Knocking on the doors of the world of the dead
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Donna Marchetti
Special to The Plain Dealer
In the mid-1800s, it seemed that western New York was ready for anything that challenged the status quo: abolition, women's rights, utopianism and other social and political innovations.
It might not be surprising then that this area gave rise to spiritualism, or the belief that it is possible for the living to communicate with the dead.
Barbara Weisberg's well-researched "Talking to the Dead" follows the lives of Maggie and Kate Fox, the two young women responsible for the genesis of spiritualism. It also provides an insightful look at the social climate of the 19th century.
Spiritualism, a term later coined by journalist and political leader Horace Greeley, began in 1848 in Hydesville, a small farming community in western New York. The Fox family reported hearing mysterious raps and knocks in their home nearly every evening.
The sounds, they determined, were made by the spirit of a man who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar. Eleven-year-old Kate and 14-year-old Maggie seemed to have a special ability to communicate with the spirit, which responded to questions by knocking in a kind of code set forth by the girls.
Over the following four decades, Maggie, Kate and to some extent their older sister Leah spread the concept of spiritualism around the globe, traveling and conducting seances in which they called up the spirits of the dead.
The movement was phenomenally successful, perhaps because it offered solace to the bereaved.
Spiritualism was not without controversy. Some claimed it was the work of the devil or simply well-disguised trickery. A century after their deaths, the Fox sisters' claims of spirit communication still have not been proved or disproved, and Weisberg does not attempt to do it here.
She admits to a certain fondness for the women - "I enjoy the mediums too much to be critical of them" - despite the possibility that they might have duped thousands of gullible people.
On the other hand, there's the possibility that they weren't lying. In 1904, a group of children in Hydesville discovered a skeleton in the cellar of the house where the Foxes had lived. A doctor determined that the corpse was about 50 years old.
The mystery might never be solved. But it makes for fascinating reading.
