Through a Glass, Darkly

by Stefan Bechtel

  A nineteen-year-old housekeeper named Jane Lape, who lived with the Weekmans for a time, reported an even creepier experience. “One day about two o’clock, P.M., while I was doing my work in the kitchen, I saw a man in the bedroom adjoining the kitchen. I was much frightened. I had been in the kitchen some time, at work, and knew no one had gone into that room.… The man stood facing me when I saw him. He did not speak.… He had on gray pants, black frock-coat, and black cap.… I knew of no person in that vicinity who wore a similar dress.… I was very much frightened, and left the room, and when I returned with Mrs. Weekman there was no one there. She thought it was some one who had been trying to frighten me; but we were never able to ascertain who or what it was.”

  As it happened, Lewis’s printer was in Rochester; he was a friend of someone who knew Maggie and Kate’s much older sister, Leah. (Leah had been twice widowed already; she made a living as a piano teacher.) Leah had not heard anything about the goings-on at her parents’ house until the printer showed up at her door and unveiled the proof sheets of his pamphlet A Report of the Mysterious Noises. Leah read them and cried. Within hours, she and her daughter Lizzie and two friends were on an Erie Canal packet boat to Hydesville.

  When she arrived at her parents’ forlorn little saltbox on the corner, she was alarmed to find the house empty, the front door locked, the windows shuttered. She ordered the driver to take her to her brother David’s farm, where she found the frightened family. Her mother sat in one of the front rooms, grimly clutching her Bible. She seemed, Leah later wrote, “completely broken down by the recent events … her sighs and tears were heart-rending.… She wished we all could die.”

  After a few days at David’s house, Leah and her daughter Lizzie took Kate with them to Rochester to escape the growing clamor, excitement, fear, suspicion, ridicule, and rage caused by the happenings in the Hydesville house.

  But within a matter of hours, something strange happened at the house in Rochester.

  The rappings began again.

  * * *

  LEAH, LIZZIE, and Kate arrived in Rochester about 5:00 p.m. on a warm spring afternoon. Here, at Leah’s pleasant rented home on Mechanic’s Square, “the sun shone brightly, and the birds sang sweetly in the trees,” Leah recalled in her 1885 memoir, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism. “Roses were just out, and all nature was in her loveliest hues.”

  Leah sat down on a sofa to savor the serenity and stillness of home. The girls had wandered out into the sunny garden. Unpacking could wait until later. Hopefully, she could simply return to quietly giving piano lessons as she had been before all this happened. Then “all at once came a dreadful sound, as if a pail of bonnyclabber had been poured from the ceiling and fallen upon the floor.” (Bonnyclabber, or spoiled, curdled milk, made a glopping sound not unlike thick, coagulating blood.) The noise was repeated three times. “Oh, that dreadful sound!” Leah cried. “What is it? What is it?” At the same time, there was a tremendous crash, which jarred the windows and the whole house, “as if a heavy piece of artillery had been discharged in the immediate vicinity.”

  The noises had followed them to Rochester!

  This wasn’t about one haunted farmhouse anymore—or the supposed tricks of two sisters, now miles apart. As Conan Doyle noted in his History, “The whole course of the movement had now widened and taken a more important turn.”

  That was no comfort to Leah and the girls, who spent a sleepless, terror-stricken night. No sooner had Leah blown out the candle than Lizzie screamed: A cold hand had passed over her face, and another crept down her back. A box of matches was shaken in their faces. The Bible flew out from under Leah’s pillow, “where I had placed it,” Leah recalled, “supposing that the sacred volume would be respected.” The noises lasted most of the night, and “we gave up in despair to our fate, whatever that might be.”

  Their fate was more uproar, night after night.

  Leah concluded that her house was now haunted, just as the house in Hydesville had been, and she decided to move out as soon as she could find another place to rent. Fortunately, she found one in a day or two—a small, brand-new house on Prospect Street. But “I was particular to tell the agent that I wanted a house in which no crime was committed.… The agent smiled and said he ‘thought that I would have no difficulty on that account.’”

  Leah, Lizzie, and Kate moved in, and for the first night all was well. Leah had by now written to her mother, who had remained with her brother, David, at his farm in Arcadia, to tell her about the eerie occurrences. The next day her worried mother, with Maggie in tow, arrived in Rochester. Leah was pleased to tell her that they’d all slept well the night before in the new house.

  But that night, at around midnight, everyone woke up to heavy footsteps thumping up the stairs. Then they heard the sounds of “shuffling, giggling and whispering, as if [the spirits] were enjoying themselves at some surprise they were about to give us.” Moments later, according to Leah’s account, their beds were lifted up almost to the ceiling and allowed to drop with a crash. Afterward, they felt themselves being patted with little hands. Finally, things quieted down, and they eventually fell asleep and slept until late the following morning. But when they woke, with sunlight flooding in the eastern windows, Mrs. Fox was distraught.

  “Can it be possible?” she exclaimed. “Is it really true? How can we live and endure it?”

  On that Sunday night, just before bed, there was a “tremendous knocking on the roof.” Leah begged for the “spirits” to stop, to leave them alone. Then Kate felt a slap across her face. All of them saw “what seemed to be the form of a large man, lying across the foot of our bed, breathing irregularly and apparently in great distress.” Just then Kate got another sharp slap across the face and sprawled across the bed, having been knocked unconscious. A mirror held close to Kate’s mouth could detect no breath at all. Eventually, Kate began to moan piteously and wakened. But by then, everyone in the room was thoroughly terrified by what was happening.

  Night after night, some fresh hell awaited them. Their winter provisions—apples, potatoes, turnips—in the cellar once sailed up three flights of stairs to strike them while they slept. Balls of carpet rags came out of locked chests to pelt them. Fence pickets flew through open windows. Mrs. Fox, disconsolate, would get down on her knees and pray. “What have we done? What have we done, that we should be so tormented? Dear children, pray to God to have mercy upon us!”

  “I can’t pray,” Kate said, irritably. “I feel more like swearing!”

  The family decided to keep these goings-on “a profound secret,” telling no one except their closest friends about what was occurring in the house. They even drew the shades during the day, to keep neighbors from peering in.

  However, Leah confided in her close Quaker friends, Amy and Isaac Post, who listened closely to her story but concluded that the family was “suffering under some psychological delusion,” according to Leah. Then Leah invited them to come to the house at night to see and hear for themselves. Once the Posts witnessed the manifestations, they “began to think we were not so entirely deluded as they had supposed.” Then they went home … and were alarmed to hear the mysterious rapping there, too. The Posts brought friends to witness the phenomena, and the secret got out.

  One day, the family was visited by a grim Methodist minister who proposed an exorcism. He told the family in no uncertain terms that the “ghosts” were the demonic “familiar spirits” of the Bible, which Scripture warns against trifling with. The family gladly allowed the minister to make the attempt. “He walked around the room, used certain formulae supposed to be potently orthodox for the casting out of unclean spirits; but, to his astonishment, all his mummery availed nothing, and the spirits did not obey his commands,” according to an 1855 account of these events by Eliab Wilkinson Capron called Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions. “He was much disappointed at the failure of his power over unseen intelligences.”
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  Several nights later, Leah, her mother, and the girls lingered at the table after supper. It had been a long, tiring day, but the house had been unusually quiet lately. Perhaps things were returning to normal. Perhaps peace was finally returning to their lives. Perhaps they’d all be able to sleep through the night.

  Then, one by one, they began exchanging glances. No one moved. In the empty parlor next to the dining room, the piano had begun sounding a doleful bass note, over and over—a death knell. They all sat there, dumbstruck, listening, until the doorbell rang. It was Isaac and Amy Post, whom Leah invited inside. She took them into the parlor, and they all stood there listening to the impossible tolling on the piano. Then Leah walked over and closed the lid, locked it, and put the key in her pocket. But the death knell continued without interruption.

  Hours passed. Sleep was out of the question. They milled about the house, dreading what this latest manifestation could possibly mean, as the death dirge rang out of the locked piano without ceasing. It was about one o’clock in the morning when they heard a wagon pulling up to the side gate.

  “Whoa!”a familiar voice yelled to the horses.

  It was Stephen, Leah’s sister Maria’s husband. Mrs. Fox rushed to the door.

  “Oh, Stephen, who is dead?” she cried. “We have had a terrible warning of death, all night.”

  “I’ve come to take you back with me,” Stephen told her. “David’s little Ella is deathly sick.”

  Stephen fed his horses, came into the house and ate something, talked a short while, and then before first light left for Arcadia with Mrs. Fox and Maggie. When they arrived at David’s farm, little Ella was still alive but failing fast.

  Later that day, the small child died.

  The piano finally fell silent.

  * * *

  IN HER memoir, Leah took pains to emphasize that despite the later accusations of skeptics—who suspected it was all a fabrication dreamed up to make money or become famous—neither she, her sisters, her mother, nor anyone else in the family welcomed what was going on.

  “The general feeling of our family, of all of us … was strongly averse to all this strange and uncanny thing,” she wrote. “We regarded it as a great misfortune, as it was an affliction, which had fallen upon us; how, whence or why, we knew not.” The general opinion in the neighborhood was, These spirits are evil. When a new neighbor moved in next door, he became enraged by the noises and obtained a warrant to have Leah and her family removed from their house. Leah’s friends, including Amy and Isaac Post, rallied to her aid, and by September 1849 the family had moved yet again, this time to a “pleasant little cottage” on Troup Street.

  Meanwhile, the fair-minded Isaac Post had grown increasingly interested in simply taking a sober, scientific view of the manifestations—outside religious zealotry, fear, scorn, or ridicule—with an eye toward determining, if possible, what these apparent presences were and what they might be trying to communicate, if anything. Now he had an idea that might help. He reminded Leah that her brother, David, conversed with the Hydesville spirits by using the alphabet—a painfully slow process of reciting the alphabet aloud until the spirit rapped at the correct letter and in this way spelling out a message.

  “Perhaps they will explain what is wanted, if thou will call the alphabet,” Isaac suggested.

  So Leah tried it.

  “Do you want to say something to us?” she asked, arms outstretched in the air. Immediately, there came a furious staccato of raps. Then she began calling out the alphabet, letter by letter, waiting for a rap to indicate which letter was chosen. These raps spelled out the first message from the “spirits” in Rochester:

  Dear friends, you must proclaim these truths to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must try not to conceal it any longer. When you do your duty, God will protect you; and good Spirits will watch over you.

  Now, by means of tediously spelled-out letters and words, “the spirits” began transmitting direct messages, sometimes claiming to come from deceased loved ones. One came through, allegedly from Leah, Kate, and Maggie’s beloved grandfather, which greatly moved them all:

  MY DEAR CHILDREN:—The time will come when you will understand and appreciate this great dispensation. You must permit your good friends to meet with you and hold communion with their friends in heaven.

  I am your grandfather,

  JACOB SMITH.

  News of this development—that it might now be possible to communicate directly with the guiding spirits who had appeared in the Fox household, or even communicate with deceased loved ones—swept through the town like the rising wind that presages a coming storm.

  “Isaac Post’s store was beset, from morning until night, with inquirers who were anxious to visit us,” Leah wrote. The family had to set up a committee of five people to screen the onslaught of requests. Many of the inquiries, it turned out, were silly or scurrilous: People wanted to know how to get rich, which stocks or lottery numbers to pick, how to win a suitor, how to get revenge or get rid of a spouse. These requests were always spurned by the spirits, who “seemed delighted to lead us on, and deceive the visitors who sought them in such a spirit.”

  But many visitors were grieving for those they had lost and longed to make contact across the veil of death, if such a thing were now possible. Though Leah’s only income came from piano lessons, she had to give up teaching to serve the crowds of supplicants who appeared at the door. But she refused to accept any money for her spiritual services, feeling that it would be degrading to do so. She continued this practice for more than two years, until her financial situation became so desperate she was forced to charge people a fee for their visits.

  As 1848 turned into 1849, the “spirits” began to lay out a plan for reaching a wider audience with their message of immortality. “It was constantly repeated to us that we had ‘a mission to perform,’” Leah wrote. “The Spirits said, ‘You have been chosen to go before the world to convince the skeptical of the greater truth of immortality.’” The Fox ladies wanted no part of this; they told the spirits they’d already done more than enough. But the spirits were getting pushy. One morning the family awoke to find four coffins drawn on the kitchen floor. The family washed off the drawings. The next morning the coffins reappeared on the kitchen ceiling. Next they appeared in the dining room, in exquisite detail—right down to the nameplates with the names and ages of the mother and three daughters, and a note: “If you do not go forth and do your duty you will soon be laid in your coffins.”

  Mrs. Fox was not intimidated. She left to join her husband in their newly built house in Arcadia. Kate was in Auburn, New York, staying with the family of Eliab Capron. As for Leah, her music pupils had abandoned her, and she asked the spirits, rather pointedly, “How can we live so?” So the spirits made a formal good-bye and shut off all communication for twelve days.

  On that twelfth day, Eliab Capron and George Willets came calling. They were met at the door by Leah and Maggie, who were morose at the departure of the spirits. Stepping into the hallway, the men responded, “Perhaps they will rap for us, if not for you.” And so they did. “Joyous sounds, all over the hall,” wrote Leah. Yes, yes, very nice, but the spirits quickly got down to business: They wanted a big demonstration, in the biggest venue in Rochester—Corinthian Hall—and the people who would officiate were none other than Eliab Capron and George Willets.

  “This proposition was met with an absolute refusal,” wrote Capron in his 1855 recollection. They feared the ridicule that would be heaped upon them if they did so. So the spirits relented and suggested that meetings first be held in private homes. (These meetings gradually evolved into what were essentially séances, with seekers seated in a circle awaiting rapped answers to questions.) The spirits even gave very specific directions; they told Amy Post, for example, to invite sixteen persons to a Saturday night séance to hear rappings; they provided the guest list and a template for the invitation.

  As for the climax, the de
monstration in Corinthian Hall: The spirits said they would produce rapping sounds, then a five-member committee of investigation was to be appointed, whose members would be selected by the audience. The committee would then spend the next day conducting a rigorous inquiry, as a “step towards laying the whole matter before the world in a way that should either settle its falsity or establish its truth.” Then the committee would report its findings at the beginning of a second meeting the following night.

  Notices were published in the Rochester newspapers of the first meeting, scheduled for the evening of November 14, 1849, at 7:00. Tickets were twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the Rochester Daily Advertiser announced that “the citizens of Rochester will have an opportunity of hearing a full explanation of the nature and history of the ‘MYSTERIOUS NOISES,’ supposed to be super natural, which have caused so much excitement in this city.”

  That night, a restless, excited crowd of more than four hundred showed up at the hall. One newspaper reported that the crowd was “in the best possible humor,” anticipating an evening of entertainment and the exposure of an absurd fraud. Because by now the finger of suspicion had repeatedly pointed at Leah and Maggie, the girls took their seats on the stage, perched nervously in front of ornate Corinthian columns and a red damask curtain. It was the first time many in the audience had gotten a look at Margaretta Fox, who by now was sixteen. A reporter for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune swooned: “She is a very interesting and lovely young lady … [with] large dark Madonna eyes, a sweet expressive mouth, a petite and delicately moulded form and a regal carriage of the head, with an aristocratic air quite uncommon.”