“The apple-dropping trick appeared to us small children so simple and innocent, that we could only wonder that any one attached so great an importance to the sounds we produced. Only think of our ages at that time, and then ask, if you will, how we could have even the shade of a realization of the real meaning of this deception!
“This lying book of Mrs. Underhill’s, notwithstanding its abominable object, does give some slight inkling of the truth here and there.
“It is thus that the wicked confound themselves.
“She quotes, as you see here, what she says to be my mother’s words: ‘The children who slept in the other bed in the room, heard the rapping and tried to make similar sounds by snapping their fingers.’
“Now that is really just how we first got the idea of producing with the joints similar sounds to those we had made by dropping apples with a string. From trying it with our fingers we then tried it with our feet, and it did not take long for us to find out that we could easily produce very loud raps by the action of the toe-joints when in contact with any substance which is a good conductor of sound. My sister Katie was the first to discover that we could make such peculiar noises with our fingers. We used to practice first with one foot and then the other, and finally we got so we could do it with hardly an effort.
“Of course, I was so young then that many incidents have escaped my memory. I assert positively, however, that much of the effect of the ‘rappings’ is greatly exaggerated in this statement which my mother was made to write. I say that she was made to write it, because the wording of the statement, if not largely dictated by others in the first place—men who desired to make public the details of the ‘rappings’ and to make money by the sale of a pamphlet describing them—was afterwards grossly garbled, that it might be used to suit the dishonest purposes of professional spiritualists. I am not even certain that mother ever signed the document, of which Mrs. Underhill makes such great parade. The same is true regarding the other pieces of so-called evidence in her work. Utterly futile as they are, when confronted with my living testimony, and when judged by their own internal weakness, I should not regard them as in any sense genuine unless I could see the original handwriting and could recognize the signatures. I say to you now, that professional spiritualists are capable of going to any lengths to bolster up their impostures. No forgery, so long as there was the least chance of its succeeding, as a furtherance to their object, would in the least repel them. Some of the so-called statements in Leah’s book I believe were manufactured from beginning to end, though to tell you the truth I have avoided reading the greater part of it because of the disgust I have felt for a long time for that whole infamous system of pretense and falsehood.
“Well, we were led on unintentionally by my good mother in the perpetration of this great wrong. She used to say when we were sitting in a dark circle at home: ‘Is this a disembodied spirit that has taken possession of my dear children?’ And then we would ‘rap’ just for the fun of the thing, you know, and mother would declare that it was the spirits that were speaking.
“Soon it went so far, and so many persons had heard the ‘rappings’ that we could not confess the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part of those we had deceived. So we went right on.
“It is wonderful, indeed, how two little children could have made this discovery, and how, by simply obeying the natural thirst for the marvelous, in others, and their inherent superstition, they should have advanced step by step, in the fraud, deluding those who most ardently wished to be deluded.
“Until first suggested to us by our mother, who was perfectly innocent in her belief, the thought of ‘spirits’ had never entered our heads. We were too young and too simple to imagine such a thing.”