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Margaret Fox, in her later years noted:-
"They [the neighbors] were convinced that some one had been murdered in the house. They asked the spirits through us about it and we would rap one for the spirit answer 'yes,' not three as we did afterwards. The murder they concluded must have been committed in the house. They went over the whole surrounding country trying to get the names of people who had formerly lived in the house. Finally they found a man by the name of Bell, and they said that this poor innocent man had committed a murder in the house and that the noises had come from the spirit of the murdered person. Poor Bell was shunned and looked upon by the whole community as a
murderer."
The two women were sent to sibling homes,
Kate to Leah's and Margaret to their brother David's home. The Fox
parents felt it might be good for them to get away from the fervor that
the rappings had caused in an ever-expanding area around Hydesville.
Unfortunately sending them away wasn't
the answer. The goings-on followed them. This, of course,
convinced everyone that the mediums were genuine and the contact with
spirits was very much real. Friends of the family, Amy and Isaac Post,
Quakers, had the girls visit their home.
"In this way, appeared the
association between Spiritualism and radical political causes such as
abolition, temperance and equal rights for women."
By mid 1850, the girls had channeled for
both famous and not famous people of the time, conducting séances and
spirit communication. The sisters began to travel in circles of
high society because of their apparent gift of talking to the
dead. Wine drinking and late nights took their toll on the
women.
In the fifties, Margaret married a man
named Kane, a skeptic who tried to keep her from her sisters by moving
her away and having her convert to Roman Catholicism. After Kane's
death however, she returned to her sister Kate in England and the mediums
continued. Kate's husband passed away in 1881, leaving her with
two kids.
William Crookes, a scientist of some note
between '71 and '74, said that Kate was a powerful medium, producing
raps with authenticity.
"I have tested them in
every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the
conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by
trickery or mechanical means." Crookes
- 1874
In later years, both Margaret and Kate
drank far too much, causing Leah and other spiritualists to be concerned
for her children. The sisters feuded with Leah and took money for
a confession of fraud and Margaret was seduced by the offer. She
went into detail about how her toe joints caused the crackings and
rappings, that she and Kate had devised methods to convince those
attending that the messages were real.
Within five years of Margaret's recanting
of her expose, both sisters were dead, in pauper's graves, turned away
by former followers and friends.
© 2008 JLee D
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