The Fox Sisters
Birth of the spiritualist movement
The world today is divided as to whether the Fox sisters were true psychics or mere fraudsters. Whatever your belief, they were successful in becoming the founders of the spiritualist movement.
The three Fox sisters, Margaret, 1833-93, Leah, 1811-90, and Katherine, 1836-92, became the most famous seers of 19th-century American Spiritualism, which by 1855, claimed 1 million followers.
The disturbing events began in spring, 1848, when the two younger sisters, Kate and Margaret, aged twelve and fifteen, became frightened by unexplained sounds (knocking) and the moving of furniture. Their house in Hydesville (which is no longer there) Rochester, New York, had been reported as haunted by the previous owner, Michael Weakman. But it still shocked the young girls when the encounters occurred.
On the evening of March 31st, Kate challenged the spirit to repeat the clicks of her fingers. It obliged, later excelling itself by tapping out their ages.
The entity claimed to be the spirit of a pedlar named Charles B. Rosma, aged 31, who had been murdered five years earlier and his body buried in the cellar.
The sympathetic neighbours (who had also witnessed un-natural events) helped dig up the cellar only to find a few pieces of bone and hair. But it wasn’t until 1904, that the skeleton was eventually found. The spirit had been correct about his burial, but had neglected to tell the girls that he was hidden in the cellar wall. The grim discovery proved beyond doubt that the sisters were telling the truth about their spirit abilities.
Kate was sent away to stay with her elder sister Leah, in Rochester; whilst Margaret went to her brother David. However, the rapping’s followed them.
The Fox girls then became famous for their mediumistic powers, and by 1849, began giving public performances, managed by their elder sister Leah. People flocked from around the country to see them, all paying for the privilege.
Their séances became hugely popular, also more elaborate with objects moving about, spirits appearing and table levitation.
The Fox sisters were routinely exposed by sceptics as fakes, but no trickery was ever discovered. One test had both girls tightly bound around the ankles, which proved them both innocent of pretence. Their under garments were also inspected for props. Finding nothing to reproduce the sounds, the sceptics were forced to admit the girls were not committing fraud.
Unfortunately, lacking in parental supervision both girls began drinking quite heavily; which in turn affected their performance.
Kate moved to England in 1871. The following year she married a London barrister and enthusiastic spiritualist. Jenken died in 1881, leaving Kate to bring up two sons on her own. Margaret had followed Kate to England in 1876.
Kate Fox was considered a powerful medium, capable of producing, raps, spirit lights, direct writing, appearance of materialized hands and movement of objects at distance.
In time the sisters developed serious drinking problems. Kate was arrested for drunkenness and people worried for her two sons welfare.
For some reason, only known to themselves, in 1888, the two sisters appeared before an audience of 2,000 declaring themselves frauds. Margaret demonstrated that the raps had been produced by cracking her toe joints. Later, in writing Margaret recanted her confession.
Kate continued her life begging and borrowing, and within five years, a few months apart, both sisters died in poverty, shunned by former friends and buried in paupers’ graves.
The conclusion to this story is that the public confession had done nothing to destroy the belief in the Fox sisters, or the movement they founded. Believers felt the sisters had been forced into lying. And spiritualism continued to develop as if the confessions of the sisters had never happened.
Tuesday, 30 August 2005, 16:10 GMT 17:10 UK
Science and the seance
By Hannah Goff
BBC News
The world's most eminent scientists are not usually associated with the dim-lit surroundings of a clairvoyant's parlour.
But some of science's biggest names have not only dabbled in, but been entirely convinced by the world of the seance.
Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird are familiar to most for the household indispensables they invented. But the attraction to spiritualism they all shared is definitely not part of the GCSE science syllabus.
All three men, and many other Victorian scientific pioneers, became involved with the religion, which depended on strange forces being demonstrated through bizarre phenomena.
Legitimacy
But how did the world of certainty and precision collide and, in some cases, fuse with that of levitating spiritualists and voices from the "other side"?
To some, it was simply down to chronology. When the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York State - widely considered to be the founders of modern spiritualism - first claimed to have communicated with the dead, the world was awash with scientific endeavour.
Just four years earlier a communication of a very different sort - the first electric telegraph - was sent across the Atlantic.
Science was challenging the old certainties about life - making the impossible, possible.
According to the biographer of the Fox sisters, Barbara Weisberg: "There was so much that was exciting and so much that wouldn't have been thought possible two decades before.
"If people could communicate over the telegraph, why couldn't this world and the next world communicate?"
This gave the sisters' claims greater legitimacy, she says.
As the spiritualist craze grew people from every level of Victorian society crammed into dingy parlours, where knocks and raps indicated the presence of spirits.
Defying gravity
Messages from the dead were spelt out using lettered cards while strange voices were mumbled in the dark.
But it was in the search for proof these phenomena were real and not cons, that the world of the spiritualist and the scientist came together.
Science historian at Cambridge University, Dr Richard Noakes, says scientists leapt to the task.
"I am convinced that discoveries of far-reaching importance remain waiting along these shadowy and discredited paths"
John Logie Baird on spiritualism
"If there was any truth in phenomena that appear to defy the known laws of nature, the known laws of gravity, then scientists believed that they had to be the ones to investigate."
When the bizarre phenomenon of table-turning hit the parlours of Victorian England, the leading experimental scientist of the day, Michael Faraday, was called in.
After attending two seances, the deeply Christian Faraday devised an experiment to see if there was a rational explanation. He decided there was and dismissed supernatural causes as nonsense.
Hypnotist
Some 15 years later, the feats of medium Daniel Dunglass Home reached new heights as he was seen to levitate out of one window and back through another. Many believed he was simply a hypnotist.
This time the eminent chemist, William Crookes, who unlike Faraday was keen to discover a psychic force, subjected Home's activities to his own test.
He devised a machine he called a radiometer to measure the "invisible forces" the medium appeared to be tapping into.
Another gave a reading when the maestro appeared to move a lever without touching it.
"Here's an instrument Daniel Dunglass Home can't possibly mesmerise because it's not a living being. How can you hypnotise an instrument?" says Dr Noakes.
"So Crookes reckons he got the traces of a psychic force in operation."
Crookes went on to invent the cathode-ray tube, pioneer research into radiation effects, photography, wireless telegraphy, electricity and spectroscopy.
Logie Baird, who built on Crookes' work to create television, was also persuaded by his seance experiences.
'Shadowy'
Not only did he claim to have communicated with the spirit of US scientist Thomas Edison, but after visiting a seance in 1926 he wrote: "I am convinced that discoveries of far reaching importance remain waiting along these shadowy and discredited paths."
But Logie Baird was trying to do exactly what mediums of the day were doing - transmitting sounds and images through space. Only the source of these, if you believe the medium, were different.
At the end of the 19th Century when Guglielmo Marconi was experimenting with the first radio signals, he was shocked when he started to receive signals.
The author of Spirit Communication, Roy Stemman, says Marconi concluded these were from the spirit world.
"He spent his last years trying to perfect an electronic device that would establish a permanent contact between this world and the next."
This was never achieved, but his work pioneered the telecommunications that still link the globe today.
Dr Noakes says that whether or not the scientists declared the whole thing to be bogus, the example they set was "extremely powerful to the next generation of scientists".
Despite years of research, no scientist has proved seances were anything more than an elaborate con trick.
But the work they did trying often contributed to a greater understanding of the laws of physics.
Science and the Seance was broadcast on BBC Two on Wednesday 31 August at 2100 BST.
