Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [27]
The Spiritualist Tide
Madame Blavatsky explained that she approached America, the land of Spiritualism, “with feelings not unlike those of a Mohammedan approaching the birthplace of his Prophet.” The opening created by Spiritualism made the young nation into a magnet for every kind of spiritual experiment. And like many cultural openings, this one appeared so quickly and dramatically that it could leave observers unsure of what was even occurring.
The Shakers had prophesied that spirits would “visit every city and hamlet, every palace and cottage in the land.” And that prophecy began coming to pass in March of 1848, directing us once more to the American occult’s equivalent of Mount Sinai: the Burned-Over District of upstate New York. In a small wood-framed house outside Rochester, in a village named Hydesville, lived two attractive young girls: Kate, who had just turned eleven, and Margaret, fourteen. Weird things had been happening in the Fox home; strange cracklings and noises ripped through the darkened rooms, coming, it seemed, from nowhere. The girls told their Methodist parents that the bangs and knocks were “spirit raps.” Soon, in front of baffled neighbors, the young sisters made a display of asking questions and receiving replies in the form of ghostly raps, worked out in a language so that knocks corresponded to letters of the alphabet. Local tales told of the murder of a traveling peddler in the area, and, sure enough, bones were discovered in the Fox basement. They were considered the earthly remains of the rapping spirit whom the Fox girls eerily called “Mr. Splitfoot.” Within weeks, curiosity seekers, clergy, and newspaper reporters converged on the little hamlet. The girls were tested, talked about, and looked over by newspaper editor Horace Greeley, New York Supreme Court Justice John Edmonds, and a variety of religious and scientific examiners—many of whom publicly attested to the genuineness of the phenomena. Americans were transfixed, and by the end of the 1840s the Spiritualist era was born.
Why did the relatively modest event grip people so? Hauntings, ghosts, and belief in an afterlife had touched every culture and civilization. And news from the spirit world was hardly unknown in America: The Publick Universal Friend had claimed to speak as an avatar from the heavens; the Poughkeepsie Seer had already produced his first massive volume of trance writing; and the Shakers had reported that spirits were visiting them ten years prior to Rochester. So spirit communiqués were nothing new. But the story told by the Fox sisters provided something of a different order. It fulfilled what was implicit in the career of Andrew Jackson Davis: that spirit communication was open to anyone, anytime. If two teenage girls could reach the otherworld, it stood to reason that everyone could. It was a completely egalitarian take on the supernatural, with newspapers and publicity-hungry investigators ready to spread the word.
And the spirit raps heard in Rochester could strike at the deepest emotions of American homes in an era when children were constantly lost to disease. In New York City in 1853, nearly half of all reported deaths were children under five. “And oh! mother that reads this,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “has there never been in your house a drawer, or a closet, the opening of which has been to you like the opening again of a little grave? Ah! happy mother that you are, if it has not been so.” For many, the hope of contact soothed the agony of loss.
As the news from Rochester spread, grieving parents, widows and widowers, or those simply pursuing otherworldly thrills gathered together in clubs and parlor rooms, schoolhouses and