Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  To a casual observer, it appeared to be a charming scene of mid-Victorian domesticity: the oil lamp on top of the upright piano glowed, and Kate Fox’s long dark hair glinted in its light, while Susanna’s eyes sparkled with interest. Jane, the maid, stood demurely by the door, in case she was needed. John Moodie picked up his flute, and suddenly, while Susanna and Kate were standing by the piano’s closed lid, they heard its strings play the accompanying melody. “Now it is certain that she could not have got within the case of the piano,” Susanna mused.

  When John stopped playing, the piano notes softly died away. John and Susanna looked at each other with wonder. Jane was open-mouthed. John turned to the slim young woman between them and asked the spirits to tell him what was engraved on the inside of a mourning ring, enclosing a curl of his grandmother’s hair, that he always wore. As Kate stood gracefully listening, they all heard the spirits’ obedient raps. The number of raps correctly identified the dates of his grandmother’s birth and death. John himself had to take the ring off to check the spirits’ accuracy, since he had forgotten the dates himself. “I thought I would puzzle them,” Susanna later wrote to Bentley, “and asked for them to rap out my father’s name, [and] the date of his birth and death.” She thought it was a trick question because there were so many eights in the answer: Thomas Strickland had been born on December 8 and died on May 18, 1818. Without a pause the spirits rapped out the right name, dates and even the cause of death.

  Susanna was intrigued—but unconvinced. Perhaps she suspected that Kate Fox had either been lucky or had been able to pick up clues to the correct answers from her audience’s body language. Perhaps the answers given by the spirits were more open to interpretation than Susanna’s account, in her letter to her publisher, suggested. Susanna rationalized the phenomenon by deciding that Kate Fox was simply a clairvoyant. She certainly didn’t think her parlour tricks had much to do with Christianity. A few weeks later, she discovered how to produce raps and knockings identical to those that Kate had produced: “I can make the same raps, with my great toes, ancles [sic], wrist joints and elbows.” Her maid Jane, who had watched Kate Fox carefully, turned out to be an even more effective rapper: “she exceeds me in the loudness of these noises.”

  Much as she might have liked to, Susanna couldn’t tell her sisters in England about these fascinating developments; this was only a couple of years after the publication of Roughing It, and the British Stricklands were still treating Susanna as a pariah. Had she written to her sister Eliza, though, she would have found a kindred spirit. Eliza, like Susanna, was swept up in the greatest fad of the century. One summer, when she and Agnes were in Paris researching French queens, Eliza had spent her evenings attending seances while Agnes hobnobbed with the well-born. Eliza had watched a Parisian mesmerist hypnotize people on trains, in public gardens and in churches. On her return to London, Eliza had become convinced of the validity of spiritualism when she was put into a trance during a seance. Even Agnes would not have turned up her nose at the Moodies’ new recreation: her beloved Queen Victoria had enjoyed a demonstration of clairvoyance at Osborne House and presented a gold watch to the medium, Georgiana Eagle.

  Susanna knew nothing of this. Instead, she turned to her publisher in London. “Can such a thing as witchcraft really exist?” she wrote to Bentley. “Or possession by evil spirits? I am bewildered and know not what to answer.” She continued her reading, and she was particularly impressed by The Healing of Nations, written under “divine inspiration” by the trance medium Charles Linton, and with an introduction by no less an authority than Nathaniel Tallmadge, a former U.S. senator and governor of the state of Wisconsin. Most of the book was taken up with generic Christian proverbs and homilies. “I am no friend to spiritualism, but I cannot doubt for a moment the truth of this wonderful book,” she told Bentley.

  While Susanna maintained a cautious distance, John Moodie rushed into this new adventure with characteristic impetuousness—he had swallowed spiritualism hook, line and sinker. John regularly attended seances at the homes of various distinguished Belleville citizens, including those of their neighbour J.W. Tate, a railroad engineer, Mayor John O’Hare and Benjamin Fairfield Davy, a Belleville grain merchant and former mayor. In the brick mansions along Bridge Street East and Queen Street, behind heavy velvet curtains, wealthy couples like the Davys and the O’Hares and their friends would sit solemnly on straight-backed chairs, with their hands flat on the polished surface of solid wooden dining tables. The host or hostess would lower the flames of the gas lamps and, as participants peered nervously at the shadows, instruct a medium to call spirits from the vasty deep.

  Mrs. Davy—in John’s view “a very intelligent and sincere woman”—managed long conversations with everybody’s deceased relatives, while her living guests sat around a table that rocked backward and forward violently. Through her agency, John heard from nearly every long lost relative he could remember—his father, his mother, a dead brother—and some of Susanna’s family, too. Miraculously, the spirit of Agnes Strickland appeared, just at the point when relations between his wife and her English sisters were at their worst, and asked for Susanna’s forgiveness for the way that she had treated her. The fact that Agnes was alive on the other side of the Atlantic rather than dead and on the other side of the fatal frontier didn’t faze John. He admitted that some of the spirits’ communications to him were “absolutely and uselessly false,” but such minor details didn’t puncture his faith for an instant. Even the false communications, he insisted, exhibited “extraordinary intelligence and knowledge of matters only known to myself.”

  John also visited the Fox family in New York and took part in a seance in which a spirit tried to unbutton his boot straps. In 1857,he bought himself a large album bound in blue leather, labelled it “Spiritualist Album” in gold block letters and began to record occult adventures in Belleville and Toronto. He constructed devices to facilitate spirit-writing. He sent lengthy accounts of his activities to the Spiritual Telegraph, a weekly periodical published in New York. The only disappointing aspect of the regular spiritualist sessions at the Davys’ was that the spirits told him he could not become a medium himself because, “You are too energetic.”

  John’s unbridled enthusiasm for knockings and table-turnings led to arguments with his wife. Susanna remained scornful of darkened-room mumbo-jumbo; it offended her respect for reason and restraint. She also shared much of Catharine’s uneasiness about an activity which suggested that God was a sort of celestial doorman, rather than a primal creative force. And she must have found the exchange of family secrets which it often involved most upsetting—she didn’t want the whole of Belleville knowing about her row with Agnes, for instance. When she heard that the spirit of a notorious local philanderer had appeared at a tea and table-moving party soon after his death, she snapped that she was surprised he had even got as far as heaven, since “he had a number of illegitimate children while in this world.” While John watched tables rock and listened to spirits moan on Queen Street, Susanna remained in the stone cottage on the wrong side of town, disgruntled by her husband’s absence. She had always been able to handle physical distance between them, but the psychological separation from her beloved John unnerved her.

  Then, early in 1858, an event occurred that dissolved even Susanna’s scepticism. She and John had had “several sharp mental conflicts … which grieved me much,” she explained to Richard Bentley. One evening when John strode off to yet another seance, Susanna stomped upstairs, threw herself into the button-back chair in her bedroom and “wept very bitterly, over what I considered the unpardonable credulity of a man of his strong good sense. As I was sitting alone by a little table …I suddenly laid my right hand upon the table, and feeling very angry in my own mind at all spiritualists, I said tauntingly enough, ‘If there be any truth in this doctrine let the so-called spirits move my hand against my will off from this table.’ You would have laughed to have seen the determined energy with which I
held my hand down to the table, expecting the moon that was then shining into the room to leave her bright path in the heavens as soon as that my hand should be lifted from that table. You may therefore guess my surprise, not to say terror, when my hand became paralyzed, and the fingers were slowly wrenched up from the table, and the whole hand lifted and laid down in my lap. Not dropped nor jerked suddenly, but brought forward, as if held in a strong grasp and placed there.”

  It is easy today (although perhaps too glib) to explain this phenomenon away as auto-suggestion, and to assume that Susanna’s need to share John’s beliefs and be reunited with her husband overwhelmed her doubts. But for a nineteenth-century woman, it could only have meant that there was a disembodied presence in the room that had grasped her hand. Susanna was shaken. She slowly rose and went downstairs into the empty dining room. She found the “Spiritoscope” that John had invented—a wood-and-brass contraption that allowed spirits to spell out words quickly. Up to then, she had always ridiculed the Spiritoscope and refused to touch it. Now, with nobody looking, she put her hands on it and asked, “Was it a spirit that lifted my hand?” The Spiritoscope spelled out, “Yes.” Susanna asked, “What spirit?” The contraption spelled out “A friend,” and then, “Thomas Harral.” Susanna was amazed; she had no idea whether her old mentor was alive or dead. But soon, through the agency of the Spiritoscope, she was conversing with Harral, who, unknown to her, had died in 1853.

  In subsequent nights, with a devoted John looking on, there were further exchanges with the disembodied Harral, and additional ones with another character from Susanna’s past, “my dear friend Thomas Pringle, the abolitionist from whose house I was married,” who had died in 1834. The spirit of Pringle apparently assured Susanna (quite erroneously, as it turned out) that she would never live to see the end of slavery. Soon Susanna was in regular communication with the spirits, who told her to trust in God. “God is a perfect Unity,” a particularly enlightened spirit told her through John’s busy little contraption. “The great circle and centre of existence. Death is but the returning wave of life flowing back to him. All created existence lives through and to Him, and no man lives for himself alone. He is a link in the chain of life which would be broken without his ministration.”

  The kind overtures of the two dead editors were part of a pattern: what Susanna found in the spirits’ communications was usually what she wanted to hear. At a difficult time in her own life, it must have been a welcome sensation to be in contact with the two men who, thirty years earlier, had been her literary mentors—almost as good, indeed, as having an apology from Agnes. Now that she had overcome her suspicion of spiritualism, she embraced its message (as she interpreted it) that God is perfection, and that it is man’s proper condition to move towards that perfection by struggling against limitations of reason, worldly pleasures and evil spirits. She also found herself very comfortable with a faith that didn’t need an autocratic male cleric as its arbiter. As a woman who had rejected the Church of England in Suffolk, and been thrown out of the Congregationalist Church in Belleville, she enjoyed her seemingly direct line to heaven.

  Catharine Parr Traill arrived for a visit while the Moodie Spiritoscope was working overtime. Being a more ingenuous woman than Susanna, and encouraged by her sister’s arguments, she allowed herself to succumb to the spiritualist fervour. “My sister Mrs. Traill, is a very powerful Medium for these communications,” Susanna remarked, “and gets them in foreign languages.” But poor, long-suffering Catharine didn’t have so much fun. Susanna recorded that “her spirits often abuse, and call her very ugly names.” There was, however, one aspect of the occult that both women loved: it allowed them to talk to their dead children. The Moodies’ son Johnnie, drowned fourteen years earlier, sent his father a message that, “I love him, and am ever at his side trying to overthrow the evil influence of bad men, who presumptuously deny the divinity of my Lord.” For her part, Catharine was made happy, according to Susanna, “by the intercourse of her dear children, which has quite overcome her fears of death that she till lately entertained.”

  By now, John was chomping at the bit. Spiritualism was a very welcome distraction from financial worries and his mounting problems in the sheriff ’s office, and he yearned to get more involved. He wanted to be a medium through which messages were sent, rather than a passive recipient of the messages. In 1858, he visited New York City again and called on “my amiable friend, Kate Fox,” with whom he had often discussed his enthusiasms. And his wish was granted. Speaking through Kate, his dead mother told him to be “faithful to your new vocation, and great Spirits will aid you.” When he inquired as to what his new vocation would be, his mother told him that it was “Healing in every form.”

  Spiritualism had been linked to healing from its earliest days. In Europe in the late eighteenth century, followers of the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer had claimed that they could cure patients of ailments ranging from blindness to rheumatism by controlling the flow of electrical energy through their bodies—which usually meant putting them into a trance. Once “mesmerism” arrived in the New World, where there was no medical establishment to authenticate its claims, it quickly became the subject of sensational demonstrations at fairs and carnivals. The charismatic preacher Henry Ward Beecher mesmerized his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe (the future author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and threw her into delicious convulsions: “spasms and shocks of heat and prickly sensation ran all over me.” The orgasmic overtones of this new touchy-feely therapy are unmistakable. Similar techniques rapidly became part of many spiritualists’ arsenal as enthusiasm for spiritualism spread across the continent. Soon the young Victoria Woodhull, who would later scandalize America with her outspoken feminism and her candidacy for presidential office, was operating as a spiritual healer in Indianapolis. According to Theodore Tilton, her first biographer and third husband, “She straightened the feet of the lame; opened the ears of the deaf … she solved psychological problems; … she prophesied future events.” Her technique, which involved gently stroking a sufferer’s body and limbs with both hands to stimulate healing electrical energy, sounds remarkably like the “therapeutic touch” technique practised today. And she earned a staggering amount of money, approximately $100,000 in one year alone.

  John Moodie embarked on his practice as a spiritual healer with some trepidation. The only advice that the spirits gave him was to be abstemious in his diet and refrain from drinking tea or coffee. He must have known all about “mesmeric passes” (perhaps from Kate Fox), because that was what he used in his first attempt. His guinea pig was his sister-in-law, Catharine Parr Trail, who had been complaining about pain in her knees resulting from gout that she thought she had inherited from her father. John made a few passes over her joints and down her lower legs. It must have been a little unsettling for both of them: Catharine would rarely have bared her knees, and John was not in the habit of stroking his sister-in-law’s limbs. Catharine claimed instant relief from the pain—perhaps through the power of John’s healing hands, perhaps through sheer embarrassment.

  John was thrilled with the result. “This encouraged me to try my healing powers in other cases,” he wrote in the Spiritual Album, “and I have been successful beyond my most sanguine expectations.” Catharine must have enjoyed the sensation of spiritual healing because she was soon back for more. John next relieved the rheumatism in her shoulder and arm by laying his left hand on her bare shoulder while holding her hand in his right. John healed a neighbour’s chronic rheumatism by gentle manipulation of his arm, and cured his neuralgia and sore eyes through massaging his eye sockets. When his daughter Agnes Fitzgibbon arrived from Toronto with a streaming cold and congested lungs, he drew his hands “from her ears downward to her stomach, and passed them off outward several times. She felt as if warm water were running down one side of her lungs.” She was better in no time. “I can hardly tell how many cases of bilious and nervous headache I have relieved by similar means, in a few minutes,�
� John recorded with delight in his album.

  What was going on? A large part of John’s effectiveness as a healer was probably psychological: his subjects believed that he could cure them, and every success reinforced their belief. He himself acknowledged, in one of his lengthy letters to the Spiritual Telegraph, that faith was an essential ingredient. It is also likely that, by promoting drainage of the sinuses or the lymph system (in the neighbour with sore eyes, for instance), John was doing some good. John himself took his role as a healer very seriously: he recorded different techniques, homeopathic remedies and accounts of his activities in his Spiritual Album. Nevertheless, news that the sheriff spent his afternoons in darkened drawing rooms, “healing” some of the town’s most respectable matrons, must have spread like wildfire through gossipy Belleville. It cannot have done John’s reputation much good amongst the stony-faced Tory lawyers who met on the first Monday of every month at the Orange Lodge.

  John’s career as a spiritual healer didn’t last long. Soon after it was launched, the sisters’ interest in spiritualism began to nose-dive. Perhaps it was the local tittle-tattle. Perhaps it was because the claims of spiritualists were coming under increasingly rigorous scrutiny, and the pseudoscientific claptrap became too much for Susanna’s and Catharine’s more mainstream, modest Christian faith. Most likely, it was because both sisters had more pressing issues in their lives: Catharine’s household was already engulfed in disaster, and John Moodie’s position as sheriff was being challenged. For whatever reason, Catharine decided that she had been “under some peculiar influence of Animal magnetism during my so-called medium state,” and she summoned up “the mental courage to abandon all that sort of thing.” Susanna simply turned her back on the mumbo-jumbo.