In Mrs. Underhill’s book, (written for her by another,) there is an effort to convey the impression that John D. Fox, her father, shared in the belief which she sought to establish in the spiritual origin of the “knockings.” Such an implication Mrs. Kane declares to be utterly false. He never manifested in any way a tendency toward such belief; on the contrary, he always showed by his conduct and his manner of speech, the utmost repugnance to it, and a perfect contempt for the weakness which could lead one into it.
Margaret Fox, the mother, used to say to her husband:
“Now, John, don’t you see that it’s a wonderful thing?”
“No, I don’t,” he would answer. “Don’t talk to me about it. I don’t want to hear a word about it!”
Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane says, further: “My father did not believe in Spiritualism. The excitement which we caused annoyed him a great deal. He signed a statement which merely amounted to his declaring that he did not know how the noises originated. He was cajoled into doing this. He wanted to get rid of the importunities of those who believed, or affected to believe, in the ‘rappings.’”
Such is the story of the earliest “rappings” at Hydesville.
It is embellished by Mrs. Underhill with many transparent falsehoods. But still further to bolster it up, it was thought necessary to discover traditions, or to invent “hearsay” anecdotes, giving to the house in which they lived a ghostly history. There are few country houses about which the memory of the oldest neighboring inhabitant does not recall something or other remarkable and strange, which was told him by some one or other whose identity is very indefinite, in the dim, distant past. Thus it is stated that odd noises had been heard in the Hydesville house during several previous years by successive occupants. But it is confessed that none of those persons (whose testimony no one pretends to give) had obtained any intelligible messages from another world.
Mrs. Kane states that all of this alleged neighborhood gossip was totally unknown to her at the time, and she believes that it had its chief—or perhaps its only—origin, in the morbid imaginations of those who were the first to set it going.