The Birth of Spiritualism
On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.
‘What hath God wrought?’ Perhaps it is a coincidence, but in the spring of 1848 – four years after Samuel Morse tapped out those first words in code and sent them out into the silence – the dead started tapping out messages to the living too.
It happened in upstate New York where the Fox family had recently moved. Their farmhouse was said to be haunted; a spirit was heard knocking in the night. The two youngest daughters, Catherine and Margaretta, both adolescents, discovered that if they asked questions the spirit would knock in reply. It revealed itself to belong to a 31-year-old man.
Neighbours came to listen. Someone had the idea of reciting the alphabet to help the spirit speak. ‘One Tuesday night, at twelve o’clock’, the girls’ mother recalled him revealing, he ‘was murdered by having its throat cut with a butcher knife’. Spiritualism, and with it the ritual of the séance, was born. It was a ‘spiritual telegraph’, a friend said.
The fame of the Fox sisters spread. People came to speak to the spirits of children they had lost, others came for advice on love or on stocks and shares. It seems to have been the girls’ older sister Leah Fish – 35 and married – who saw the commercial possibilities. On 14 November 1848 the first public demonstration of the sisters’ powers took place at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester. ‘We ... could not but admit the evidence of [our] senses’, the local paper reported. ‘THE GHOST was there.’ Spiritualism exploded. By the late 1860s there were some 11 million spiritualists in the US alone.
Fame took its toll on the Fox sisters, however. In 1888 Margaretta, widowed and alcoholic, gave an interview to the New York Herald.
‘Is it all a trick?’ the journalist asked.
‘Absolutely’, Margaretta replied. ‘Spirits, is he not easily fooled?’
As a child, she explained, she learned to make the sounds using the joints in her feet.
A sense of sadness pervades the interview. ‘The spirits will not come back’, she said of the dead. ‘God has not ordered it.’ Not every distance could be conquered, not every silence filled.