Hubert Haddad - Rochester Knockings - A Novel of the Fox Sisters

Next to her, Margaret, noting her sister’s pallor, discreetly pressed her shoulder. She was also uneasy but despite everything was still amused by the enormity of the phenomenon: an even greater wonder than their story of the knocking spirit was this crowd who had paid just to see them! She told herself, knees shaking, that secrets would abound under her pen as soon as she opened up her diary. Wasn’t she, a silly girl, living a pure moment of History?

After a solemn warning to the skeptics who risked scaring off the Spirits, or even of making them dangerous, Leah returned as rehearsed to their side.

“Margaret and Kate Fox will sit at this table under your inspection. In the name of God who has granted them this holy gift among us, do not disturb the mediums in their channeling of extra-sensory powers. .”

On the brink of panic, Kate and Margaret glanced furtively at one another. The mischievous smile of one behind the shelter of her palm recovered the other’s serenity, while electrical vibrations were already traveling from the depths of their bowels to the ends of their hair, hands, and feet. “Oh oh! Mister Splitfoot, don’t leave me!” Kate begged. For she had no doubt that the peddler’s spirit had followed her all the way from Hydesville. She imagined his cloven foot as being incredibly swift, able to leap in a single bound the distance between the Earth and Moon. In the blink of an eye, Mister Splitfoot could save her from the bottom of a well or from the mouth of a brown bear. Moreover, here he was now leaping without anyone’s knowledge on the table as if to say: “But what do you want from me now, naughty little girl!” “Wow! Did you see that band of ogres and mean crows out there? Here we are, Maggie and me, in a terrible position. .” “You sought it out, I swear it on the slit of my throat! So let’s talk! What are you waiting for?”

“Spirit, are you there?” Kate exclaimed out loud in direct response to Mister Splitfoot. “If you are there, knock twice. .”

The table was immediately the instrument for two powerful knocks that had the dryness of actual bullet shots or of a hatchet thrown at a hollow tree.

There was revolt in the room, and one woman let out a sinister howl. Shaken with convulsions, Charlene Obo frantically applauded. Camped behind the backstage exit after his buffoonish performance, invisible to the public and protagonists that he could now observe at leisure, Lucian Nephtali was smoking a cigarillo while pondering the degree of fantasy the Great Watchmaker placed in his work. Quite curious phenomena surrounded these young girls. The furniture seemed to respond to them as feeling persons, like paralytics in fervent skeletons. And why the devil did the dead act so turbulently at the least invocation? Leah monitored her sisters with the eye of a night owl: white moon rabbits, surrounded in a gloomy forest of Puritans, they were frolicking between two coffins of old wood, one in the shape of an armoire and the other a table.

The dry knocks turned into a rain, more regular than the clangor of a gallows, and the afflicted crowd roared in anger and dismay. Were they afraid under the livid light of the astral lamps of the apparition of a vast population of numb souls, with scythes and fangs, such as Breughel had depicted in his Triumph of Death, coming by the thousands of millions to put an end to the scandal of the separation of the beyond from here? If little girls had the power to abolish such borders, logically an apocalypse should follow. Lucian burst out laughing at the prospect. He himself would be ready to give credit to all this nonsense to see his friend again, to ask his forgiveness and press him once more against his chest. But Nat Astor was without a doubt still in the old cemetery on Buffalo Street. And what could answer to the mystery of the abyss? O you who do not enter, or not yet, abandon here all hope!

From then on the house on Central Avenue with its Fox & Fish Spiritualist Institute sign was frequented by all the polite Rochester society. They even came from New York City and Boston, from Illinois and Pennsylvania in order to consult one or the other of the Fox sisters. Leah managed the business with determination and rigor, selecting the clientele, taking care of the ritual of welcome, and the staging in each of the three rooms decorated without ornamental overload in a neo-Gothic style. The most difficult for her was banning any semblance of a desire for independence in the two sisters, who were certainly both of marrying age — Margaret especially. The little farm girls were growing refined thanks to her lessons and now knew how to appreciate beautiful corseted dresses, taffetas or black satin, tasteful jewelry, and smart hairstyles with hairbands and chignons at the neck that looked so nice with thick hair. They’d become so beautified that contenders flocked, even among the widowers coming with the hope of corresponding with their deceased wives. Why bother with a husband, that’s what she, a divorcée and happy to be so, repeated to them at leisure. Thanks to the paid séances and the donations from their wealthy followers, they lacked neither the ordinary nor the extravagant — even if the bank accounts remained hidden to them. A fortune acquired outside of marriage has for a woman the exquisite taste of revenge.

Leah held bitter memories of the tests they’d had to pass before actually establishing themselves and building their reputation beyond Monroe County, the state of New York, and then in the whole Union! The episode in Corinthian Hall, however decisive for their careers, fed her worst nightmares, where an anonymous voice suddenly destabilizes the precarious equilibrium of the believing public. “Witches!” the crowd had cried at the moment when a randomly chosen spectator was learning from the counting of knocks a shameful secret. Then there was a battle of insults carried out in full force by the Puritans, ready to take action. The demonstration happened to be coming to its end, but the released audience congregated outside, unleashing their animosity. The most virulent of them had stolen thick ropes from the storefront of a saddle shop that they were brandishing in the half-light of the evening. Perched on a horse cart, a sententious pastor named Ryan excited the lynch mob. “Whoever plays with Satan will not take delight in God!” he started to proclaim, among other cookie-cutter slogans.

Press correspondents gave considerable coverage to the event, though their reports contrasted wildly. Whereas the papers of the South and Midwest spoke of the shameful deception of abolitionist clans and women’s rights movements, the New-York Tribune, under the pen of a young follower of transcendentalism, in fashion with progressives in the North, announced it a fundamental discovery proving nothing less than the immortality of the soul. The article ended with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “There are persons, from whom we always expect fairy tokens; let us not cease to expect them.” The Quakers on their end were heavily engaged in the spiritualist path, in competition with the Mormons who had the aim to recall, by their lawful baptized name or with good reason, all the souls that ever lived on Earth since Adam and Eve, without neglecting anyone.

The lawyers and scientists present at Corinthian Hall, however, suspecting a hoax, joined together to assemble a commission of experts. Seeing this merely as a ploy and case of bribery, the populace threatened to hang the three girls and their protectors in the case of favorable findings. It was at their risk and peril that they presented themselves at those meetings in the form of a public hearing at Corinthian Hall. Neither the first commission nor the second could detect the least stigma of fraud. All sorts of tests, however, were conducted by a clerk of the court. They listened inside the armoire and the table with a stethoscope. They placed felt pads under the chair legs. After having inspected under all their garments and up to their private parts, they bound the young women’s hands and legs during the invocations. The court doctor Brinley Simmons restricted each girl’s diaphragm with straps to thwart any attempt at ventriloquism. Nothing suspicious could be detected in the course of these extravagances. The experts confined themselves to stating the absence of mechanical causality between the mediums’ action and the various means by which the knocks were produced. An Episcopalian commission headed by an itinerant bishop of the Evangelical Association even concluded the entire good faith of the two youngest sisters without explaining or endorsing the phenomenon.