The Death-Blow to Spiritualism: Being the True Story of the Fox Sisters

by Reuben Briggs Davenport

ORIGIN OF THE FRAUD.

There are spiritualists who pretend that so-called “spirit rappings” originated long before the Hydesville disturbances took place. These declarations, however, are of no value as actual evidence.

In any event, there is no claim that in their cause and general character these manifestations, so-called, were very different from similar ones of the present day.

The “rappings” produced by the “Fox Sisters” are certainly the first of which there is an authentic account. They began in a little rustic cottage at a place called Hydesville, in the town of Arcadia, near Newark, Wayne County, New York. Here John D. Fox and his wife Margaret dwelt with their two daughters, Margaret and Catherine. Two other children, Ann Leah and David S., lived elsewhere. There was sometimes a fifth member of the household, also a child. This was Elizabeth Fish, the daughter of Leah, and therefore the niece of Margaret and Catherine. She was seven years older than the elder of the two latter.

The elder Fox and his wife had not been always united since their marriage. They were separated for a number of years. The three older children, Ann Leah, Maria and David S., were conceived before this separation took place, and Margaret and Catherine afterwards. The two broods had distinctive characteristics. The father, in the interval, is said to have become addicted to intemperate habits. The taint of heredity may excuse much in the younger generation that sprang from a weakness of will-power and made them the too easy victims of colder and more mercenary natures. To many it is well known that they are still incapable of guarding their interests in a business way, and that they have always been too largely at the mercy of any one who could acquire an influence over them.

Margaretta, or Margaret, Fox, as she always signs herself, was born in the year 1840, and Catherine Fox a year and a half later. The eldest sister Leah was born twenty-three years before the former. The little girls, one eight years old and the other six and a half, had rarely seen this sister prior to the beginning of the spiritualistic movement. She knew nothing of it until the popular excitement over the “rappings” had almost reached its climax. Very early in life she had married a man named Fish, who had deserted her, and she was supporting herself at this time in the city of Rochester by teaching the rudiments of music. David S. Fox, son of John and Margaret Fox, lived about two miles from the home of his father in Arcadia.

Maggie and Katie Fox were as full of petty devilment as any two children of their age ever were. They delighted to tease their excellent old mother, who by all who knew her is described as simple, gentle and true-hearted. In their antics, they would resort to all sorts of ingenious devices, and bed-time witnessed almost invariably the gayest of larks. One of their frequent amusements was to plague their niece, Elizabeth, who slept in the same bed with them, by kicking and tickling her, and by frightening her at almost any hour of the night out of sound sleep.

Their riotous fancy soon hit upon the plan of bobbing apples up and down on the floor in their bedchamber, as a means of scaring Elizabeth and of puzzling their mother without much risk of detection. They tied strings to the stems of the apples, and thus let them hang down beside the bed. The noise of dropping them more or less quickly upon the floor resembled almost anything that the imagination chose to liken it to, from raps on the front door to slippered foot-falls on the narrow stairway. Whenever a search was made for the cause of the noises, the apples were easily hauled up into the bed and hidden in the bedclothes, where no one would think of looking for them, at least at that stage of the investigation.

The plan had everything in it to charm a juvenile mischief-maker. It succeeded admirably. It was not till the wonder which was caused by these strange “knockings” had extended beyond the humble Fox household, that the suggestion of any other means of affording to that growing feeling its daily food of seeming evidence came to the roguish youngsters.

The family had moved into the house at Hydesville on December 11, 1847. The mother began to hear strange sounds almost from that date—strange because they occurred with great frequency and were oddly repeated. The children slept in what was called the East Room; the parents in an adjoining chamber. At all hours of the night, almost, the sounds were heard; but it happened that they always occurred when one or both of the children were wide awake. The mother, in a statement which has been published as one of the so-called proofs of the genuineness of these manifestations, says that the sounds could with difficulty be located. “Sometimes it seemed as if the furniture was moved; but on examination we found everything in order. The children had become so alarmed that I thought best to have them sleep in the room with us. * * * On the night of the first disturbance we all got up and lighted a candle and searched the house, the noises continuing during the time, and being heard near the same place.”