Fox sisters
[7][8] The girls had been born and raised "in or near Consecon, a tiny village in Prince Edward County, Ontario where their father owned a farm.
[12]: 89–111 Amy and Isaac Post, a radical Quaker couple and long-standing friends of the Fox family, invited the girls into their Rochester home.
Immediately convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena, they helped to spread the word among their radical Quaker friends, who became the early core of Spiritualists.
"[12]: 89–111 [15] Horace Greeley, the prominent publisher and politician, became a kind of mentor for them, enabling their movement in higher social circles.
[15] Although Greeley watched over the sisters, the lack of parental supervision was pernicious, as both of the young women began to drink wine.
[16][d] In 1851, the Reverend C. Chauncey Burr wrote in the New-York Tribune that by cracking toe joints the sounds were so loud, they could be heard in a large hall.
[16][e] In 1851, Mrs. Norman Culver, a relative of the Fox family, admitted in a signed statement that she had assisted them during their séances by touching them to indicate when the raps should be made.
[16] A report by the Seybert Commission in 1887 stated that after investigating various mediums including Margaretta, the phenomena could have easily been produced by fraudulent methods.
The report noted that the raps were heard close to Margaretta and a séance sitter, Professor Furness had felt pulsations in her foot.
[21][22] Harry Houdini, the magician who devoted a large part of his life to debunking Spiritualist claims, provided this insight: As to the delusion of sound.
[23][24] Margaretta told her story of the origins of the mysterious "rappings" in a signed confession given to the press and published in New York World, October 21, 1888.
Margaretta expanded on her career as a medium after leaving the homestead to begin her Spiritualist travels with her older sister, Mrs. Underhill.
[11][g] Pressured by the Spiritualist movement and her own dire financial circumstances, Margaretta recanted her confession in writing in November 1889, about a year after her exhibition.
[12]: 89–111 Kate had traveled to England in 1871, the trip paid for by a wealthy New York banker, so she would not be compelled to accept payment for her services as a medium.
The trip was apparently considered missionary work since Kate sat only for prominent persons, who would let their names be printed as witnesses to a séance.
[28] Less than a year later, Margaretta, deep in alcoholism, was living on charity as the sole tenant of an old tenement house at 456 West 56th Street.
According to psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren Jones, "many accounts of the Fox sisters leave out their confession of fraud and present the rappings as genuine manifestations of the spirit world.
Later, the alleged "entity" creating the sounds claimed to be the spirit of a peddler named Charles B. Rosna,[12]: 56–85 who had been murdered five years earlier and buried in the cellar.
In his writings on the Fox sisters, Arthur Conan Doyle claimed the neighbors dug up the cellar and found a few pieces of bone.
[11]The feminine security of these rappers against the inspection of their actual quomodo... if by search warrant, stratagem, or vi et armis, the rapping instrument of these Fox girls had been exposed to the public, there would not have been one doubt about the nature and origin of the spiritual communications.[19]Mrs.
My sister Katie was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints and that the same effect could be made with the toes.
The rapping is simply the result of perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow the action of the toe and ankle bones that are not commonly known.
Such perfect control is only possible when the child is taken at an early age and carefully and continually taught to practice the muscles, which grow stiffer in later years.
