The Haunting History of The Fox Sisters: Victorian Spiritualists

The Victorians were no strangers to the macabre, so the inception of the Spiritualist movement in the late 19th Century fit perfectly into the trends and traditions of the era. In a period rife with war and untimely death, the idea that someone could communicate with the dead (either famous figures from the past or the deceased loved ones of their clients) brought comfort and consternation to Europeans and Americans alike. Children died less frequently than they used to, but since families were much smaller, the 46% death rate for children under the age of 5 affected bereaved parents even more greatly. As a result, those parents would seek out mediums in a desperate attempt to communicate with their children beyond the grave. In the United States, the Civil War only served to make matters worse: almost a quarter of a million dead soldiers meant even more people found themselves in search of communication with their deceased husbands, brothers, and sons.

It’s no surprise, then, that the number of spiritualists in the United States alone grew from 4 to 11 million over the movement’s lifespan, with a new book about Spiritualism published nearly every week and over a hundred periodicals in the US alone dedicated specifically to reporting on and dissecting Spiritualists and their gifts. Mary Todd Lincoln famously held seances in the White House; Arthur Conan Doyle put Sherlock Holmes on the back burner to focus on Spiritualism; Sojourner Truth sold everything she owned to move into a Spiritualist community for ten years. Harry Price, one of the original ghost hunters, joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920, and another famous Harry (Houdini himself) dedicated much of his career to disproving Spiritualist mediums, all the while promising that if he were wrong about the afterlife, he’d haunt his loved ones to prove it.

The origins of Spiritualism, however, can’t be discussed without mentioning two sisters, aged 14 and 11, who lived in Hydesville, NY, in 1848. Maggie and Kate Fox informed first their mother, then anyone who would listen, that a spirit they called Mr. Splitfoot could communicate with them by knocking on the walls and floor of their bedroom. The knocking started with just simple yes and no questions, but after a while, the sisters developed a system Mr. Splitfoot could use to spell things out in their entirety. According to the Foxes, Mr. Splitfoot had been murdered and buried in their basement five years prior (and the story was backed up, then subsequently called into question, by the discovery of bones in the basement after the Foxes’ deaths).

When the sisters were sent to live with their older sister in Rochester, NY, the knocking continued, and Leah decided to take matters into her own hands and monetize her sisters’ new abilities. The Fox Sisters’ first live show took place at Corinthian Hall; the girls had an audience of approximately 400 people who came to see them communicate with spirits who would knock, write on blank slates, and otherwise make their presence known. The success of the show launched a national (then international) tour, though the Foxes were much less successful in Europe. The girls’ growing fame drew the attention of celebrities like William Lloyd Garrison, James Fennimore Cooper, Horace and Mary Greeley, and Andrew Jackson Davis, who took the girls under his wing to grow both their careers and his own.

Unfortunately, as time wore on, the sisters grew apart. While touring in Philadelphia, Maggie met Arctic explorer Elisha Kane, a man thirteen years her senior, and the two engaged in a secret relationship, allegedly marrying sometime before Elisha’s death in 1857. Kane was a staunch disbeliever in the Spiritualism movement; Kate, on the other hand, married a man just as entrenched in the movement as she was, and she continued to practice and improve upon her gifts as the decades wore on. Her work began to wear on her, however, as the Civil War brought a huge new influx of believers her way, and each one of them expected something grander and more moving than the last. Kate developed first a drinking problem and then a poor reputation among the other Spiritualists, including even her older sister Leah.

As a result, due in part to her (now late) husband’s insistence and in part to Kate’s mistreatment, Maggie stood on stage in 1888 and declared that the whole thing had been a hoax from the very beginning (and, because the first instance of knocking occurred on March 31st, some people think it might have even started as an April Fool’s prank). She showed the audience, including Kate, how she was able to click her big toes and rap her feet on the floor to create the knocking noise she was most famous for, and though she took back the confession one year later, the damage was already done. She, Kate, and Leah all died poor and in relatively short succession, one after the other, but still, their work helped launch the Spiritualist movement into the huge success it became.