Mrs. Kane’s sole comment upon this is: “Of course, we slily did it, as we did many other hoydenish tricks.
“We also used to twitch mother’s cap off and gently jerk the comb out of her hair, just to tease her. Leah says that these things were done by the spirits! How silly to address such a puerile pretense to any one gifted with common sense!”
As a companion picture to what has gone before, let the reader also engrave this “miraculous” scene upon the retina of his imagination:
“We had stored our winter provisions in the cellar. Among them were several barrels of apples, potatoes, turnips, etc. From this cellar came the apples, potatoes and turnips flying across our room, hitting all in precisely the same place every time. It will now be remembered that these articles were in the cellar under the ground floor, and had to come from the rear of the cellar, through the door, into the kitchen, up the stairs, into the pantry on the second floor, through the pantry into the dining room, up the second flight of stairs, into the large room in which we slept, hitting us as we lay in our beds near the front window. * * *
“A cabinet shop was the next thing represented by the spirits. They seemed to be possessed of all kinds of tools to work with. After sawing off boards they would let them fall heavily on the floor, jarring everything around them. Then, after planing, jointing, driving nails, and screwing down the lid of a coffin, they would shove the hollow sounding article about the room. (This we understood at a later day.) Often to our utter amazement, pickets from the discarded lots in the cemetery came flying through the room over our heads, on our beds, like debris in a tornado. They came from the extreme west side of the burying-ground, through that lot, and the distance of about two hundred feet through our lot; an entire distance of about four hundred feet. That they came by no visible means, we knew; as no human power could have thrown them through the air into our chamber window, hitting us in our beds, in the same place every time.”
In July, 1848, Leah, her sisters and mother, revisited the Hydesville house, which was then unoccupied. David, the brother, had fallen by this time into the plans of Leah, whether a dupe or an accomplice, Margaret, even at this day, is unable to say. To him was due the very first suggestion that the so-called spirits might communicate with the living by means of the alphabet. And since then, this has been the chief stay of spiritualism, literally the A B C of all its so-called science. It is a singular commentary upon the consistency of the “spirits,” or the good faith of those who professed to interpret their messages, that the code of communication at first employed in their circles was entirely different in the meaning of the simple signals used from the one which finally was adopted. Would the “spirits,” think you, who are divorced from the trammels of this world, have been guilty of this simple error and have been obliged to correct it afterward, had they not been impostors?
The object of Mrs. Fish in going back to Hydesville is quite apparent. There was yet an unworked mine of wonder and superstition, out of which the dust of dross might be thrown into the eyes of the credulous, as the pure gold of revelation.
In the first place, it was necessary to get from the so-called invisible intelligence an injunction to seek for proofs of the foul murder which it had been said had been committed in the house where the “rappings” were originally heard.
Mind you, months had then elapsed since the digging had been first done in the cellar and the Ganargua creek near by, and David S., who was now wholly in sympathy with Leah in her view of the future importance of the new superstition, had lived in the neighborhood ever since, while nobody had remained in the “haunted” house to be cognizant of what might have taken place there in the mean time.
By the new code system of obtaining answers to queries, a mandate to dig up the cellar and to search for something or other there was obtained, and obeyed, the work lasting two or three days. It is stated by Leah that some fragments of an earthen bowl, a few bones, some teeth and some bunches of hair were found. She says that doctors pronounced the bones to be human.