EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXIII · Theosophy

Liber XXXIII · Theosophy · Chapter IX: Spiritualism

The Fox Sisters: The Hydesville Rappings and Spiritualism

The Fox sisters and Spiritualism: the 1848 Hydesville rappings, Leah's Rochester circle, Maggie and Elisha Kane, Kate in London, and the 1888 confession.

7 min read 1,621 words Updated

The Fox sisters were three American women, Leah, Margaretta (Maggie) and Catherine (Kate) Fox, whose demonstrations of spirit "rappings" from 1848 onward launched the religious movement known as Spiritualism. The story began in March 1848 in a small farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, where the two younger girls appeared to communicate with an unseen spirit by knocks. Forty years later Maggie publicly confessed that the raps had been produced by cracking the joints of her toes, then retracted the confession, and the sisters' lives ended in poverty and controversy while the movement they started spread across the world.

The Hydesville Rappings of March 1848§

In December 1847 John and Margaret Fox, a farming family of modest means and Methodist background, moved with their two youngest daughters into a rented wooden house at Hydesville, a hamlet in Wayne County in western New York. Maggie was about fourteen and Kate about eleven; their birth years are given differently in different sources. The family soon complained of knocking sounds at night.

On the evening of 31 March 1848, according to statements gathered within days, Kate challenged the noise to copy her finger snaps, addressing it by the folk name "Mr Splitfoot", a name for the Devil. The raps answered. Mrs Fox then asked it to rap the ages of her children, which it did correctly, and neighbours who were called in established a code of knocks for yes and no. Through this code the "spirit" said it was a peddler who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar. A local man, E. E. Lewis, collected sworn statements from the family and neighbours and published them as a pamphlet within weeks, so the early phase of the story is unusually well documented.

The region was fertile ground. Western New York was the "burned-over district", repeatedly swept by religious revivals and new movements, including Mormonism and Millerite expectations of the Second Coming. Mesmerism and the trance lectures of Andrew Jackson Davis, the "Poughkeepsie Seer", had already popularised the idea that the living could contact a spirit world, as described in our guide to Spiritualism.

From Rochester to New York: The Birth of Spiritualism§

The girls were soon sent to the nearby city of Rochester to live with their much older married sister, Leah Fox Fish, and the raps followed them. In Rochester the family attracted the support of Isaac and Amy Post, Quaker reformers active in the anti-slavery movement, and the rappings began to spell out messages by the alphabet, including the declaration that the spirits wished to make their presence known to the world.

In November 1849 the sisters gave the first public demonstration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester. Committees of local citizens examined them, placing the girls on pillows and glass and having women search their clothing, and reported that they could not find the source of the sounds. In 1850 Leah took Maggie and Kate to New York City, where they held séances at Barnum's Hotel for paying visitors. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley became a sympathetic patron, and writers, judges and politicians came to sit with them. Within a few years hundreds of "rapping" and "writing" mediums appeared across the United States, and the movement spread to Britain and continental Europe, where in France it would take a different, reincarnationist form under Allan Kardec.

The sisters' circle also linked Spiritualism with reform. The first women's rights convention met at Seneca Falls, a few miles from Hydesville, in July 1848, and historians such as Ann Braude have shown how Spiritualism gave women a public religious voice as mediums and trance speakers at a time when most churches denied them the pulpit.

Investigations, Critics and the Knee-Joint Theory§

Critics appeared at once. In 1851 three physicians associated with the University of Buffalo, among them Austin Flint, examined the sisters and argued that the raps were produced by voluntary dislocation of the knee joints; when the girls' legs were held, they reported, the sounds ceased. In the same year a relative by marriage, Mrs Norman Culver, published a statement claiming that Kate had shown her how to make raps with her toes. Defenders replied that the raps came from tables, walls and doors at a distance from the girls.

The pattern of the controversy was set for the rest of the century. Supporters pointed to messages that seemed to contain information the mediums could not know; sceptics pointed to the conditions under which phenomena failed and to the commercial interests involved. When the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, the Fox case was already a classic example of the difficulty of separating genuine anomalies, if any, from conjuring and self-deception. The resemblance between the Hydesville raps and earlier household disturbances also led later writers to discuss them alongside poltergeists.

Maggie Fox and Elisha Kent Kane§

In 1852 Maggie met Elisha Kent Kane, a naval surgeon and celebrated Arctic explorer from a prominent Philadelphia family. He fell in love with her, paid for her education, and pressed her to give up mediumship, which he regarded as deception unworthy of her. His family opposed the match. Kane died in Havana in 1857, and Maggie afterwards maintained that they had been privately married by a declaration before witnesses. His relatives disputed this, and in 1866 she published their correspondence as The Love-Life of Dr. Kane to support her claim. Maggie converted to Roman Catholicism and for some years gave up séances, though financial need later drew her back.

Kate Fox in New York and London§

Kate remained the most admired of the sisters as a medium. In the early 1860s she held a long series of séances for the New York banker Charles F. Livermore, during which, he believed, the figure of his dead wife appeared and wrote messages. In 1871 she travelled to England, where the chemist William Crookes investigated her and reported raps and other effects that he regarded as genuine, in experiments that were later criticised for their lack of controls. In London she married Henry D. Jencken, a barrister active in Spiritualist circles, and had two sons, to whom Spiritualists attributed mediumistic gifts in infancy. After her husband's death she returned to New York.

Both younger sisters struggled with alcohol. By the 1880s they had fallen out bitterly with Leah, who had married a wealthy insurance man, Daniel Underhill, and who presented herself as the movement's founding figure in The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885).

The 1888 Confession and Its Aftermath§

In 1888, in an interview with the New York World, Maggie declared that the rappings had begun as a children's prank to frighten their mother and had been kept up under Leah's direction. On 21 October 1888, with Kate present in the audience, she appeared at the Academy of Music in New York and produced audible raps by moving her foot, which a panel of doctors confirmed came from the joint of her big toe. The journalist Reuben Briggs Davenport published her account as The Death-Blow to Spiritualism (1888). In November 1889, however, Maggie retracted the confession, saying she had made it under financial pressure and the influence of the movement's enemies.

Leah died in 1890, Kate in 1892 and Maggie in 1893, the younger sisters in poverty. In 1904 children playing in the abandoned Hydesville house reported finding human bones and a peddler's tin box behind a cellar wall, which Spiritualists hailed as confirmation of the 1848 messages; sceptics questioned whether the remains were human or genuine. The house was moved to the Spiritualist assembly at Lily Dale, New York, in 1916 and was destroyed by fire in 1955. Defenders such as Arthur Conan Doyle in The History of Spiritualism (1926) upheld the sisters, while the magician Harry Houdini treated the confession as decisive.

Frequently asked questions§

Did the Fox sisters admit to fraud?§

Yes, in 1888 Maggie Fox publicly stated that the raps were made by cracking her toe joints, and demonstrated the method in New York, with Kate's tacit support. She retracted the confession in 1889, so Spiritualists and sceptics continue to read the episode differently.

What happened at Hydesville in 1848?§

On 31 March 1848 Kate and Maggie Fox appeared to communicate by knocks with a spirit in their family's rented farmhouse, which identified itself as a murdered peddler. The event is regarded as the beginning of modern Spiritualism.

Who was Leah Fox?§

Leah Fox Fish, later Underhill, was the sisters' much older sibling. She managed their public career in Rochester and New York, became a professional medium herself, and wrote The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885).

Sources and further reading§