Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [127]
By the end of the 1850s, the Moodies had largely abandoned their spiritualist activities. John continued to keep up his album for a few months, but he didn’t have the energy for frequent submissions to the Spiritual Telegraph, or the money for more trips to see sweet Kate Fox in New York. And his children, particularly his eldest daughter, ridiculed him for indulging in sorcery. Katie Vickers, now a member of Toronto’s social establishment, disapproved of her elderly father’s tactile healing activities. Several years later, she destroyed over fifty pages of John’s Spiritual Album, including those (she explained) that dealt with her father’s “homeopathic medical prescriptions … all of which my dear Father lived to see the fallacy of.”
South of the border, spiritualism was rapidly falling out of fashion and its practice had become decidedly tacky. Some spirits turned out to be rather opinionated, radical folk. There were mediums who claimed that the spirits believed in free love; others who insisted that they endorsed votes for women; still others through whom the spirits lobbied for the abolition of slavery. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the mania for spiritualism disappeared. In Britain, Professor Michael Faraday subjected the movement to a barrage of withering contempt in the columns of the Times. The eminent scientist wrote that he was “aghast at the hold which the table-turning mania had gained on all classes of society, and at the loose thinking and presumptuous ignorance which the popular explanations revealed.” He described experiments that showed that the movements of tables and the “rappings” could be produced by unconscious muscular pressures exerted by the sitters. The novelist Charles Dickens was equally caustic: “I have not the least belief in the awful unseen being available for evening parties at so much per night.”
And in October 1888, before a sold-out audience at the New York Academy of Music, Maggie Fox publicly confessed that spiritualism, as far as she was concerned, had been nothing but a fraud from the start. She demonstrated that the mysterious “Rochester rappings” had been produced by an abnormality of her big toe, which she had developed through assiduous practice. Kate Fox, who was sitting in a box overlooking the stage, confirmed her sister’s statements. Susanna Moodie had been right all those years earlier when she had divined the source of Kate Fox’s rappings as the cracking of toe and ankle joints.
Chapter 16
Tottering Slowly On
A couple of hours after midnight on August 25, 1857, Catharine woke up and smelled smoke. Her stomach twisted with fear, and she pulled herself into a sitting position as she gathered her thoughts. Perhaps she was dreaming. Perhaps it was just the whiff of a bush fire a few miles away. But a second later, she heard an ominous crackle. She shook her husband, slumbering next to her. Her voice rising with panic, she told him to get up and wake their children, who were asleep on the floor above. Hurriedly, she swung her feet to the floor, groped for a shawl and felt for her moccasins with her feet. Oaklands was on fire. Catharine knew that an old log house with a shingle roof would burn like a tinderbox.
“I had barely time to awake the sleepers upstairs, and we got out a part of our bedding, wearing apparel, a few books, 3 chairs and 3 tables before the whole house was in a blaze,” recorded Thomas in a journal he kept intermittently. “I am so thankful that all our lives were saved, particularly our dear Walter, whose room