Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [120]
The famous Fox sisters: Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox Fitch. Pretty Kate Fox (centre) was John Moodie’s “spiritual muse.”
Soon tales of the Fox girls’ strange powers were being passed round at every general store, church hall and drinking house scattered through upstate New York. A public demonstration of their powers was staged in Rochester’s splendid Corinthian Hall. Several of the city fathers were deeply sceptical, insisting that the raps must be made either by ventriloquism, a newfangled machine or lead balls sewn into the girls’ hems. But each hypothesis was proved wrong, and nobody could furnish any proof that the girls were frauds. Their lucrative careers as spiritualist mediums were launched. They moved to New York City and conducted seances at P. T. Barnum’s Hotel; participants paid one dollar each to attend. Big names such as Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, and the author James Fenimore Cooper became converts to their cause. Others quickly jumped on the bandwagon: clairvoyants, hypnotists, trance-speakers, levitationists, table-tappers.
Why did the spiritualist faith catch on with such fury? Why did an essentially mystical movement thrive during an age dedicated to scientific innovation and engineering triumphs—steam-driven ploughs and railways, gas lamps, suspension bridges and daguerreotypes? In London, the Great Exhibition of 1851 celebrated the glorious products of the Industrial Revolution: mass-produced lace, electroplated silverware, steel surgical implements, Lisle stockings—all housed in the Crystal Palace, a giant glass house. William Makepeace Thackeray described the show as “A noble awful great love-inspiring gooseflesh-bringing sight … the vastest and sublimest popular festival that the world has ever witnessed.” Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland toured the Crystal Palace and were captivated with its glories. Yet in the midst of all this machine-made production, interest in the occult flourished.
Ironically, it was the ability of spiritualism’s supporters to talk about phenomena like the “Rochester rappings” in quasi-scientific terms that gave the activity a bogus scientific credibility. At a time when scientists were investigating invisible sources of energy, spiritualists argued that the Fox sisters were harnessing another kind of unseen force, which could connect souls of this world to those that had already reached the next. Samuel Morse’s invention of the electrical telegraph allowed thoughts to travel mysteriously from one location to another; perhaps the Foxes were operating a kind of spiritual telegraph.
Such a theory was particularly tenable in a deeply religious society that believed in a life after death, and nowhere was the population more prone to religious excess in the mid-nineteenth century than in the state of New York. It had experienced so many religious revivals (usually during the cold, dark days between Christmas and spring) that it was known as the “burned-over district”—burned over by Holy Rollers preaching fire-and-brimstone sermons to labourers, storekeepers and farmers assembled in lonely barns. Gothic horrors had an equal appeal for the educated: throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe, master of the Gothic frisson, published stories in newspapers up and down the East Coast. The most chilling effects in Poe’s tales centre on the blurring of the boundaries between life and death, the “fatal frontier.” The paraphernalia of the Fox sisters’ seances—mysterious rappings, darkened rooms, voices from beyond the grave—combined the notion of scientific inquiry with both a steadfast belief in the immortality of the soul and the fascination of the occult.
It didn’t take long for interest in spiritualism to spill over the border. At the Belleville Mechanics’ Institute, Susanna and John regularly heard lectures on “mesmerism, phrenology, biology,