by Colin Wilson
The Foxes summoned in about fourteen neighbours. One of these was a man called William Duesler, who assured his own wife that the whole thing was ridiculous and that there could be nothing mysterious about the noises. When he got there, some of the neighbours were too nervous to go into the bedroom, but Duesler was not worried. He went and sat on the bed, and was astonished when Mrs Fox’s questions were answered with a rapping noise that made the bed vibrate. (Later writers were to insist that the two children made all the noises by cracking their joints; but it is hard to see how the cracking of joints could make the house shake and cause a bed to vibrate.)
Duesler took up the questioning of the ‘spirit’. By a code of knocks, he established that the entity was a man who had been murdered in the house, a pedlar named Charles B. Rosma, who had been attacked for the $500 he carried. The murder had taken place five years earlier, and had been committed by the man who was then the tenant of the house, a Mr Bell. A maid named Lucretia Pulver later confirmed that a pedlar had spent the night in the house, and that she had been sent home; when she returned the next day, the pedlar had gone.
As news of these amazing occurrences spread throughout the community, hundreds of people came to the house. On Sunday 2 April, Duesler learned from the murdered man that his body had been buried in the cellar. This seemed to offer a method of verification, and James Fox and his neighbours took shovels to the cellar — which had an earth floor — and proceeded to dig. At a depth of three feet they encountered water, and abandoned the attempt. But in July, when the water had gone down, they dug again, and at a depth of five feet found a plank; underneath this, in quicklime, there was some human hair and a few bones.
Mr Bell, on being heard that he had been accused of murder by a ghost, indignantly denied it, and produced a testimonial to his good character from his new neighbours in Lyon, New York. The spirit had already prophesied that the murderer would never be brought to justice.
In his account of the case in Modern Spiritualism, the sceptical Frank Podmore comments: ‘No corroborative evidence of the supposed murder, or even of the existence of the man supposed to have been murdered, was ever obtained.’ This was written in 1902. Two years later, in November 1904, a wall in the cellar of the Fox house collapsed, revealing another wall behind it. Digging between the two walls uncovered a skeleton and a pedlar’s tin box. It looked as if someone had dug up the body from its original grave and interred it next to the wall, then built another wall to confuse searchers.
In those days immediately after the first manifestations, a committee was set up to collect the statements of witnesses. Not all the investigators were convinced that the sounds had a supernatural origin; but no one suggested that the Fox family could be responsible. With the family all together in the same room, it was obviously impossible that either the parents or the children could be causing the bangs.
What everyone soon noticed was that nothing happened unless the children were in the house — particularly Kate. A committee of sceptical Rochester citizens came to the house to investigate; they agreed that Margaret was certainly not responsible. A second, a third investigation produced the same result. The children were stripped and searched to see if they had some mechanical device for producing the sounds; there was nothing. They were made to stand on pillows with their ankles tied; still the raps occurred.
The children were separated; Kate was sent to stay with her elder sister Leah in Rochester, and Margaretta with her brother David in Auburn. The ‘spirits’ followed them both. Rapping noises were heard, and people felt themselves touched by invisible hands. In Leah’s house, a lodger called Calvin Brown took a mildly satirical attitude towards the spirit, and it began to persecute him, throwing things at him. Mrs Fox’s cap was pulled off and the comb pulled out of her hair. When members of the family knelt to pray, pins were jabbed into them. In brother David’s boarding house, similar things were happening. It was clear that the murdered pedlar was not responsible for all this — he was back in the Hydeville house, making terrifying gurgling noises and sounds like a body being dragged across the floor. Mrs Fox’s hair turned white. One spirit who communicated with Kate claimed to be a dead relative named Jacob Smith. Sister Leah Fish discovered that she could also communicate with the spirits, and began producing messages. One sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Bebee, who visited the house in Auburn and witnessed the rapping noises, returned to her home twenty miles away and found that the noises had followed her.
The Fox family moved to Rochester, but the manifestations continued. Sometimes the bangs were so loud that they could be heard miles away. Poltergeists had apparently taken over from the original ‘injured spirit’. One day, a visitor named Isaac Post started asking the spirit questions, and was answered by a thunderous barrage of knocks. Then, by means of an alphabetical code, the ‘spirit’ spelled out a message: ‘Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must not try to conceal it any longer. God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you.’ And now began a series of manifestations that were to become typical of ‘Spiritualism’.* Tables moved and rapped with their legs; musical instruments were played by unseen fingers, objects moved round the room. The ‘spirits’ intimated that they would prefer to manifest themselves in the dark — which confirmed the sceptics in their opinion. But other believers decided it was time to put the ‘spirit’ ’s injunction into operation and ‘proclaim this truth to the world’. On 14 November 1849, the first Spiritualist meeting took place in the Corinthian hall in Rochester.
In his account of the haunting of Willington Mill, the local historian, M. A. Richardson, had remarked:
Were we to draw an inference from the number of cases of reported visitations from the invisible world that have been made public of late, we might be led to imagine that the days of supernatural agency were about to recommence, and that ghosts and hobgoblins were about to resume their sway over the fears of mankind.
For 1840, that was a remarkably perceptive observation. Whether it was merely due to improved communications and the increase in the number of newspapers, it does seem clear that there was an apparent increase in ghostly manifestations at about this period. In retrospect, it looks oddly as if the ‘spirits’ had decided that the time had come to make themselves noticed. Of course, there had been such manifestations for centuries — the Elizabethan astrologer Dr John Dee devoted a large book to an account of his communications with spirits through the agency of a ‘scryer’ (or, as they later came to be called, medium) called Edward Kelley. Cases like the Epworth poltergeist, the Stockwell poltergeist (described by Mrs Crowe), the Cock Lane ghost and the phantom drummer of Tedworth* had aroused widespread excitement and been the subject of contemporary pamphlets. In 1847, a young American shoemaker named Andrew Jackson Davis was placed under hypnosis and wrote an extraordinary and erudite work called The Principles of Nature which subsequently became a literary sensation. In this remarkable book, Davis prophesies that ‘the truth about spirits will ‘ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration, and the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened’. Within four years of its publication, Spiritualism had spread across America and was sweeping Europe.
For whatever reason, the Fox sisters began a Spiritualist explosion. People discovered that all they had to do was to sit in a darkened room, preferably with a ‘medium’ present — someone who had already established a communication with the spirits — and the manifestations would usually follow immediately. No apparatus was required, except possibly a few musical instruments. In the Rochester area, more than a hundred ‘mediums’ appeared in the year 1850. In Buffalo, New York, two brothers and a sister named Davenport attended a seance at which the Fox sisters produced their manifestations, and decided to try it themselves — in fact, inexplicable raps and bangs had sounded in their home in the year 1846, two years before the Hydesville manifestations. When Ira, Wi
lliam and Elizabeth Davenport sat in a darkened room, with their hands on a tabletop, the table began to move, raps were heard all over the room, and when Ira picked up a pencil his hand began to write automatically. A few nights later, with witnesses present, all three children were seen to levitate into the air. At their fifth ‘seance’, Ira was instructed — by means of raps — to fire a pistol in the corner of the room. As it exploded, it was taken from his hand, and by the light of the flash, a figure of a man was seen holding it. He vanished a moment later, and the pistol fell to the floor. The man introduced himself — through the code of raps — as John King; he was one of the first examples of a ‘control’ (or master of ceremonies), who acted as intermediary between the medium and the ‘spirits’. ‘John King’ was soon taking over the brothers directly and speaking through their mouths. The Davenport brothers went on to become even more famous than the Fox sisters.
In Dover, Ohio, a well-to-do farmer named Jonathan Koons discovered his own talents as a medium by sitting in a dark room and going into a trance. The ‘spirits’ who spoke through him told him that all his eight children were gifted mediums. They instructed him to build a special house made of logs, sixteen feet by twelve, to be used exclusively for spiritualist activities. There were large numbers of musical instruments — drums, triangles, tambourines, a banjo, an accordion, a harp, a guitar, and so on. The room was dimly lighted by sheets of wet paper smeared with phosphorus. When the mediums — usually Koons and his eighteen-year-old son Nahum — were seated at a small table — with the audience on benches — Koons would play the violin, and the spirits would soon join in, producing the effect of a full orchestra. Witnesses also speak of a heavenly choir joining in. The racket was impressive, and could be heard a mile away. A voice would then deliver a homily, using a speaking trumpet, which floated in the air. A spirit hand floated round the room, touching people and shaking their hands. People came from all over the county to witness these marvels, and the spirits impressed everyone by producing information about strangers that none of the audience could have known.
This was, in fact, one of the most convincing things about the ‘spirits’; they seemed to have access to all kinds of information. In Boston, the wife of a newspaper editor, Mrs W. R. Hayden, startled the wife of the English mathematician, Augustus de Morgan, by giving her detailed messages from dead friends about whom she could not possibly have known. The result was that Mrs de Morgan invited her to England, where she held seances under ‘test conditions’ in the de Morgans’ home. She was loudly ridiculed by the English newspapers, who were convinced that this latest American craze must be based on fraud and deception (which the British were too sensible to swallow), but she convinced most of those who actually saw her. And respectable members of the British middle classes who tried ‘table-turning’ to while away the long evenings were amazed to discover that it actually worked. One journalist wrote a few years later: ‘In those days you were invited to “Tea and Table Moving” as a new excitement, and made to revolve with the family like mad round articles of furniture.’ Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert tried it at Osborne, and the table moved so convincingly that the queen had no doubt whatever that no trickery was involved — she decided that the answer must lie in some form of electricity or magnetism.
The French were more than prepared to adopt this new form of entertainment, for half a century of controversy about Mesmer — who had taught that healing, clairvoyance and other such mysteries were due to a mysterious force called ‘Animal Magnetism’ — had accustomed them to strange phenomena; by 1851, table-turning had become the latest craze. And the spirits soon made a highly influential convert. He was a fifty-year-old educationalist named Denizard-Hyppolyte-Leon Rivail, who was to become famous under the name Allan Kardec. Rivail had been a pupil of the celebrated educator Pestalozzi, and he had opened his own school at the age of twenty-four. He had written popular books on arithmetic, grammar, spelling, how to calculate in your head, and educational reform, and given immensely successful courses of free lectures on astronomy, chemistry, physics and anatomy. He was also an enthusiastic student of phrenology and Animal Magnetism.
It was in May 1855 that Rivail attended a hypnotic session with a certain Madame Roger, who was placed in a trance by her ‘magnetiser’, M. Fortier, and was able to read minds and perform other puzzling feats. There Rivail met a certain Madame Plainemaison, who told him that even stranger phenomena were taking place regularly at her house in the rue Grange-Bateliere. Rivail agreed to go, and was amazed by what he saw. The tables did more than merely ‘turn’; they also jumped and ran about the room. The disciple of Mesmer felt that these phenomena challenged the powers of reason to which he had devoted his life, and he determined to try to get to the bottom of it. At Madame Plainemaison’s, he met a man named Baudin, who told him that his two daughters practised automatic writing. The young ladies seem to have discovered their powers accidentally, in the course of entertaining their friends with table-turning; they were, says one commentator, ‘of a worldly and frivolous disposition’. This did not deter the serious-minded Rivail, who proceeded to ask the table major philosophical questions. Asked if mankind would ever understand the first principles of the universe, it replied, ‘No. There are things that cannot be understood by man in this world.’ When Rivail asked if matter had always existed, the table replied (perhaps a trifle wearily) ‘God only knows.’
It was obvious to Rivail that the entities who were communicating were genuine spirits, not the unconscious minds of the young ladies. (Even in those days, the concept of the unconscious was accepted.) In fact, the communicators identified themselves as ‘spirits of genii’, and said that some of them (but not all) had been the spirits of those who had been alive on earth.
With excitement, Rivail realised that this material had an impressive inner-consistency, and that the total pattern revealed a philosophical scheme that embraced the whole universe. Other friends who had been collecting ‘automatic scripts’ — including the playwright Sardou — handed over their own material to Rivail — more than fifty notebooks. And Rivail was told to bring all this material together into a book, which should be called The Spirits’ Book. The spirits even gave Rivail the pseudonym under which he should publish the work: Allan Kardec; both of these names — according to the spirits — were names he had borne in previous incarnations. When it appeared in 1856, The Spirits’ Book achieved instant celebrity, and swiftly became a classic of Spiritualism (or Spiritism, as Kardec preferred to call it).
The message of The Spirits’ Book is easily summarised. Man is a fourfold being, made up of body, ‘vital principle’ (aura), intelligent soul and spiritual soul — the divisions we have already encountered in the Seeress of Prevorst and in Steiner. Spirits are intelligent beings, who constitute the ‘population of the universe’. Man is a spirit enclosed in a physical body. The destiny of all spirits is to evolve towards perfection. There are three basic categories of spirit: the ‘low spirits’, who are trapped in materiality, the ‘second degree spirits’, whose moral nature has evolved to the point where they experience only a desire for good, and the ‘perfect spirits’, who have reached the peak of their evolution. The ‘low spirits’ range from evil spirits who are activated by malice to mere ‘boisterous spirits’ who enjoy getting into mischief. These latter are also known as poltergeists. After death, a spirit spends some time in the spirit world, and is then reincarnated on earth or some other world. The purpose of earthly life is to enable the spirit to evolve. To some extent, the spirit is able to choose the trials it will undergo in its next life. (This means that it is pointless to bemoan our lot, since we have chosen it ourselves.)
In all but one respect, Kardec’s ‘spirit teaching’ agreed basically with those of most other spiritualists since Swedenborg; but that one aspect, reincarnation, was to prove a source of severe contention within the French spiritualist movement. The Spirits’ Book had already been anticipated by a work called Arcanes de la vie future d
évoilée — Secrets of the Future Life Unveiled, by Alphonse Cahagnet, published in 1848 (and a second and third volume later). Cahagnet was a cabinet maker who had become fascinated by ‘somnambulism’ (hypnotism) in his mid-thirties; he placed various subjects in a hypnotic trance — the most impressive being a woman called Adèle Maginot — and recorded what they told him of life after death. Adèle was so remarkable because her messages from the dead — and sometimes from living people who had disappeared — were so full of convincing evidence. Cahagnet started a journal called The Spiritualist Magnetiser, and this was later transformed into The Spiritualist Revue, edited by Z. Piérart. But Cahagnet, who was a follower of Swedenborg, did not believe in reincarnation. And the French spiritualist movement was soon split by a bitter war of words between the followers of Cahagnet and the followers of Kardec. Kardec was critical of trance mediums — like Adèle — because they had nothing to say about reincarnation, and Cahagnet and his followers regarded automatic writing with suspicion and disdain. But Kardec, who had heart problems, died in 1869, only thirteen years after The Spirits’ Book was published, while Cahagnet lived and flourished until 1885, publishing many more influential books. So it was Kardec’s version of spiritualism that gradually faded away as the movement became increasingly powerful. It was only in Brazil — a country whose witch doctors frequently called on the spirits for magical aid — that Kardec’s version of Spiritism took root, and where it still flourishes today as one of the country’s major religions.