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- The Haunted Museum -
HISTORY & MYSTERY OF
SPIRITUALISM
The Spiritualist Movement -- From the Beginning to Today |
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The Spiritualist movement, like jazz, was purely an American invention.
Although the idea that man was able to communicate with
spirits had existed already for centuries, modern belief in such a practice
came about in March 1848 in Hydesville, New York. The movement, which would
come to be known as Spiritualism, would remain strong for nearly a century,
enjoying its greatest revival after World War I. The practice was founded on
the belief that life existed after death and that the spirit existed beyond
the body. Most importantly, it was believed that these spirits could (and did)
communicate with the living.
THE HISTORY
Spiritualism was born at the home of the Fox family in
Hydesville but legend holds that the house was haunted before the Fox Family
came to live there. In those days, between 1843 and 1844, a couple named
Bell occupied the cottage. In the last few months of their occupancy, a young
local woman named Lucretia Pulver handled the household chores. She acted as a
maid and carried out the cleaning and cooking duties for the Bell’s.
One day, a young peddler came to the door of the house. He
was a friendly young man and he brought with him a case of merchandise. These
goods consisted of pots, pans and other useful items for the home. He stayed
with the family for several days and it has been suggested that perhaps he
enjoyed a closer than was proper relationship with Mrs. Bell. A short time
later, Lucretia found herself fired from her position in the house. No
explanation was ever given but apparently, there were no hard feelings about
her dismissal. Mrs. Bell took the girl home in her wagon and before she left
the house, Lucretia purchased a small kitchen knife from the peddler’s
selection. She left him instructions to deliver the item to her father’s farm,
but the knife never arrived.
Barely a week later, Lucretia was surprised to find that
Mrs. Bell was again requesting her services. Thankful to have her job back,
she reported for duty the next morning. The peddler who had been staying with
the family had departed but she found that a number of things he carried in
his case were now in the possession of Mrs. Bell. She simply assumed that Mrs.
Bell must have bought the items from the peddler before the young man left for
parts unknown. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary, but that would soon
change.
Shortly after returning to the house, Lucretia began
to notice some particularly strange things had begun to occur. Unaccountable
noises, like knocking and tapping, came from the room that the peddler had
once occupied. On several occasions, she also heard footsteps pacing through
the house and then descending the stairs to the cellar. Not surprisingly,
Lucretia began to feel frightened and nervous when left alone in the house.
She would often send for her brother, or a friend, to come and stay with her
and usually, the strange sounds would cease. However, on one occasion, they
continued for hours and scared Lucretia’s brother so badly that he left the
place and refused to return. One afternoon, while in the cellar, Lucretia
stumbled and fell over a patch of freshly turned dirt. She was slightly hurt
and Mr. Bell explained that the mound of dirt had been dumped to cover up "rat
holes".
A short time later, the Bell’s moved out and the Weekman
family moved in, along with a relative, a Mrs. Lafe. The length of their
residence in the house would prove to be a short one. One day, Mrs. Lafe
entered the kitchen and as she closed the door behind her, she spotted the
apparition of a man in a black frock coat standing across the room. She
screamed in terror and the figure vanished. Soon, they all began to hear the
rappings and footsteps in the house. They would come during the daylight
hours, but mostly they were heard at night, bothering everyone as they tried
to sleep. Finally, the odd happenings proved to be too much for them and they
abandoned the place.
Then in 1848, the Fox family moved into the house. John Fox
and his wife had two young daughters, Margaret and Kate, and they settled
temporarily into the cottage. Fox was a farmer who had come to New York from
Canada and had purchased land nearby. A home was being built on the new
property and he moved his family into the cottage until the other house could
be completed. Their stay would turn out to be very eventful.
Within days of moving in, the noises began. The banging and
rattling sounds pounded loudly each night, disturbing them all from their
sleep. At first, John Fox thought nothing of the sounds that his wife and
children reported and were so frightened by. He assumed that they were merely
the sounds of an unfamiliar dwelling, amplified by active imaginations. Soon
however, the reports took another turn. Kate woke up screaming one night,
saying that a cold hand had touched her on the face. Margaret swore that
rough, invisible fists had pulled the blankets from her bed. Even Mrs. Fox
swore that she had heard disembodied footsteps walking through the house and
then going down the wooden steps into the dank cellar. |
A Fanciful Period depiction of the Arrival
of the Spirits at the Fox Home in Hydesville |
Fox, not a superstitious man, was perplexed. He tried
walking about the house, searching for squeaks and knocks in the floorboards
and along the walls. He tested the windows and doors to see if vibrations in
the frames might account for the sounds. He could find no explanation for the
weird noises and his daughters became convinced that the house had a ghost.
On the evening of March 31, Fox began his almost nightly
ritual of investigating the house for the source of the sounds. The tapping
had begun with the setting of the sun and although he searched the place, he
was no closer to a solution. Then, Kate began to realize that whenever her
father knocked on a wall or door frame, the same number of inexplicable knocks
would come in reply. It was as if someone, or something, was trying to
communicate with them.
Finding her nerve, Kate spoke up, addressing the unseen
presence by the nickname that she and her sister had given it. "Here, Mr.
Splitfoot," she called out, "do as I do!" She clapped her hands together two
times and seconds later, two knocks came in reply, seemingly from inside of
the wall. She followed this display by rapping on the table and the precise
number of knocks came again from the presence. The activity caught the
attention of the rest of the family and they entered the room with Kate and
her father. Mrs. Fox tried asking aloud questions of fact, such as the ages of
her daughters and the age of a Fox child who had earlier passed away. To her
surprise, each reply eerily accurate.
Unsure of what to do, John Fox summoned several neighbors
to the house to observe the phenomenon. Most of them came over very skeptical
of what they were hearing from the Fox’s, but were soon astounded to find
their ages and various dates and years given in response to the questions they
asked.
One neighbor, and a former tenant in the house, William
Duesler, decided to try and communicate with the source of the sounds in a
more scientific manner. He asked repeated questions and was able to create a
form of alphabet using a series of knocks. He also was able to determine the
number of knocks that could be interpreted as "yes" and "no". In such a
manner, he was able to determine the subject of the disturbances. The answer
came, not in private, but before an assembled group of witnesses, that the
presence in the house was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and
robbed years before.
As it happened, one of the neighbors who had assembled in
the house was the former maid of the Bell family, Lucretia Pulver. She came
forward with her story of finding the dirt that had been unearthed in the
cellar. The story now took on a more sinister tone. John Fox and William
Duesler went to the area that Lucretia described and began to dig. After more
than an hour, they had little to show for their trouble but an empty hole and
sore backs. That was until Fox noticed something odd beneath the blade of his
shovel. He prodded at the object and then picked it up. It appeared to be a
small piece of bone with a few strands of hair still clinging to it. Spurred
on by the gruesome discovery, he and Duesler began to dig once more. They
found a few scraps and tatters of clothing, but little else. They were far
from disappointed though, as a local doctor determined that the bone appeared
to be a piece of a human skull. They were convinced that the presence in the
house was indeed the ghost of the luckless peddler!
Shortly after, the story of the Fox family took a more
dramatic turn. The two daughters were both purported to have mediumistic
powers and the news of the unearthly communications with the spirit quickly
spread. By November 1849, they were both giving public performances of their
skills and the Spiritualist movement was born. The mania to communicate with
the dead swept the country and the Fox sisters became famous.
Click Here to Read A Biography of the Fox Sisters Over the years, the credibility of the Fox family was often
called into question. As no real evidence existed to say that any peddler was
actually killed in the house, many accused the family of making up the entire
story to support their claims of supernatural powers. It may come as no
surprise to the reader that the Spiritualist movement was riddled with fraud,
but was the story of the murdered peddler merely a ruse to prove the powers of
the Fox sisters?
It’s possible that Margaret and Kate, had they not died
years before, would have been vindicated in 1904. By this time, their former
home had been deserted for some years. A group of children were playing in the
ruins one day when the east wall of the cellar collapsed, nearly killing one
of them. A man who came to their aid quickly realized the reason for the
wall’s collapse. Apparently, it had been a false partition, hastily and poorly
constructed in the past. Between the false brick wall and the genuine wall of
the cellar were the crumbling bones of a man and a large box, just like the
ones that had been carried by peddlers a few decades before. A portion of the
man’s skull was missing.
Dead men, as they say, really do tell tales.
Do you want to read more???
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Sat Jan 04, 2014 1:48 pm by Ian
