The Fox Sisters And The Beginnings Of Spiritualism: The Story Of A Fraud
It was the eve of April 1, which in the Anglo-Saxon world is equivalent to our April Fool’s Day. The year was 1848 and two of the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, were bored at her house, a modest farm in the town of Hydesville, upstate New York. To combat their boredom, the sisters thought of playing a prank. They began to make small noises, tapping their feet, and tried to make their parents believe that they were talking to ghosts
The joke worked, and Margaret and John, the frightened parents, thought that the same devil lived in their house. Shortly after, encouraged by their older sister, Maggie and Kate began holding shows where customers were offered a live connection with the deceased. Thus, what started as a joke became one of the biggest frauds in history. We’ll tell you then.
Forty years after these events, in October 1888, Maggie and Kate (now two mature and respectably married women) call a press conference in one of the rooms of the New York Academy of Music, attended by journalists along with followers and detractors of the sisters. The public was about to receive big news that, despite everything, many already suspected.
In front of the room full of people, Maggie and Katie announce that the “communication” they have been establishing with the deceased since they were children (a phenomenon that is now beginning to be known as spiritualism) is a deception the “most devastating” blasphemy, as Maggie, the youngest sister and considered the most important medium of the group, literally stated.
To demonstrate to those still incredulous that nothing they had held in those four decades was real, Maggie takes off her shoes and climbs on the table. Immediately, she begins to make with her toes the characteristic clicks that the deceased supposedly emitted (the famous raps) that, reverberating through the wood of the surface, seem to echo throughout the room. The pantomime has been discovered.
Although, in reality, the milestone that marks the appearance of spiritualism at an official level is the publication of the work The Book of Spirits (1857), it is traditionally considered that the birth of this pseudoscience began on March 31, 1848. when the Fox sisters decided to play that prank on their parents, related to April Fool’s Day. From that little innocent joke, the mockery increased until, with the approval of the family, the Foxes began to make a living from it.
That night, Maggie and Kate (aged fifteen and twelve, respectively) pretended to call a spirit while tapping their feet on the headboards of the bed. The wood amplified the noise and the poor mother had the feeling that, indeed, a ghost was answering her daughters. Soon, the farce escalated. The girls claimed to hear the squeak of the chains that the spirit was dragging, as well as the dull pulsation of uneven breathing that came and went
Fascinated by the discovery, the older brother, David Fox, who in those years was already an adult and lived in another house, devised a system so that his sisters could improve their communication with the “ghost.” The young man decided that questions would be asked to the spirit, questions that the apparition would have to answer only with “yes” or “no.” A knock was affirmative; two, a denial. The Foxes had just designed the first Ouija board.
The dead peddler
Shortly after the first “communications”, the news began to spread through the town and there were many curious people who came to the Fox farm to witness the strange phenomena. The apotheosis came when, in one of the sessions, the sisters managed to “coax” the spirit who was the ghost of a peddler murdered years ago and who had been buried in the house, before the Fox family took over the property.
The news stunned Hydesville. To prove the veracity of the ghostly confession, the Foxes decided to excavate the foundations of their farm and expose the peddler’s corpse The only thing they got was a water leak that paralyzed the work. However, some years later, and due to a landslide, some bones came to light. The people of Hydesville held their breath; Could they actually be the remains of the peddler whose spirit communicated with the sisters?
The police investigation confirmed that the body did, in fact, belong to a peddler who had disappeared several years ago, long before the Foxes acquired the property. The news spread around the state of New York, but the fact is that the Fox sisters had been making a living from their farce for years. Leah Fox, the eldest of the three girls (who at the time of the first communications was already thirty-four years old and married) had organized a kind of tour for her younger sisters, where attendees paid a ticket to attend the sessions of live spiritualism.
His first big performance took place in November of the following year, before 400 people At their peak, the sisters earned no less than $100 per session. We are talking about the middle of the 19th century. 100 dollars a night, for forty years. Almost nothing.
The business of desperation
The number of Fox “clients” grew like wildfire, as there were many who had lost a loved one (let us also remember that it was the time of the American Civil War) and wanted to contact them. So, Taking advantage of the desperation of family and friends, the Fox sisters managed to fill the rooms at their sessions
We can imagine the impact that Maggie’s confession had during the press conference on October 21, 1888. People began to wonder: was it all a fraud, then? When the sisters claimed to have spoken with a husband, a wife, a son, a father, was it just a lie? Was it true that those young girls with good and sincere faces had taken advantage of the pain to get rich?
Over the years, the Fox sisters perfected their “technique” and managed to create raps and other absolutely impressive “paranormal” effects just by making “invisible” touches with their fingers, touches that vibrated through solid surfaces and seemed to envelop to those present, really as if it were a spirit. Simply put, the Fox sisters were not spiritualists; They were conjurers. The most curious thing is that, after their unexpected statement, the Foxes assured that they had been forced to lie, and that their spiritualism was true Between veiled words, they pointed to the Catholic hierarchies as elements of pressure, since, apparently, they wanted them to profess in a convent so that they would leave their “spiritualist” career.
However, they could no longer turn back. When Maggie climbed onto the table at the New York Academy of Music and performed her performance with her toes in front of those present, the myth of the mediumistic sisters collapsed. Some continued to maintain its veracity for a few more years. They died relatively young, drunk and in misery.
