#493 The Fox Sisters: Summoning the Spirits

The mysterious farmhouse murder

0:00In early America, peddlers were a common sight on the back roads between small towns, selling a variety of goods and services from place to place. These so-called Yankee peddlers sold everything from silverware to clocks, and along the way they also spread news and gossip before the days of the telegraph and the railroad. But peddling could also be a very dangerous profession, and a man loaded up with special goods never knew what he would find when he rolled into a small town

0:32and knocked upon the door of unknown farmhouses. And so it was that a traveling peddler entered the small hamlet of Hydesville, New York, east of Rochester one day in the early 1840s. The salesman knocked on the door of a simple two-story farmhouse with wooden siding and a few small windows. As the door opened, he prepared to give his spiel about the many fine items he had with him for sale. He was invited into the house to show off his valuable wares and eventually invited to spend the night.

1:09This was a customary courtesy. But in this case, when the door shut, the salesman would never again leave the house. For according to the story that would later attach itself to this house, the Bells had other plans for the peddler. The peddler's throat was slashed, and his stash of money and his collection of housewares, tools, and clothing were stolen. And his body was hastily buried in the house's basement. And it went undetected.

1:41Because who in rural western New York was going to notice a missing traveling salesman? The only reason we know this tragic tale is because it was shared by the peddler himself from beyond the grave, five years after his death, and communicated through a series of rapping sounds to two young sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, who had moved into the very same house and who had a gift for communicating with the deceased peddler.

2:13Through these rappings, the spirit would not only eventually divulge his name, but he would also reveal the location of its bodily remains in the cellar. It caused a sensation. Yet when the basement was investigated, no body was found. Not a trace of a missing peddler. Certainly, these two girls would not lie about such a thing. But the spirit rappings didn't stop. In fact, they were only getting started.

2:46Soon, messages were zinging fast and furious from the spirit world. And soon, too, were the Fox sisters traveling the country to exhibit their talents for communicating with the dead. And in New York City in particular, they attracted big crowds, but also powerful supporters in business, politics, and media. But they also had their detractors and were dogged by scandal and accusations of being fraudsters.

3:17From the roots of the story come the birth of one of the most significant American religious movements of the 19th century, spiritualism, and the popular use of its primary tool of communication, the séance. But was it real? Or were these young women playing a very dark and dangerous game?

Two ways to read the story

3:41The Bowery Boys episode 493. The Fox sisters summon the spirits. Hey, it's the Bowery Boys. Hey. Hi there. Welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young. And this is Tom Myers. And Greg, did you hear that? After almost two decades of telling spooky and mysterious stories on this podcast,

4:19the spirits are finally responding. Those are the ghosts, I think, of bad puns past. What? They're just now taking notice? Just now, yes. But seriously, if we were to turn back the clock to 1848, we might have been able to convince people that those sorts of sounds were really communications from the spirit world. In 1848, Kate and Maggie Fox claimed to receive those very transmissions while living in a haunted house.

4:52Now, later joined by their sister Leah, this trio then exhibited powers to communicate with the dead, soon taking this act out on the road and inspiring an entirely new belief that would come to be known as spiritualism. And when you said that they took this act out on the road, was this a show? Was what they were doing seen as entertainment? Well, there are actually two ways to look at today's show. A kind of choose-your-own-adventure, listeners.

5:23You can listen to the story of the Fox sisters and believe that all of this is real. And in fact, a great many people today still believe in some element of spiritualism, in the tools that can be used to puncture the wall between the living world and the afterlife. Right. Or you can take the very same facts and believe that the whole thing was some kind of, you know, extremely elaborate hoax that was perpetrated by these young women over decades.

5:56And it was corroborated by witnesses and also those in the press as though it was some kind of amusement. Or you could also follow a middle path, you know, that the sisters might have been performers, even charlatans, but that they also undeniably awakened ideas in others that were perfectly legitimate. Now, the Fox sisters became national celebrities after the year 1850 when they came to New York City and convinced a great many quite influential men of their mysterious power.

6:32Right. And we should reiterate, of course, we're talking about women here in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, because this is also a story about the traditional roles of women in American society at the time. The Fox sisters risked their reputations and really sometimes their own safety in practicing, you know, these and performing these seances and in claiming that they had this unique connection to the afterlife. Because many people saw that claim as blasphemous.

7:03If it was a fraud, how did they manage to get away with this then for so long? Were the Fox sisters really spiritually gifted? Or were they just great actresses? And were they actually great sound designers? Is this a show about apparitions or acoustics? Messages or magic tricks? Or perhaps is it a bit of all of that? Okay, so I feel like this episode needs quite a bit of situating, Greg.

7:35Because the story of the Fox sisters and the world in which they lived, you know, the spiritual world, if you will, but also literally the world in upstate New York and later New York in the mid-19th century. Can you put that in context for us?

The burned over district context

7:49Well, actually, let's start with Rochester, okay? Let's start with the place. It's located on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, about 70 miles east of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and founded on the original lands of the Seneca Nation. Rochesterville, as it was originally called, was actually a planned development with surveyed streets and parceled lots, which remained very, very quiet, let's just say, sparsely populated before the 1820s.

8:22And I'm guessing then that things change with the opening of the Erie Canal? The canal actually creates a partial southern perimeter to the modern city today, as residents can tell you. We did a show last year on the history of the Erie Canal. It's episode 470 with historian Derek Pratt of the Erie Canal Museum, if you would like more information about the development of the canal. But essentially, after 1825, when the canal did open, everything changed for Rochester,

8:57and quite suddenly, with hundreds of new businesses and thousands of new residents. And we talk frequently on the show about how the Erie Canal benefited New York City, because the city became the gateway, you know, for this new waterway that linked the Atlantic Ocean, then via the Hudson River, up to the canal and into the interior of the country. But we have to underscore that it completely reinvented western New York, right, as well, with many new cities and towns forming right along it,

9:30where there really hadn't been much settlement at all. And I think you can say it even changed the religious nature of the United States. That's a surprising side result of the canal. I mean, imagine this. You have all these new pioneer families by the thousands making new places to live, far from established cities, connected only by waterways and dirt roads,

10:03with, you know, railroads would arrive in the 1830s. Most of these new settlers were Protestants, but they were making their own realities. You know, they were making their own cities from scratch, building their own forms of wealth, you know, out of nothing. And then they even started building their own new religious beliefs. And all of this religious fervor, this religious movement, was called the Second Great Awakening, which occurred really throughout the entire country.

10:33But especially here, within this concentrated area of western New York, where people were really, really awakened, and so many souls... Quite awakened, yes. So many souls were fired up, fired up, Greg. There was a lot of talk, actually, about fire, right, revivals, fire of the soul. There was so much fire that there were actually no souls left to burn. And so this area in western New York was then referred to as the burned-over district,

11:07like a fire that had burned through a forest and was now burned over and nothing left to burn. That is vivid image. And actually, like, not just in western New York, but throughout the state. You know, the pendulum was swinging away from, like, the founding fathers' era of enlightenment, which was, you know, science-based thought. And back to more localized, even personalized spiritual beliefs. But no less revolutionary than prior generations, we should say. People began to question everything they had been taught, not just in religion,

11:42but also in basic social ideas, which often spread through outdoor religious revivals, but also door-to-door. Sounds a little bit like, you know, the evangelical, right, and born-again movements might trace their origins back to this period. Right through the burnt-over district, you're right. And that's really just the beginning. We've also got the Shakers, the Adventists, the Oneida movement is even named for a place

12:12in New York. Even the Mormons all trace their development to New York and to this new fervor. But it goes even further than that, Tom. It's even bigger than that, because if we're breaking spiritual norms, rewriting what we've been taught, we can also break cultural norms. For western New York also becomes the center of the abolition movement, of the temperance movement, and even the birthplace of the modern women's rights movement.

12:45In fact, it was in the very same summer of 1848, so the very same year that the Fox sisters first heard those rapping noises, that the first women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, which advocated for a greater expansion of rights for American women. And Seneca Falls is only about 50 miles away from Rochester. So all of this is to say, the events of our story today are embedded within a place of

13:15both extreme, extreme spiritual reinvention, but also progressive cultural reinvention as well. So a place where young women leading a radical spiritual movement actually had a chance to be heard here. Okay, so thank you.

The Fox family moves in

13:33Now let's go back to that farmhouse, that scary haunted farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. This was located in Arcadia Township, which is about 30 miles east of Rochester. Right, exactly. That farmhouse had been standing for quite some time, actually, and was occupied by a few different families already, including, as we mentioned, the Bell family, who were here in 1843, at the time that the poor, unfortunate peddler allegedly came knocking.

14:07A servant girl named Lucretia Pulver had been working at the home and was sent away when the peddler arrived. Okay, mysterious. She returned three days later to find no trace that the peddler had, you know, had even been there at all. A 1936 article in The New Yorker continues the story. A few days later, the Bells decided to drive into Palmyra and spend the night with friends there.

14:38At midnight, Lucretia was awakened in her second-story room by the sound of a slow, regular tread on the ground floor. Thinking that the Bells might have come home, she arose and peered down the stairs just in time to hear the footsteps past the stairway and to realize that the walker was not visible. Panic-stricken, she returned to her bed and, lying in it, heard the footsteps slowly descend

15:08the cellar stairs. Then there was silence. On the next day, the Bells returned and sent Lucretia on an errand to the cellar. As the trembling girl was obeying, her feet sank beneath her into a hole only partially filled with soft earth. When she reported this upstairs, Mrs. Bell said the hole had probably been made by rats. Unquote. So, did she think that perhaps the peddler had been murdered and was buried in the basement?

15:45Well, this is the story that stuck with the house, right? And was passed down with it to another owner who claims to have also heard rapping sounds from the basement. And it was certainly then that story passed to the Fox family, a good Methodist family, who during the dark, cold December of 1847 moved into this house, the Fox family, a blacksmith

16:16named John Fox, his wife Margaret, and their two daughters, 14-year-old Maggie and 11-year-old Kate. And they chose this house because it was close to the farm of the Fox's eldest son, David. Still, it was a bit of a forlorn place. Winter in an old wooden house is bad enough, with all the creaking and wind whistling. But this house had these stories attached to it.

16:46Early in the new year, 1848, the family reported hearing unexplained knocking sounds, even the sounds of something dragging upon the floor. Each time, they lit a candle to investigate, and each time, they found nothing. But there must have been some explanation here. Sure, until the evening of March 31st, 1848, when the rappings sounded again, erupting through

17:19the house louder than ever. I now quote from Mrs. Fox, who witnessed something unexplainable. The children in the other room heard the rapping and tried to make similar sounds by snapping their fingers. My youngest child, Kathy, said, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do, clapping her hands.

17:49The sound imitated following her with the same number of raps. When she stopped, the sound ceased for a short time. Then Margareta said, in sport, now do just as I do. Count one, two, three, four, striking one hand against the other at the same time. And the raps came as before. She then said, oh, look, mother, it can see as well as hear.

18:21Oh, and I'm sorry, why did she call it Mr. Splitfoot? Well, that is another name for the devil. Oh. How else to really explain this phenomena at this point? Like, what other words could you use to describe it? The mother decided to press the spirit further, asking it to knock the respective ages of each of her children. It did so, even correctly knowing the age of a child who had died as an infant.

18:57She then asked, is this a human being that answers my questions so correctly? When it did not respond, she asked, is it a spirit? If it is, make two raps. And then she heard it. So, they were establishing a kind of language here. Mm-hmm. No, no rap meant no, and raps, in this case two raps, meant yes.

19:32Yeah, and it could even spell out messages, like they would ask questions, then recite the alphabet and ask it to rap at the correct letter. And in this way, you know, a long, drawn-out process, they spent a lot of time with this spirit, the family was able to ascertain the frightening identity of the spirit. And realized it was the ghost of this murdered peddler. Exactly.

20:02I mean, this is an unbelievable thing to discover in your home. Just terrifying and way too horrifying, really, to keep to themselves. So, Margaret called for the neighbors to come over, as you might do, and they also witnessed this haunting communication. Soon, there were over a dozen people in the house, and all of them were asking this spirit various questions. Quoting from an article that ran just a few weeks later in the Brooklyn Times Union, it

20:36states the body it once inhabited was that of a peddler, that it was 31 years of age and was murdered about four years since by the then occupant of the house. By having its throat cut with a butcher knife. And once they got these details, then, did they, did these people and the neighbors, I don't know, somebody start digging for the body? Well, they were unable to really dig significantly for anything for several days due to the dampness

21:09of the earth from underground springs and some rain. But eventually, they did dig down, and they did find something. They found bits of bone, very, very small bits of bone, some hair, even. Human hair? Animal hair? Well, this is sort of an interesting detail. No one could actually investigate this. There were no forensics back in the day, and no one could really investigate because Mrs. Fox allegedly threw all of these remains into the creek.

21:42That's strange. That's inconvenient. Mm-hmm. Of course, the bigger revelation here was that these young Fox daughters could not only really speak to the dead, but they had now invented a pretty sophisticated system of talking to the dead, a communication of spirit wrapping. They were using questions to guide the inquiry and reading out the alphabet to hammer out

22:12specifics. And pretty quickly, they also came up with a really interesting way to make a lot of money, thanks to their enterprising older sister, Leah. The Fox sisters hit the road right after this. For more spooky shenanigans, join us at Joe's Pub this year for our hit Halloween tradition, Ghost Stories of Old New York. Two shows every night from October 28th through October 31st, 2026.

22:48That last night is Halloween. Go to joespub.com and get your tickets now. That's the Bowery Boys' Ghost Stories of Old New York. We'll see you there.

Telegraphs and family dynamics

23:01So here were two girls, 14-year-old Maggie and 11-year-old Kate, who very quickly in late 1848 had become locally famous for their ability to communicate with spirits. Which sounds really, you know, unusual to us, and it certainly was back then, of course. But it also lands right at this moment when religious discoveries were happening all around them. Like, this is the context. So why not to two young sisters, you know?

23:35Well, and it was also at the very same time that the telegraph was gaining wider use. Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844 between Washington and Baltimore. So by the time of these wrappings in 1848, telegraph wires were being strung alongside new railroad tracks and were starting, you know, to finally connect the country's major cities.

24:00This moment, this is the birth of breaking news, right? This is it. Yeah. It never travels as quickly as it does now. And it completely changed how business was done and, of course, including trading stocks. That's right. And much of it happened using Morse code, which is, of course, a series of long and short rhythmic tones. What a coincidence, right? Not terribly different from wrappings and knockings. Or counting things out to get to the right letter.

24:32Right. And I think it's important to mention that because the public was already astonished by those other tapping sounds happening in the telegraph office. But those also seemed kind of magical to the American public. And exciting times back when we, like, were really excited about a new technology and, like, was opening our world and not crushing down on us. I don't know what you're talking about, Greg. It was. But yes, it was creating jobs. Lots and lots of jobs. Yes.

25:03Anyhow. So rewind for a second, because the parents, Margaret and John Fox, had had a pretty bumpy marriage. We talked already about young Maggie and Kate, but the girls had much older siblings. There was Leah, who was already mentioned. There was also Maria, Elizabeth, and David. And they had lived in the Rochester area in the 1820s, long before the youngest girls had been born. But Father John Fox had business problems and he drank too much.

25:36So their mother, Margaret, had left him. However, John had attended a Methodist revival meeting. All of those were happening in the 1830s and he was born again and the family was thus reunited. So it was then in 1833 and 1837 that Maggie and Kate were born. So they've got these older siblings. There's a whole group of older siblings in the family. But it's these two youngest girls then who are suddenly famous.

26:07Yes. And the older sister, Leah, lived in Rochester and she supported herself by giving piano lessons. Now, she had been married, but her husband had simply left town and left her back alone to figure it out on her own. So she caught news of the happenings that were taking place back at the farmhouse in Hydesville. And she tracked down her parents and her sisters who were hiding out away from the reporters at her brother David's house.

26:38Was she possibly upset by their fame, maybe a little jealous? I think she could have also been protective, right? And she was also upset that her mother seemed to be really suffering from it emotionally, but also physically from witnessing all of these frightful spirit wrappings. Leah claimed that her mother's hair had turned completely white from the scare. That is in itself frightening. Also, the mother, Margaret, was understandably very upset that the family was no longer welcomed

27:09at their Methodist church because of all this. That's right. It was just too much for them. So Leah decided that the girls needed to be separated, right? The youngest daughter, Kate, would return to Rochester with Leah and her daughter. And Maggie would stay in Hydesville with the parents. But that didn't exactly calm the spirits, though, did it? No. The wrappings actually started on the boat ride back to Leah's house along the Erie Canal. And the wrappings got worse once they got back to Leah's house,

27:41when after midnight, they were awakened to find tables and chairs moving around the room. Oh, that's a very, very easy indicator that it is time to move, which they did. Which they did. They got out of there, right? Right. They moved into a larger home, and she actually invited her mother and Maggie to move in with them. Unfortunately, the spirits followed them to this new home, and the new house was quickly filled with wrappings and bumpings and furniture and beds moving right before their eyes.

28:18So the furniture is moving around. So this actually is beginning to sound dangerous, not just like a little scary. Well, and it could actually be violent. Kate claimed to have actually gotten smacked by an invisible hand, which knocked her to the floor. And in a half-trance, she started reciting poetry. According to the book American Spirits, The Famous Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Fad That Haunted a Nation by Barb Rosenstock, the still-woozy Kate began reciting religious poetry like an automaton, at least a hundred lines in a row.

28:55As the recitation trailed off, she awoke fully and began sobbing. Through her tears, Kate said she'd seen the peddler, the knife, and the blood. So much blood. While in her trance, she'd witnessed the peddler's murder. And then, like, at this point, well, they keep it under wraps, right? They keep it quiet. Right. Because all of this is quite scary, controversial, disturbing. But obviously, word starts to sneak out that something very strange is going on in Leah's house.

29:32Yeah, it's kind of difficult to keep, you know, a lid on spirits knocking about from beyond. Apparently. And since the girls had proven to be able to communicate with, you know, this specific spirit, neighbors and friends started to visit the house and to ask the girls if they could help summon up the spirits of their beloved, you know, loved ones who had passed away.

30:03It really was like someone was asking them to send a telegraph message to the other side.

The birth of the seance

30:12And one of those requests came from a well-known Rochester resident named Lyman Granger, who was speaking through the girls to his deceased daughter, Harriet. At one of these, what they called spirit circles, he invited his friend, the Reverend Lemuel Clark, to join them for a session. And Clark was a skeptic. Well, you did say reverend. He's a man of the cloth. I'm not surprised by his skepticism, but go on.

30:44Well, hold on. Because Clark sat around a table with the Grangers and the Fox sisters and their mother. They had tea, they sang a hymn, and then the tapping started. And Reverend Clark was perplexed. As Rosenstock writes, quote, The sounds could be loud or faint, hesitant or bold, slow to answer or quite rapid like a human voice. Lemuel followed the wrappings to find their source.

31:14At first, the sounds came from under the table. But when the group sang, the raps thumped in time to the music on the table's top. Lemuel had a clear view of the hands, arms, and faces of Leah, Kate, and the rest of the company. Not a muscle moved visibly, quote. And I should add that as they all sat resting hands on the table, he witnessed it move across the carpet to rest right before him.

31:47So the Reverend Clark left that evening a true believer. And so this circle, the spirit circle here from 1848, this is the beginning of what would become known to us as the seance. Yes, and usually these sessions involve sitting around a table, holding hands or resting your hands on the table, touching your neighbors, closing the curtains, turning off any lights, and closing your eyes in order to open yourself up to the spirits.

32:25And in fact, so many more prominent figures from Rochester were actually opening themselves up to this possibility. That's right. The word got around town. And soon, you know, Leah's friends, Isaac and Amy Post, who were prominent citizens, they were Quakers, they were abolitionists. They also were a couple who were hoping to communicate with their three young children who had all died at early ages. And whenever Kate or Maggie was seated around a table with this couple and their family, the spirits of the children would present themselves.

33:03And this couple was so relieved to hear them and to hear that they were doing well. This communication brought these grieving parents happiness. So, Mr. Granger and Clark and the Posts, so the collective, they're collecting a little bit of a group around them. The Posts, by the way, who were friends with civil rights leader Frederick Douglass, an author and lecturer, one of the leaders of the abolitionist movement, who was also invited to a seance.

33:35And who was apparently not at all won over by it. I think he called it something like hokum. But there was also a well-known journalist named Eliab Capron, who attended his first circle and was initially filled with doubt. But then he was astonished to see questions answered correctly that nobody present could have known the answer to. Hmm. So, like he was testing the spirit, maybe? Yes. For example, he asked the spirit to guess the number of shells, small shells, that he was hiding in his hand.

34:11And unbelievably, the spirit wrapped the correct number. Well, I mean, this sounds like a child's game, right? Or like a magic trick. I mean, it sounds like a trick, but he was not convinced until he tested the spirit himself, because he wanted to find out who was really producing these noises. And instead, like others, he came out of this experience a believer. So this group of friends met regularly with the Fox sisters, and they held many sessions.

34:42And then, the spirit sent this group a direct message. According to Capron and another member, George Willits, quote, So a direct message, but a little mysterious here.

35:16Like, what is the ghost getting at here? What does it mean, exactly? The spirit was telling this group that they had a responsibility to share this gift with more people, to share it publicly. As the men wrote, The great object was to start investigation and clear those who had been hearing it for the last two years from the imputation of fraud and deception. Hmm. So to clear all of their names, because, you know, people were obviously talking.

35:46Like, they had to get it out to prove to people, you know, this is really happening. And did the spirit share, like, how exactly they were supposed to do all of this? They did, actually. They tapped out the message that this group was to, quote, hire Corinthian Hall. That is, they were supposed to rent out Corinthian Hall, which was Rochester's largest theater. And so they booked it for Wednesday, November 14th, 1849. And they sold tickets at 25 cents a person.

36:20So the ghost even shows the venue.

Corinthian Hall stage debut

36:25That's some organizing from beyond the grave, I must say. And so then it's really at this point that the story of the Fox sisters takes this big turn. It goes from being a story about some accidental teenage mediums into a story that all of a sudden becomes about showmanship and theater and production. It does, but I will underscore that the girls here swore that this was not their idea at all, right? They were just simply following the instructions that were being sent directly to them from the spirits.

37:00And, in fact, when they received those instructions, they initially refused. They did not want to put themselves up on a stage in front of strangers. Yeah, I mean, it's not a great place for women who are concerned about their reputation, right? Right. Especially young women who had not created a place for themselves yet. Exactly. And so Kate actually refused. She was simply too young to present herself in a theater like that. And so she stayed at the home of the Caprins.

37:30But even for Maggie, this risked actually affecting her future marriage prospects. However, when the group resisted, you know, this instruction, the spirits then shunned them. And it sort of left them and refused to make contact every time they held a spirit circle. So they acquiesced. And Maggie and her older sister Leah agreed to appear at Corinthian Hall. And the spirits came back to them.

38:01I mean, and they weren't taking any chances on an empty house or, you know, like word of mouth. They did some proper advertising. Yeah. I found an ad in the Rochester Daily Advertiser on the day of the show, November 14th, with the headline, Wonderful Phenomena at Corinthian Hall. The citizens of Rochester will have an opportunity of hearing a full explanation of the nature and history of the mysterious noises supposed to be supernatural, which have caused so much

38:34excitement in this city and other places for the last two years. And then finally, a banner, Come and Investigate. Well, the very same paper published a news piece about it on the very same page. The article was somewhat more skeptical, stating that the show will either produce, quote, very new and startling developments or the exposure of one of the most cunningly devised and long-continued impositions ever practiced in this or any other community.

39:05Oh, the drama. Is it real or is it a fraud? Is it a humbug? So, November 14th, 1849. Let's get to the show here. How many tickets did they sell? About 400 people bought tickets to that evening session. And the inner circle, you know, the posts, Reverend Granger, Capron, Willett, and the others, sat at the table that had been set up for them on stage in front of the audience. Maggie and Leah joined the others at the table, and the audience hushed.

39:39And Capron delivered a brief lecture on the subject, retelling the whole history of the wrappings up to that point. According to Capron and Willett's account of the evening that was published two weeks later in the New York Tribune, quote, during the relation of these facts, the sounds were distinctly heard by the persons in the hall, unquote. And the audience sat in amazement, listening to these noises that were echoing through the theater.

40:12The audience apparently grew very excited, listening to these loud, mysterious knocks. And I love this part, by the way, because the show, it didn't simply end there, right? It could have just stopped there. But they decided to investigate, and a group of five men from the audience formed an investigation committee to examine the women the following day, and then hold another spirit circle, and then report back the next night for another show at Corinthian Hall, right?

40:48So this is just like, you're creating a concept of multiple shows. They didn't have Netflix. No, they didn't. No, but seriously, it underscores again the fact that this was both something mystical and mysterious, perhaps even religious, but it was also entertainment. And audiences were willing to buy tickets to the following night's show. At that, the men admitted to the crowd that, yes, in fact, the spirits had reappeared, and

41:19the men hadn't discovered where the wrappings were coming from. As Capron and Willits reported in the Tribune, the sound on the floor near where the two ladies stood was heard as distinctly as at other places. And that part of the committee heard the rapping on the wall behind them. The sounds were heard on the outside, apparently, of the front door, after they had entered, and on the door of a closet. By placing the hand upon the door, there was a sensible jar felt when the rapping was heard.

41:54One of the committee placed one of his hands upon the feet of the ladies, and the other on the floor, and though the feet were not moved, there was a distinct jar on the floor. But even this didn't satisfy them. So another committee was formed to investigate the following day, and this committee included a doctor and a judge, and the investigations took place at the offices of a local attorney who was also on the committee. They heard the sound on the floor, on the wall, and door, that the ladies were placed in different

42:31positions, and like the other committee, they were wholly unable to tell from what the sounds preceded or how it was made. Dr. Langworthy made observations with a stethoscope to ascertain whether there was any movement of the lungs, and found not the least difference when the sounds were made, and that there was no kind of probability or possibility of their being made by ventriloquism, as some had supposed. And they could not have been made by machinery.

43:03Unquote. But again, this failed to satisfy the audience. So they formed one last committee on the next day. But according to Capron and Willits, this group was drawn, quote, from persons who had opposed in the meeting all pretensions to there being anything but a trick. That is to say that this group was committed to finding the source of what they considered to be trickery. But even for this committee, the sounds persisted, even when the group brought in women to conduct

43:36searches. This group of female investigators issued their own statement, stating that, When they were standing on pillows with a handkerchief tied around the bottom of their dress, tight to the ankles, we all heard the rapping on the wall and floor distinctly. Signed, Mrs. Stone, Mrs. Gates, Miss M.P. Lawrence. So the public had splintered over them. Not surprising, I guess.

44:07There were believers, including prominent citizens and regular folks. But then there were a great many others who were skeptical and even those who were angry about what they saw as this dangerous fraud. And that even erupted on stage at that final performance on Saturday nights. There were firecrackers that popped in the auditorium. People rushed to the stage. And the women and Fox sisters were whisked away to safety. And two weeks later, as I've been reading, this account by Willits and Capron was printed

44:43in the New York Tribune and then picked up via these new telegraph wire services in newspapers all across the country. You know, not unbiased, right? Written by Willits and Capron, who themselves were part of the Fox sisters' inner circle. In fact, they had been the ones who booked the hall for the performance. And they were also friends with Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Tribune. But now the Fox sisters had become famous. And their story and these mysterious rapping sounds had become national news.

45:18But was it supernatural? Or was it just the latest humbug? The Fox sisters hit New York City right after this.

Taking New York City

45:28In the spring of 1850, the Fox sisters took their show on the road, taking actually the Erie Canal to Troy, New York, and then Albany. Then they sailed down the Hudson River, headed for New York City, arriving there in June of that year, setting up shop in a room at Barnum's Hotel at Broadway and Maiden Lane.

45:58And as much as I wish it was the same, this was actually a different Barnum, right? The Barnum's Hotel here is a distant relation, not PT. But it was just a couple blocks down from Barnum's American Museum, which must have caused frequent confusion. Imagine the mail. This era, by the way, the 1850s, Lower Manhattan, where this next part will be set, was in its commercial era. And the Fox sisters had never seen anything like it.

46:30They were just simply blown away walking around the city, from City Hall to the Astor House. Residents zipping around on horse-drawn omnibuses from Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan to the theaters and early department stores of Broadway, and then up to the graceful new Washington Square. And so they were holding, then, their spirit circles here at the Barnum Hotel. So not in a theater. Not a theater. And not in the Barnum Museum.

47:00No, no, no. Barnum was into other unusual things, like phrenology and other things, but not seances. Besides, the Fox sisters, let's be honest, they charged more. They charged at least a dollar for their services. And a seance, you couldn't have, like, a massive room. A seance needed to be intimate. They performed three times a day, and very often to some high-profile clients. Prominent New York men, such as George Templeton Strong, the diarist, and socially prominent

47:36individual, who became convinced that, quote, some magnetic or electrical or mesmeric agency was behind their powers. Well, their biggest proponent in New York City was Horace Greeley, the editor and publisher of the New York Tribune. And, you know, I've just been reading that article that was published in his very paper. Right, right. He didn't just publish flattering articles about them. He also sort of took them on himself, right? He shepherded these sisters around the city and introduced them to a great number of very

48:11significant people. They were the toasts of the town, pretty much. Even if some of their guests were far more skeptical than others. For instance, one evening, they were invited to the home of Rufus Griswold, a rather vicious literary critic of his day, introduced them to his guests for a little party. Those guests, including William Colin Bryant of Bryant Park fame and author James Fenimore

48:44Cooper, we know him best today for his book, The Last of the Mohicans, among many other exalted men here, literary men. George Ripley, for instance, one of the Tribune's most trusted writers was also there. And he later wrote, for some time, perhaps a little over half an hour after the arrival of the ladies, no sounds were heard, and the company gave obvious symptoms of impatience.

49:15They were then requested to draw nearer the table, which was in front of the ladies, and form themselves into a compact circle. Soon after, faint sounds began to be heard from under the floor, around the table, and in different parts of the room. They increased in loudness and frequency, becoming so clear and distinct that no one could deny their presence nor trace them to any visible cause.

49:46The guests then proceeded to ask the spirits questions, receiving answers to the affirmative, including Mr. Cooper, who seemed chilled by his line of questioning. For the spirit had correctly confirmed the details regarding his sister, who had died 50 years earlier. Unquote. Thanks to Mr. Greeley and other spiritualists who were in high places in New York, these

50:18New York seances made the Fox sisters even more famous. So, by the time that they arrived back in Rochester, they had become the most famous people in town. Not always a good thing, though, of course. Maybe infamous, notorious, perhaps. While they were able to make a living, you know, with these seances daily, it meant long periods of time in rooms full of strangers. Very often men, which, you know, seemed rather loose and untoward behavior to certain persons.

50:53And then there were those who were outright hostile to these powers, who thought them sacrilegious, who even thought that they were witches. Throughout the career of the Fox sisters, they would receive murderous threats from time to time from those who thought them wicked or even just by critics. They would, you know, grow to have an army of critics, and for good reason, because the sisters had awakened something that was going on in American society.

51:27You had mentioned earlier the great number of spiritual revivals of different sorts that were taking place during this period. There were these new kind of seemingly radical theories of Christianity. But there were other movements and beliefs that were forming at the same time, like mesmerism, which is kind of a form of what we'd call hypnotism today, which places spiritual practice in the hands of regular people. So naturally, you know, given the modest station of the Fox sisters, women from upstate of modest

52:05means, you know, if they had these gifts, why couldn't the same gifts begin manifesting in other people? You know, in particular, why couldn't other women be offered, be open to these gifts? Now, a few months ago, I interviewed the author Paul Staub on the rise of phrenology, which is another pseudoscience of this period, and the New Yorkers who popularized phrenology, a family known as the Fowlers.

52:36Right. And they also got into spiritualism, right? And one of the Fowlers even held seances in his home. Didn't they, in fact, like, conjure up the spirits of founding fathers? Ben Franklin, in fact, they called him up. I think a lot of spiritualists got a hold of Ben Franklin. He's just hanging around in the afterlife, just waiting for people to call, apparently. But the Fowlers were publishers, like Horace Greeley. So, you know, word of the power of spiritualism then could, thanks to these sorts of highly

53:11connected people, spread quite efficiently throughout the country. And it was during the same period that the word spiritualism, meaning otherworldly communication, came into fashion. And that was mostly due to New Yorkers. According to writer Emma Harding Britton, who later became a noted medium herself, quote, The ball once set rolling in New York sped on with an impetus which soon transcended the

53:42power of the press, pulpit, or public to arrest it, despite of every force that was brought to bear against it. But not everybody was taken by this new supernatural force. Because as spiritualism became more popular, it also gave rise to a whole new generation of critics, right? Many who spent their whole lives and their careers just trying to debunk mediums. And I think the Fox sisters were at the top of their list.

54:12Now, this is interesting. Had early critics, like very, very, very early on, been successful and unmasking the secrets of the Fox sisters. You know, I think that we might have seen some effects in the public opinion about, you know, all of these things, about spiritualism and about speaking to the dead in general. However, once the fire started spreading, it was hard to stop it. And even taking down the Fox sisters, had this been successful, I don't think it would have

54:47had much of an effect. And as we'll see, in fact, to be more modern example of this comparison, as we'll see one century later with UFOs and aliens, to paraphrase a famous line from the TV show, The X-Files, people wanted to believe. But who were, though, these 19th century investigators who were really investigating the Fox sisters? Well, there were a lot of them. There was a whole list. We can't get into them, but perhaps the best known or earlier example of this was the magazine

55:22editor C. Chauncey Burr and his brother, Heeman. Heeman. H-E-M-A-N. Heeman? Heeman. Heeman. And his brother, Heeman. C. Chauncey Burr and Heeman. That's how it's spelled. Anyway, they publicly denounced the sisters, claiming that they were cracking their toes to make, to emit that rapping sound. These brothers would kind of have a little mini career debunking this. They would have lectures and they would demonstrate the toe cracking on stage and interviewed

55:57acquaintances associated with the Fox sisters who might have had, say, a skeptical opinion to share. So, I'm sorry. Their big hypothesis was that toes were cracking? That was how they explained all of these phenomena and the otherworldly messages that were being received? Yeah. I don't even know. Like, my body can't do that. But apparently, like, they believed you could crack your toes and make it so loud that people

56:28would think it was ghosts. Now, fortunately for the Fox sisters, they had so many allies in the press by this time that many of these skeptics could be easily dismissed. And they were. Also, these critiques didn't quite address everything, right? Because the Fox sisters began, how do you say, diversifying their seances with new little tricks like levitating tables with strange breezes and other unexplained phenomena.

57:01I guess by the mid-1850s, knocking alone was no longer going to cut it. Old news. The novelty of that old system was already wearing off. People began looking for other ways to send signals over wires, over the spiritual wires. And this is exactly what happened in spiritualism. Other mediums began talking in spirit languages, right? In the voice of the dead. So now we're talking like the telephone, right?

57:33Voices being communicated. Some sang songs or practiced ghostwriting, even. There were also planchettes, like little kind of wooden triangles, which mediums could use to indicate or spell out alphabets or words on a table, saving people time from reading the whole alphabet out loud. And which would later be called talking boards or Ouija boards in the 1890s. And much later, they would be mass produced as a parlor game, eventually produced by Parker

58:09Brothers. But back to, from Parker Brothers to the Fox sisters. Go back to our story. Yeah. Many of you at home have Ouija boards. You're in the fine tradition of the Fox sisters. In other words, all to say that the genie was out of the bottle, but that didn't stop people from going after the Fox sisters specifically throughout the 1850s and 60s, partially because of how influential these women would be. Even presidents of the United States and their wives, governors and justices, all fell under

58:45the spell of spiritualism. And this was a very dangerous time to be promoting an alternative spirituality as there were very, very real, very big crises going on in the country in the 1850s. Particularly as the country was fracturing over real issues like slavery and immigration. And we've been discussing the Fox sisters as, you know, as if they were always working

59:16as one unit, always together. Although from the very beginning, it had quickly become clear that it was Leah, the older sister, who was leading and sort of managing her two younger sisters, Maggie and Kate. But at a certain point, as they were getting older, Leah started to lose her grip on her younger sisters. The problem for Leah is that the secret, whatever secrets they held about these gifts, could be threatened if somebody from the outside got too close to any of them, especially the

59:52younger ones. Maggie and Kate spent much of their young lives conducting these seances. It defined them. But they would, of course, eventually want and look for a normal life of domesticity when they got older. And that's exactly what happened with Maggie. When she was 19 years old in the year 1852, when she met a man while she was working in Philadelphia, a man named Elijah Kent Kane, a military man and an Arctic explorer who fell in

1:00:28love with her and hoped to take her away from this wretched life of spiritualism, this dead end life. You know, she she believed that she kept in it. It would only lead her to become a fallen woman. And this was a huge break for Maggie, right? Because Kane was very, very famous in his day. It's a bit of a curveball, actually, for the entire story. Yeah. Because Kane was just far more famous than Maggie or Kate was.

1:00:58He was treated like a national hero.

Romance and shifting alliances

1:01:00And he sort of, you know, represented a way out for her. Maggie could finally get out from the grasp of her older sister. However, there was his family to deal with. And it's no surprise that his family looked down upon this relationship, didn't like her at all. Oh, I should add, by the way, that by the mid 1850s, the Fox sisters had actually moved to New York City permanently at this time into a townhouse on 26th Street.

1:01:32In fact, actually, before we continue, if I may, to root the story back into the city here, Leah eventually lived in several places. And if you'd like to follow her footsteps, I will read a quote from her memoir, which was called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism. A book full of half-truths, if you want to look it up. But this one, I think, is a... Proceed with caution. I believe this is accurate, but, quote, I established myself in West 26th Street, in a large and handsome brownstone front, in

1:02:09a neighborhood then of first-rate excellence, in which I resided for two years. From that house, I removed to 15th Street, next door to Irving Place, from which, after a residence of a year, I removed, by the advice of my friends, to one Ludlow Place, which I left, only to go to my husband's home at West 37th Street, on my marriage, in 1858. Wow, she moved around more than we did when we were temp workers in the 90s.

1:02:42So, Leah stayed in New York. What about Maggie? And back to her seemingly impossible love affair with this international explorer, Elisha Kane. Yeah. The romance ends very tragically. So, Maggie did step away from the seance table, and eventually, Elisha sent her away for some proper schooling, you know, to, like, kind of, like, reinvent herself, in hopes of making her a more respectable prospect for marriage.

1:03:14However, due to his social prominence and his reliance on his family fortune, he could never marry Maggie Fox publicly. Still, he did court her privately, and then set off on a second Arctic expedition, where he suffered incredible hardships. At one point, they were iced in, ran out of food, you know, it was very dramatic stuff. Um, he was rescued, and then he came back to New York in 1856.

1:03:49And according to Maggie, the two actually did get married. They got married secretly, according to Maggie. However, Kane became ill. He sailed to Cuba, where he died on February 16th, 1857, thousands of miles from his love, Maggie Fox. And meanwhile, were her sisters still outperforming seances? Well, yes. Just a few months after Kane's death, in fact, Leah and Kate, they were the ones doing the

1:04:24seances, perhaps unwisely decided to face their skeptics head on. And they agreed to a challenge brought on by the Boston Courier newspaper to give prospective mediums $500, which they could have used, if they could prove their talents in front of a board of Harvard professors. Okay. So that's a little bit different than just city folk in Rochester. Now we're going to prove this in front of a board of Harvard professors, which-

1:04:56And how did that go? Well, they could not. They did not. The board determined that in these observations of the Fox sisters and all the other subjects who had arrived to get that $500, quote, nothing was done by the most except a little wrapping by the foxes, easily traceable to their persons and easily done by others without the pretense of spirit, not a table or piano lifted or anything moved a hair's breadth.

1:05:32So ends this ridiculous and infamous imposter, unquote. Wait, the wrappings were, quote, traceable to their persons? Yeah. And nothing moved? I don't know about the toe cracking, but maybe it was other joints. I don't know. So was this the end for them? Well, Aaliyah certainly did retire for a time. In the previous quote, she said she got married in 1858 to an insurance executive that she

1:06:02met through Horace Greeley, who still passionately believed and supported these women. Eventually, she did return to conduct a few more seances with her sister, Kate, who was still a regular practitioner even through all of this. But now let's step back a little bit. We're entering a profound period in American history with the events of Southern succession, the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, with the hundreds of thousands of people who died

1:06:36during the war, throw in the rancor and the anger and the sadness that the war inspired against fellow Americans, with all of these people looking for answers, you know, looking for some relief, millions more turned to spiritualism, which had now blossomed into this proper, very sophisticated belief system. And they may have turned increasingly to spiritualism, but they turned less and less to the Fox sisters,

1:07:10who became rather embittered and discouraged that they were not able to make a living in this movement, really, that they had founded or certainly helped create. Right. And sadly, both Kate and Maggie turned increasingly to alcohol abuse and suffered even more. But even despite all of this, Kate did continue to perform seances into the 1870s, because think of it, what else did she know what to do at this point?

1:07:43She was only 11 years old when she first began in 1848. What other life did she know? She had kind of no choice. In 1871, she did go to England, and there she married an English barrister named H.D. Jenkin the following year. And then a few years later after that, her sister Maggie joined her there.

The Academy of Music confession

1:08:09So let's jump forward to Sunday morning, October 21st, 1888, when New Yorkers woke up to the startling headline in the New York world, Spiritualism, Spiritualism Exposed. The Fox sisters sound the death knell of the mediums. Margaret Fox Kane tells for the first time the history of the fraud, full explanation of how the astonishing spirit wrappings were made.

1:08:39Whoa, so Maggie is spilling the beans here in a newspaper. Well, yes and no. She confessed here in the newspaper, and she gave some details, but she would give a full explanation on stage at the Academy of Music. And that was then carried in breathless detail in the next morning's papers throughout the country. All right, so that was just a little teaser, that headline, a little advertisement.

1:09:12Just wanted to wake everybody up. All right, but let's rewind. 1888. Yes. So as I mentioned, 17 years earlier, in 1872, Kate had married H.D. Jenkin, this lawyer, and started a family there. Maggie joined her, then living there as well. But Jenkin died in 1881, leaving Kate with two small sons. Right, and also leaving her with not enough money to settle his estate.

1:09:43Now, Kate had not been performing, but now she really had no choice. She was forced to move back to the States in 1885, where she started working again, although she was less famous now, and although she continued to drink heavily, and life was really hard for her. And Leah, her older sister, was especially upset about her ability or inability to care for her own children. Well, but things were not exactly much easier for her sister Maggie.

1:10:17No, she was in and out of trouble, too. And none of it was helped by her drinking and her living in poverty, in her case, in a small Manhattan apartment. And it was sort of darkly ironic because the spiritualism movement was thriving, but she was almost forgotten, right? There were other stars now. Maggie and Kate, who had been teenage stars in the 1840s, I mean, by now, by the mid-1880s, they were in their 40s and 50s.

1:10:48Meanwhile, their older sister, Leah, she had managed to live a more socially acceptable life. You know, she got married again, and in 1885, she published the book that I mentioned earlier, the one called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism. Right. Which, as you hinted, was a very Leah-centered version of how the wrappings were discovered and how the whole spiritual movement had developed. But, you know, even if these younger sisters were down and out, they did continue holding

1:11:25spirit demonstrations and seances in New York. In June 1886, Kate was found drunk in a New York bar, and Leah decided to report her sister to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which dropped in on Kate, surprise visit, in 1888, and found her children fine, but also found Kate intoxicated. She was arrested on the spot, and Kate spent the night in jail.

1:11:56And even this story, like, they were still well-known enough that this was all in the newspaper. It almost seemed like the New York world might have even had a beat reporter assigned to the Fox sisters, unfortunately. Yes, and this sort of betrayal by Leah infuriated the younger sisters. And so they decided to strike back at her in the way that they knew how. They would expose her secrets. And so Maggie invited a New York Herald reporter to her apartment on West 44th Street,

1:12:29and she told him that she was preparing to give a lecture and to finally expose to the public the source of these spirit wrappings. And she also produced raps right there in the room for him and then promised to explain it all, the whole shebang, on stage in her lecture. And Kate was in on it as well. The sisters were committed to exposing this fraud, as they now called it, a fraud, and also exposing their sister as well, who was highly respected in the spiritualism movement.

1:13:05Their next step was an exclusive interview that was published in the New York World on Sunday, October 21st, 1888, for which Maggie was paid $1,500, which she desperately needed. In that piece, which included a signed confession by Maggie, she explained how it all began back in Hydesville, how they had just been mischievous girls playing a prank on their mother. But what started as a prank, which, you know, involved dangling an apple on a string, like

1:13:39a floating apple just to scare her, developed into something more extravagant. And soon, the young girls, you know, like the ball was in motion, they had created this uproar and something they couldn't stop. Which they initially thought was funny. I mean, they were girls. But then their sister, Leah, took control and made it all a for-profit operation. So then how did she explain, I mean, we all want to know this, this is the $64,000 question,

1:14:11how did she explain these mysterious wrappings? Well, according to the article, the wrappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendon of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that are not commonly known. And for a little demonstration of that, if that sounded too unbelievable to really believe, readers would have to head to the Academy of Music that very night, tickets are still

1:14:44available, to witness a demonstration of this trickery by Maggie herself. And boy, did they. 2,000 people crammed into the old Academy of Music on 14th Street that night, including many reporters from the city's papers, and Kate, sitting prominently for all to see her supporting her sister. It opened with a long prelude. There was an amateur magician who was trying to expose some seance trickery, but the audience

1:15:14was restless and they were waiting for the now 55-year-old Maggie to take the stage. According to The World, Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane, therefore, when she stepped before the footlights, found herself before a wearied and non-sympathetic audience. It was evident that she was suffering from intense nervous excitement. Discovering that she was not in proper condition for a public address, her companions on the stage

1:15:46invited her to give a public demonstration of her ability to produce raps without further delay. A plain wooden stool or table resting upon four short legs and having the properties of a sounding board was placed in front of her. Removing her shoe, she placed her right foot upon this table. The entire house became breathlessly still and rewarded by a number of little short, sharp raps. Those mysterious sounds which have, for more than 30 years, frightened

1:16:23and bewildered hundreds of thousands of people in this country and Europe. A committee consisting of three physicians taken from the audience then ascended to the stage and having made an examination of her foot during the progress of the wrappings, unhesitatingly agreed that the sounds were made by the action of the first joint of her large toe. Only the most hopelessly prejudiced and bigoted fanatics of spiritualism could withstand the

1:16:56irresistible force of this commonplace explanation and exhibition of how spirit wrappings are produced. The demonstration was perfect and complete, and if spirit wrappings find any credence hereafter, it would seem a wise precaution on the part of the authorities to begin the enlargement of the state's insane asylums without any delay.

1:17:23Soon, the Sisters Tell All Expose hit bookstores for people to read more about their elaborate hoax. It was ghostwritten, if you will. And Maggie and Kate were hopeful that they had a new career, sort of debunking spiritualism. But it didn't exactly turn out that way. This wasn't really a death blow to spiritualism, because the movement continued.

1:17:56I mean, a large part of the public perhaps had a pretty good laugh, but the true believers of the movement absolutely refused to believe their explanation. I mean, which is understandable. The women were asking these true believers to accept that these intense experiences were being caused by a woman cracking a toe joint. Yeah. And how did cracking one's big toe knuckle, right, produce answers that were unknown to

1:18:29anybody but the person asking? And how did this explain other phenomena that had presented itself? You know, the spirit music, there had been visions of ghosts that had floated around the rooms at some point. People had also felt hands touching them. Of course, we've talked about tables moving around rooms. You know, there were so many other aspects to this. How was any of that explained simply by toe cracking?

Retractions and final years

1:18:57Once again, the public was polarized by all of this. Some of it was laughed off pretty easily. Others actually became more steadfast, you're right, more extreme, hardened by these stories. And actually, ironically, Leah, the elder sister, benefited from this. Her sisters had turned on the movement, but she remained faithful and she was rewarded by the spiritualists themselves. She was the last Fox sister standing and and representing the cause.

1:19:31I mean, this is a classic backfiring, right? I mean, like Maggie and Kate had actually made things worse for themselves. Maggie might have sold out a show, one show, but she killed her chances of ever working as a spiritualist again. And that dawned on her. And she quickly reversed herself and retracted her statements the next year in 1889. Wait a minute. How? Think about this. She had already cracked her toes in front of thousands of people,

1:20:03you know, fully explained everything. How then did she reverse herself? She asked for forgiveness, right? And she once again offered her services as a medium. But understandably, as you're pointing out here, there were very few takers by this point. The moments of the Fox sisters had passed. They had been famous for decades, but others had simply taken their place. And this brought their story to a close as well.

1:20:34Leah died of heart problems at home in New York on November 1st, 1890. Kate died in New York of alcohol-related illnesses on July 2nd, 1892, at the age of 55. And eight months later, on March 8th, 1893, Maggie died in Brooklyn. She was 59 years old. Leah was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, while Maggie and Kate were buried at Cypress Hill

1:21:07Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Bones found in the cellar

1:21:10But there is one more thing. In 1904, a man named William H. Hyde was now living in the Fox family's haunted family home in upstate New York. There had been some water damage in his basement that had caused part of the cellar wall to collapse. And when he went downstairs, he found human bones protruding from the wall. The newspapers pounced. The New York Times reported on November 23rd, 1904,

1:21:41bones in old spook house. Apparent confirmation of story told by originators of spiritualism. So then again, maybe young Maggie and Kate had been telling the truth the whole time. Well, it's spooky season here on the Bowery Boys. So please visit BoweryBoysHistory.com to see some more images about this show and to see our full list of ghost story podcasts,

1:22:18mysterious story podcasts. We're just kicking off a whole season of these types of special podcasts with this show. So that is BoweryBoysHistory.com. Of course, much of that will also be on various social media, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and many others. And of course, yes, we have these upcoming podcasts. We also have the upcoming show at Joe's Pub. And so we encourage you to head over to Joe'sPub.com to pick up tickets for our eight

1:22:50shows that we are holding this year in 2026. And we also encourage you to check us out over on YouTube. Just search for the Bowery Boys podcast to watch all of our recent shows in video form as well. And you can like or subscribe to that channel so that you're always notified when a new episode comes out. You can also get your spook on this fall by joining us over Bowery Boys walks. We have brought back the Haunted Histories of Lower Manhattan ghost walking tour. We've got tours all through

1:23:23October many times a week. So join us on one of those or on a non-spooky tour all over the city. You can join a small group or you can book a private tour for your family or friends or company group. All of that at BoweryBoysWalks.com. So thank you very much for listening to the Fox Sisters epic story of the birth of spiritualism. And keep tuned in because we've got a lot of surprises rolling out through the next few weeks.

1:23:55We'll keep cracking.

1:23:57I'll learn. Maybe I'll learn to crack my joints by that point so we can do it on stage. Oh, we can crack our toes at Joe's Pub. I think people would run in horror if we actually did that. And on that note, thank you for listening. Have a great New York week, whether you live here or not. See you real soon.