The Fox sisters and the beginnings of spiritualism: the story of a fraud

It was the eve of April 1, which in the Anglo-Saxon world is equivalent to our April Fool's Day. It was the year 1848 and two of the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, were bored at home, a modest farm in the town of Hydesville, in the state of New York. To combat their tedium, the sisters came up with a prank. They began to make small noises, a few taps that they made with their feet, and tried to make their parents believe that they were talking to ghosts..

The joke worked, and Margaret and John, the frightened parents, thought that the same devil lived in their house. Shortly after, spurred on by their older sister, Maggie and Kate began putting on shows where patrons were offered to witness the connection to the deceased live. Thus, what started as a joke became one of the biggest frauds in history. We'll tell you then.

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The Story of the Fox Sisters

Forty years after these events, in October 1888, Maggie and Kate (now two mature and respectably married women) convene a wheel press room in one of the rooms of the New York Academy of Music, where journalists attend together with supporters and detractors of the sisters. The public was about to receive some high-profile news that, despite everything, many already suspected.

In front of the crowded room, Maggie and Katie announce that the "communication" they have been establishing with the deceased since they were girls (a phenomenon that is already beginning to be known as spiritualism) is a deception, the “most devastating” blasphemy, as literally expressed by Maggie, the youngest sister and considered the most important medium of the group.

To prove to the still incredulous that nothing they had sustained in those four decades was real, Maggie takes off her shoes and climbs on the table. Immediately, he begins to make the characteristic clicks with his toes that supposedly emitted by the deceased (the famous raps) which, reverberating through the wood on the surface, seem to reverberate throughout room. The pantomime has been discovered.

A joke that got out of hand

Although, in reality, the milestone that marks the appearance of spiritualism at an official level is the publication of the work The Book of Spirits (1857), traditionally it is considered that The birth of this pseudoscience began on March 31, 1848, when the Fox sisters decided to play that joke on their parents, related to the Day of the innocent. From that little innocent, the mockery increased until, with the approval of the family, the Foxes began to earn a living with it.

That night, Maggie and Kate (fifteen and twelve years old, respectively) pretended to call a spirit while tapping their feet on the headboards. The wood amplified the noise and the poor mother had the feeling that, indeed, a ghost was answering her daughters. Soon the farce escalated. The girls claimed to hear the creaking of the chains that the spirit was dragging, as well as the dull throbbing of uneven breathing that came and went..

Fascinated by the discovery, the older brother, David Fox, who in those years was already an adult and lived in another house, he devised a system so that his sisters could improve their communication with the "ghost". The young man decided that the spirit would be asked questions, questions that the apparition would have to answer only with "yes" or "no". A blow was affirmative; two, a denial. The Foxes had just designed the first Ouija board.

the dead peddler

Shortly after the first "communications", the news began to spread through the town and there were many curious people who came to the Fox farm to witness the strange phenomena. The apotheosis came when, in one of the sessions, the sisters managed to "extract" the spirit that was the ghost of a peddler murdered years ago and buried in the house, before the Fox family got hold of it. property.

The news stunned Hydesville. To prove the truth of the ghostly confession, the Foxes decided to dig up the foundation of their farm and expose the peddler's corpse.. The only thing they got was a water leak that paralyzed the work. However, a few years later, and due to a landslide, some bones came to light. The people of Hydesville held their breath; Could it be the remains of the peddler whose spirit communicated with the sisters?

The police investigation confirmed that the body did indeed belong to a hawker who had disappeared several years earlier, long before the Foxes acquired the farm. The news went around the state of New York, but the fact is that the Fox sisters had been making a living off their farce for years. Leah Fox, the eldest of the three girls (already thirty-four years old and married at the time of first communication) had She organized a kind of tour for her little sisters, where attendees paid a ticket to witness the séances in alive.

His first big performance took place in November of the following year, in front of 400 people.. At their peak, the sisters earned as much as $100 per session. We are talking about the middle of the 19th century. $100 a night, for forty years. Almost nothing.

The business of despair

The number of Fox "clients" grew like foam, since there were many who had lost a loved one (let us also remember that it was the time of the American Civil War) and wanted to contact he. So, taking advantage of the desperation of family and friends, the Fox sisters managed to fill the rooms in their sessions.

We can imagine the impact Maggie's confession had during the press conference on October 21, 1888. People began to wonder: was it all a fraud, then? When the sisters claimed to have spoken to a husband, a wife, a son, a father, was it just a lie? Was it true that those young women with their good and sincere faces had taken advantage of pain to enrich themselves?

Over the years, the Fox sisters perfected their "technique" and managed to pull off absolutely stunning raps and other "paranormal" effects with just make “invisible” touches with their fingers, touches that vibrated through the solid surfaces and that seemed to envelop those present, really as if a spirit were will try In short, the Fox sisters were not spiritualists; they were magicians. The most curious thing is that, after their unexpected statement, the Foxes assured that they had been forced to lie, and that their spiritualism was true.. Between veiled words, they pointed to the Catholic hierarchies as elements of pressure, since, apparently, they wanted them to profess in a convent so that they would leave their "spiritualist" career.

However, they could not go back. When Maggie climbed up on the table at the New York Academy of Music and performed her performance with her toes before those present, the myth of the sister mediums collapsed. Some continued to maintain its veracity for a few more years. They died relatively young, drunk and destitute.