Mystic, Medium, or misleading maids?
The Fox Sisters carved their own special place in the nineteenth-century history of America.
The so-called spiritual séances reached celebrity status long before spiritualism was founded
as a branch of modern pseudoscience and are remembered today as it's unlikely founders.
Welcome to Nutty History and today we will tell you how sisters fooled the whole country
with their claims of metaphysical communication and stunts which inspired an independent movie,
the foundation of pseudoscience, and episodes of shows like Supernatural.
During the winter of 1847, fifteen-year-old Margaret Fox and her twelve-year-old sister Katy,
living in the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y, came up with an excellent prank to frighten their mother,
also named Margaret Fox. They tied strings to apples to drop them rhythmically on the stairs
in a repeated fashion, This mimicked the sound of ghostly footsteps. What started as an innocent
prank soon became a scary menace for the Fox Sisters’ parents. The home with a married couple
and six daughters was plagued by thuds and cracks reverberating through floorboards, ceilings,
and bedsteads. The daughters were sent to bed as early as 6pm but what Mr. and Mrs. Fox were
not aware of, was that little Margaret and Katy had learned to make popping,
cracking, and thumping sounds on their own to echo throughout the house, without leaving their bed.
While Mamma Fox grew more and more paranoid with the belief that their farmhouse was haunted, her
husband John Fox was still somewhat dismissive. This is when the Fox Sisters came up with the
devilish trick of making the rapping ‘talk’. On March 31, 1948, Margaret and Katie performed the
big finale of their prank. As the rapping sounds began to haunt the house after dusk, Mrs. Fox was
forced to search the house with a candle. When the poor lady reached the bedroom of her daughters,
she witnessed something extraordinary. Her daughters Katy and Margaret were ‘talking’ to
the ghost. They would clap and snap their fingers, and the ghost would answer with knocks mimicking
their pattern. It was supposed to be the end of it. They enjoyed the horrified look on the face
of their mother but in their adolescence they did not expect what came next. Mrs. Fox was
now convinced their farmhouse was haunted and she started telling all her neighbors about it.
With Mrs. Fox bringing neighbors to their farmhouse to witness the haunting, the girls
were put in an awkward position. If they confessed now, the whole family would become the subject of
mockery. So, when all the neighbors gathered around in their house, the “spirit” had to put
on another performance to prove its existence. Despite being under a lot of pressure, the girls
managed to create a narrative of a spirit telling them of a murdered peddler being buried under the
farmhouse basement with the rapping. The Foxes and their neighbors planned an excavation to find the
remains, but thanks to heavy spring rains and a nearby flooded creek filling the excavation
pit, the investigation was halted. However, water wasn’t the only thing spreading in Hydesville,
rumors of hauntings and sightings began to float around the neighborhood as the hysteria grew. And
soon the Fox farmhouse had a long line of anxious, curious, and downright hysterical visitors
seeking the help of the Fox Sisters and pleading with them to act as mediums for the spirits.
The new séances soon became not just the talk of the town but in the News of Newark,
a pamphlet published based on investigations of attorney E. E. Lewis, word spread about
the sisters across the counties in the tri-state area. This is also how Leah Fox Fish, the eldest
sister of Margaret and Katy, came to know about what was happening at her parent’s farmhouse.
Leah was a divorced mother living in Rochester. Upon hearing the news of the haunting,
she rushed back to her family’s home but her motive was more than her family’s well-being.
An avid reader of early spiritualistic and mystic literature, Leah was actually
interested to find out about what this occasion might mean to her struggling financial situation
she wanted to come up. When Leah arrived home, she managed to lure the supernatural secrets of the
farmhouse from her younger sisters aka they told her the real truth. She realized what a fantastic
entrepreneurial opportunity this whole affair was, and she began working on how to monetize it.
By the 1840s, America’s obsession with death was spread all across the country. New cities were
expanding at an alarming rate, but sanitation and population control was lagging. This had epidemics
and the mortality rates rising all across the country and unhealthy work environments were no
help either. Death touched every family during this period as one-third of the new-borns died
before reaching their first birthday. Epidemics claimed adults on a regular basis and work hazards
left millions of relatives mourning for the untimely death of loved ones. Leah saw this
fascination as a prospect and appointed herself as an interpreter of the spirits while Margaret
and Katy became the mediums. There was no turning back for the reluctant pranking sisters
as Leah took control of the whole operation with an iron fist and led her sisters like lambs.
The early customers were friends of Leah and the sisters convinced them with really intimate and
personal details about their dead relatives. This turned the clients into ardent promoters and word
spread fast. Some locals also outrightly rejected believing in the girl’s so-called powers and
accused them of trickery. The nearby Methodist Episcopal Church expelled the family from the
congregation and they blamed the girls for practicing unholy magic and wished ill upon them.
The Rochester clergy also railed against them with the accusation of witchcraft and heresy.
Still, all this negative publicity was still publicity for the Fox family
and the business just kept getting more popular as satisfied customers grew with every meeting.
The request for séances was soon in such large numbers that the sisters had to divide the job.
Leah led every meeting which was now conducted by Margaret
and Katy separately to split the workload between the two. Margaret, at this point,
was also not happy about how Leah was making everybody work against their wishes
and tried to revolt, but as the money stopped coming in, the Fox funds dwindled and Margaret
had to grudgingly agree again to perform medium duties for the financial security of the family.
In desperation to grow their market base even bigger, Leah rented Corinthian Hall,
the largest auditorium in Rochester for a mass public demonstration of her sister’s
powers in 1849. The most popular newspaper of the city, the Rochester Daily Democrat
reported the announcement of the event with a hint of satire and warned its readers that
the event would expose the sister’s con for good. The very first performance by Maggie
at Corinthian Hall made the newspaper eat its own words in the next edition
but the scathing criticism did not stop despite accepting the sight of the ghost in the hall.
This caused a rift between the supporters of the Fox Family and their critics and a committee was
formed to closely inspect the medium, Margaret and the interpreter, Leah, on future performances.
With every performance, the Fox sisters left the committee members more and more baffled.
It didn’t matter that they were asked to perform while being placed on glass, pillows, or after
being thoroughly searched for any kind of device or mechanism they were hiding under their clothes.
With every trial the Fox Sisters won, the crowd grew larger and larger at the next performance at
Corinthian Hall. As more and more committee members gave up and began to admit to the
abilities of the Fox sisters, the non-believers grew restless and hostile. On November 17th, 1849,
the performance was interrupted by firecrackers lit by the nonbelievers. The smoke almost caused
a riot and police had to intervene to ensure the safety of the Fox Family and their allies.
In one way or the other, stunts at their Corinthian Hall performances gave Leah what
she aimed for, popularity. Even though a lot of it came in the form of notoriety from the criticism
by major media publications, it still created more buzz and demand for the services of the
Fox Sisters across the nation. The sisters began to tour outside of Rochester in 1850 and after
visiting Albany and Troy, they were invited to Manhattan’s most illustrious literati gatherings.
This is where Margaret and Katy performed at the revival of the famous author James
Fenimore Cooper’s sister, and gave a descriptive account of her fatal horseback riding accident
which occurred almost half a century earlier. The accuracy of the events made the celebrated
author a fan of the Fox Sisters instantly. Other celebrities who were present there that evening
were historian George Bancroft, poet William Cullen Bryant, essayist Henry Tuckerman and
the New York Tribune’s George Ripley, who reported the events of the evening in his writing that the
incomings and outgoings of the spirit were not at all in control of the sisters and thus were
otherworldly. This report caused a lot of other publications to retract past criticism of the
Fox Sisters. The New York Herald, which was known to publish scornful and disgusting reports about
the Fox Sisters ‘scam, wrote that their reporter believed that the spirit apparitions were real
and sisters Margaret and Katy were incapable of any sort of deception. This new media acceptance
raised the Fox Sister’s success to a new high and it elevated them to celebrity status.
The success of the Fox Sisters opened the door for a lot more copycat mediums,
and séances started popping up from Vermont to California. Spiritualism began to grow popular
as a religious movement and a lot of them, like Mrs. Sisson and Lucinda Tuttle in Boston and
a teenager, Cora Scott, in Buffalo started to attract a large number of gatherings as well.
Soon spiritualism also became a platform for reform movements because of its growing impact.
As most mediums were females, suffrage activist Amy Post, who was a close friend of Leah,
used spiritualism to grow awareness for female voting rights. The religious movement also was
praised for its lack of discrimination and segregation by reformers of its time. Spiritualism
was hailed as the brainchild of the Fox Sisters but soon they found themselves outdated by
the very movement they created. As the other growing mediums upped their game with new tricks
and effects, like levitation and table tipping which left their audiences in awe and splendor,
Katy and Margaret’s rapping lost their charm. Despite a lot of new mediums being exposed and
caught with their fraudulent techniques, Margaret and Katy lost their position as the champions of
spiritualism and were often pushed off the center of the stage to make way for new trending mediums.
This affected their demand as well as their egos and it caused a severe rift among the
sisters who found themselves quarreling with each other as well as with their supporters. Leah,
who always insisted on treating their tricks as real spirit manifestations, struggled with keeping
up with her sisters and as their success dwindled, Katy and Margaret found solace in alcohol.
This was worsened by the fact that Margaret suffered heartbreak when she lost her fiancé,
Dr. Elisha Kane, a famous explorer. This only added more burden to the guilt she had about
deceiving people for years. Katy’s personal life was not much better either as she too was widowed.
In 1888, Margaret was offered $1500 by the New York World to tell the
real story. She accepted the offer and opened up about the truth of the fraud they played on the
American people for years. She not only confessed her own and her family’s deception but she accused
the entire spiritualism movement of being built on the premise of lies, trickery, and deceit.
When Leah heard about Margaret’s confession, she rolled her eyes and called her sister a
liar. Katy on the other hand confirmed everything Margaret had to say as she sat in the audience at
New York’s Academy of Music where Margaret made the confession on stage. Spiritualism advocates
did not take the confession and accusations lightly and hit back, accusing Margaret of
making up the confession story only for the $1500 she received. They also called out Margaret and
Katy’s alcoholism and tried to discredit them. The storm created by her own family and an entire
religious movement made Margaret retract her confession within a year, but the damage was done.
The sisters had lost their goodwill and were no longer welcome in the celebrity circles of which
they were once the highlight. Leah died in 1890, Katy in 1892, but Margaret, who perhaps carried
the burden of guilt the most, lived another year, only to die poor and relying on friend’s charity.
Spiritualism still considers the Fox Sisters as their pioneer and inspiration. However, history
remembers them as sisters who fooled an entire nation. What do you think of the Fox Sisters’
life story? Were they con artists, entertainers, or true mediums? Tell us in the comments below.
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