Lives and legends

The Fox sisters

Leah about 1813 to 1890, Margaretta 1833 to 1893, Catherine 1837 to 1892

Who were the Fox sisters, and what is truly known of them?

What is known

Three sisters of upstate New York with whom modern Spiritualism began. On 31 March 1848, in a farmhouse at Hydesville, the two youngest, Margaretta and Catherine, told their parents that knocks in the walls answered their questions and came from a pedlar murdered there. Neighbours crowded in; their elder sister Leah took them to Rochester and managed their sittings; and in November 1849 they filled a public hall. Within five years there were mediums across America and Europe. Doctors at Buffalo in 1851 reported that the raps came from the girls’ knee joints. Catherine was later tested in London by William Crookes. Both younger sisters drank heavily and died poor.

The teaching

Taught from the Hydesville statements of 1848, Leah's The Missing Link (1885) and Margaretta's confession of 1888.

The night of 31 March 1848

The knocks had been heard in the house at Hydesville for some nights when, on 31 March 1848, the family went early to bed. The raps came again, and Catherine, the youngest, clapped her hands and called on the knocker, Mr Splitfoot, to do as she did; it answered with as many raps. Their mother asked it to rap the ages of her children, and it rapped each in turn. Asked whether it was a human being, it was silent; asked whether it was a spirit, it rapped. By the same questions it told that it was a man murdered in the house and buried in the cellar.

The code of the raps

At first the raps answered by number and by yes and no. At Rochester the sitters added the alphabet: one of them called the letters over in order, and the raps marked the letter wanted, so that words and whole messages could be spelt out, slowly, letter by letter. By this means, Leah's book says, the spirits told the sisters to make the communication known and not to hide it.

The circle at the table

From their sittings came the form the séance kept: a small company round a table, hands resting on it, the medium among them, questions put aloud and answered by raps, and soon by the table itself tilting and knocking with its legs. The spirits gave tests of who they were, names, ages and facts the sitter knew, and the comfort of the sittings lay in that recognition. Spiritualists still keep 31 March as the day their movement began.

The public tests

At Corinthian Hall in Rochester, in November 1849, committees chosen from the audience examined the sisters over several days. They had them stand on pillows, had their dresses tied about their ankles and their clothing searched by a committee of women, and listened at floors and walls, and they reported that they could not find how the sounds were made. The newspapers took the story up, and through them the sittings spread.

How the raps were made

Against all this stands the demonstration of 1888. Margaretta showed how the raps were made, by a snap of the joints of the foot, above all the big toe, which sounds through boards and walls as if it came from them. She said that she and Catherine had begun as children with an apple bumped on a string to frighten their mother, had learned the trick of the joints, and had been made to go on by their elder sister. A year later she withdrew the confession, and both statements stand on the record.

Orders and memberships

No order is documented. They were raised Methodists, and Margaretta was baptised a Catholic in 1858. Spiritualism had no lodge behind it: it spread from their sittings through newspapers and travelling mediums.

The legend

That a pedlar’s skeleton found in the cellar wall in 1904 proved the first story. A newspaper reported such a find; no murder or missing pedlar was ever traced, and the bones were never shown to be one man’s.

What was forged, or is false

On 21 October 1888, on the stage of the New York Academy of Music with Catherine present, Margaretta declared the rappings a fraud begun as a childhood prank and showed how she made them by cracking the joints of her toes. In November 1889 she took the confession back in writing. Both statements are on record, and each side quotes its own.

Their works

A Report of the Mysterious NoisesAccount, 1848
A pamphlet by E. E. Lewis, printed weeks after the rappings at Hydesville, with statements taken from the Fox family and their neighbours. It is the first record of the events with which modern Spiritualism began.
Ask the Oracle about it
The Missing Link in Modern SpiritualismBook, 1885
The history of the rappings and of the sisters’ sittings written by Leah, the eldest, who had managed them. It tells the story as the movement wished it told. It was written three years before her sister Margaretta’s public confession of fraud, and it makes no mention of the doubts.
Ask the Oracle about it
The Love-Life of Dr. KaneLetters, 1866
Letters between Margaretta Fox and the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, who loved her and urged her to give up the sittings. She printed them after his death to show that they had been secretly married.
Ask the Oracle about it
The Death-Blow to SpiritualismAccount, 1888
A book by the journalist Reuben Briggs Davenport giving Margaretta’s confession of 1888, that the rappings had been made by cracking the joints of her toes. In 1889 she took the confession back, and each side quotes its own.
Ask the Oracle about it

How the house tells a life

This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.

The arts it feeds

Death and what follows The spirit realm The sixth sense

Lives near it in time