Beneath Your Bed Podcast
Beneath Your Bed Podcast
The Fox Sisters and the Emergence of Spiritualism and Seances
Since the beginning of time, humans have tried to reach beyond the veil that separates the living and the dead. Tonight we’ll tell the story of three sisters who claimed to make that connection. We’ll explore the ripples that claim made in their own lives – and in our own.
I'm Jenna Sullivan and I'm Jen Lee. And we'd like to welcome you to beneath your bed, a podcast where we drag out all those fears that lurk beneath our beds from the paranormal to true crime, to the simply strange along the way, we'll be drinking cocktails and sharing stories from our Appalachian upbringings. Since the beginning of time, humans have tried to reach beyond the veil that separates the living and the dead tonight. We'll tell the story of three sisters who claim to make that connection. We'll explore the ripples that claim made in their lives and in our own
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:Jen, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. You know, it's labor day. I've had a really, I guess I've rested from my labor today. I haven't done much. I took a really long nap with the cats. What about you? Um, I did some cooking and I ran some errands and when I go outside now, I noticed that I can't really tell the seasons apart. I'm thinking is this fall is a summer. I mean, I guess with global warming, we're kind of losing the seasons anyway, but I think with being in the house with COVID, that's really throwing things off to at least for me. What are you having to drink? Oh, right. My drink. How could I forget? So I'm having something called a black widow smash. I found a recipe online and it uses tequila. So yeah, this has, um, I had to, in the cocktail shaker, you throw in a bunch of blackberries and fresh Rosemary and honey, there was one other thing. Oh, lemon juice. And then you muddle it. So it muddled it all up. And then I poured in the tequila and some bitters and shook it and then you strain it over ice. And then you add little sparkling water to the top of it. I'm starting to see honey as an ingredient and more and more cocktails or maybe it just stands out because it seems like it's just such a unusual ingredient. Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about honey and a cocktail? I love honey, but I don't know. I don't know if I'd like it in a cocktail. I mean, there's something that's called the bee's knees, but I think was around since prohibition and that was with honey. And then also I believe Jen, but it might've been a honey syrup. I could probably do a honey syrup. I do have some honey bitters though. I haven't tried out yet. Oh, did you make those bitters? No, actually I ordered those. I'm going to have to order some bitters cause I was looking everywhere for orange bitters for this drink and couldn't find them. So I had just had to use a regular Angostura bitters. You hated my bidders when we went away, they were strong. But you know, I think I wasn't as into cocktails then I was less of a drunk. So I think I would appreciate them now. I really do. I think the taste has evolved. Was I trying to get you to drink it straight or just give you the cherry or I feel like, I can't remember. I feel like you were trying to get me to drink it straight. You're like Jed tried setters and I was like, it was kind of intense. It was an intense experience, but I would try your bitters again. Especially if you make orange bitters or something like that. That would be cool. We should do that together. Once COVID is in addition to making our syrups, we should do better.
Speaker 3:I do have like, I have orange and fig bitters. I have, um, you name it. I have the lavender bitters I have.
Speaker 1:That would be good in that bees knees. I don't know if that goes in there, but it seems like bitters with honey and gin. I'm like, but what are you having? I'm actually having,
Speaker 3:I mean, a hurricane, you know, um, last week I, I did a Mai tie that didn't turn out so hot. So this is involves passion, fruit puree, and also has a bunch of Rome in it. And my favorite of course, and then also Grenadines so plenty of rum, light, rom dark rum and passion, fruit and orange juice and grenadine. So it's actually pretty good. The passion fruit puree. I got that of course off Amazon, but it's really, it's just a lot of sugar. So I would like to try to make some myself, it would probably, I would think would be better. Hopefully.
Speaker 1:Well, let's jump into the story since we both have our drinks and we are ready. So tonight I'm going to talk about spiritualism, especially through the lives of these three sisters, by the name of Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox, really Maggie and Kate are the main characters. I'm going to go through my sources, but I think I'll do that at the end. So the story I'm going to tell you tonight combines a lot of things that I love. And these are things that I think you love too. So I'm hoping that you will like this story. So it combines history, especially women's history. It has the mysterious entails of spirits and ghosts. And it really looks into the very nature of life and death itself. It's populated with vibrant and unforgettable characters and at the heart of the story. As I mentioned, our two girls, sisters whose lives unfolded very differently than the average 19th century woman. So are you ready? I am. All right. Spiritualism was a movement that began in the 19th century and it actually continues today, although in a somewhat different form and I'll get that, I'll get to that later. The spiritualist believe that people do not die, but instead they move on to the realm of spirit. They believe that the living can communicate with the dead. Although spiritualists hate the word dead. They don't really like to use it. Instead. They referred to them as somebody who's gone in spirit or they might call them the dearly departed in their belief system. Also assumes that those who are in spirit are on a higher level than those of us who are still on earth and that our spirit guides can help us through this life and help us really learn the lessons that we're supposed to learn down here.
Speaker 3:I wonder where my spirit God is at.
Speaker 1:I don't, I don't know. Do you think you have one? I've been wondering lately. If I have one, when I went to bed last night, I'm like, I wonder what my spirit guides are doing. Are they around me? I can guarantee you. I don't have one. I think you might have a bunch just to keep you in line. I mean,
Speaker 3:I'd be living a different life if I think if I had a spirit guide,
Speaker 1:No, you definitely have a spirit guide. If there, if there such is such a thing, you have one I'm sure of it. So there are a couple of guys I want to tell you about who were really precursors to ism. And they're just interesting to know about, so you may have heard of them. One is Emanuel Swedenborg. He lived from the late 16 hundreds into while he lived a long time up to 1772, but he claimed that he could communicate with spirits, but he cautioned anybody else from doing it. And he said, it wasn't a good idea. Only, only he should be doing this. And he came up with this idea that there's not one heaven or one hell, but there's really a whole bunch of different ones. And they're all on different levels. To me, it almost sounds like Dante is notion of the Inferno. You know, where there are, there are all these layers and he thought that spirits acted as intermediaries between God and human beings. So he's a precursor. The other one who had some, I guess you would say bearing on spiritualism, his name was Mesmer and you may be familiar with that term. Mesmerist he, he studied, he was really kind of a prodo psychologist in studied how to put people into trances with hypnosis. So they would talk about mesmerizing or another word they used was magnetizing, which they meant not to literally make somebody magnetic, but to put them in this kind of a trance. And so a lot of the mediums in the 19th century did go into what looked like these trance States. I mean, so the story of spiritualism is inextricable from the lives of the two sisters living in 1840s, New York. And as I mentioned earlier, their names are Maggie and Kate Fox. And their story is interesting for all kinds of reasons. But one of the reasons is because it intersects with some really notable figures in history. Their story also unfolds during a really dynamic time in American history. So this was a time when the country was moving from a rural economy to more industrialization in the cities. People were sick of the old gloomy Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This idea that you may be doomed to hell and there's nothing you can do about it. So they were moving towards more optimistic, forward thinking religious movements. And this is of course is also the era of the abolitionists movement of the suffragette movements. And it was a time when science was also on the rise. And so you would see some tensions between science and religion. And of course the right in the middle of the 19th century, there's the civil war, you know, already there was a growing interest in mediums and spirit communications, but it wasn't until strange happenings in a little one-bedroom cabin in Hydesville New York, which is in Western New York, that the movement fully came to be so spiritual ism. It emerged, as I said in Western New York, and this was called the burned over district, I think that's such a, such a funny name, but it was called that because of the spirit of revival, which had been spreading throughout the area during what was known as the second grade awakening. So there was a lot of evangelical religions really going through there and trying to get everybody on board with their particular religion. And it seems that many earth shaking messages were being passed down from on high around me, sleepy communities during this time in 1823, somebody by the name of Joseph Smith, who you may have heard of says he received a set of golden plates from the angel Merona and you can you guess what that was translated into the book of Mormon? Yep. So another religious movement that was going on around this time was in the 1830s. There was this wacky New York farmer. He was also a Baptist preacher named William Miller. And he started going around telling people in the community that the world was going to end. And so apparently October 22nd, 1844 was the final day. So would you believe almost a hundred thousand people gathered? They sold everything. They had, they converged in this little town in New York and they just sat there waiting for God to come. And so this religion was known as militarism. It's not obviously not as well known or didn't, didn't catch on as well as Mormonism. And I kind of wonder, like, what did they do after nothing happened?
Speaker 3:I would like to think that I, I couldn't imagine that, but my mom had told me, of course it always goes back to Appalachians, but she told me as a child that the sky had turned red, I guess just how you see pretty sunsets or just very vibrant colors. And of course I couldn't just leave it at that. So she remembers like neighbors and people being out in their yards crying and holding each other. Cause they thought, um, it was the end of the world. Oh my God was this when she was a kid. Yeah. And that, you know, God was coming and the apocalypse and all of that stuff, but she was young. But you also have to remember, this is, you know, my, my grandmother who used Appalachian folk remedies, such as having my mom drank water that had minnows in it. Yeah. Yeah. And I found out what that was for too. Oh, you did? What was it? Four? I asked her the other day and she said, she said, are you making fun of me? And, um, it was used for croup. So she was made to do it. And she went along with it more than once. So it was, I think it was multiple times when she had the crew
Speaker 1:Or if it helped her, did she say no, I think she would, she probably just got a terrible GI infection from it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So
Speaker 1:Beliefs can be really powerful sometimes. I think, although something may not work scientifically, it may work because you believe in it. Um, so the story about the Fox sisters, as I mentioned, it begins in their little tiny little house. They were living and they were having another house built. So for the time being the family, it was the mom and dad and then the two young girls. So they were living in there. It only had one bedroom. And so the family, they would, they would sleep together in the one bedroom. And this was in March of 18. God was in 1848 I think. And so they hear, they start to hear these really weird sounds. So they were, they sounded like these wraps and taps and they were coming from all over the room and they would be really loud. Sometimes it would sound like they were above them. Sometimes they would sound like they were on, you know, on the left, on the right. And this went on for many, many nights. Would that freak you out if you, if you started hearing something like that?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah. I mean, if I just hear a creak in the house, now it kind of freaks me out a bit or when I'm at my parents' house and I was there, I guess last week I know it was Friday and I kept hearing all this creaking and I just kept hearing things and I'm like, okay, this is an older house. So yeah, that, that's the thing completely freaks me out.
Speaker 1:It freaks me out too. I don't want to hear a lot in my house. Thankfully. I know when we first bought it, I thought, what if I've just bought a haunted house because the door does kind of Creek and it's kind of a creepy looking door, but thankfully I have not felt anything. So knock on wood, I'm going to wrap them on my, on my desk. Anyway. So the mother, her name was Margaret. She began after a couple of lights of this. She starts trying to communicate with whatever it was that was making the raps. So she starts asking it questions. So she would ask, are you human? You know, where are you from? Um, but so she received these answers, which of course she, they were her interpretations. Uh, I think she had developed a system where like the, the spirit, cause it said it was a spirit, according to her that like wrap ones for yes or two for no. So that she, she had developed a system. And so eventually it, whatever it was told her that it was the spirit of a murdered peddler. So this guy who went around the village, selling crap off of his cart, he had been murdered in the house and he was buried in the basement. So this is the story she gets. So they don't really say how she reacted, except she wanted, she wanted her neighbors to come and see. So she sent her husband out into the cold and he goes and gets this neighbor. Her name is Mary Redfield. And she comes and then, because it's a small town, there's a bunch of other neighbors who hear the commotion. So they come to, and before, you know, it like half the town is there and they come and check it out. So one thing that I wanted to say is that people of this era, you know, the mid 19th century, they really seemed very, very open to stories of spirits and just weird things. Like if you think about the militarism thing, they were just open to a lot of different ideas and ghost stories. I found this really fascinating. They were actually a regular feature in some newspapers in the 19th century. I mean, and I'm not talking like the national Enquirer, I'm talking about regular reputable newspapers. Like there was one paper, for example, that reported on the ghost of a 16 year old girl, living in Baltimore who had been murdered by her father. Apparently she came back to haunt him. So these, these things were covered in the papers. It was a different time.
Speaker 3:I mean, do you think people aren't open to it now?
Speaker 1:Well, no, it, as I was saying that I was almost thinking, I think, I think people are, but I don't think it's as mainstream, maybe as it was then. Like, I think it's a little more like a niche thing, but you know, so you see stuff like that. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Sure. I mean, when you say that, but I still think people are very open to this type of thing. I mean, I had a friend and this has been a years ago while associate and she was going through a bad breakup, let's say with Lori and Lori had split up with her and she was really, really down in the dumps about it. So she gets hooked on this. Um, do you remember the psychic friends that work?
Speaker 1:Yes, I do. I never called it, but I do remember it. I believe
Speaker 3:That's what she got involved with. And I think at the time, and of course this is years and years and years ago, I think she spent like$10,000. Did she really? Yeah. That figure sticks out in my head. And on top of that, Laurie had to get a restraining order on her. So it didn't work out so well,
Speaker 1:. I wonder what they were telling her. I mean, do you think they were telling her stuff? She wanted to hear, like they could tell what she wants.
Speaker 3:You're okay. They weren't. Cause I remember she would, whenever I was cornered by her, I remember like some of the things that she would say, I'm thinking, Oh my God, this is such. Cause they were, they were just telling her things and leading her to believe that she was going to get back together with this person, Lori. And she ends up getting restraint, restraint and Sterling. Right.
Speaker 1:Did she turn out like did her life turn out? Okay.
Speaker 3:I don't think so. I haven't seen her in such a long time, but yeah, she was heading a, in a, in the wrong direction at that time. I never told you that.
Speaker 1:No, I've I know a lot of your stories, but it's always cool when I hear a new one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I completely forgot about that one. Anyway. Hopefully
Speaker 1:Even when we're 80, we'll still have new stories to tell you.
Speaker 3:I think that's great. Like when you, you know, you know, somebody really, really well, but there's still like a thousand stories to be told that you've never discussed before.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Cause you get to know people better and it's yeah. That's just, it's funny. The stories you don't even think of. Sometimes that drag drop when you're talking about stuff. So getting back to Maggie and Kate and their story, they had this older sister named Leah and she was 35 and they were only, I should have told you earlier how old they were. I think Kate was younger. So she was about 11 at the time all of this was happening and which was 1848. And then Maggie was Maggie was about 14. So Leah is like a whole generation older than them. And Leah was living in Rochester. She had a young daughter, Lizzie, who I think was also about 13 or 14, but there had been no sign of her husband for many a years. I think I read that her husband disappeared when she was about 15. So I don't know how old she was when she got married,
Speaker 3:But her husband disappeared when
Speaker 1:Yeah, like she was 15, I think so. Cause they said, um, she was 35 and he had ran off 20 years ago. Wouldn't they make her 15 for my doing math role. No, no you're doing, you're doing it, right? Yeah. So I don't know at what age they got married, but it was never clear. Like did they break up? Did he, did he die? Did he run off? So there were in, she would tell different versions of this over the years. Maybe she killed him that just now popped into my mind, but who knows what happened? So anyway, um, it wasn't clear whether she was widowed or what, but she was, she was a single mom basically in the 18, 1840s. She
Speaker 3:Was, uh, she was the original Carole Baskin.
Speaker 1:So anyway, a month had passed before Leah in Rochester living with her kid, um, before she even hears what's going on. Cause even though, you know, Heightsville was probably, so Rochester's probably about 60 miles from Buffalo and then Hinesville is a little, I think South of that for similar in between there, I think I'm getting my geography kind of wrong, even though I used to live in that area. But anyway, it's probably about an hour and a half away by car today, but it would take a full day or more of travel for her to get there from Rochester. So when she did get a letter that told her what was going on, she like, you know, hooks up the horse and buggy and gets there as fast as she can. And she consults with her parents and they decide the best thing to do is for Leah that they're going to separate the sisters and that they're going to take that Lee is going to take Kate back to Rochester with her and that Maggie will stay with the parents. I guess their idea was that if they split up the girls that maybe whatever was cause they, they, they kind of started to think that the wrappings were related to the girls in some way. So that was their plan. And I think, you know, it makes sense. So anyway, so that's what they do. But the first night, this is funny to me the first night they get back to Rochester, Kate and Lizzie, you know, her cousin, they go to bed and it's a wild and crazy night. Their wrappings, like the whole house sounds like it's shaking. It's just completely insane. And so it, you know, and it continues to happen and it doesn't happen during the daytime. It only happens once everybody goes to bed and, but over time, you know, I guess a few weeks pass and Leah kind of seems to start to get into it. And she had sort of a sense of humor. Um, she wrote this book called the missing link and she talks about how she started talking to whatever it was that she thought was in the room. And she called him old flatfoot and she asked him if he could dance the Highland fling. And she said, she sang to him and he danced most admirably. So she kind of played with the spirits and thought they were cool. And then in time she started introducing Kate to some friends of hers, some fairly prominent people in the community. It's important to say probably that Leah was a social climber. She really wanted a better lot in life than what she had. So she was always trying to like always try and move into bigger houses. She was always renting, but she tried to like rent a slightly nicer house, you know? And then after six months move again and try to meet more and more people. So anyway, she introduced Kate, these two, this couple, their names were Isaac and Amy post and they were a couple of prominent Quaker reformers. So they were, they were really into like the abolitionist movement, the suffragette movement, things like that. So at first Amy and Isaac are skeptical, but it doesn't take long before they're really won over and, and they believe they believe what's going on. Eventually Maggie comes and joins Kate and Leah and Rochester and the three of them start to hold seances or spirits circles in the Rochester community. So what are their abilities traveled in before? You know, it, they were attracting people, not just from Rochester, but from surrounding counties. And people were really just flocking blocking to the house, trying to be part of these, um, these spirits circles they were holding and they had, there was everybody from evangelical preachers came radical reformers skeptics came to try to debunk what was going on. And then you had what I think is the saddest of all people who were really grief, stricken people, who'd lost their children and other ones. And honestly, seances attracted a lot of people who were suffering after the death of a loved one. And you know, during this time there was a lot of death to go around death permeated, nearly every corner of 19th century life. It was just in the culture. I mean they, little kids would be taught to sing songs about death,
Speaker 3:A thing before them, or is this what it is?
Speaker 1:I think this is, this is really when it starts, there may have been like a little bit happening before this, but this is really, this is when it's really born as far as I understand it. So it's, it's interesting that it would happen in this time. You know, it just seems kind of like the perfect time for it because around this time too, they were also, people were building these beautiful. I don't even know what to call them. Park-like cemeteries where they have these gorgeous monuments and there was all this symbolism with the graves and people would go there and they would have picnics and they would walk and they would enjoy nature and kind of contemplate what it meant to be alive and to be dead and to commune with their dead loved ones. And there was really this sentimental notion of death and what it meant to have a beautiful death. Um, Victorians were obsessed with the idea of a good death, but the real world was very different from that. Of course. And a lot of the diseases is we've. We talked about tuberculosis in an earlier episode, you know, there was just so much illness and contagion contagion that was just rampant throughout this time. And of course, if you're talking about death, can't really get any more death than in the 1860s. When you have the massive casualties of the civil war, which leads me to, to a footnote that, that I find interesting during her time in the white house, Mary Todd Lincoln, it was really sad. They lost their son, Willie, when he was only 11, he actually died while they were living in the white house. So Mary actually had several seances. Apparently Lincoln knew about them. I think maybe he attended one, but he didn't really go in for it. Like she did
Speaker 3:Welcome to the distraction. He probably did.
Speaker 1:He's like Mary, you do your seances. I got work to do here, saving the union. So there was a lot of death, but there was nothing depressing or even creepy about these seances. In fact, they were described as very lively. Um, and, and they start doing the sisters, start doing spirit sessions for larger and larger gatherings of people. And they did this big performance in Rochester's Corinthian hall, which was kind of like, I guess the Carnegie hall of the day. And this is the first time that they allowed themselves to be strip searched, to satisfy their skeptics. And this part freaks me out because they're still young girls at this point. So what was called a committee of ladies takes them into a separate room to be undressed and searched. And I read that they, they would manipulate their limbs. I don't know, like spread their legs apart to put their arms above their head and do all this stuff. Apparently they had their under garments on, but you know, they would feel them up to make sure there was nothing in their clothes. I mean, it's really awful. And the account I was reading about this said that the girls were so upset. They were so mortified that they were crying and just screaming. And eventually Amy post, their Quaker friend came in and put this all, put a stop to this and them. Um, but it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be the last time they were strip searched. This happened several times. That's revolting. It is really revolting. Absolutely. And you know, I think it, it leads to something else. That's, that's part of their story, which is, there was almost an erotic element. Some of these seances, you know, today, if you go, if you go to a sale it's most likely, or like a spirit reading, it's most likely gonna take place in somebody's, you know, sitting room or something with a couch. But back then, um, it would be pitch black and there usually would be a round table and everybody would sit around the table and usually you would hold hands. So you might be with strangers or maybe you're with somebody, you kind of liked, but you're not together. And so there's this, you know, electric kind of current people touching. And then sometimes in the dark, the spirits would be known to touch people in whatever places. I don't know where, where everybody got touched, but, but so some, some interesting things could happen in the dark and the girls, as they got older, they were described as very attractive and very attractive. Um, like men really took a liking to them. Kate was described as a theoretical, but Maggie was also good looking in a more, more kind of a solid way. Both of them had dark hair and their skin was described as fair almost to the point of translucent. I also read that some women were really, they were really jealous of the girls. So when their men, when their husbands would go to these seances or go see them, you know, perform in one of these larger halls, they would be really, like thinking the girls were trying to steal their husbands. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy jealousy. Um, so as the Fox sisters come to greater prominence, they were seen as flouting. What was really proper for a woman of their class and station. You know, the proper woman was supposed to be at home, either a wife or a mother of she wasn't married yet to be in her parent's home and sort of preparing for, for marriage and motherhood. But she certainly, wasn't supposed to be on a stage holding hands and talking to spirits and you know, a lady also wouldn't let herself be handled to be strip searched. God forbid, you know, you wouldn't take off your crinoline. Um, so they were, you would, yeah. I, I, I don't know. I don't think I'd give up my crinoline or my hoop skirt, cause I want to wear it so bad, but maybe they could take off, my course might need to breathe for a minute. So, u m, you know, the girls were always, o r the women by this point, young women, they were always trying to attain this middle-class security and respectability, but they were always just outside of it. So like, even though they were making money with what they were doing, the nature of what they did made them sort of be on the fringes of society, but there's something about 19th century spiritualism, which is so in keeping with the American middle-class idea of self-improvement a nd this idea of reaching beyond what's possible, you know, this was the era of the railroad. And I had never realized until I've been reading about it lately, just what a big deal, the building of the railroad was, it really rocked people's worlds. You know, this connecting of one side of the country to the other, I like to think of the railroad is it's really the 19th century equivalent of the internet for us today. And it was also the century of transcendentalism. And there are all these kinds of social experiments going on. Like you have Brook farm in Massachusetts and it was a time Brooke farm was this experiment by Bronwyn Alden. He was Louisa may Alcott's I'm sorry, Bronwyn, Bronson, sorry, Bronson Alcott. He was Louisa may Alcott's dad. And it was this idea that I think they lived in a place called Fruitland maybe. And people from people from the community would come and live. It was like this commune type thing. And the idea that they were going to have a perfected society, it failed as you can imagine, it didn't work out very well. I don't know if they slept with each other or not. I don't think they did. I think they just like they farmed and they tried to maintain this, you know, rural lifestyle and talk about all their transcendentalist stuff, but it, it didn't work out so well, but a lot of social experimentation was going on. And then of course, 1850 is like, you're approaching those cataclysmic years of the civil war and people are grappling with the evil of slavery and then women are just beginning to sound their voices for the vote. So it's a really, really dynamic time. And this is the context in which these young women are living in. And I think that has a lot, I think it has a lot to do with their lives. So before long, the sisters start touring cities in the Eastern United States. So like they went to Troy, New York, Cleveland, New York, New York city that is, and by this time Leah who, she also decided that she had medium capabilities. So she starts to hold seances as well. Um, and she is basically their impresario. I mean, I like to think of her as their pimp really she's pumping them out, she's setting up, you know, their engagements and connecting them with people in society and helping them money. And, and yet you described her as a, a bit of a social climber, so absolutely. Yeah, there was nothing shy or modest about Leah. She was all about just putting it out there. And really, I mean, her sisters were the ones that people were interested in on her. So she, she used them in a sense, cause they're mostly when they went to these different cities, the crowds were friendly, but you know, I think of Kate Maggie's working girls and you know, usually you say that about prostitutes for sex workers, I should say, but they were, um, they were working really hard and it was very, I don't know, it was very personal kind of work. You know, you're having to, like, you have to talk to grieving people and people who are doubting you and you know, you have to put this performance on over and over and over and over. And sometimes they would see, in addition to doing these engagements, they would have private sittings with people. And it would be like one after another one time Maggie went alone. Cause I would split up sometimes and visit some of these cities by themselves. So Maggie went alone to Troy New York and she had a really bad experience with a crowd that was super nasty. Um, I mentioned that some of the women were jealous and I think that had something to do with what happened, but the whole crowd got up, got out of hand. I think they were pelting her with like rocks and stuff, apparently rumor of an app, an assassination attempt. So she was going to get killed. So that was really scary. And they did have some bad experiences like that by this point they were famous. And this book that I read that I'll, I'll give the source at the end. Um, the author, her name is Barbara Weisberg. She says that the modern notion of celebrity was also a 19th century invention. So it's, it's the birth of modern celebrity. Surprisingly, another kind of technology that was becoming more popular at the time was magic, which was considered by its practitioners. Almost all of them were male to be a technical, even a scientific art and their work made use of optics, chemistry and rational processes that created a sense of illusion and mediums are people who talk with spirits. On the other hand, these were almost always women. And like that fascinates me. I could just think about this and read about this forever. Like think men have always been more associated with science and technology. I mean, even now, like there's this big push to get girls involved in STEM and things like that. But Weisberg and her, her book about the sisters talks about how for centuries, I mean, going back to probably medieval times, maybe even before women have been identified with witchcraft and the healing arts, like, uh, I don't know, what do you call those? Not which, which you women are, um, there's a, isn't there an Appalachian term for granny women or any women? Yeah. Granny women. Yep. Yeah. So that kind of thing, and maybe women were considered more theorial than men that they were, I think also it's like women were considered a conduit or a vessel that spirit talked through, whereas men had too much of, we're seen to have too much of their own, their own personality to like own agency at exactly. Exactly. So if you think that love is a kind of magic, both Maggie and Kate had magic in their lives, but for each of them, their love affairs ended very tragically. Maggie met this man. His name was Elijah Kent Kane. And he was an Explorer who, um, like a sailor who explored the Arctic. Um, he became very, very smitten with her very quickly. And she, she was kind of leery of him at first. Cause he was, he was a fair bit older, but eventually he kind of started to win her over. But he was, they were separated by, by a wide social sphere. So he came from a very prominent well-to-do family. And of course Maggie is a spirit, you know, spirit talker or whatever. So, um, Maggie and Kate were living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle by this point because they were making, bringing in quite a bit of money, but they didn't have that. As I mentioned before, that middle-class respectability because of, because of the work they were doing. So King was initially really drawn to Maggie because he had attended some of her seances and you just thought there was something just other worldly about her. He thought she was so beautiful, but as they started to kind of form their relationship, he was not happy that she was living this lifestyle. He really wanted her to be something different. And to be honest, Maggie was also getting kind of tired of this work. You know, I talked before about just how grueling it could be. And there was a part of her that really wanted to be, just be a regular woman, you know, whatever that means. So Kane was initially drawn to Maggie because he had attended some of her say dances. And from the very moment he saw her, he was just enchanted with her. He thought that she, there was something so other worldly and beautiful about her. But once they began to form an attachment and a relationship, he didn't like the fact that she was doing the spirit work. And to be honest, Maggie herself was getting kind of sick of it. And she started to really long to know what it would be like to just settle down and live the life of a normal 19th century woman. So Kane, um, he's traveling a lot. He goes off on these Arctic voyages. So he seals the engagement by giving her a ring and inside the ring with some of his dead brother's hair,
Speaker 3:He seems a bit of a weirdo. Anyway, he did
Speaker 1:Because they did have a secret marriage. And this is another sign that he was probably a weirdo. Because according to what I read, they're sitting there just sitting around in the parlor one evening, it's Cain and Maggie. And I think her sister, Kate, maybe Leah was there and maybe another couple of other people. And he's just like, let's get married right now. You know, we don't need to have an actual legal ceremony. You all are witnesses. And if we profess our love in front of you, we will be married. So that's what they did. And ever after that, married, not married. Maggie considered herself married and
Speaker 3:Themselves as married. Yeah. He's a total micro pain. What a.
Speaker 1:Cause he didn't have the guts to stand up to his family probably cause he would have lost money, right? Maybe Ben disinherited or something like that and making him even more of a. So almost immediately after they're married, he leaves again for England. But while he's there, he gets really, really sick. And he writes Maggie that he's going to Havana Cuba to try to get better, but she gets this message that he died. And I think it was some, some weeks after he had died. So he died in February of 1857 and 37 years old and Maggie for her, even though he was a micro pain, as he said, he remained the love of her life. The other thing he, he didn't like, like he not only wanted her to stop working, but he didn't want her to believe in spiritualism anymore. And in fact, he wanted her to convert to Catholicism, which she did. But get this, he wasn't Catholic. He was Protestant. I'm not sure. I think maybe Presbyterian. I wonder why Catholicism? Well, what high read said that he thought that that would, that religion would be a good match for her because it had all of these rituals and things that like, maybe that would, that would kind of stand in for the spiritualist stuff she was missing when she gave it up. So she did become Catholic, but she's so, she's so sad. A grief stricken after he dies that she starts drinking and in her alcoholism, I mean, she, she really does become alcoholic. Like she, she just drinks and drinks. So poor Maggie, but Kate, her sister, remember her younger sister she's continuing to work, but a few years later, um, the girl's parents die. They've died really, not too long. I forget which one died first, but it wasn't long until the, you know, the other one followed and this really hit Kate very hard. So like Maggie, she takes to drink and she's drinking all the time and something I read in this book by Weisberg, she talks about the fact that mediums apparently are very prone to addiction and the theories that the substance has helped them block out the constant stimulation from the spirit world. And I have read that other places as well.
Speaker 3:And the author of this book. What's her name again? Her name is Barbara Weisberg. So Wiseberg is she like proponent of spiritualism or she's,
Speaker 1:I'm not, I don't think she's a proponent. I think she found it interesting. I think she has questions and I'll talk about that at the end. She has an open mind, but I think she just really wanted to, she was just fascinated by these, by these girls' lives. I read that she also writes for some TV series. So Kate, Kate's not doing very well, but then like Maggie, she has her love of, so she falls in love with this guy named Henry Dietrich genkan and he doesn't seem like he's a b ag. Like I'm like Elijah Kent K ane. P lus they actually get married in the normal way and they have two, two boys. U m, and they live abroad for a long time. I think they lived in England. It was really sad. He died 10 years later. So he didn't, you know, they were only together a decade and following his death, even though she had her two boys, Kate just couldn't keep it together. And she started drinking again. Meanwhile, Maggie had just rejected spiritualism and she, because she felt that's what, what her dead husband wanted her to do. And she revealed a lot of bitterness towards Leah, her older sister and her mother. And there was an article that appeared in a paper at that time. And this is what she said when spiritualism first began, Katie and I were little children and this old woman, my other sister made us her tools. Mother was a silly woman. She was a fanatic. What did we know? Our sister used us in her exhibitions and we made money for her. So I mean, she's pretty, pretty harsh on everybody there. I love when she calls an old, old woman, I know little
Speaker 3:Shade, I don't play where. So Kate
Speaker 1:Is at this time, she's also denouncing spiritualism. And she says it was a humbug from beginning to end. So on October 21st, 1888, Maggie accepts this gig at New York city's Academy of music. And she's paid, I think about$1,200 for it. I'm not sure that the people who paid her knew what was going to happen, but what did happen is she gets up on stage and she makes this big confession that, that basically she and Kate were making it up the whole time. So she, she explains how they made the wraps. And she says that they used basically their leg joints from the knee down. So I guess that would be like their knees and their ankles. And especially they would use their big toe and they can cheat. It demonstrated this onstage. Apparently she took off her shoes and she had her stocking leg up and was showing people how she could manipulate her toes in different ways to make these sounds. And sometimes if she did it one way, it would sound like it was coming from the back of the theater. And other times it would sound like it was like right next to the person in the front row. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I'm just thinking like what the toll would be on your body doing that. So many times they
Speaker 1:Must've had some hell of a arthritis at that point. Um, and she explained that when they were kids. So when they, when this whole thing started and that little cottage, they were living in with their parents, they had tied an Apple to a string and they dropped it at like different places around the floor, in the dark. And that's how they made the wraps. I guess they use the Apple and then they figured out they could make noises with their toes.
Speaker 3:And then they were probably laughing their off the whole time. And then their lives are ruined.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Which it that's one of the really interesting things about the story,
Speaker 3:Uh, a little prank like that and basically lying. And it destroys your life things that kids do.
Speaker 1:I know. And it's so strange. I think that everybody took it so seriously. I mean, Maggie does say in that one quote that her mother was a silly woman. She was a fanatic. I think she was really eager to believe whatever and what I've read about their dad as he was very hands-off apparently he struggled with alcoholism early on and then he became very religious, but he was just not, you know, not really involved
Speaker 3:Restore. You told me that you told when you were a child. Oh my God.
Speaker 1:Don't make me tell this story. Oh, so yeah, when I was in second grade, so I guess that, that would make, I did a lot of weird in second grade. Actually. I c ould tell you a lot of stories, but I wonder what was going on with me when I l ooked back. So I was like seven and one day we were in class, you know, reading our textbook or whatever. And I just k ind o f realized that if I just s ort o f like, if I looked at the page in a certain way and sort of r elax my e ye muscles, that I couldn't see very well, t hat everything was b lur. And so I convinced myself t hat I couldn't see. And even though like, if I, if I did my eyes the right way, I could see again, I was like, what if I don't do it that way? I just can't see. So I started not being able to see things on the board. And then I would tell the teacher that I couldn't read the book. And so she'd have to get another student to like read out loud. A nd t hen one time, I mean, I think this i s within the space of a week. I acted like I couldn't see my way to the bathroom, which was actually inside the classroom. That's the only natural progression. So you didn't
Speaker 3:Even have to go down the hall. It was in, it was in the
Speaker 1:Classroom. It was like, that's
Speaker 3:Even worse. I needed my little, you know, my little
Speaker 1:Walking stick, but I didn't have one. So I guess the teacher called my mom and said, you know, I'm really worried about Jennifer like sheets. She's not able to see and it's happened very quickly. So my mom took me to the eye doctor and um, I just remember thinking, Oh God, I hope he, I kind of remember thinking two things. I wonder if something really bad is wrong with me. Cause I think part of me really did think that maybe I was going blind, but the other part of me was like, I hope he doesn't figure out I'm faking. So somehow I sorta knew I was faking and also believed I was going blind.
Speaker 3:I think your mom took you to the wrong type of doctor.
Speaker 1:I think she did. I think, I think you're right. Um, but anyway, so the doctor is like, well, I need to have, you know, uh, talk alone with your mom. And I'm like, Oh, this is not good. You know, seven year old me is like, I'm in trouble now. But he,
Speaker 3:So he does,
Speaker 1:Mom is just like get in the car. And she doesn't say anything to me the whole way home. There's nothing like we're going to get glasses for you or anything like that. So I, I just decided when I went back to school the next day, I would just be able to see it again. And so I did. And that's nobody ever asked me any questions about it that I remember. I mean, they probably did, but I don't remember it. And my teacher thought she must have thought I was psycho. She must've thought there was like crazy stuff going on at home. But my mom never said anything about it till I was about 13. And I was having like backaches or this pain in my back. And my mom was like, I'm not taking you to another doctor just to find out that there's nothing wrong. I just had to deal with my backaches taking that time seven
Speaker 3:Years later. And she's still holding it against you,
Speaker 1:You know, I'm, you know, I'm almost too embarrassed to bring it up with her. I want to ask her about it, but I'm, I'm too embarrassed. Oh, you have
Speaker 3:To. And they're like,
Speaker 1:When we go to West Virginia sometime to see her, maybe we can, I just feel like I need somebody else there. I can't
Speaker 3:Kind of ease into it. I have to give your mom credit because she didn't say anything for seven years. So, or six or seven years. I wouldn't have been able to sit on that.
Speaker 1:Would you have been if your kid did t hat?
Speaker 3:I think I would have been worried about her psychological.
Speaker 1:Well, I know when I think about it, I does make me think like what was wrong with me? I mean, I think I knew I wanted to wear glasses and I'm cursed because now I have to wear glasses because I really truly am blind as a bat now. So I have to wear glasses, but then I really wanted them. And I think, I mean, they always want, I mean, obviously I was wanting attention. Wasn't all kids want attention, but I think your mom,
Speaker 3:Other than saying that she didn't want to take you to a doctor when something was really wrong. But I think your mom handled it well, not to handle it. Well, not to say anything. I think my mom would have spanked me.
Speaker 1:You would've had a whole different health problem.
Speaker 3:She wouldn't shoot her, grabbed me by my kid in the car.
Speaker 1:She would have dislocated your elbow. Is she like throws you in the car? Oh my God. So do you have any stories like that?
Speaker 3:Not as like a child that I can remember off hand, but as a teenager, I, my mom, I don't know. I felt like at the time that maybe she suspected that I was gay. And even though, because I dated quite a few boys and then I stopped all of a sudden and I never knew that you dated a lot of guys. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't a lot, but it was, it was more than a few. And, and she, yeah, the lesbian, it gets all the unwanted action. So she, I was afraid that she suspected cause all of a sudden I just kind of stopped or to me in my mind, that's kind of how it was. And I was just really paranoid about her finding out. And there was one particular person in the friend group that, well, we were seeing each other, but my mom, I think could tell, I felt like she could pick up the vibe that maybe there was something more than just friendship. So we wanted to of course, you know, stay the night together one night and I lied to my mom and I told her I was with my friend. My friend is, I think I told her it was with my friend, Lisa and for whatever reason, the next day I came home really early. And you have to remember, this is prior to pre-cellphone days. And I think I came home at something like seven 30 in the morning. Oh, you cut that night short. Yeah. I just, I just felt something was wrong. And when I walk in my mom's on the couch, she's been crying, she's upset. She confronts me. And um, I've been out all night, you know, driving around and it's like, I don't know where she thought that she was going to find me, but so she's, you know, crying and going into all these histrionics about who was I with and you know, was I on birth control? And um, and so of course I play along. Like I didn't want her to find out it was gay and not that she, she probably, it was just in my mind that I thought maybe she would know, but I just went ahead and played along with it. And I was like, well, I was with Mark and um, you know, so she was like, Oh, you're going to get pregnant. You know, that type of thing. Well, she just assumed that she just assumed the worst.
Speaker 1:So he was a loose woman, Jen,
Speaker 3:That's a really good point. Yeah. So I guess she just assumed the worst and
Speaker 1:That's what she did when she was young. You know, people believe what other people, what they were, what they did.
Speaker 3:Well, my mom's, um, my mom's first boyfriend, he was gay. So my mom, yeah. I don't think my mom engaged in anything. Your mom or the store. Yeah. So it was, it was much more palatable for me to be out freaking this guy at all hours of the night and potentially getting pregnant than to say that I was with my girlfriend. Yeah. So that's, that's the only thing I can think of offhand. It wasn't, um, it's not nearly as fun as yours.
Speaker 1:No, but it's a good story, but it makes me kind of sad cause it just makes, I don't know. I just think it was so hard growing up and
Speaker 3:It's ridiculous. And when you think back on things like that, I mean, just thinking about it makes me so uncomfortable. I don't know with you just telling your story to
Speaker 1:Be very uncomfortable because I think what a little freak
Speaker 3:I was, well, it's still, for me, it's like still super embarrassing and
Speaker 1:Yeah. So with your story, I don't see that you had anything to be embarrassed about kind of like all these assumptions on your mom's part. But, but I, you know, I think we all have these deceptions, you know, that when we're young that we don't know how to handle or we don't know how to handle certain things in our lives and maybe desires or wishes or just situations. And we do, we come up with these deceptions and like you said, probably Maggie and Kate were laughing their asses off. When they first figured out they could crack their toes and you know, make their parents believe all this crazy stuff, but then it just goes wrong for them. And it's like their whole
Speaker 3:Life. This is so funny.
Speaker 1:And then you're like, yeah, it's funny, girl, this is gonna go down a bad road. So after Maggie confessed, this was a huge deal. And it was, the press said that her confession was the death blow to spiritualism. Um, in fact that turned out not to be true. Spiritualism continued to thrive, although Maggie and Kate were not involved, but just a year later after confessing, Maggie were her confession. And she says that when her recantation is that she did it at the behest of her spirit guides, they told her, take back what you said, you know, it wasn't true. So she did that, but I think it's probably more accurate to think that the poor, the poor woman needed some money. I mean, she needed to work again and nobody was going to go to her as a medium, well about her sister. So she, so she dies she's she makes it into her seventies. She dies in 1890. Um, but she was very beloved in spiritualist circles and was kind of seen as like the mother of spiritualism. In some ways, even though she, she was not known to have the same gifts, is this and Maggie or so following her death, um, just two years later, 1892, Kate dies. She's the younger one. Um, she dies after a drinking spree and then Maggie dies in 1893 and both women were just in their fifties. So for me, the mystery that persists is what exactly Kate and Maggie believed about their gifts. And how did the understanding change over the years? Um, you know, I think we we've talked about this by talking about our stories. There's probably some cognitive dissonance there like you like, cause I really think when I was in second grade, like during that one week I kind of did think I was going blind even while I knew I was faking it. Like there was, there was like both were happening in my weird little brain, you know? So it makes you wonder what they really thought. You know, if you're doing, if you do something as a trick, but then people start to believe you, maybe it takes on this reality for you. So at its peak spiritualism was so popular. I mean, by the 1880s, there were an estimated 8 million spiritualists in the United States in Europe and people w you know, when I tell you some of the people who were into it, it's going to surprise you. Like Thomas Edison was into it. He was working on something called a spirit phone that he thought could make contact between us and the spirit realm, which I wish that existed. Would that be amazing if you could just call? Like, I mean, there's so many people I would call, I feel like most of my family is on the other side of this point, but Charles Dickens, he was part of this thing called a ghost club in London, I think in the 1860s. And there was some spiritualist stuff there. And then Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes books. Um, he was an in, um, an ardent spiritualist and his, his son Kelsey died in world war II, world war II. And so I think he believed that he contacted Kelsey through a medium. And then the other one that surprised me I read about was Upton Sinclair, you know, the, the muckraker journalist, but yeah, so he and his wife were, were very much into spiritualism too. So it was, was really popular. So the same year that Maggie dies 1893, the natural, the national spiritualist association was formed. And today it's known as the national spiritualist association of churches. And it's, it's really what remains of the spiritualist movement. It's still in existence today. It is actually one of the biggest communities of spiritualists is, is still in New York, in Western New York. Believe it or not, it's in this little town called Lilydale. And, um, it's about 60 miles South of Buffalo off of interstate I 90. And it kills me because when we lived in Rochester, New York, we were there for four years and we used to go, we take[inaudible] to go to West Virginia to see my family. So I must've driven past the turn off for it, like a million times, not a million, but a bunch of times, but I never knew about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I was going to say, obviously you didn't know about it cause I know you would have, Oh, I would have just been there.
Speaker 1:In fact, I want us to go there. I think it would be a really, really cool trip, but anyway, so they have a museum there and then a lot of mediums live there. And during July and August, people really flocked to the town, the whole it's a little place, but it comes alive and people go there for readings and they have all these different classes and like, Oh, these just all these like hippy dippy, you know, kinds of things that they do very new age, very female centered community. But in their museum, they have a peddlers trunk, which is supposed to be the trunk, the belong to the peddler who remember at the beginning of the story that the girl's mother, you know, interviews the spirit. And it was a peddler who was killed and buried in the basement. So they have his trunk. What's supposed to be his trunk and their museum and the Hyattsville cottage where the girls, you know, first where the family first heard the raps, it was actually moved to Lily Dale in 1916. But unfortunately it did burn down in 1955. But yeah, you can go to Lilydale today to meet with a medium, um, right now during COVID you can also do a remotely. I was actually thinking of booking a session, which I still might do. I'm a little nervous about it. And I'm kind of, part of my nervousness is like, am I wasting my money? But I'm also free. So it's just interesting, um, how it does remain today. And there's one last postscript I want to tell you. So in 1904, which is what seven, about 11 years after, after the last sister dies, um, there are these kids in Heightsville and they're playing in the old house that the sisters, you know, heard all this stuff or all this stuff happened in and locally, it was known as the spook house, but they're playing around and they discover a skeleton. So you wonder it was at the, was it the bones or the murdered peddler? Like what was, why was that there? How long after did they find it? Um, they found it, so Maggie died in 1893, Kate in 1892. And they found it in 1904 in that wild and it really explained yeah. Then it makes
Speaker 3:You kind of go back to, well, it was a really something to it.
Speaker 1:I know. So I think who knows, I mean, I, I don't disbelieve in spiritualism. I don't know that Maggie and Kate were the real things, but I think that there's the potential for it to be real. I don't disbelieve in it
Speaker 3:Either. I just find, I think, you know, looking at this case or whatever, it's highly suspicious in for me, it's only because it's not even necessarily the one of the sisters recanting for whatever reason, I'm more suspicious because the older sister was just propelling. This was a catalyst and clearly using this for her own gain.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think you're totally right about that. Yeah. It just seemed like it was, it was really a way of making money and really gathering power for her. So, you know, and I'm sure there are some, some bad mediums out there who are in it for all the wrong reasons and they're exploiting people. But I like to think that there's some good ones too, that maybe they really do have a gift, but that's the story for tonight? Well, that was a great story. Thank you. These things are endless. They are, and they can take you down so many rabbit holes when I was putting this together, I was really having a hard time because there were so many, so many little side roads. You could go down interesting things, but that's, what's so fun about history, you know, especially paranormal history. There's just so much there so much inner connectedness. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, you know, I like when supernatural history is actually connected to the larger history of like, what's going on, you can just see like all these elements coming together. And, and I think spiritualism is uniquely American in a lot of ways. And I thought that that was really cool. So have you finished your hurricane on? Go ahead. Just about, just about, how about you, have you finished your, I have maybe like a quarter of it left and what are you having? I'm having my, um, black widow smash, your black one. Okay. That's right. And we should toast and Maggie and Kate. Cause I feel like they got a bad, a bad rap. I didn't, I didn't mean to make a pun, but I just made a pun.
Speaker 2:They had kind of a life. H e did. So t o, to Maggie and Kate. Yes. I'll drink to that. I'll drink to that. Thank you to everyone who l istens. The best thing you can do to help us grow is to like review on subscribe on iTunes and even better yet tweet about us or post about us on Facebook. Tell your friends if you think they would like us and have a good night.[ inaudible].