The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [10]
“Is the person I inquire about a relative?”
Two knocks for yes.
“A near relative?”
Yes.
“A man?”
No answer, meaning no.
“A woman?”
Yes.
“A daughter? A mother? A wife?”
No answer.
“A sister?”
Yes.
The questioner was the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, author of the sprawling American epic The Last of the Mohicans. He had come to visit the Fox sisters at Barnum’s place, along with other luminaries, including the newspaper man Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, the poet William Cullen Bryant, and Nathaniel Tallmadge, former governor of Wisconsin.
How long ago had his sister died? Fifty raps sounded, one for each year.
Had she died of illness? No answer.
“An accident?”
Yes.
“Was she killed by lightning? Was she shot? Did she fall from a carriage? Was she lost at sea?”
No answer. No answer. No answer. No answer.
“Was she thrown by a horse?”
Two knocks. Yes.
Definitely.
After he left, Cooper told his companions that every answer had been correct. He had been thinking about his sister, who, fifty years ago that month, had been killed when her horse threw her.
Cooper decided not to return. He was spooked. So was Greeley, but he described the visit anyway in his influential newspaper column. It would be the “basest cowardice,” Greeley said, to deny that sensation of spirits knocking at the door.
Most mainstream church leaders loathed the spiritualist movement and condemned the Fox sisters, almost immediately, as a “nemesis of the pulpit.” There was nothing of a biblical God, none of the teachings of Jesus Christ, in these tales from other side. The movement drew congregation members away from traditional teaching. Swedenborg’s church reported a rush of new members; other “churches of spiritualism” flung their own doors wide.
The term medium—a person who provided a medium through which spirits could connect to the world of the living—became part of the common language. So did sensitive, meaning someone claiming an unusual sensitivity to messages from the summerland, the borderland, the spirit world, the seventh heaven, the misted realms where the dead wandered, waiting their chance to return. Professional mediums and fortune-tellers advertised in the local papers, hung their signs out to attract customers, offered sittings in their parlors. Newspapers that catered to the growing audience of believers—Zoist, Light, Banner of Light—claimed new subscribers every day.
In the early 1850s America, especially, seemed possessed. The spiritualist publications claimed that at least two million solid citizens.could be counted as believers, perhaps half again that many in Europe. Many believed they had themselves talked to the dead. Not everyone shared the Fox sisters’ talent for calling spirits out of the woodwork. But most people could manage the new craze of table tilting: gather a group around a pedestal table, place hands above the table’s edges, fingers just touching the wood, watch the table bobble back and forth in response to questions asked, speculate about the power of the spirits to move material objects.
It was spiritual power at work, people said. Invitations to “tea and tabletilting” became standard social events. Others labelled their events table talking and invited professional mediums to join their parties. People said that when a gifted psychic joined in, tables did more than tilt and wobble. They hopped, crackled, hummed like a vibrating string. Some rose into the air, as if being tugged by invisible hands.
In 1853, three newly published books made the response of the clergy bitterly clear. The publications unanimously warned that table