Were the Fox Sisters Really Charlatans?

If we rely on the majority of internet references, the famous (or infamous) Fox Sisters of Hydesville, New York were clearly charlatans.  AI, as an example, concludes that they “were not genuine mediums.”  It further states that they “were performers and hoaxers, though perhaps not initially with malicious intent.”  Their story, AI continues “is a powerful case study in mass belief, deception, and the human desire for contact with the afterlife.”

In addition to being labeled charlatans, the three sisters – Leah, Maggie (Margaretta) and Kate (Catherine) – have gone down in history as kicking off the Spiritualism epidemic in 1848 by recognizing that “raps” they were hearing in the family home in western New York were attempts by a “spirit of the dead” to communicate with them.  After some experimentation, they would get three raps for a “yes,” no raps for a “no” and otherwise they would recite the alphabet and get a rap at the proper letter as the “spirit” spelled out a message.  According to the skeptics, the raps were nothing more than the sisters cracking their toe or knee joints. As for the veridical information communicated, the skeptics ignore it or conclude that they must have had  covert ways of obtaining information beforehand.  (photo shows, left to right, Leah, Kate, Maggie) 

In their declining years, Maggie and Kate, both widows and impoverished, became alcoholics.  Maggie converted to Catholicism and, in 1888, told a New York newspaper reporter  that it was all a hoax.  In exchange for the confession, she received $1,500 or approximately $50,000 in today’s money.  She later recanted her confession, stating that she was destitute and needed the money given her by the reporter.  The confession is the part of the story that carries the most weight for those who have not dug into the story or the history of mediumship, as well as those who have not considered how difficult it was for many elderly people to survive before Social Security and other government benefits became available.       

Various messages coming through the Fox Sisters and other mediums said that Benjamin Franklin, then part of the spirit world, figured out the rapping method, with the assistance of Emanuel Swedenborg; however, it took a dozen or more years before anybody, viz., the Fox Sisters, discovered what they were all about. To others around the world, they were simply strange noises. The spirits then learned how to manipulate matter in other ways, to levitate tables and people, to materialize their bodies, to control human hands, to write using their own hands.

The “communicators” explained that they were experimenting on their side of the veil and that their efforts often failed. It was also stated that mischievous spirits often intruded. When they did succeed, it was too mind-boggling for most people and especially for educated people grounded in science. Religion had been impeached and the phenomenon seemed to be in the category of religion. It had to be a hoax. If God wanted souls to communicate, the religious skeptics reasoned, He most certainly could do better than raps from cracking toes. 

Scientific Testing

In his book, Researches into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism, Sir William Crookes (upper right), a renowned British scientist, stated that the rappings could be heard with almost every medium, each having a special peculiarity. “They are more varied with Mr. [Daniel D] Home,” he wrote, “but for power and certainty I have met no one who at all approached Miss Kate Fox.” Crookes reported that he sat with her weekly for several months in 1871 and closely studied the sounds.  “It seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off.”  He heard them coming from the wall, floors, and even from a tree, all the while Miss Fox having her hands and feet held. “With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means.”   

Crookes also reported on observing direct writing “I was sitting next to the medium, Miss Fox, the only other persons present being my wife and a lady relative, and I was holding the medium’s two hands in one of mine, whilst her feet were resting on my feet. Paper was on the table before us, and my disengaged hand was holding a pencil. A luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room and after hovering near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into the darkness.” Crookes did not state what the hand wrote. He might have been a brilliant scientist, but he clearly lacked in reporting skills. 

On another occasion, he again asked for another written message. As Crookes recited the alphabet, the raps spelled out “We will try.” The pencil rose up to its point, advanced with a few jerks, and then fell. Two additional failed efforts were made by the invisible force, before the raps communicated, “We have tried to do as you asked, but our power is exhausted.” 

Crookes wondered if the movements and sounds were governed by an intelligence. “At a very early stage of the enquiry, it was seen that the power producing the phenomena was not merely a blind force, but was associated with or governed by intelligence,” he wrote, “thus the sounds to which I have just alluded will be repeated a definite number of times; they will come loud or faint; and in different places, at request and by a pre-arrangement code of signals, questions are answered, and messages given with more or less accuracy.”  He further noted that the intelligence was sometimes below that of Miss Fox and that it was frequently in opposition to her wishes. “The intelligence is sometimes of such a character as to lead to the belief that it does not emanate from any person present.” 

On one occasion, Crookes recorded, Kate Fox was conversing freely with a person in the room at the same time a message was coming through by means of raps for another person in the room. At still another sitting, at the Crookes’s home, the raps spelled out, “We are going to bring something to show our power,” after which almost immediately Crookes heard the tinkling of a bell moving about in all parts of his dining room, even touching him on the head.  He was controlling Fox by holding her hands at the time. The ringing continued for five minutes and then the bell fell on the table. He recognized the bell as his, but was certain that it had not been removed from his library and placed in the dining room.  Upon checking his library, the bell was not there. 

Thunderous Poundings

In his 1871 book, The Debatable Land between This World and the Next, Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877, bottom right), an Indiana legislator, reported on his experiences with the Fox Sisters, all three of which, he concluded, had mediumisticability, though Kate, he concluded had more of it than her two sisters. In numerous sittings with Kate and Leah, between 1860 and 1864, Owen heard countless rappings. He reported that they ranged from delicate, tiny tickings to thunderous poundings. He heard them with other mediums and in other countries, but the “most wonderful rapping phenomenon” were with Kate and Leah at Leah’s home in western New York.  Leah was then Mrs. Underhill, her husband, Daniel, the president of  a Wall Street insurance company. 

Owen was a Scottish-born American who served in the United States House of Representatives for Indiana between 1843 and 1847 and otherwise in the Indiana legislature. He introduced the bill to organize The Smithsonian Institute and served as one of its first regents. His father, Robert Owen was well known as a socialist and humanitarian.  The family migrated to the United States around 1826. 

At a sitting at the Underhill home, on October 25, 1860, the raps spelled out, “Darken.” They did so and observed a few luminous phenomena.  “There came suddenly a tremendous blow on the center of the table; a blow so violent that we all instinctively started back,” Owen recorded. “By the sound, it was such a stroke, apparently dealt by a strong man with a heavy bludgeon, as would have killed anyone and such a blow as would have broken in pieces a table, if not very stout, and would have left severe marks upon any table, no matter how hard the wood. The same blow, apparently with the same force, was repeated five or six times. It was impossible to witness such violent demonstrations without a certain feeling of alarm; for it was evident that there was power sufficient to produce fatal results; yet I myself felt no serious apprehensions of injury, knowing of no case on record in which any one had thus been seriously hurt.”

After the gaslight was turned up, they looked for damage to the table but found none. “I consider it a physical impossibility that, by any human agency, blows indicating such formidable power should have been dealt without leaving marks on the table which received them,” Owen wrote, further noting that he went into the basement of the house to be sure someone was not there causing the blows from below. 

At an evening session on August 17, 1861, at the Underhill home and under bright gas-light, “we heard, after a time, not the usual moderate raps, but instead loud thumpings or poundings, such as might be produced by blows dealt on the floor by a ten-pound mallet 
By these we had spelling, on calling the alphabet (a rap coming at the proper letter in the alphabet). Asking for the pounder’s name, there was spelled out, “Jackson.’”   Owen asked if Jackson was the man who he had known by that name in Indiana. A single rap   meaning, “no” was the response. Owen then asked if the man might possibly be the Jackson he had met in Alexandria, Virginia two months earlier and who had killed Colonel Ellsworth when Ellsworth removed the Confederate flag from Jackson’s inn.  Three “sonorous poundings” signaled “Yes.”   

“His manner tantalized me!” Owen wrote.  Daniel Underhill, Leah’s husband, said: “I pitied that man; no doubt he did what he thought was right.”  The poundings from Jackson spelled out: “I defended the flag.” 

On March 10, 1864, Owen again visited the Underhill home and sat under bright gas light with only Mr. and Mrs. Underhill (Leah Fox and her husband). After a wait of several minutes, they heard sounds that Owen described as like a medium-sized cannon ball dropping to the floor from two feet above. Leah expressed concern that those in neighboring homes would be alarmed.  The room shook quite distinctly and they felt the concussion beneath their feet, which was communicated through the table to their hands. They called for the alphabet (five strokes).  The operating spirit identified himself as a New York physician known to both the Underhills and Owen.  He had died less than a year earlier.  The rappings slowly communicated: “I am little changed. My knowledge of the spirit-world is not so great as you would suppose.  I am sure of the things I once hoped for. I have found my beloved friends in Heaven, and I know I live in immortality.  A. D. Wilson.”

With such testimony as that offered by Crookes and Owen, I find it extremely difficult to believe that the Fox Sisters were charlatans and I think AI has to rethink itself.   

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. and No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife. His latest book Consciousness Beyond Death:  New and Old Light on Near-Death Experiences is published by White Crow books.

Next blog post:  June 28