“Now, Maggie, how can you say that it was done by spirits! You know yourself that it’s all a story. It’s a great shame to pretend such things.”
Many occurrences of this description I have gathered from Mrs. Kane.
But Mrs. Leah Underhill, in her jumbled up narrative, states that “When the raps broke out suddenly close to some of the family, or at the table, one of the girls would accuse the other of having caused them, saying, ‘Now you did that, etc., etc.’”
Thanks to Mrs. Leah Underhill, such hints of the true explanation of these “manifestations” are plentiful throughout her book, and one needs only to bring some little intelligence to bear upon it to read between the lines the whole story of the fraud.
And here let me quote a passage which only goes to show how very strong was the love of deviltry in the children:
“Father had always been a regular Methodist in good standing, and was invariable in his practice of morning prayers; and when he would be kneeling upon his chair, it would sometimes amuse the children to see him open wide his eyes as knocks would sound and vibrate on his chair itself. He expressed it graphically to mother: ‘When I am done praying that jigging stops.’”
Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane distinctly remembers incidents like this one; only she qualifies the narrative by saying that her father never opened his eyes when these annoyances came while he was at prayer, but went devoutly on to the end without heeding them.
How absurd for any one to suppose that if these sounds were produced by a cause unknown to the children, they would laugh at them and regard them as very great sport, instead of trembling and crying with affright!
“The sounds which were heard at those times,” says Mrs. Kane in her statement to the writer, “were all produced by Katie and myself, and by no other being or spirit under the sun. Nor did we always do it with our feet. Frequently in that early stage of the excitement about the ‘rappings,’ we would make the sounds with our fingers, provided it was easy to do so without causing suspicion. In order to do it unknown to any one, we would sit with one hand hidden by an elbow resting upon the table, or the woodwork of a chair.
“Of course, our mother in her earnest belief, poor soul, excited us to do a great deal more than otherwise we would had done. The mystery of the sounds absorbed her entire being for the time. She became pale and worn-looking and thought that great misfortunes were to happen, and prayed often and fervently. I can well remember how my heart used to smite me at times when I looked upon her and knew that Katie and I were the cause of all her trouble. In later years, long after I had come to the age of understanding, I had very bitter reasons for such pangs of remorse, especially towards the last of mother’s life, when, as I know, she was in a great measure undeceived and feared for the perdition of the souls of her children.”