Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [123]
Much as she might have liked to, Susanna couldn’t tell her sisters in England about these fascinating developments; this was only a couple of years after the publication of Roughing It, and the British Stricklands were still treating Susanna as a pariah. Had she written to her sister Eliza, though, she would have found a kindred spirit. Eliza, like Susanna, was swept up in the greatest fad of the century. One summer, when she and Agnes were in Paris researching French queens, Eliza had spent her evenings attending seances while Agnes hobnobbed with the well-born. Eliza had watched a Parisian mesmerist hypnotize people on trains, in public gardens and in churches. On her return to London, Eliza had become convinced of the validity of spiritualism when she was put into a trance during a seance. Even Agnes would not have turned up her nose at the Moodies’ new recreation: her beloved Queen Victoria had enjoyed a demonstration of clairvoyance at Osborne House and presented a gold watch to the medium, Georgiana Eagle.
Susanna knew nothing of this. Instead, she turned to her publisher in London. “Can such a thing as witchcraft really exist?” she wrote to Bentley. “Or possession by evil spirits? I am bewildered and know not what to answer.” She continued her reading, and she was particularly impressed by The Healing of Nations, written under “divine inspiration” by the trance medium Charles Linton, and with an introduction by no less an authority than Nathaniel Tallmadge, a former U.S. senator and governor of the state of Wisconsin. Most of the book was taken up with generic Christian proverbs and homilies. “I am no friend to spiritualism, but I cannot doubt for a moment the truth of this wonderful book,” she told Bentley.
While Susanna maintained a cautious distance, John Moodie rushed into this new adventure with characteristic impetuousness—he had swallowed spiritualism hook, line and sinker. John regularly attended seances at the homes of various distinguished Belleville citizens, including those of their neighbour J.W. Tate, a railroad engineer, Mayor John O’Hare and Benjamin Fairfield Davy, a Belleville grain merchant and former mayor. In the brick mansions along Bridge Street East and Queen Street, behind heavy velvet curtains, wealthy couples like the Davys and the O’Hares and their friends would sit solemnly on straight-backed chairs, with their hands flat on the polished surface of solid wooden dining tables. The host or hostess would lower the flames of the gas lamps and, as participants peered nervously at the shadows, instruct a medium to call spirits from the vasty deep.
Mrs. Davy—in John’s view “a very intelligent and sincere woman”—managed long conversations with everybody’s deceased relatives, while her living guests sat around a table that rocked backward and forward violently. Through her agency, John heard from nearly every long lost relative he could remember—his father, his mother, a dead brother—and some of Susanna’s family, too. Miraculously, the spirit of Agnes Strickland appeared, just at the point when relations between his wife and her English sisters were at their worst, and asked for Susanna’s forgiveness for the way that she had treated her. The fact that Agnes was alive on the other side of the Atlantic rather than dead and on the other side of the fatal frontier didn’t faze John. He admitted that some of the spirits’ communications to him were “absolutely and uselessly false,” but such minor details didn’t puncture his faith for an instant. Even the false communications, he insisted, exhibited “extraordinary intelligence and knowledge of matters only known to myself.”
John also visited the Fox family in New York and took part in a seance in which a spirit tried to unbutton his boot straps. In 1857,he bought himself a large album bound in blue leather, labelled it “Spiritualist Album” in gold block letters and began to record occult adventures in Belleville and Toronto. He constructed devices to facilitate spirit-writing.