Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [121]
By the mid-1850s, newspapers were full of accounts of various phenomena, and there were at least a dozen periodicals devoted exclusively to the subject. Susanna was fascinated by the ghoulish mystery of it all. She pored over books like Spiritualism, published in 1853 by Judge John Edmonds and Dr. George T. Dexter of New York, which was supposedly the product of spirit-writing, employing Dr. Dexter as the medium. She also read Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations, Demonstrating the Existence of Spirits and Their Communion with Mortals by Robert Hare, a University of Pennsylvania chemist, and E.W. Capron’s Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms; its Consistencies and Contradictions. As a girl, Susanna had believed in telepathy between friends. As a middle-aged woman, her strong religious faith made her respectful of man’s spiritual potential, while her curiosity drove her to dig deeper into these mysterious goings-on. Whenever Catharine came to stay, Susanna discussed spiritualism with her in tones of both awe and amusement. “There is a capital article in the last Albion on table turning,” she wrote to her sister in 1852. “I read it twice with infinite glee.”
Catharine was not so sure about the whole business. Her God was a God of nature and beauty, who clothed pastures with flocks of sheep and made the valleys “stand so thick with grain that they laugh and sing.” He was not a God who rocked dining-room tables or produced discordant rappings at the bidding of adolescent girls. But she did like the idea, as she told Ellen Dunlop in a letter, that “one of the offices of the released spirit [of someone who died] may be to watch over and care for those that were united to them by bonds of love or friendship during its sojourn upon earth.”
Susanna had been introduced to Kate Fox on the streets of Belleville in the summer of 1854, when Kate Fox (then living in New York City) was visiting her oldest sister Elizabeth Ousterhoust in the nearby village of Consecon. On that occasion, Susanna recalled, she was “much charmed with her face and manners.” The nineteen-year-old’s pale oval face, waist-length dark hair and dark purple eyes beguiled the author. “She is certainly a witch,” Susanna wrote in a letter to Richard Bentley, “for you cannot help looking into the dreamy depths of those sweet violet eyes till you feel magnetised by them.”
Kate Fox’s visit to the Moodie cottage the following September provided Susanna’s first opportunity to see the young woman’s powers with her own eyes. After a few minutes of small talk in the dining room, Miss Fox asked if Susanna would like to hear some rappings. Susanna replied that she would: “Very much indeed, as it would confirm or do away with my doubts.” So Kate Fox closed her eyes and asked the spirits if they would communicate with Mrs. Moodie. Straightaway, there were three loud raps on the table. “In spirit language,” Susanna later wrote to Bentley, this meant yes. “I was fairly introduced to these mysterious visitors.”
Miss Fox told Susanna to write a list of friends, some of whom were dead and some alive. The medium turned her back on Susanna as the latter wrote, then told her hostess to run her pen slowly down the list. Every time Susanna’s pen lingered on a dead friend, the spirits would rap five times; for a living friend, they would rap three times. “I inwardly smiled at this,” Susanna later wrote to Richard Bentley. “Yet strange to say, they never once missed.” Next, Susanna wrote, “Why did you not keep your promise?” under the name of Anna Laural Harral. Anna was the daughter of Thomas Harral, who had published Susanna