On the eve of April Fool’s Day in 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, NY, began screaming for their mother. Margaretta, known as Maggie, was 14; Catherine, called Kate, was 11. Something in their bedroom was making thumping sounds, apparently attempting to communicate with them.
The girls asked the Something to copy them as they snapped her fingers; it did. They asked it if it knew their ages; it rapped 14 times, then 11 times. The neighbors were called in to witness; everyone was agog. Arthur Conan Doyle, who discussed the sisters’ experiences in his 1926 book, The History of Spiritualism, wrote, “Over the course of the next few days a code was developed where raps could signify yes or no in response to a question or be used to indicate a letter of the alphabet.”
The otherworldly communications quickly took an unnerving turn. Harry Houdini, who told the girls’ story in his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits, wrote, “Some one [sic] asked the girls if a murder had ever been committed in the house. The ominous sounds of the code answered in the affirmative.” Conan Doyle reported that the girls called the spirit “Mr. Splitfoot,” a nickname for the devil.
The family abandoned the house. (Who wouldn’t.) The girls’ much older, married sister, Leah — she was 23 when Maggie was born — took Maggie and Kate to live with her in Rochester, NY. There, the young sisters amazed the neighbors by communicating with their dead children. Leah became Maggie and Kate’s manager; she was soon collecting a dollar a head (around $40 today) from people who wanted to see Maggie and Kate talk to spirits. The girls drew ever-greater crowds. In November 1849, they sold out the biggest venue in Rochester, Corinthian Hall, and demonstrated their powers for nearly 400 people. Some thought they were fakers (Scientific American magazine called them “Spiritual Knockers from Rochester”) but many were convinced. Leah took them on a national tour, keeping them to a rigorous schedule of daily private spiritualist readings and public performances.
The sisters were an early inspiration for Spiritualism — a faith characterized by the belief in communication with departed souls. Spiritualism gained adherents throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely in English-speaking countries. Many families lost loved ones in the Civil War, World War I, and the great flu epidemic of 1918. Almost every household at the time was touched by death in some way. Spiritualism gave grieving people hope. At the same time, the development of and advancements in photography meant that people began seeing (apparently) documentary images of ghosts and strange ectoplasm — the supposed physical manifestation of a dead person’s energy. This too helped people believe that their loved ones could reach out to them from the beyond … with a little help from certain gifted souls, who often happened to be attractive young women. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lost a son in the flu epidemic and whose wife believed she could communicate with the dead, became increasingly passionate about Spiritualism; Harry Houdini cynically pretended to be a medium early in his career but became increasingly determined to debunk Spiritualist trickery. Their differences wound up destroying their long friendship.
Over the years, some mediums recanted and apologized for bilking rubes. Among them were Maggie and Kate Fox. Sort of.
By 1888, the sisters were exhausted. Maggie had been widowed; she and Kate both struggled with alcohol and poverty. They’d had a falling-out with Leah, who had accused Kate of being a bad mother because of her drinking.
In September of that year, Maggie decided to confess her deceptions to The New York World. She was paid $1500, the equivalent of around $51,300 today.
As recounted by Harry Houdini in his book debunking Spiritualism, Maggie acknowledged her and Katie’s actions … but blamed Leah completely. “Katie and I were led around like lambs,” she wrote. “The rooms were jammed from morning till night and we were called upon by those old wretches … when we should have been out at play in the fresh air.” She noted that Leah got rich while she and her little sister did not. “We had crowds coming to see us and she made as much as a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars a night. She pocketed this.”
Lithograph depicting Miss Margaretta Fox, Miss Catherine Fox, and Mrs. Fish, Currier & Ives, 1852
Maggie went on:
I loathe the thing I have been. I used to say to those who wanted me to give a séance, ‘You are driving me into Hell.’ Then the next day I would drown my remorse in wine. I was too honest to remain a ‘medium.’ That’s why I gave up my exhibitions. I have seen so much miserable deception! Every morning of my life I have it before me. When I wake up I brood over it. That is why I am willing to state that Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description. I have had a life of sorrow, I have been poor and ill, but I consider it my duty, a sacred thing, a holy mission to expose it. I want to see the day when it is entirely done away with. After my sister Katie and I expose it I hope Spiritualism will be given a death blow.
This isn’t an apology. Maggie takes no responsibility; everything is Leah’s fault. She doesn’t acknowledge that she perpetrated harm. She focuses on her own suffering and her bravery in coming clean (very like the way Mark Wahlberg focused on his own heroism in facing his youthful, racist criminal history, which we discuss at length in our book).
Maggie did a little better at a presentation a couple of weeks later, at the New York Hall of Music. There, on October 21, in front of an audience of 2000 people, with Kate in attendance for moral support, Maggie did acknowledge her own wrongdoing.
I have been chiefly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public, most of you doubtless know.
The greatest sorrow of my life has been that this is true, and though it has come late in my day, I am now prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—so help me God!
There are probably many here who will scorn me for the deception I have practiced, yet did they know the true history of my unhappy past, the living agony and shame that it has been to me, they would pity, not reproach.
The imposition which I have so long maintained began in my early childhood, when, with character and mind still unformed, I was unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
I repented it in my maturity. I have lived through years of silence, through intimidation, scorn and bitter adversity, concealing as best I might, the consciousness of my guilt. Now, thanks to God and my awakened conscience, I am at last able to reveal the fatal truth, the exact truth of this hideous fraud which has withered so many hearts and has blighted so many hopeful lives.
I am here tonight as one of the founders of Spiritualism, to denounce it as an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.
I ask only your kind attention and forgiveness, and as I may prove myself worthy by the step I am now taking, may you extend to me your helping hands and sustain me in the better path I have chosen.
This is better, though still not great. She uses the term fraud, and says she repents for her actions (though “repent” is a lot like “regret”; it isn’t quite “apologize” – it’s still about the speaker rather than about those the speaker harmed). She does acknowledge that she hurt people. But she still focuses more on the wrong done to her and she still asks for “pity, not reproach.” A good apology would have taken ownership of her decisions as an adult and focused still more on those she’d harmed rather than herself.
Giving the people what they wanted, Maggie proceeded to describe and demonstrate how she and her sister had made their unnerving knocking sounds. At first, while living with their parents in Hydesville, the two had tied strings to apples, hid the apples in their beds, and secretly dropped them onto the floor to scare their mother. Over time, they learned to crack their finger and toe joints at will, loudly enough to create rapping noises that seemed to come from spirits. (Houdini had earlier called out their toe-bones trick, to Conan Doyle’s annoyance.)
Some victims of spiritualism were happy to forgive Maggie. Here are two letters the newspapers received:
God bless you, for I think that you now speak the truth. You have my forgiveness at least, and I believe that thousands of others will forgive you, for the atonement made in season wipes out much of the stain of the early sin.
If, as you say, you were forced to pursue this imposture from childhood, I can forgive you, and I am sure God will; for he turns not back the truly repentant. I will not upbraid you. I am sure you have suffered as much as any penalty, human or divine, could cause you to suffer.
Forgiveness can be healing for those who opt to forgive. It doesn’t mean any of the other victims were obliged to follow suit, however. (As we like to say, apologies are mandatory; forgiveness isn’t.) We who weren’t wronged aren’t entitled to berate victims for forgiving or for not forgiving. That’s their choice.
A year later, Maggie took back her confession. Her spirit guides had told her to lie, she said! They’d been real all along! Also real was the fact that she had run out of money. She was drinking heavily. But recanting didn’t help her career; she wasn’t welcomed back into the ranks of mediums. (Most of them chose not to forgive, it seems.) Maggie and her big sister Leah never spoke again. Leah died in 1890, at 77, well-off, married to a Wall Street banker. Kate died in 1892, at 55, in a drunken binge. Maggie died – penniless and living on charity in an empty Brooklyn townhouse belonging to a friend — eight months later, at 59.
Like Fox Mulder, many still want to believe. In 1904, newspapers reported the discovery of a human skeleton inside a wall in the basement of the Fox sisters’ childhood home. Had this been the murder victim Mr. Splitfoot had told Maggie and Kate about? YES! said the Boston Journal, in a story on November 23, 1904. The discovery “clears [the Fox sisters] from the only shadow of a doubt held concerning their sincerity in the discovery of spirit communication,” the paper intoned. There was no follow-up story noting that the “skeleton” consisted mainly of chicken bones.
Faith can be unshakeable. In 1926, Conan Doyle wrote that Margaret had always been a true psychic who did not understand her own power, was gaslit by her Catholic husband who scorned Spiritualism and convinced her she was lying about her gifts, and only renounced Spiritualism because of “alcoholic excitement and the frenzy of hatred” she felt for Leah, paired with “the hope of pecuniary reward.” (Conan Doyle felt that mediums should receive salaries, so as not to be tempted by either rich jerks or the fear of poverty. How the salary system would work is unclear.)
Today, many stories about the Fox sisters hint that they may have had legitimate knowledge of the spirit realm after all.
Who can prove otherwise?
Happy Halloween.
Image Credits: Missouri Historical Society, 1852, no known copyright, Library of Congress
