ORIGIN OF THE FRAUD.
There are spiritualists who pretend that so-called "spirit rappings"
originated long before the Hydesville disturbances took place. These
declarations, however, are of no value as actual evidence.
In any event, there is no claim that in their cause and general character
these manifestations, so-called, were very different from similar ones of
the present day.
The "rappings" produced by the "Fox Sisters" are certainly the first of
which there is an authentic account. They began in a little rustic cottage
at a place called Hydesville, in the town of Arcadia, near Newark, Wayne
County, New York. Here John D. Fox and his wife Margaret dwelt with their
two daughters, Margaret and Catherine. Two other children, Ann Leah and
David S., lived elsewhere. There was sometimes a fifth member of the
household, also a child. This was Elizabeth Fish, the daughter of Leah,
and therefore the niece of Margaret and Catherine. She was seven years
older than the elder of the two latter.
The elder Fox and his wife had not been always united since their
marriage. They were separated for a number of years. The three older
children, Ann Leah, Maria and David S., were conceived before this
separation took place, and Margaret and Catherine afterwards. The two
broods had distinctive characteristics. The father, in the interval, is
said to have become addicted to intemperate habits. The taint of heredity
may excuse much in the younger generation that sprang from a weakness of
will-power and made them the too easy victims of colder and more mercenary
natures. To many it is well known that they are still incapable of
guarding their interests in a business way, and that they have always been
too largely at the mercy of any one who could acquire an influence over
them.
Margaretta, or Margaret, Fox, as she always signs herself, was born in the
year 1840, and Catherine Fox a year and a half later. The eldest sister
Leah was born twenty-three years before the former. The little girls, one
eight years old and the other six and a half, had rarely seen this sister
prior to the beginning of the spiritualistic movement. She knew nothing of
it until the popular excitement over the "rappings" had almost reached its
climax. Very early in life she had married a man named Fish, who had
deserted her, and she was supporting herself at this time in the city of
Rochester by teaching the rudiments of music. David S. Fox, son of John
and Margaret Fox, lived about two miles from the home of his father in
Arcadia.
Maggie and Katie Fox were as full of petty devilment as any two children
of their age ever were. They delighted to tease their excellent old
mother, who by all who knew her is described as simple, gentle and
true-hearted. In their antics, they would resort to all sorts of ingenious
devices, and bed-time witnessed almost invariably the gayest of larks. One
of their frequent amusements was to plague their niece, Elizabeth, who
slept in the same bed with them, by kicking and tickling her, and by
frightening her at almost any hour of the night out of sound sleep.
Their riotous fancy soon hit upon the plan of bobbing apples up and down
on the floor in their bedchamber, as a means of scaring Elizabeth and of
puzzling their mother without much risk of detection. They tied strings to
the stems of the apples, and thus let them hang down beside the bed. The
noise of dropping them more or less quickly upon the floor resembled
almost anything that the imagination chose to liken it to, from raps on
the front door to slippered foot-falls on the narrow stairway. Whenever a
search was made for the cause of the noises, the apples were easily
hauled up into the bed and hidden in the bedclothes, where no one would
think of looking for them, at least at that stage of the investigation.
The plan had everything in it to charm a juvenile mischief-maker. It
succeeded admirably. It was not till the wonder which was caused by these
strange "knockings" had extended beyond the humble Fox household, that the
suggestion of any other means of affording to that growing feeling its
daily food of seeming evidence came to the roguish youngsters.
The family had moved into the house at Hydesville on December 11, 1847.
The mother began to hear strange sounds almost from that date--strange
because they occurred with great frequency and were oddly repeated. The
children slept in what was called the East Room; the parents in an
adjoining chamber. At all hours of the night, almost, the sounds were
heard; but it happened that they always occurred when one or both of the
children were wide awake. The mother, in a statement which has been
published as one of the so-called proofs of the genuineness of these
manifestations, says that the sounds could with difficulty be located.
"Sometimes it seemed as if the furniture was moved; but on examination we
found everything in order. The children had become so alarmed that I
thought best to have them sleep in the room with us. * * * On the night of
the first disturbance we all got up and lighted a candle and searched the
house, the noises continuing during the time, and being heard near the
same place."
How natural it was that little children, being averse to sleeping away
from their elders in a dark room in a lone country neighborhood, should
take advantage of a pretext such as this to get their bed placed nearer to
that of their parents! Such, indeed, was the immediate result.
The third night of the "rappings" was the 31st of March, 1848. Mrs. Fox
says:
"_The children who slept in the other bed in the room heard the rappings
and tried to make similar sounds with their fingers._
"Katie exclaimed:
"'Mr. Splitfoot,' (the imaginary person who was supposed to make the
noises), 'do as I do;' clapping her hands. The sound instantly followed
her with the same number of raps; when she stopped, the sound ceased for a
short time. Then Margaret said in sport: 'Now, do just as I do; count one,
two, three, four,' striking one hand against the other at the same time,
and the raps came as before. * * * I then thought I could put a test that
no one in the place could answer. I asked the noises to rap my children's
ages, successively. Instantly, each one of my children's ages was given
correctly, pausing between them sufficiently long to individualize them
until the seventh, at which a longer pause was made, and then three more
emphatic raps were given, corresponding to the age of the little one that
died, which was my youngest child. I then asked: 'Is this a human being
that answers my questions so correctly?' There was no rap. I asked: 'Is
it a spirit? If so, make two raps,' which were instantly given as soon as
the request was made. I then said: 'If it is an injured spirit, make two
raps,' which were instantly made, causing the house to tremble. I asked:
'Were you injured in this house?' The answer was given as before. 'Is the
person living that injured you?' Answer by raps in the same manner. I
ascertained by the same method that it was a man, aged thirty-one years;
that he had been murdered in this house; and his remains were buried in
the cellar; that his family consisted of a wife and five children, two
sons and three daughters, all living at the time of his death, but that
his wife had since died."
Then the supposed spirit was asked if it would continue to "rap" if the
neighbors were called in to listen. The answer was affirmative.
And so they were called in.
This caused the commencement of that great excitement which so soon spread
from neighborhood to village, from the village to the near-by city of
Rochester, and thence all over the country.
* * * * *
Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane says at the present time:
"The apple-dropping trick appeared to us small children so simple and
innocent, that we could only wonder that any one attached so great an
importance to the sounds we produced. Only think of our ages at that time,
and then ask, if you will, how we could have even the shade of a
realization of the real meaning of this deception!
"This lying book of Mrs. Underhill's, notwithstanding its abominable
object, does give some slight inkling of the truth here and there.
"It is thus that the wicked confound themselves.
"She quotes, as you see here, what she says to be my mother's words: 'The
children who slept in the other bed in the room, heard the rapping and
tried to make similar sounds by snapping their fingers.'
"Now that is really just how we first got the idea of producing with the
joints similar sounds to those we had made by dropping apples with a
string. From trying it with our fingers we then tried it with our feet,
and it did not take long for us to find out that we could easily produce
very loud raps by the action of the toe-joints when in contact with any
substance which is a good conductor of sound. My sister Katie was the
first to discover that we could make such peculiar noises with our
fingers. We used to practice first with one foot and then the other, and
finally we got so we could do it with hardly an effort.
"Of course, I was so young then that many incidents have escaped my
memory. I assert positively, however, that much of the effect of the
'rappings' is greatly exaggerated in this statement which my mother was
made to write. I say that she was _made_ to write it, because the wording
of the statement, if not largely dictated by others in the first
place--men who desired to make public the details of the 'rappings' and to
make money by the sale of a pamphlet describing them--was afterwards
grossly garbled, that it might be used to suit the dishonest purposes of
professional spiritualists. I am not even certain that mother ever signed
the document, of which Mrs. Underhill makes such great parade. The same is
true regarding the other pieces of so-called evidence in her work. Utterly
futile as they are, when confronted with my living testimony, and when
judged by their own internal weakness, I should not regard them as in any
sense genuine unless I could see the original handwriting and could
recognize the signatures. I say to you now, that professional
spiritualists are capable of going to any lengths to bolster up their
impostures. No forgery, so long as there was the least chance of its
succeeding, as a furtherance to their object, would in the least repel
them. Some of the so-called statements in Leah's book I believe were
manufactured from beginning to end, though to tell you the truth I have
avoided reading the greater part of it because of the disgust I have felt
for a long time for that whole infamous system of pretense and falsehood.
"Well, we were led on unintentionally by my good mother in the
perpetration of this great wrong. She used to say when we were sitting in
a dark circle at home: 'Is this a disembodied spirit that has taken
possession of my dear children?' And then we would 'rap' just for the fun
of the thing, you know, and mother would declare that it was the spirits
that were speaking.
"Soon it went so far, and so many persons had heard the 'rappings' that we
could not confess the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part
of those we had deceived. So we went right on.
"It is wonderful, indeed, how two little children could have made this
discovery, and how, by simply obeying the natural thirst for the
marvelous, in others, and their inherent superstition, they should have
advanced step by step, in the fraud, deluding those who most ardently
wished to be deluded.
"Until first suggested to us by our mother, who was perfectly innocent in
her belief, the thought of 'spirits' had never entered our heads. We were
too young and too simple to imagine such a thing."