We Hear the Dead

by Dianne K. Salerni

  ***

  Morning came late for me. I awakened to Kate’s low voice, rich with excitement, urging me out of slumber. There were a few moments of disorientation when I opened my eyes, until I was able to identify my place on a trundle bed in Mrs. Redfield’s bedroom.

  “Maggie, wait until you see!” Kate was saying. “The whole town has come!”

  For a moment, I thought she was telling me that the entire town of Hydesville had come to punish the two of us for last night’s wickedness. Kate’s persistent grin seemed out of place. Finally I pushed myself upright, taking in the full daylight streaming in the windows and hearing the murmur of voices outside the glass. A dress was strewn across the foot of my bed, one of my own, taken from the trunk in my bedroom.

  Within a few minutes, I emerged fully dressed onto the front porch of Mrs. Redfield’s house. Blinking in the daylight, raising one hand to shield my eyes, I saw an amazing sight.

  A large crowd of people stood outside the house in which we lived, just across from the Redfields’. The front door of our house stood open, and people milled in and out as if it were a place of commerce. Several people took note when Kate and I appeared, and there came an excited murmur among the crowd. Men removed their hats and bowed to us. Ladies whispered to one another behind their hands, and a few of them inclined their heads in respectful greeting.

  All these people had come to see the house haunted by the ghost of a murdered man!

  Throughout the afternoon, our house was the site of a great commotion. Over and over, we heard our mother and Mrs. Redfield repeat the story of last night’s events to curious neighbors from all over Arcadia Township. To my vast amusement, the story grew in the telling of it! The more Mrs. Redfield and my mother talked, the more they believed their own words. Kate chimed in whenever they would allow her to speak, agreeing with everything they said, while I smiled behind my hand and Lizzie looked bewildered.

  There were many people who searched our house during the day, but of course there was nothing to find. No one seemed surprised by the lack of ghostly sounds in daylight, although everyone was anxious to see what would happen when night fell. There was talk of digging up the cellar to look for the peddler’s body, but without my father’s permission, nobody wanted to begin such an endeavor.

  My father, meanwhile, had left. He had gone to the building site of our new home, just as he had promised David the day before. We learned later that he said nothing to David about the night’s excitement, and my brother was ignorant of the events in town until he went home for the evening meal and found a house full of gossiping neighbors.

  When evening finally came, it was nearly impossible to find standing room in our miserable little house. People completely unknown to us had arrived by carriage and were pushing and jostling their way into our bedroom. This room, where Kate and I sat unnoticed on our little bed, was the best place to hear the knockings of the peddler’s ghost.

  Mr. Duesler at once took charge and asked most of the questions for the crowd. He repeated all of last night’s questions over again and received all the same answers—that a visitor to town was murdered by having his throat cut. Various committees were formed to go into the attic or the cellar to listen and look while the raps took place. No sounds could be heard in any room except this one bedroom, and eventually Mr. Duesler found out that the murder had taken place in this room!

  It was about this time that my brother, David, appeared, gently inserting his way through the curious onlookers. I wasn’t sure what David thought when he first heard the raps for himself. I admit that I was nervous. But eventually he suggested what others had been saying all along: they should get some picks and shovels and overturn the cellar floor. Nobody had wanted to do this without the approval of my father, or at least Mr. Hyde, but when David seemed willing to take charge, several men produced the desired digging tools.

  The crowd surged out of the bedroom and into the buttery, where the cellar stairs seemed likely to give way under the weight of spectators watching David, shirtsleeves rolled up, breaking up the dirt floor with a pickax. The fever of excitement was catching, and I found myself as anxious as anybody to hear what he found. Kate said calmly that she was sure David’s findings would satisfy everyone, and because I had no problem believing that there probably was a body in that horrid cellar, I had little fear of being found out.

  Mr. Duesler was distressed to lose his place as the center of attention. He was not quick enough to get a spot among the diggers, and so he returned to the bedroom to recommence his role as spirit questioner. In a moment’s inspiration, he offered to recite the alphabet, and if the spirit rapped at certain letters, he could spell out answers other than yes and no. By this process the name of Bell was spelled out again and again as the peddler named his killer.

  Mrs. Redfield, not to be outdone by Mr. Duesler, came forward at this point and cried, “Oh, you poor restless spirit! Is there not a heaven for you to attain?”

  The spirit rapped yes.

  At this, Mrs. Redfield’s eyes filled with tears, and she asked if her little child Mary Louisa were in heaven. Very quickly, the sympathetic spirit rapped yes.

  Instantly, a chorus of voices called out, asking after a legion of dead relatives and acquaintances. The spirit assured all present that every single one of their loved ones was in heaven with the Almighty.

  A great emotional outburst commenced, with women bursting out in tears as they wept for lost children and men blowing their noses into handkerchiefs as they remembered their dear old mothers. Thankfully, there came a great upheaval of men from the cellar at that point, and David appeared with his digging crew, their trousers damp and their shoes coated with mud.

  “We cannot excavate any further tonight,” my brother declared. “The holes fill up with water as fast as we can dig them. There’s a spring under this house, and it’s going to require a pump to do any kind of thorough search.”

  My mother inserted herself into the crowd and urged everyone to leave. “We can resume our contact with the spirit tomorrow evening, or rather Monday, as it would be unseemly to conduct this on the Sabbath,” she said.

  “Agreed,” Mr. Duesler concurred. “We can allow a reasonable number of people access to this room in order to communicate with the spirit. This constant crowd is a distraction to those of us trying to pose a serious inquiry into the affair.”

  “Here, Bill!” shouted out the voice of a man I did not know. “What gives you the authority to decide what questions to ask or who gets to listen to the ghost jaw on about how he was killed?”

  Mr. Duesler turned bright red and seemed quite speechless for a moment. Mrs. Redfield jumped in immediately. “If you have some doubt about what’s been happening here, Demosthenes Smith, then I will invite you to attend Monday night’s investigation yourself. I am sure Bill Duesler would be happy to stand down in his role, if you so desire. Wouldn’t you, Bill?”

  Mr. Duesler had no choice but to agree to allow someone else to ask the questions, although he looked unhappy about it.

  Slowly, the crowd began to disperse. David stayed for a while to speak to my parents. Father especially seemed unhappy with the idea of digging up the cellar and adamantly refused to allow any activity to take place the next day, on the Sabbath.

  For my part, I refused to be removed from my bed. Kate snuggled down beside me, and we did not allow any room for Lizzie Fish, who had to go home with Mrs. Redfield.

  The spirit was very quiet for the remainder of the night.

  Chapter Four

  Maggie

  One of the most amazing things about those strange days was that Kate and I were caught in the act more than once. Still, most people never believed we could be responsible for what they were hearing.

  The first person to accuse us was that loud-voiced man, Demosthenes Smith, who embarrassed Mr. Duesler on the night of April Fools’. He did not retu
rn on Monday, as suggested, but came later that week. By then we had grown accustomed to receiving a limited number of people in the bedroom at dark. My mother would shut the door to close out distractions, lighting only a small candle in the corner of the room “because the spirit preferred it that way.”

  Kate and I had become rather bold and, I daresay, overconfident about our own cleverness. Therefore, it was with a sense of shock and disbelief that I felt a great hand grasp my foot during the rapping. My leg was abruptly pulled out from beneath the covers and over my head.

  “I have the ghost!” shouted Mr. Smith. “I have the ghost!”

  Mother quickly reached for the candle and brought it around to light the area near my bed. There I was, exposed, certainly with a look of shock and fear on my face, while Mr. Smith held my foot triumphantly in his hand, his unpleasant face twisted with smugness.

  There was a long, long moment of silence in which I imagined being soundly thrashed with a rod by my father and shunned forevermore by all the good people in the town.

  Then my father’s low voice growled, in a tone of anger I had never heard before, “Mr. Smith, I will ask you to release my daughter at once.”

  It was only then that I realized how my dress had fallen away, baring my legs. The women in the room had all turned furious faces upon Mr. Smith, who suddenly seemed to realize the liberty he had just taken with a young girl. He dropped my foot and took a step backward. I scooted away from him to the head of the bed and pulled my dress down over my ankles.

  Talk of the town for the next two days was how Demosthenes Smith had presumed to lay hands on one of the Fox girls and how John Fox had run him out of the house. No one wanted to know why Mr. Smith thought my foot was the ghost.

  In fact, the ghost originated from four feet and a couple of knees. Kate had always been able to loudly crack her toes. With practice, I had learned to do so also, although not as reliably as Kate. For really loud raps, Kate popped her knee joints. When possible, I concealed two thin blocks of wood under my dress. Loosely holding them between my knees, I could bring them together for a sharp rap if nobody was closely observing me. This was the reason Kate and I so often drew the bed coverings over us during the rapping.

  The next person to guess our secret was the town doctor. It happened under particularly frightening circumstances, and I came close to confessing everything in that moment.

  Visitors continued to arrive at the house nightly. My mother never turned them away, even people unknown to us. Night after night, the murdered peddler answered questions about his own death and the heavenly disposition of every departed soul known to the questioners. In addition, David had brought a pump to try to reduce the water level in the holes he had dug in the cellar. The pump made a ghastly noise by day, and the spirit knocked long into the night. We were exhausted.

  Kate’s health had always been fragile. She was prone to severe headaches, which made her violently sick to her stomach and left her weak for days. One afternoon, after a bad spell of vomiting, she fell to the floor like a stone and became stiff and insensible. I screamed for help, and Mother and Lizzie came running. Mother cast me out the door, bidding me run for the doctor.

  Run I did. I banged loudly upon the door of Dr. Knowles. His daughter-in-law opened the door and, finding me frantic with worry, called for the doctor. I begged him to come attend my sister.

  We arrived back at the house within minutes, the doctor having taken pity on me and broken into a run beside me. We found Mother and Lizzie anxiously standing over the bed in which they had placed Kate, wringing their hands and alternately moaning and praying. Kate was still stretched out to her full length, with her feet extended and her head stretched back on her neck. As we watched, her limbs began to shake and twitch. A commotion of snapping and cracking sounds rang out from the bed, and to me it seemed obvious that they were coming from Kate.

  It was obvious to the doctor, too. He quickly surveyed the situation and said, “She is having a seizure. We must make certain she does not bite her tongue, or worse, swallow it.” Swiftly, he removed his belt and began to force it between her teeth.

  As quickly as it had come upon her, the fit ended. All her limbs relaxed and went limp. Her head rolled back to its normal position, and the sounds all stopped. She suddenly broke out in a sweat, and her eyes fluttered.

  “Kate!” I sobbed, climbing up on the bed beside her and putting my arms around her. She moaned and clutched at her head.

  The doctor sent Lizzie out of the room and drew Mother aside. He was a very hesitant and soft-spoken man. He had never come to our house to hear the spirit rapping, but he must have known what had been taking place six houses down from his own. He questioned Mother gently regarding Kate’s headaches and looked at the tonic that we usually gave her when she was ill.

  “This would be good for her to take now. It will relax her muscles and help her to sleep. I think…today’s seizure was perhaps a result…that is to say, the activities in which she has been engaged may have brought on too much excitement.” The doctor spoke in half sentences, looking over Mother’s shoulder at Kate on the bed. He seemed loath to say what was on his mind. As I listened, burying my face in Kate’s hair, I knew that he was about to give us away.

  Mother, meanwhile, asked if communicating with the spirit had made Kate fall ill.

  The doctor shook his head. “Too much excitement for a young girl…I can’t account for the noises, exactly…I mean, I haven’t heard them…unless you count today. I think…that is to say, I suggest that a manipulation of the joints or muscles of her fingers and toes…that could be a cause. I would suggest rest for her…away from all of these activities. This medicine has morphine in it. That should prevent…that is to say, make unlikely another seizure.”

  It was clear to me that the doctor had betrayed us. My guilty mind heard his accusation, and I waited all afternoon for my mother to confront me. My dread turned to bewilderment when she said nothing at all but sat down beside me to hold my hand and watch over Kate’s sleep. It was later that I realized that she had listened to the doctor and heard only what she wanted to hear.

  When my father returned home that afternoon, Mother informed him of the doctor’s opinion that the excitement of the spirit rapping had made Kate ill. She needed to be removed from the house and kept under the sedation of medication to prevent another fit.

  Far from being persuaded that her daughters were causing the rapping, Mother had now been convinced that the haunting was a danger to her children’s health. She moved us to David’s house immediately.

  The doctor never said another word about the noises he heard the day Kate had her fit. But Demosthenes Smith chuckled knowingly every time he passed me in town.

  Chapter Five

  Kate

  There is a history of second sight in my mother’s family. Great-Grandmother Rutan, for example, was a legend. She was known to rise from her sleep in the middle of the night and walk out of the house and down the road to the graveyard, following a funeral procession that only she could see.

  In the morning at the breakfast table, Great-Grandmother Rutan would tell her family all the details of the funeral: how many carriages had attended, who had led the procession, and how many mourners had been present. The family would listen sadly, because the visions that she saw always came true within a few weeks.

  My mother’s sister Elizabeth was also gifted with the sight. Sadly, she was burdened with a dream vision at the age of nineteen in which she saw her own gravestone. She knew that she would marry a man who had a name beginning with the letter H and die at the age of twenty-seven. True to her vision, my aunt married a man named Higgins and died at the foretold age.

  Maggie says that if she had been Aunt Elizabeth, she would have avoided all men whose names began with the dreaded letter and would not have moved from her bed for her entire twenty-seventh year of life. But Maggie doesn�
�t truly understand the gift, or she would know that such antics cannot stop a preordained future from happening.

  I grew up knowing that I would be the next family member to have the sight. Sometimes I had vivid dreams and knew that they were visions of the future, but upon waking, I would be unable to remember them. I believed that my headaches were a manifestation of my frustration to truly use my gift, and that if I could develop my power fully, the headaches would cease.

  It is true that the rapping started as a prank. But quickly I came to realize that the answers I rapped were coming from a source I could not identify. When Mary Redfield asked about her dead child, I felt the strangest sense that some small spirit was reaching out from beyond the veil of life, wishing to comfort this poor woman in her grief. And all of the other neighbors who flocked to me, asking after the loved ones who had passed on—they sensed this gift in me, that I could deliver messages from heaven and thus ease their pain.

  After my fit, when my mother dosed me thoroughly with the headache tonic, I heard the voices more clearly than ever. Perhaps that bout of illness was the breaking of a kind of barrier, allowing me to use my gift in a way that had thwarted me before. Although my mother removed us from that sad little house in Hydesville, I knew that my role in the rapping of messages from the spirit world had not come to an end.

  As for my sister Maggie—she says that she invented the murdered peddler on an impulse, to entertain me and frighten the neighbors with a good ghost tale. No one was more surprised than she was by what David found in the cellar.

  Sometimes people do not recognize their own gifts.

  Chapter Six

  Maggie

  The day after Mother moved us to David’s house, we received an unexpected visitor.

  “Yoo-hoo!” called the unmistakable voice of Mrs. Redfield. “Margaret Fox! Do tell me you are at home, because I have brought you an important visitor!”