The Fox Sisters and the Rise of Modern Spiritualism

The Perinton Historical Society, near Rochester, recorded this presentation on 21 October 2025. The speaker, Tracy Murphy, is director of Historic Palmyra’s museums and has been historian and caretaker of the Fox Sisters Hydesville Memorial Park in Wayne County for more than 25 years.

Murphy starts with the founding of Hydesville and the earlier tenants of the small house the Fox family rented, including the tale of a peddler said to have called there years before. She retells the events of 1848 – Kate’s challenge to the knocker, “Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do” – the sisters’ move to Rochester, the 1849 demonstration at Corinthian Hall, their celebrity and their troubled later lives, and Maggie’s public confession. She then follows the empty “spook house” to its dismantling in 1916, the creation of the memorial park and her own work on the site, before taking questions.

This is a sympathetic telling from someone who cares for the site and, as she says during the questions, shares spiritualist beliefs. The peddler story and the messages from the raps are presented largely as the family and later spiritualists told them, but no murdered peddler has ever been traced in the records, and bones reported from the cellar in 1904 included animal remains.

Murphy presents Maggie’s confession as something she did for money while down on her luck. Skeptics read it the other way: in October 1888 Maggie demonstrated on stage how she produced the raps by cracking her toe joints, and her retraction a year later came amid poverty and pressure from spiritualists.