On a Friday evening at the end of March 1848, in a wooden farmhouse in Hydesville near Rochester, New York, a small scene unfolded that would reshape the religious, intellectual and mediumistic landscape of the Western world over the next thirty years. A mother calls out into the room, asking whether whoever has been shaking the house for weeks might respond. Her eleven-year-old daughter Kate snaps her fingers, one, two, three — and in the same rhythm something raps back. From that moment emerges the most important mediumistic movement of the 19th century, modern Spiritualism, with millions of adherents in the US and Europe, with effects reaching into the women's rights movement, into the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, and into every contemporary academic mediumship study. Anyone reading Beischel, Schwartz or Tressoldi today is reading in a tradition whose birth date lies in this room in Hydesville. This article reconstructs the story source-critically — with confession, retraction, bone discovery and everything sceptics and defenders have pitted against each other for a century and a half.
The family
The house in Hydesville, a two-storey wooden building on the edge of the hamlet (today part of the township of Arcadia, Wayne County, NY), was occupied by the Fox family in December 1847. John D. Fox, a blacksmith, his wife Margaret Fox, and the two youngest daughters — the older children had already left home. The two girls who would make history:
- Margaretta ("Maggie") Fox, born 1833 in Canada, thus fourteen years old in March 1848
- Catherine ("Kate") Fox, born 1837 also in Canada, thus eleven years old
An older sister, Leah Fox (born 1813, aged 35 in March 1848, abandoned by her first husband Bowman Fish), lived as a piano teacher in Rochester, almost thirty kilometres away. In our story she becomes the manager and the engine of public fame — and at the same time, in Maggie's 1888 accusation, the evil inventor of the spirits, who staged everything for profit.
The sounds, 31 March 1848
From mid-March on, according to the mother's later sworn testimony, nightly noises had become established in the house — a rapping, a low rumbling, occasionally something like furniture being moved. The family first thought of rats, wind, a passing carriage. On Friday, 31 March 1848, the sounds became loud and impossible to ignore. Mrs. Fox's affidavit of 11 April 1848 — one of the earliest still-extant written documents — describes the scene:
"The children, who had slept in the same room with us, had heard it first, and it had awakened us all. It was repeated. … Cathie said: 'Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do', snapped her fingers, and the noise imitated her. She snapped twice, three times, and the noise responded each time with the corresponding number."
From the snapping arose a systematic question-and-answer game. To the question whether it was a human, one rap (no). To the question whether it was a spirit, two raps (yes). With an agreed code — a specific number of raps for each letter of the alphabet — the "something" identified itself: a pedlar named Charles B. Rosna, allegedly murdered some years earlier in this very house and buried in the cellar.
The neighbours — David Fox (John's brother), William Duesler, Mrs. Redfield and others — were called in that same night and in the following days. Duesler, a methodical man, wrote in his affidavit:
"I am wholly unable to solve the mystery, and to account for it on any other ground than that it is supernatural."
He and other neighbours tried to explain the phenomenon physically, searched walls and floor, but kept hearing the rapping even when the girls held still. The cellar was dug — reports of recovered bones and tufts of hair were circulating already in 1848, but cannot be documented hard.
Intelligent rapping — sounds that answer questions, maintain codes, reproduce rhythms — is not unique to Hydesville. It is a recurring feature of physical mediumship and continues to be reported today, for instance in the séances of Kai Mügge and the Felix Experimental Group. What really happened in Hydesville in 1848 can scarcely be reconstructed from sources nearly two centuries old. Since the same phenomena continue to be reported by physical mediums working today, it would be considerably easier to investigate them under modern conditions — rather than endlessly debating historical records.
Rochester and the first public sittings
In May 1848 the two girls were sent to their sister Leah in Rochester — partly to shield them from the now intrusive commotion, partly because the rapping "accompanied" them there too, as all participants reported. Leah recognised the economic and ideal potential. She introduced the sisters to her circle of Quaker friends Amy and Isaac Post, long-time abolitionists and liberal reformers. The Posts were early converts — and a decisive bridge was thereby built: through their network, the Hydesville story did not become an anecdote of uneducated country folk but a serious matter taken up by the well-connected American reformist bourgeoisie. Precisely this social anchoring in a respected educated class gave the sisters the credibility and reach that a mere village incident could never have attained.
On 14 November 1849 Leah held the first public demonstration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester — one of the largest halls in the city. Admission 25 cents, audience of several hundred. A citizens' committee was set up; three women from the audience physically searched the girls, examined their clothes and shoes. The rapping continued. A second and third committee, with increasing strictness, repeated the search — all three reached the same conclusion: no fraud detected, the phenomenon not explicable. The Rochester coverage in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune — Greeley was one of the most influential publishers in the United States — made the sisters known nationwide.
Buffalo 1851 – the first sceptical explanation
In February 1851, roughly three years after Hydesville, three physicians at the University of Buffalo — Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee, C. B. Coventry — published a letter in the Buffalo Medical Journal: the rapping sounds were the result of voluntary "cracking" of knee joints. They had silenced the sounds by holding the sisters in a position in which the knees could not be moved. From this letter stems the still most popular sceptical explanation: toe-and-knee-cracking.
The matter is methodologically thinner than it sounds. The Buffalo doctors observed one sitting, held the sisters' knees, the rapping fell silent — and concluded: the knees were the source. What they did not exclude: that a sitting under such conditions runs psychologically differently; that the "medium" cannot work when held that way; that the spontaneous variability of the phenomenon (it did not rap equally strongly in every sitting) produced fluctuations anyway.
This is methodologically the same shortcut as the classic frog joke: the physician says "frog, jump!" — the frog jumps. He cuts off its legs and says again "frog, jump!" — the frog doesn't jump. Conclusion: the frog hears with its legs. An intervention changes what is observed, but it does not follow what the source was; it only follows that the intervened-upon part was involved in the manifestation. Exactly this logic operates when the Buffalo doctors' knee-holding is taken to identify the seat of the rapping sounds — or, in parallel, when anaesthesia or brain-lesion data are taken to show the brain as the producer of consciousness.
Nonetheless, the Buffalo report became for decades the canonical sceptical answer and is cited to this day in Wikipedia articles.
Crookes 1874 – the scientific test
More than two decades after Hydesville, the British physicist William Crookes — discoverer of thallium, inventor of the Crookes tube, Fellow of the Royal Society since 1863, later its President (1913–1915) — investigated the rapping phenomena under controlled conditions. Kate Fox had moved to London in 1872 after marrying the English lawyer Henry Jencken, and so came within Crookes's reach. Crookes, who had already tested Daniel Dunglas Home with a spring balance and a locked accordion cage, was no Spiritualist but an experimenter at home in the methods of physical measurement.
The sittings with Kate Fox took place in Crookes's own house at 20 Mornington Road, London — not in the medium's séance parlour but under conditions controlled by the investigator: his room, his furniture, his chosen witnesses, good light. Crookes did not conduct a single sitting but a series of experiments over several months. His report in the Quarterly Journal of Science (July 1874), later collected in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, documents three classes of phenomena:
- Rapping: Clearly audible knocks on tables, floors and walls, answering questions intelligently and maintaining letter codes — while Kate's hands and feet were fully visible and in some cases held by Crookes or other persons present.
- Automatic writing: A pencil wrote words and entire sentences on paper held by Crookes himself, with no visible hand touching the instrument.
- Luminous hand: A materialised, self-luminous hand appeared, took a pencil and wrote — a phenomenon Crookes observed under conditions in which Kate Fox's own hands were controlled.
"I have heard delicate ticks, … under the most absolute test conditions … I have witnessed, in some cases, the writing of words and even of whole sentences on paper held by myself, and where no mortal hand could have approached the pencil."
These reports were subject to intense criticism during Crookes's lifetime and after. The usual sceptical answer — that Crookes was deceived by Florence Cook — does not apply here: the Kate Fox investigations are independent of the Cook controversy, separated in time and differently structured methodologically. What Crookes describes with Kate Fox are not dark-room séances but observations in light, in his own house, with the medium's hands and feet controlled. Under these conditions, toe-cracking as an explanation for the observed phenomena is difficult to maintain.
The professional career and the decline
Between 1850 and the 1880s, Maggie, Kate and Leah were the most famous mediums in the world. They held sittings before presidents, writers, European aristocrats. Kate lived in London since her marriage to Henry Jencken and worked there for Crookes among others. Maggie had a long, tragic relationship with the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, who supported her financially after his death in 1857, but whose family did not recognise their marriage. Both sisters fell into alcoholism in the 1870s and 80s — a well-documented tragedy in the contemporary press. Leah, who had built a bourgeois life (marriage to the wealthy insurance manager Daniel Underhill), withdrew from her sisters.
The confession of 21 October 1888
On a Sunday evening, 21 October 1888, Margaret Fox stepped onto the stage of the New York Academy of Music, one of the largest theatres in Manhattan. Before an audience of 2,000 she declared that it had all been fraud. She demonstrated the cracking of her toe joints, in stockings on a wooden pedestal. Doctors from the audience came on stage and confirmed the sounds. Reuben Briggs Davenport, the reporter from the New York World, had paid her $1,500 for the confession (today roughly $50,000). At this point Maggie was destitute, alcoholic and deeply embittered toward her sister Leah, whom she blamed for exploiting her childhood.
The text of the confession, printed in the World of 22 October 1888, however, contains some remarkable sentences almost never quoted in the popular sceptical reception. Maggie claimed that at the time of the Hydesville events she had been eight years old, Kate five. Both is demonstrably false — Mrs. Fox's 1848 affidavit names fourteen and eleven, as do census records, tombstones, all independent sources. When a 55-year-old woman gives the central biographical dates of her own life incorrectly in a confession, caution is warranted with the rest of the confession.
The 1889 retraction
Barely a year later, in November 1889, Maggie retracted the confession in writing. She had been under the influence of alcohol and under pressure from Catholic clergy who opposed Spiritualism; the money she had accepted out of existential need; the rappings had not been produced by her. She returned to the medium profession. Maggie died in 1893, Kate a year earlier in 1892, both poor and alcoholic.
The sceptical tradition since then reads the retraction as a subsequent correction under pressure from the Spiritualists and ignores it. The Spiritualist tradition reads the confession as the desperate act of an alcoholic woman and keeps the retraction. Both readings have their logic. What remains: the source situation is unclean, and neither side can decide the dispute on the basis of Maggie's statements alone.
The 1904 bone discovery
In November 1904 — fifty-six years after the first Hydesville rappings — the house in Hydesville was being renovated. During repairs in the cellar, an outer stone wall collapsed. Behind the wall, in a sealed cavity, fragments of human bones and a tin box were found. The Boston Journal of 22 November 1904 reported that the find corroborated the Hydesville narrative: these were the remains of Charles B. Rosna, the murdered pedlar whose spirit had begun to speak in 1848.
The police investigation was brief and inconclusive. A physician who examined the bones found a mixture of human and animal bones, including chicken bones. No one pursued the case further. A missing pedlar named Charles B. Rosna could not be traced in any contemporary missing-person register. So the bone discovery serves neither as confirmation nor as refutation.
What today's historians see
The serious historical reappraisal is relatively young. Four works are indispensable for any source-critical work:
- Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism, HarperCollins 2004 — the scholarly standard biography, rich in material and cautious in judgement.
- Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Beacon Press 1989 (expanded new edition 2001) — the classic on the social and feminist dimension of the movement; shows how closely American Spiritualism was interwoven with abolitionism and early feminism.
- Robert McLuhan and KM Wehrstein, "Fox Sisters", in the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research (London, kept current online) — the methodologically cleanest treatment of the pro- and contra-arguments, with all original documents linked.
- Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, New York 1888 — the contemporary sceptical book that places Maggie's confession in context; to be read with caution, but indispensable as a primary source for the confession scene.
The current division of judgements runs roughly thus: the majority of academic historians assumes an original prank by the two girls, professionalised by Leah — without however claiming that every single sitting of the next four decades is explicable. A substantial minority — especially in the parapsychological research tradition (SPR, Psi Encyclopedia) — considers the source situation open: too many independent observers, too many controlled conditions (Corinthian Hall, Crookes), too many methodological weaknesses in the Buffalo explanation. Both positions arrive at the same secondary conclusion: the 1888 confession is, owing to its internal inconsistency, not a decisive source; the 1904 bone discovery is not a confirmation.
The historical impact
What the Fox sisters actually triggered in the history of science and ideas is independent of the "real or fraud?" question:
- Within two decades, hundreds of Spiritualist circles sprang up in the US and Europe; by around 1870, contemporary estimates put several million Americans as self-identified Spiritualists.
- Allan Kardec in France systematised the movement in his Le Livre des Esprits (1857) and founded the Kardecist tradition, today with millions of adherents in Brazil.
- In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London — with Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers and later William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson, Lord Rayleigh as presidents. The SPR is the mother of scientific parapsychology and thus the institutional root of every contemporary academic mediumship study.
- William James began investigating the Boston medium Leonora Piper in 1885 and wrote one of the most influential methodological texts of the genre.
- Today's mediumship research line — Beischel/Windbridge, Schwartz/Veritas, Roy/Robertson Glasgow, the Tressoldi meta-analysis and Lazar/EREAMS — stands in an uninterrupted institutional line that begins in Hydesville.
What we take methodologically
Three points the Fox case writes into every contemporary observer's notebook:
- A popular confession scene is not automatically a methodologically clean source. Maggie's 1888 appearance was celebrated as the "final exposure", but contains false age claims and was made under monetary payment and in a condition of alcoholic desperation. Anyone citing it without the retraction is working selectively.
- A single physiological explanation does not replace a four-decade phenomenon series. Toe-cracking explains what toe-cracking explains — but not every Crookes sitting of 1874 or every Corinthian Hall investigation of 1849.
- The cultural-historical impact is independent of the authenticity question. Even if every rapping in Hydesville should have been trickery, it would still have created the conditions under which the SPR, William James, academic parapsychology and finally contemporary mediumship research could come into being. History of ideas works with effects, not only with ontologies.
Anyone today viewing a sitting at Beischel or Schwartz with scepticism — and one may, should, must be rightly sceptical — should know the Fox sisters' story. It shows: the claim of the phenomenon and the labour of investigation are equally old in this tradition. Anyone saying today "but that has been refuted" is saying something that the methodological source situation does not, in fact, license. How much Voltairean tone speaks here and how little actual engagement with the records, we have traced in the Voltaire-Sanssouci article.
Sources: Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism, HarperCollins 2004 (scholarly standard biography). Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Beacon Press 1989, expanded new edition Indiana University Press 2001. Robert McLuhan and KM Wehrstein, "Fox Sisters", Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research, London — kept current online at psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/fox-sisters. Mrs. Margaret Fox, affidavit of 11 April 1848 (printed inter alia in E. E. Lewis, A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox, Canandaigua, NY 1848). William Duesler, affidavit, in the same source. Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee, C. B. Coventry, "Discovery of the source of the Rochester knockings", Buffalo Medical Journal, February 1851. William Crookes, "Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual", Quarterly Journal of Science, July 1874; idem, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London 1874. Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, G. W. Dillingham, New York 1888 (containing Maggie's confession text). New York World, 22 October 1888 (report on the New York Academy of Music appearance). New York Herald, 20 November 1889 (report on the retraction). The Boston Journal, 22 November 1904 (report on the bone discovery). Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914, Cambridge University Press 1985 (on the British reception and SPR prehistory). Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, Indiana University Press 1997.