Examining the Local Origins of the Modern Spiritualist Movement: The Fox Sisters

St. John Fisher University in Rochester posted this short interview during Halloween week in 2024. Dr. Tim Madigan, who teaches a course called “Rochester and the Great Awakening,” explains why the Fox sisters – two girls in Hydesville who in 1848 said rapping noises in their home came from a spirit – are on his students’ syllabus.

Madigan places the sisters in the ferment of upstate New York in the Erie Canal era, when abolitionism, the women’s rights movement – the Seneca Falls Convention met in 1848, the same year as the first rappings – temperance and new religious movements were all taking shape, often among people who knew one another. He points to Lily Dale, the spiritualist community near Buffalo that traces itself to the Fox sisters, to spiritualist churches that survive today, and to recent books, podcasts and plays about the sisters.

Madigan’s framing – taking spiritualism seriously as history without endorsing it – is the right one. Spiritualism became a real religious movement with churches that survive today, even though Maggie Fox demonstrated in 1888 how the original raps could be produced by cracking her toe joints.

The interview is brief and does not go into the question of fraud, so pair it with the full story: a children’s prank that seems to have escalated under adult attention, and an older sister, Leah, who managed the girls’ public career.