The Fox Sisters and the Hydesville Rappings

In the spring of 1848 the Fox family – John and Margaret Fox and their two youngest daughters, Margaretta (Maggie), about 14, and Catherine (Kate), about 11 – were living in a small rented frame house in Hydesville, a hamlet in the town of Arcadia, Wayne County, east of Rochester. The house already had a reputation for odd noises. On the night of March 31, 1848, the girls began “answering” the knocks: when they snapped their fingers, the raps replied, and when their mother asked the children’s ages, the raps counted them out correctly. Neighbours were called in to hear for themselves.

By questioning the raps with a code, the family and neighbours built a story: the spirit said it was a peddler, later named Charles B. Rosna, who had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar. No missing peddler of that name was ever identified. The girls were sent to their much older sister, Leah, in Rochester, and the raps went with them. On November 14, 1849, the sisters gave a paid public demonstration at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, and within a few years they were celebrities, holding séances in New York City for journalists, politicians and reformers.

Their fame helped launch Spiritualism, a religious movement built on communication with the dead that spread across the United States and Europe and still has churches today. But on October 21, 1888, Maggie Fox stood on the stage of the New York Academy of Music and demonstrated how she had produced the raps by cracking the joints of her toes, publishing a signed confession in the New York World. A year later she retracted it, saying she had been pressured and was in financial distress. Both sisters, by then struggling with alcohol and poverty, died within a few years – Kate in 1892 and Maggie in 1893.

The house itself had a long afterlife. In 1904, when a crumbling cellar wall collapsed, bones were found and hailed as the peddler’s remains, although a physician who examined them reported a jumble of bones that included animal bones. The cottage was moved in 1915–16 to the Spiritualist camp at Lily Dale, in western New York, where it became a shrine until it burned down on September 21, 1955. The bones and a peddler’s tin box are displayed in the Lily Dale Museum.

Knocks and raps that answered questions by code, and later the full apparatus of the séance – reported by the Fox family, neighbours and paying audiences.

The bedroom and cellar of the Fox cottage in Hydesville; afterwards wherever Maggie and Kate held sittings, beginning at Leah’s home in Rochester.

The Hydesville rappings are regarded as the birth of modern Spiritualism, a movement that drew followers from Mary Todd Lincoln to Arthur Conan Doyle. Lily Dale, the Spiritualist community in Chautauqua County, keeps the story alive in its museum, and the case is a staple of histories of the paranormal and of skepticism.