The Apparitionists Read online

  Whether by choice or desperation, the answer for Morse proved to be work. He no longer sought greatness as a painter. Instead, he became a man driven by the conviction that the distances that had suddenly defined his life could be undone. With his wife’s death he determined that no man should remain as unknowing for so long as he had been of his lover’s fate, and should never more fear forgetting a single detail of her beauty.

  The Spiritualist sisters Kate and Margaret Fox. Thomas M. Easterly, 1852.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ties Which Death Itself Could Not Loose

  WHETHER ONE REGARDS it as a fad, a cult, a scam, or a sincere transformation of American belief, there is little disagreement over how Spiritualism began. Some fourteen years before William Mumler first touched a camera in 1862, when both he and Hannah Green Stuart were adolescents growing up on the outskirts of Boston, two other teenagers living some two hundred miles west of the Massachusetts border began to tell stories about things that went bump in the night.

  As the movement’s creation myth was eventually told, it started in the spring of 1848, when a family in the village of Hydesville, New York, not far from Rochester, noticed faint but persistent tapping sounds emanating from their floorboards and walls. The youngest children in the house, sisters Kate and Margaret Fox, age thirteen and fifteen respectively, insisted that their home was being visited by spirits. No one else took much notice until the girls convinced their older sister, thirty-four-year-old Leah, of the presence of a dead man who would not be ignored. The three Fox sisters then persuaded their parents to listen more closely.

  “It sounded like someone knocking in the east bedroom, on the floor,” their mother said. “We could hardly tell where to locate the sounds, as sometimes it sounded as if the furniture was moved, but on examination we found everything in order.” She encouraged the girls to ignore the sounds of a settling house, and they all tried to sleep, but the noise persisted. “Although not very loud, it produced a jar of the bedsteads and chairs that could be felt when we were in bed. It was a tremulous motion, more than a sudden jar. We could feel the jar when standing on the floor.”

  On the following night, the disturbance intensified. “The noises were heard in all parts of the house,” Mrs. Fox continued. “My husband stationed himself outside of the door while I stood inside, and the knocks came on the door between us. We heard footsteps in the pantry, and walking down-stairs; we could not rest, and I then concluded that the house must be haunted by some unhappy, restless spirit.”

  Mr. Fox agreed. “I do not know of any way to account for these noises as being caused by any natural means,” he said. “We have searched every nook and corner in and about the house, at different times, to ascertain if possible whether anything or any body was secreted there that could make the noise, and have not been able to find anything which would or could explain the mystery. It has caused a great deal of trouble and anxiety.”

  For their part, the Fox girls seemed to regard the noises as an invitation. They called out questions to the “unhappy, restless spirit” and received further knocks and raps in return. Through this call and response they were soon able to ascertain that their home was haunted by a man—“aged 31 years . . . with a wife and five children, three sons and two daughters”—who had been murdered in the house a year before. He was, the spirit told them, buried in the cellar, ten feet below the packed earth.

  When the neighbors heard about the strange happenings at the Fox farm, they came first by the dozen, then by the hundreds. The sisters demonstrated how the tapping and knocking seemed to follow them even when they moved great distances from the house, and a new religious movement was born.

  It was no longer just one murdered man tapping in one upstate farmhouse. Apparently crowds of the dead vied for the attention of the living, longing to be heard. “There must have been a score of spirits who rapped one after the other, some on the table, some on the door, ceiling, windows, floor, etc,” Leah Fox wrote. “Some were loud, some low, some rapid and some slower, and no two of them seemed quite the same. Many persons who are familiar with these signals frequently identify them by the sounds.”

  The three Fox sisters became the first hugely successful American mediums, and inspired others—many of them of similar age and rural background—to make known their own supernatural abilities. Spiritualism, they said, was a gift given to all. As such, it was quickly received and accepted by millions who had apparently been longing to talk with the dead all along. The movement’s tenets were flexible enough—or unbearably vague, as critics said—to accommodate a range of practices and personality types. If it had a creed, it was, as one nineteenth-century description stated, “that disembodied human spirits sometimes manifest themselves, or make known their presence and power, to persons in the earthly body, and hold realized communication with them.”

  Wherever it went and however it was practiced, Spiritualism was embraced not only as a matter of faith but a matter of science, as in the first large public lecture explaining the new movement to the masses, delivered in New York City in November of 1850. The recent events near Rochester, the Reverend S. B. Brittan suggested to a packed crowd at the Stuyvesant Institute on Broadway, were an extension of the telegraph that had recently begun to connect the nation’s cities. The messages received by the Fox family were sent by “telegraphy,” he said, and the sisters themselves were the first “spiritual telegraph.”

  “As for the future of this great wonder, what the telegraph may become, or the means of intercommunion between the two worlds may develop, I confess I cannot even speculate upon,” Brittan said. “The present is our own, and in that we have indeed good cause for congratulation; but beyond our own immediate day and hour who can venture to prophesy the probable future of what we call ‘Modern Spiritualism’?” Despite this note of humility, he closed by expressing the task to which he thought all Spiritualists should be devoted: “A connecting bridge should be built between the mortal and immortal worlds,” he said, “and a telegraph set in motion through which the ascended souls of earth should enlighten humanity on the actual conditions of the life hereafter.”

  For their part, the Fox sisters wanted to be clear about which means of communication—electromagnetic or spiritual—deserved to be spoken of first. “I soon received letters from various places,” Leah Fox said of the spirit knowledge she had been given, “saying that it had been made known through clairvoyants, speaking mediums and seers, that the same signal had been given to all mediums. Thus we see that God’s Telegraph antedated that of Samuel F. B. Morse.”

  “I well remember the time when the phenomena of spiritual manifestations were first introduced by the Misses Fox,” Mumler later recalled, “and I did not, even at that early day, when Spiritualism was so little known and its promulgation so new and wonderful, do, as many others did and do now, scout its pretensions, for I saw the germ of a new era—one in which the human mind would become more free and expanded, and that it would do away with many false and cruel tenets in most of the popular creeds of the day. I was desirous, however, that others should study its reality and its claims to public confidence, as I had neither the time nor the inclination to search into such mysteries, for I had some fears that I might go too deep and that the subject might so involve my meditations as to unfit me for the actual duties of life, of which I had many responsible ones.”

  Decades later, the middle Fox daughter, Margaret, would acknowledge that it had all begun as a kind of game. As a lark to amuse themselves and give a fright to their family, the girls had learned ways to make tapping sounds without being seen. They had been surprised by the uproar it caused, but then reveled in the attention. In any case, it mattered little what had sparked such intense public interest in a few farm girls and their tall tales. Spiritualism was suddenly the fastest-moving fire of religious reinvention in American history. And like any wildfire, it did not burn in isolation.

  In the 1830s—the decade in which William Mumler, Hanna
h Stuart, the two younger Fox sisters, and other mediums and metaphysical savants too numerous to name were born—the young United States was suffering a spiritual hangover. The period of radical religious fervor known as the Second Great Awakening had lasted forty years and was nearing its end. Though its earliest manifestations had been marked by explosive developments in Christian piety, its later stages moved expressions of faith even farther afield.

  The Fox sisters were one embodiment of this trend. Another could be found in a self-taught “magnetic healer” by the name of Andrew Jackson Davis. Before the explosion of Spiritualism lit by the Rochester tappings, Davis had been a not particularly successful practitioner of mesmerism—the manipulation of animal magnetism made popular by the German physician Franz Mesmer in the previous century. In 1847, Davis had published a book that in retrospect seemed to herald the rappings upstate the following year—The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind—and then had successfully ridden the wave of interest in the Fox sisters to a reputation well beyond what anyone of his humble origins might expect. With the boom in spiritual interests in the 1850s, he became known as “the Seer of Poughkeepsie,” the preeminent interpreter of the phenomena natural performers like the Foxes presented to the world. If they were the original evangelists of Spiritualism, Davis was its Saint Paul, providing an intellectual framework in which the pure appeal to emotion and sensation offered by séances might be understood.

  As Davis and the Foxes began to travel on lecture tours spreading their new gospel, selling tickets all the while, the new faith extended from the hinterlands to urban centers, redrawing the map of the nation as a topography of ghosts.

  And Boston was indisputably its capital. Of the more than one hundred Spiritualist periodicals that came into being in the decades following the Fox family’s alleged haunting, the most widely read by far was the Banner of Light, whose offices through the 1860s were just two hundred feet north of Mumler’s first employer on Washington Street. Soon boasting a circulation in the tens of thousands, the Banner promised to present Spiritualism “in all its varied phases, and furnish full and reliable statements of the all important events that may transpire in connection therewith.”

  From large public lectures to private séances held in “circles” hosted by mediums for hire, to loosely organized discussion groups that over time came to resemble the church services many of the spiritually curious had left behind in favor of more eclectic religious pursuits, the weekly Banner of Light and similar journals, like Andrew Jackson Davis’s New York–based Herald of Progress, advertised thousands of such events held all over the country.

  The Banner, moreover, was not just a newspaper; it was a religious institution in its own right. It was founded in 1857 by the printer Luther Colby and the journalist William Berry, who had met when both worked for the secular Boston Daily Post. In the 1850s, Berry had begun hosting séances in his Cambridge home, to which he soon invited a twenty-four-year-old medium, Fannie Conant.

  Born Frances Ann Crowell, Fannie had been raised by a strict Baptist mother known for troubling the members of her church with “wild delusions” about the presence of spirits in her home. When she was first introduced to the notion of talking to the dead, the medium in the making was just seven years old. Lying ill with a fever that had recently taken her baby sister, Fannie overheard her mother having a conversation in an empty room.

  “Who are you talking with, mother?” she asked.

  “Well, my dear,” her mother replied, “I was talking to the angels.”

  “The angels, mother! I thought they lived in heaven.”

  “Yes, but they sometimes come to talk with us in this world.”

  Knowing what was said of her mother in their church, Fannie worried her mother had gone mad.

  “Who are the angels, mother?” she asked.

  “The angels, my daughter, are those who once lived on this earth, but who are now called dead. Your little sister is an angel.”

  “So you were talking to them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Your little sister tells me that you are to recover.”

  Two decades later, Fannie Conant began to host regular séances with William Berry at the Banner of Light offices. The angels now spoke not only to her, but through her. Three times a week, believers would pose questions to her and she would reply in the voices of the dead. As one of her disciples later claimed, “She has been the channel through which more than ten thousand different spirits have sent messages to their kindred and friends on earth.”

  On Sundays, she fell into a trance state and delivered lengthy discourses on the subject of Spiritualism, though again, her words were presented as those of an outside intelligence merely making use of her ability to speak. Even her autobiography, she insisted, was not of her own creation, but of a spirit inhabiting her body. “It is a simple, straight-forward narrative,” one of her collaborators noted, “even though a dead man here describes the life lines of a living woman.”

  Mainstream papers covered colorful figures like Fannie Conant and Spiritualist developments around the country generally with alternating bemusement and alarm. Institutions both religious and scientific took formal positions on Spiritualist practices, issued in high dudgeon as in this dispatch from rural Ohio in 1853:

  SPIRIT RAPPING AND NECROMANCY

  One of the churches in the Presbytery of Chilocothe has suspended two of its members, who had been engaged in Spirit Rapping. The Presbytery adopted the following resolution in relation to the Rappings:

  Resolved, That the practice of Spirit Rappings, (so called) as it prevails in many parts, is, in view of this Presbytery, a revival of the old abomination of necromancy, so decidedly condemned in the word of God.

  As the movement spread and the spiritual marketplace became crowded with those offering connections to the dead, mediums specialized and diversified to set themselves apart. Some delivered messages by means of automatic writing, the practice of going into a trance while allowing a pen to move as if possessed with dramatic speed across a page. Others focused on channeling music, levitating tables, or reading messages in sealed envelopes. The Fox sisters’ rapping and knocking were the seed from which a tree with a thousand branches and roots extended in every direction. By current scholarly accounting, as many as eight hundred cities became home to Spiritualist activities of one kind or another. None held nearly as many as the place William Mumler called home.

  Among skeptical Yankees of a no-nonsense Puritan mindset, the very ubiquity of Spiritualists in Boston made it ripe for scorn and satire—that most Puritans had believed in witchcraft only furthered the desire of their descendants to distance themselves from what seemed its unwelcome reincarnation.

  Well beyond New England, the fact that the Hub of the Universe was also the epicenter of an earthquake of floor rappings and wall knockings became widely noted. As far away as London, Charles Dickens’s comic weekly Household Words ridiculed the city mercilessly for the growth in its metaphysical population. There were so many spirits and people eager to speak to them pouring into Boston that even the real estate market was seen to respond. “Spiritual phenomena of the medium kind are grown so common in that enlightened country,” Dickens’s correspondent wrote in 1858, “that furnished apartments are absolutely advertised upon the ground of their suitability for clairvoyant pursuits.” He then reproduced one such ad as evidence:

  ROOMS FOR MEDIUMS!

  To let, at No. 6, Watner Square, two parlours, furnished in handsome style.

  Will be leased singly, or together. Also, an office on the first-floor suitable for a Healing Medium.

  Readers of Household Words also discovered that Boston was home to “medium apothecaries whose spiritual, clairvoyant, and mesmeric prescriptions are carefully prepared,” as well as “highly gifted butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers of all kinds, anxious to secure the patronage of the spiritual public.” If the
reporter made no mention of photographers, it was only because Boston’s spirits had not yet been taught to pose for the camera.

  In the years leading up to the ghostly turn in Mumler’s career, Boston’s Spiritualist conflagration flared up and then seemed to smolder as memories of the excitement over the Fox family dimmed and as debunkers began to throw sand on the flames.

  In a highly publicized visit in 1858, two of the Fox sisters and several local mediums were drawn into a public dispute over their abilities with a cohort of particularly dismissive members of the Harvard science faculty. It did not go well.

  The organizer of the event, a well-known physician, H. F. Gardner, had taken up a challenge to produce signs of the supernatural for a prize of $500. Like many new religious movements, Spiritualists had by then developed an acute persecution complex. In their estimation, they were beset on all sides by naysayers who took great pleasure in denying the truths it was their duty to tell. Dr. Gardner’s well-attended debate between the mediums and the professors was like Christians thrown to the lions. In the carefully controlled setting prepared by the nonbelievers, the raps and knocks that audiences had come to expect rang hollow. They were met not with reverent applause but doubtful silence.

  For Spiritualism as a mass religious movement, the automatic writing seemed to be on the wall. But then came the Civil War, bringing with it death on a scale so vast that it gave the movement new life. What had begun in the innocence of a childish prank performed to relieve the monotony of life on an upstate farm had found in the battlefields of the South a seriousness of purpose beyond the scope or ambition of any early medium.