Search
Share & Follow Religion News Blog
Remember These Stories?
Otherworldly Pursuits and Down-to-Earth Motives
TALKING TO THE DEAD
Kate and Maggie Fox And the Rise of Spiritualism
By Barbara Weisberg
HarperSanFrancisco. 324 pages. $24.95.
A few years ago I traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the reliably sunny spot where the Amazing Randi has set up a foundation devoted to debunking psychics, mediums, U.F.O. spotters and spoon benders; a kind of ghostbusters HQ.
As a former magician, James Randi knows how to levitate tables and read the contents of a sealed envelope, so he is well positioned to expose frauds.
”I’m a liar, a cheat and a charlatan,” he said, but, ”at least I know it.”
Such certainty about the celebrated 19th-century psychics Kate and Maggie Fox seems to elude Barbara Weisberg even after writing a 324-page book about them. Throughout ”Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism,” Ms. Weisberg insists on maintaining an irksome ambiguity about whether the sisters’ good-natured contacts with the dearly departed were the result of mortal or immortal shenanigans — despite detailed confessions of fraud from both sisters toward the end of their lives.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, she writes in the Afterword, ”the degree to which the Fox sisters did or didn’t believe in the spirits, or what tricks the mediums may have used to create the manifestations, or whether the spirits themselves occasionally paid a visit, or even how much the sisters contributed to the rise of a movement.”
Gee, I wish she had told me that before I read the book.
More than a century before John Edward had his psychic television series and Sylvia Browne answered callers’ questions on Larry King, Kate, age 11, and Maggie, 14, were wowing audiences in New York, Washington and Ohio. Through strange rappings, which the girls first claimed to hear in their bedroom in Hydesville, N.Y., one night in March 1848, spirits passed along messages that gave career advice, comforted grieving mourners and even urged a child’s parents to allow extra dessert.
The idea of otherworldly contact quickly caught on, inspiring the Modern Spiritualist movement. Some of the most respected leaders of the day were ardent supporters, many drawn to it after the loss of a child or spouse, like Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune. President Franklin Pierce’s wife, Jane, met with Maggie after their 11-year-old son was killed.
That shouldn’t be surprising. Reason and faith have pendulumed throughout American history, with belief in the supernatural tending to flourish during periods of social and political transition. Ms. Weisberg’s description of mediums delivering ”inspiring addresses to large audiences on the pressing issues of the day, such as perfecting the body through diet and exercise,” sounds remarkably contemporary.
The book lays out the social and cultural forces that contributed to the rise of Spiritualism — fearsome childhood death rates, science’s undermining of religion, rising urbanization and the restricted options open to women, the ones who most frequently became mediums. She touches on the eroticism that permeated darkened séances as well as the hands-on inspections of the girls for fraud. But much of that history is not new, and has already been detailed more powerfully by other writers like Barbara Goldsmith in her brilliant 1998 book, ”Other Powers.”
What Ms. Weisberg tracked down were lots of contemporary descriptions of the sisters’ theatrical séances. The comparison between the observations of sympathizers and skeptics offer a useful lesson in interpreting many of the awestruck accounts. One wrote of seeing ”phosphorescent flames,” a card table moving ”with violent force,” a chair ”conveyed from one end of the room to the other,” a pocket handkerchief taken out of a judge’s pocket, ”tied into many knots and put back again.”
Another witness at the same gathering complained that ”a series of proceedings took place which utterly and entirely disgusted me; of course, anything done in the dark is useless so far as convincing people goes.”
Clearly, it’s the thinking that makes it so.
The Foxes were undoubtedly con artists. But they were also young, mischievous girls subject to a neglectful father, a flighty mother and a manipulative and ruthless older sister. Their sister, Leah, was so intent on exploiting their amazing ability to produce crackling noises by snapping their toes and other joints that she even banished her own daughter for criticizing the spirits (and the income they represented). Their strange childhood unfolded onstage and in parlors where they were constantly manhandled by skeptics and exposed to debauched company, then compelled to endure constant travel and prolonged separation from loved ones.
With access to personal letters, Ms. Weisberg’s details the ill-fated courtship between 18-year-old Maggie and Elisha Kent Kane, a wealthy Arctic explorer who was obsessed with her, yet who constantly toyed with her feelings. When he died after nearly five years of on-again, off-again romance, Maggie had a breakdown.
His skepticism toward Spiritualism, along with her own inability to contact the person she most loved after his death, eventually pushed her to confess publicly years later that it was all trickery, or, as Kate put it, ”a humbug from beginning to end.” ”The rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee,” Maggie explained before a packed audience at the New York Academy of Music in 1888 and then slipped off her shoe to demonstrate the loud cracking sounds she could make.
A year later Maggie recanted her confession, saying she hoped to set the record straight — as well as make some money by lecturing about Spiritualism.
Both sisters, longtime alcoholics, died in their 50′s.
Ms. Weisberg has done an impressive amount of research, but even the sisters’ poignant personal story lacks emotional punch, partly a result of the book’s emphasis and partly a result of occasionally weak writing. This is a book in which critics hurl ”slings and arrows,” frauds create a ”tissue of lies” and people are ”nestled in the bosom of a middle-class home.” The narrative is littered by descriptions of events or feelings that ”must have,” ”surely” or ”probably” occurred.
The other problem, though, is the coy nod to supernatural power. By holding out the possibility that the Fox sisters were actually in contact with the spirit world, Ms. Weisberg saps some of the real-life tragedy from their story: two girls who started out playing adolescent pranks on others ended up the unhappiest vics.
Bookmark, Share, or Email This Page
Read Another Article
|
Related News Articles
Topic(s): 
Subscribe to Religion News Blog updates
Find Related Information
Find Related 
Possibly related... or Most Popular Religion News Articles
Search Religion News Blog