The Death-Blow to Spiritualism Part 6

This caused the commencement of that great excitement which so soon spread from neighborhood to village, from the village to the near-by city of Rochester, and thence all over the country.

Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane says at the present time:

"The apple-dropping trick appeared to us small children so simple and innocent, that we could only wonder that any one attached so great an importance to the sounds we produced. Only think of our ages at that time, and then ask, if you will, how we could have even the shade of a realization of the real meaning of this deception!

"This lying book of Mrs. Underhill's, notwithstanding its abominable object, does give some slight inkling of the truth here and there.

"It is thus that the wicked confound themselves.

"She quotes, as you see here, what she says to be my mother's words: 'The children who slept in the other bed in the room, heard the rapping and tried to make similar sounds by snapping their fingers.'

"Now that is really just how we first got the idea of producing with the joints similar sounds to those we had made by dropping apples with a string. From trying it with our fingers we then tried it with our feet, and it did not take long for us to find out that we could easily produce very loud raps by the action of the toe-joints when in contact with any substance which is a good conductor of sound. My sister Katie was the first to discover that we could make such peculiar noises with our fingers. We used to practice first with one foot and then the other, and finally we got so we could do it with hardly an effort.

"Of course, I was so young then that many incidents have escaped my memory. I a.s.sert positively, however, that much of the effect of the 'rappings' is greatly exaggerated in this statement which my mother was made to write. I say that she was _made_ to write it, because the wording of the statement, if not largely dictated by others in the first place--men who desired to make public the details of the 'rappings' and to make money by the sale of a pamphlet describing them--was afterwards grossly garbled, that it might be used to suit the dishonest purposes of professional spiritualists. I am not even certain that mother ever signed the doc.u.ment, of which Mrs. Underhill makes such great parade. The same is true regarding the other pieces of so-called evidence in her work. Utterly futile as they are, when confronted with my living testimony, and when judged by their own internal weakness, I should not regard them as in any sense genuine unless I could see the original handwriting and could recognize the signatures. I say to you now, that professional spiritualists are capable of going to any lengths to bolster up their impostures. No forgery, so long as there was the least chance of its succeeding, as a furtherance to their object, would in the least repel them. Some of the so-called statements in Leah's book I believe were manufactured from beginning to end, though to tell you the truth I have avoided reading the greater part of it because of the disgust I have felt for a long time for that whole infamous system of pretense and falsehood.

"Well, we were led on unintentionally by my good mother in the perpetration of this great wrong. She used to say when we were sitting in a dark circle at home: 'Is this a disembodied spirit that has taken possession of my dear children?' And then we would 'rap' just for the fun of the thing, you know, and mother would declare that it was the spirits that were speaking.

"Soon it went so far, and so many persons had heard the 'rappings' that we could not confess the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part of those we had deceived. So we went right on.

"It is wonderful, indeed, how two little children could have made this discovery, and how, by simply obeying the natural thirst for the marvelous, in others, and their inherent superst.i.tion, they should have advanced step by step, in the fraud, deluding those who most ardently wished to be deluded.

"Until first suggested to us by our mother, who was perfectly innocent in her belief, the thought of 'spirits' had never entered our heads. We were too young and too simple to imagine such a thing."

CHAPTER VII.

GARBLED AND DISTORTED TESTIMONY.

So the neighbors were called in at the Hydesville house and the "rappings"

were continued.

By diligent questioning on the part of the older persons in the Fox household and of the neighbors, the mysterious noises were made to affirm or to deny almost anything which was suggested to the "mediums," often in accordance with knowledge that, it had been believed, was only possessed by a few persons.

And so the wonder grew, day by day.

Pursuing the idea that a man had been murdered in the house, the whole of a very horrible history was obtained, and the name even of the supposed murderer was indicated by affirmative "raps" when mentioned together with others in a tentative way. The occupation of the victim was said to be that of a pedler. He had $500 in money and was buried in the creek which ran past the house.

Mrs. Underhill admits that some of the neighbors were misled and went to digging in the creek, called Ganargua, the water of which was then very low. But they speedily recognized the absurdity of this undertaking, and the girls, Maggie, Katie and Lizzie laughed at them for their pains. The bones of an old horse were found there and nothing more.

By this time the two sisters had arrived at very great proficiency in producing the raps. Such a crude and easily detected means as the bobbing of apples on the floor was early discarded. Often in the morning, before they dressed, and after the old folks had left their room, the sisters would stand in their bare feet on the floor and vie with each other in the laughable exercise of making the "strange" noises. It was impossible, of course, that Lizzie should not know the whole truth, although being about thirteen years old at this time, she was unabled to imitate the "raps"

very successfully. Indeed, it is said that she was too frank and outspoken in disposition to engage long in any deception. When the children persisted in deluding their mother, partly for their amus.e.m.e.nt and partly because they were ashamed to retract what had already caused so much excitement and had drawn so much attention to themselves, Lizzie used to break out indignantly:

"_Now, Maggie, how can you say that it was done by spirits! You know yourself that it's all a story. It's a great shame to pretend such things._"

Many occurrences of this description I have gathered from Mrs. Kane.

But Mrs. Leah Underhill, in her jumbled up narrative, states that "_When the raps broke out suddenly close to some of the family, or at the table, one of the girls would accuse the other of having caused them, saying, 'Now you did that, etc., etc.'_"

Thanks to Mrs. Leah Underhill, such hints of the true explanation of these "manifestations" are plentiful throughout her book, and one needs only to bring some little intelligence to bear upon it to read between the lines the whole story of the fraud.

And here let me quote a pa.s.sage which only goes to show how very strong was the love of deviltry in the children:

"Father had always been a regular Methodist in good standing, and was invariable in his practice of morning prayers; and _when he would be kneeling upon his chair, it would sometimes amuse the children to see him open wide his eyes as knocks would sound and vibrate on his chair itself_.

He expressed it graphically to mother: 'When I am done praying that jigging stops.'"

Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane distinctly remembers incidents like this one; only she qualifies the narrative by saying that her father never opened his eyes when these annoyances came while he was at prayer, but went devoutly on to the end without heeding them.

How absurd for any one to suppose that if these sounds were produced by a cause unknown to the children, they would laugh at them and regard them as very great sport, instead of trembling and crying with affright!

"The sounds which were heard at those times," says Mrs. Kane in her statement to the writer, "were all produced by Katie and myself, and by no other being or spirit under the sun. Nor did we always do it with our feet. Frequently in that early stage of the excitement about the 'rappings,' we would make the sounds with our fingers, provided it was easy to do so without causing suspicion. In order to do it unknown to any one, we would sit with one hand hidden by an elbow resting upon the table, or the woodwork of a chair.

"Of course, our mother in her earnest belief, poor soul, excited us to do a great deal more than otherwise we would had done. The mystery of the sounds absorbed her entire being for the time. She became pale and worn-looking and thought that great misfortunes were to happen, and prayed often and fervently. I can well remember how my heart used to smite me at times when I looked upon her and knew that Katie and I were the cause of all her trouble. In later years, long after I had come to the age of understanding, I had very bitter reasons for such pangs of remorse, especially towards the last of mother's life, when, as I know, she was in a great measure undeceived and feared for the perdition of the souls of her children."

In Mrs. Underhill's book, (written for her by another,) there is an effort to convey the impression that John D. Fox, her father, shared in the belief which she sought to establish in the spiritual origin of the "knockings." Such an implication Mrs. Kane declares to be utterly false.

He never manifested in any way a tendency toward such belief; on the contrary, he always showed by his conduct and his manner of speech, the utmost repugnance to it, and a perfect contempt for the weakness which could lead one into it.

Margaret Fox, the mother, used to say to her husband:

"Now, John, don't you see that it's a wonderful thing?"

"No, I don't," he would answer. "Don't talk to me about it. I don't want to hear a word about it!"

Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane says, further: "My father did not believe in Spiritualism. The excitement which we caused annoyed him a great deal. He signed a statement which merely amounted to his declaring that he did not know how the noises originated. He was cajoled into doing this. He wanted to get rid of the importunities of those who believed, or affected to believe, in the 'rappings.'"

Such is the story of the earliest "rappings" at Hydesville.

It is embellished by Mrs. Underhill with many transparent falsehoods. But still further to bolster it up, it was thought necessary to discover traditions, or to invent "hearsay" anecdotes, giving to the house in which they lived a ghostly history. There are few country houses about which the memory of the oldest neighboring inhabitant does not recall something or other remarkable and strange, which was told him by some one or other whose ident.i.ty is very indefinite, in the dim, distant past. Thus it is stated that odd noises had been heard in the Hydesville house during several previous years by successive occupants. But it is confessed that none of those persons (whose testimony no one pretends to give) had obtained any intelligible messages from another world.

Mrs. Kane states that all of this alleged neighborhood gossip was totally unknown to her at the time, and she believes that it had its chief--or perhaps its only--origin, in the morbid imaginations of those who were the first to set it going.

CHAPTER VIII.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE FRAUD.

Now we come to the moment when Ann Leah Fox Fish, the eldest sister, thirty-one years of age at that time, appears upon the scene of the wondrous and so-called supernatural commotion at the little rustic hamlet of Hydesville.

No "mediumistic" suggestions or impulses had ever come to her. Not one, though she had lived twenty-three years longer in the world than the dark-eyed, fascinating little girl who produced the first mysterious sounds in her mother's home.