Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism -- Barbara Weisberg

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately.  Well, a lot of non-fiction for me, anyway.  This one caught my eye because of Mallory's Oracle--there was quite a bit about spiritualism in that one, specifically the different tricks that fake mediums use to create the sound (and sometimes visual) effects for their (sometimes) unsuspecting clients.

In late March 1848 two young sisters excitedly waylaid a neighbor, eager to tell her about the strange sounds they had been hearing at home nearly every night around bedtime.  The noises, the girls confided to Mary Readfield, seemed to have no explanation.  Their father had failed to discover the source of the raps and knocks.  Their mother was exhausted from worry and lack of sleep.

This paragraph kicks off a biography of Kate and Maggie Fox, the sisters that (according to the author) were the beginning of the huge surge of interest in Spiritualism in the late 1800s.  From this small beginning in their own house, surrounded only by their own family, (according to the question-and-answer sessions with the invisible rapper, the spirit was a murdered peddler that was buried in the basement) the girls were catapulted to stardom--early on in their careers, their older sister, Leah, also discovered that she was a medium--and over the next 40-or-so years, they attracted thousands and thousands of followers all over the world.  Kate even traveled to Russia to hold a seance for the royal family in St. Petersburg.  As their careers moved on, the effects generated during the seances grew in intensity and impressiveness--from the simple rappings to moving furniture to actual spirit appearances.

Of course, there were many detractors--over and over again, the girls were subjected to humiliating public "tests" to prove themselves--men would hold their ankles and feet, to make sure they weren't secretly rapping their toes against the floor or moving the table with their knees.  Harry Houdini was a huge anti-spiritualism advocate.  He saw the mediums as worse than frauds--according to him, they were just bad magicians.

Later in life, the younger Fox sisters came forward and publicly said that they had never been in contact with the spirit world--that Spiritualism itself was a fraud.  They even explained how they had created many of the special effects.  Years later, they reversed the denial, saying that they had made the statement under pressure from anti-Spiritualist groups.

In 1904 schoolchildren playing around the Hydesville "spook" house ventured down into the dark cellar.  A crumbling wall gave way:  Eureka! a skeleton lay behind it.  According to an article in the Boston Journal, a doctor was consulted who estimated that the bones were about fifty years old.