiritualism carried on regardless. Both sisters died within a few years, impoverished and largely abandoned by the faith they had founded.

Provenance: Hydesville and Rochester, New York; the public confession delivered at the New York Academy of Music, 1888.