The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [9]
John Fox, his wife, Margaret, and his three daughters had moved to Hydesville the previous year. They had a neat serviceable house, with wood-framed walls and a dirt-floored cellar. They’d heard rumors that it was haunted, nicknamed “the spook house,” but the place seemed ordinary enough to them, country quiet and country dark, until the night that Mr. Splitfoot came calling.
The racket began on a spring night in 1848, and it shook the household awake. Something, it seemed, was trying to beat its way out from the timbers. The knocks rattled the rooms, made the floor shiver underfoot. The girls—Leah, sixteen, Margaretta, fourteen, and Kate, eleven—ran screaming into their parents’ bedroom.
Night after night, the beat sounded in the walls. Exhausted, tired beyond fear after several weeks, the younger daughter, Kate, stood up in bed and issued a challenge to the rapper in the wood.
“Mr. Splitfoot,” she said, giving him a name.
Her voice was high and light, a child’s voice.
“Do as I do.”
She clapped her hands once.
Came one knock.
Kate clapped twice. Two knocks.
Her sister, Margaretta, snapped her fingers. Again the raps echoed her actions.
Snap. Rap. Snap. Snap. Rap. Rap.
In his book A History of Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories and a devoted believer in the spirit world, tried to re-create the moment: “the earnest, expectant, half-clad occupants with eager, upturned faces,” the small pool of candlelight around them, the heavy shadows coiled in the corners of the room, the dead knocking at the walls of the living. “Search all the palaces and chancelleries of 1848, and where will you find a chamber which has made its place in history as secure as this little bedroom of a shack?”
According to the legend of the Fox family, Kate and Maggie next devised a simple code to communicate with the spirits: Two knocks for yes. Silence for no.
“Were you murdered?”
Two knocks.
“Can your murderer be brought to justice?”
No sound.
“Can he be punished by law?”
Silence.
The girls developed a gruesome portrait of the spirit in the house. He was a peddler, killed for his money by previous occupants. His throat had been cut with a kitchen knife, and his body had been dragged, smearing blood, through the buttery, down the stairs, down to where he now lay buried in the earth-floored cellar.
That summer, John Fox and his neighbors started digging in the “spook house” cellar. Five feet down, they found a plank, and beneath the wood a layer of charcoal and quicklime. In the dirt below, they found fragments of bones and hair. They called in a doctor to look over the filthy bits and pieces. He identified them as the pitiful remnants of a human body.
THE STORY OF the Fox sisters was big news in upstate New York and even the surrounding states. It grew to national, even international quality, thanks largely to that master showman Phineas Taylor Barnum.
P. T. Barnum read and enjoyed news accounts of the Fox sisters’ amazing powers. He also realized that the girls were wasted in the upstate sticks. They belonged in his American Museum, a marble showcase on lower Broadway, emblazoned with brilliant flags, packed with 600,000 live and dead curiosities—stuffed lions to living fortune-tellers, two-headed men to dancing midgets.
The two younger Fox sisters were the attraction: brown-haired girls from the country—chubby Maggie with her big dark eyes and round face and skinny little Katie with her sharp,