The modern popular interest in seances, channeling, etc. may well have originated with Kate and Maggie Fox, two sisters who seemed able to summon and communicate with spirits.
The Fox sisters, who lived in the small rural town of Hydesville in upstate New York, were the nexus of a series of bizarre phenomena that started in the late winter of 1848, when loud raps were persistently heard throughout the Foxes' farmhouse. On March 31, 1848, events came to a head. The Haunted Museum provides a nice summary of that memorable night:
[The girls' father, John] Fox began his almost nightly ritual of investigating the house for the source of the sounds. The tapping had begun with the setting of the sun and although he searched the place, he was no closer to a solution. Then, Kate began to realize that whenever her father knocked on a wall or door frame, the same number of inexplicable knocks would come in reply. It was as if someone, or something, was trying to communicate with them.
Finding her nerve, Kate spoke up, addressing the unseen presence by the nickname that she and her sister had given it. "Here, Mr. Splitfoot," she called out, "do as I do!" She clapped her hands together two times and seconds later, two knocks came in reply, seemingly from inside of the wall. She followed this display by rapping on the table and the precise number of knocks came again from the presence. The activity caught the attention of the rest of the family and they entered the room with Kate and her father. Mrs. Fox tried asking aloud questions of fact, such as the ages of her daughters and the age of a Fox child who had earlier passed away. To her surprise, each reply eerily accurate.
Unsure of what to do, John Fox summoned several neighbors to the house to observe the phenomenon. Most of them came over very skeptical of what they were hearing from the Foxes, but were soon astounded to find their ages and various dates and years given in response to the questions they asked.
One neighbor, and a former tenant in the house, William Duesler, decided to try and communicate with the source of the sounds in a more scientific manner. He asked repeated questions and was able to create a form of alphabet using a series of knocks. He also was able to determine the number of knocks that could be interpreted as "yes" and "no". In such a manner, he was able to determine the subject of the disturbances. The answer came, not in private, but before an assembled group of witnesses, that the presence in the house was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and robbed years before.
Later some skull fragments were recovered from the cellar, suggesting that possibly someone had been buried there. Many years after the fact, part of the basement wall collapsed, and more skeletal remains were discovered. But if the remains were indeed those of a murder victim, he was never identified. The name given by the raps, Charles B. Rosma, was widely publicized but never verified as belonging to any actual person.
In any event, Kate and Maggie, along with their older sister Leah, became celebrities of a sort, and embarked on a career as professional mediums. Their story is well told in a recent book, Barbara Weisberg's Talking to the Dead, and is neatly summarized by Troy Taylor of the Haunted Museum in two parts (part one and part two).
Along the way, Kate and Maggie fell on hard times, became alcoholics, and eventually recanted their claims of psychic powers, saying that their act was fraudulent. Still later, they withdrew their confessions and said they had been pressured into admitting to fraud in exchange for monetary compensation. The affair is still controversial.
To me, the most remarkable thing about the Fox sisters is the claim made by some skeptics then and now, and by Maggie herself in her public confession. This claim was that the girls produced the raps by cracking the joints of their toes.
As a side note, I remember reading a skeptical explanation of the table raps made at many seances (possibly in M. Lamar Keene's The Psychic Mafia, though offhand I'm not sure). The explanation was that a fraudulent medium can simply press his thumbnails together and make a loud clicking noise, which, supposedly, will sound just like a hard rap. Maybe Shakespeare had this sort of thing in mind when he had one of Macbeth's witches say, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
Now, maybe I'm missing something here, but I have always found these claims a bit hard to understand. I have tried clicking and pricking my thumbs, and all I can produce is a soft clickety-click that is nothing at all like a rap. As for cracking one's joints - well, I can't crack my toes, but I can crack my knuckles, and again the noises produced do not strike me as even vaguely similar to raps.
It's worth pointing out that numerous witnesses attested to the volume of the raps produced in the Fox sisters' presence. These were not soft clicks or pops. They were reportedly loud, dramatic sounds that in some cases actually caused the walls and floors to vibrate. Arthur Conan Doyle covers this aspect of the case in his comprehensive History of Spiritualism, which can be read online in its entirety (Volume One and Volume Two). Here is a typical account, drawn from Vol. I, Ch. 5:
Miss Rosamund Dale Owen also refers to the incident of the medium [Kate Fox] standing in the street at a shop window with two ladies, when raps joined in the conversation, the pavement vibrating under their feet. The raps are described as having been loud enough to attract the attention of passers by.
Many such reports were issued, some anecdotal, others the product of serious research. Witnesses consistently claimed, over a period of decades, that the noises were sometimes so loud as to reverberate through the room. Even when Maggie demonstrated her alleged toe-cracking technique to a sold-out auditorium, the noises produced could be heard clearly throughout the spacious hall.
Some people say the girls used a loose wooden board, such as a loose floorboard in the Hydesville farmhouse, to amplify the toe-hoint crackssounds. But it is hard to see how any such trick could produce the loud, sometimes thunderous raps reported by so many witnesses. Besides, the raps occurred even when the sisters were outdoors - for instance, standing on the sidewalk, as in Doyle's example above.
Furthermore, the sounds were often perceived to come from various locations far away from the girls. Skeptics say vaguely that the girls used "ventriloquism" to pull this off.
There is also the additional fact that the raps often gave correct answers to questions that the girls probably could not have answered on their own. In some cases the raps reportedly answered purely mental questions posed by witnesses - questions, in other words, that the witnesses never asked aloud.
Assessing the case, Doyle posits a hypothesis that may deserve consideration. He suggests that the girls' feet - or toes - may well have played a role in the phenomena, but not such a simple role as the skeptics insist. He imagines that a physical medium must have "a centre of psychic force ... in some part of the body."
Supposing that centre to be in Margaret's foot, it would throw a very clear light upon the evidence collected in the Seybert inquiry [a medical investigation]. In examining Margaret and endeavouring to get raps from her, one of the committee, with the permission of the medium, placed his hand upon her foot. Raps at once followed. The investigator cried: "This is the most wonderful thing of all, Mrs. Kane. I distinctly feel them in your foot. There is not a particle of motion in your foot, but there is an unusual pulsation."
This experiment by no means bears out the idea of joint dislocation or snapping toes. It is, however, exactly what one could imagine in the case of a centre from which psychic power was projected. This power is in material shape and is drawn from the body of the medium, so that there must be some nexus. This nexus may vary. In the case quoted it was in Margaret's foot....
It is to be remembered that no one is more ignorant of how effects are produced than the medium, who is the centre of them.... Thus in the case of these Fox sisters, who were mere children when the phenomena began, they knew little of the philosophy of the subject, and Margaret frequently said that she did not understand her own results. If she found that she had herself some power of producing the raps, however obscure the way by which she did it, she would be in a frame of mind when she might well find it impossible to contradict [a skeptic] when he accused her of being concerned in it. Her confession, too, and that of her sister, would to that extent be true, but each would be aware, as they afterwards admitted, that there was a great deal more which could not be explained and which did not emanate from themselves.
I understand that skeptics will be content with the toe-cracking theory, especially since Maggie herself espoused it (despite her later retraction). But I would like to see someone with such snap-crackle-popping joints reproduce the effects that the Fox sisters obtained. I'd like to see someone, simply by cracking his fingers or toes, produce loud bangs and accompanying vibrations, indoors and outdoors, spontaneously and on demand, with the noises apparently occurring at a variety of distances. I'd like to see this person use these raps to correctly answer personal questions from strangers, and even to answer unvoiced questions. And I'd like to see this subterfuge carried out so expertly that it would fool hundreds of witnesses, including skeptical scientists and journalists, over a period of decades.
Maybe it can be done. Personally, however, I'm of the mind that the toe-joint hypthesis isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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