FOX SISTERS

Opening

On the night of 31 March 1848, in a small rented cottage in Hydesville, in the town of Arcadia, Wayne County, New York, the knocking that had kept the Fox family awake for weeks began to answer back. According to their mother's statement, the younger daughter, Kate, clapped her hands and said "Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do", and the raps copied her. By the end of the night the neighbours were in the house, asking questions and counting knocks.

Within two years Maggie and Kate Fox were giving paid demonstrations, and the movement that grew around them, Spiritualism, spread across America and Europe. Forty years later Maggie stood on a New York stage and showed how she had made the raps with her toes. A year after that she took it back. The movement outlived both statements.

Timeline

11 December 1847John D. Fox and his wife Margaret move into the Hydesville cottage with their two youngest daughters, Margaretta (Maggie), in her fifteenth year, and Catherine (Kate), about twelve.

31 March 1848The raps answer Kate. Mrs Fox works out a code of knocks with the noise, and John Fox fetches the nearest neighbour, Mrs Redfield. Her husband brings in William Duesler and others. Through yes-and-no knocks, the raps say they are a man murdered in the house and buried in the cellar.

April 1848E. E. Lewis collects signed statements from the family and neighbours and publishes them as A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox. A former servant's statement supplies the pedlar. A previous tenant, John Bell, is suspected, and Lewis's report also carries a character reference for him signed by about forty neighbours.

1848 to 1849The girls move to Rochester, where their much older sister Leah Fox Fish takes charge of them and the raps follow.

14 November 1849The first paid public demonstration, at Corinthian Hall, Rochester. Three committees examine the sisters over the following days and find no trick they can name.

1850Sittings at Barnum's Hotel in New York. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune takes an interest and becomes a protector of the sisters.

February 1851Three University of Buffalo professors, Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee and Charles B. Coventry, examine the sisters and conclude the raps come from cracking joints, chiefly the knees. With the girls' feet held on cushions, there are no raps.

1852 to 1857The Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane meets Maggie, believes the raps are a deception and urges her to give them up. She later says they married in secret. He dies in Havana on 16 February 1857.

1872Kate marries Henry Dietrich Jencken, a London barrister.

21 October 1888At the New York Academy of Music, before an audience of about 2,000 with Kate present, Maggie produces raps with her toe joints while doctors from the audience check her on stage. Her confession runs in the New York World the same day.

November 1889Maggie recants in an interview with the New York Press, saying she confessed for money and under pressure.

1890 to 1893Leah dies on 1 November 1890, Kate on 2 July 1892, and Maggie on 8 March 1893 in Brooklyn.

22 November 1904The Boston Journal reports bones found behind a crumbling wall in the cottage cellar.

Key figures

Maggie and Kate Fox produced the raps. They were children when it started, and it shaped the rest of their lives, including the drinking that both struggled with later.

Margaret Fox, their mother, made the first decision to call the neighbours in, and her signed statement is the earliest account of the night. Leah Fox Fish, later Underhill, turned the raps into a public act and managed her sisters' careers; in 1885 she published her own account, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism.

E. E. Lewis gathered the first statements. The Buffalo doctors made the first serious test, and Maggie herself made the last one, on stage in 1888.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: Lewis's 1848 pamphlet of signed statements, including Mrs Fox's; the reports of the Rochester committees; the Buffalo doctors' 1851 finding; Maggie's 1888 confession in the New York World and her 1889 recantation; Leah's 1885 book; and the 1904 newspaper report of the bones.

What is missing: any record of a pedlar who disappeared near Hydesville around 1843, and any proper examination of the 1904 bones, which were never verified as human remains from the period. Even Mrs Fox's own statement doesn't call the spirit a pedlar; that detail came from another witness.

Things you might not know

• The pedlar had a name. The raps were later said to identify him as Charles B. Rosna, murdered five years earlier. The name is spelled Rosna, Rosma or Rosa depending on the source, and no missing man by any of those names was ever identified.
• The bones included chicken. A physician who looked at the 1904 find said it was a random mix of bones, chicken bones among them, and took it for a joke.
• It started with apples. In her 1888 confession Maggie said that as small children they tied an apple to a string and bumped it on the floor at night to frighten their mother.
• Kane's family denied the marriage. Maggie took the name Kane after his death, but his family rejected her claim and historians doubt it.
• "Mr. Splitfoot" may be a later polish. The line comes from Mrs Fox's statement as Leah reprinted it decades later, and some historians treat it as an embellishment.

Competing explanations

Genuine contact. The reading Spiritualism was built on. Neighbours heard the raps in the house in 1848, the Rochester committees found no trick, and Maggie withdrew her confession. Believers point out that she was poor and drinking in 1888 and was paid for the stage appearance.

Toe and knee joints. The Buffalo doctors found it in 1851, the raps stopped when the sisters' feet were controlled, and Maggie demonstrated it in front of 2,000 people and a row of doctors. Her recantation came a year later and showed no other way of making the sound.

A prank that got away from them. Two young girls frighten their mother, the neighbours arrive, and a game becomes something adults want to believe. By the time they were on stage at Corinthian Hall, there was no easy way back.

Later life of the case

Spiritualism outlived the sisters and Maggie's confession. In 1916 the Hydesville cottage was moved to the Spiritualist camp at Lily Dale, New York, where it burned down on 21 September 1955; a plaque now marks the spot. A replica built on the original Hydesville foundation later burned too, reportedly in 1983. The Hydesville site is now a memorial park that preserves the old stone foundation. For the voice on a Tennessee farm a generation earlier, see the Bell Witch.

Finding

The Hydesville raps were a trick. In 1851 three Buffalo doctors traced them to cracking joints, and when the sisters' feet were held on cushions the raps stopped. On 21 October 1888 Maggie Fox stood on the stage of the New York Academy of Music, with Kate in the audience, and made the raps with her toe joints while doctors checked her. She took the confession back about a year later, when she was short of money, but she never showed any other way the raps could be made.

The sisters were children when it began, and the comfort people found in the movement that grew from it was real. What still will not resolve: whether anything was ever in the cellar, since the pedlar the raps named has never been found in any record, and the bones found there in 1904 were never verified.