The Fox Sisters and the Spiritualism Mania

The Fox sisters were three women from New York who somehow revolutionized the study of the paranormal. Kate Fox (1837–1892), Margaret Fox (1833–1893) and Leah Fox (1814–1890) claimed that their house was inhabited by spirits. Over the years they tried to “prove” this before different media and witnesses which were almost always inadmissible, and along the way they gained fame, fortune and implacable enemies.
In 1848, twelve-year-old Kate and fifteen-year-old Margaret lived in a house in Hydesville, New York, that was reputed to be haunted. In March of that year, the family began to get restless after hearing sounds in the middle of the night that had no clear origin. Within a few days, the sounds stopped, but objects, sometimes even furniture, began to move in a boastful manner.

An uncle who was staying at the house decided to confront the supposed spirit and challenged him to hit/produce sounds that matched the age of the girls. The entity not only announced the ages of the girls, but even whispered their name on air, a whisper that was not audible to anyone else. The spirit said they could call him Mr. Splitfoot, a recognized nickname for the devil.
From then on, the Hydesville house became the apex of amazing apparitions. The spirit of Charles B. Rosma, who had been murdered five years earlier, began making chilling statements in the ears of the girls. Among other things, he clarified that his body had been buried in the basement.

The girls were dispersed to different houses of relatives and friends, but paranormal phenomena seemed to follow them wherever they settled. All the hosts declared hearing terrifying voices and sounds that in no way resembled the modulations of the human voice.
The Fox sisters rose to popularity when they held a series of séances in New York in 1850, which attracted an extraordinary number of personalities from art and politics. Naturally, this popularity also drew critics, such as Charles Grafton Page, a lawyer with a long track record exposing supernatural fraud. In his 1853 book Psychomancy, Page denounces that the strange sounds came from a region inaccessible to the eye just below the girls’ skirts, and even hypothesizes that the Fox sisters were some kind of vaginal ventriloquists. , capable of imitating the human voice by retaining and expelling air through their reproductive systems.

The Fox sisters’ séances became more of a frivolous social events than true attempts to communicate with the afterlife. The criticism turned ruthless, but the girls had won the favor of Horace Greeley, a prominent politician and publisher, who shielded them from reasonable allegations of fraud. Moreover, in a few months he included them in a higher social circle, and perhaps a much more gullible one. This entry into the aristocracy forced them to adopt a more theatrical stance in their sessions, which generally led to endless parties.
After the death of her first husband, Leah remarried to a successful Wall Street banker, who encouraged her to continue her career as a medium. Margaret was less lucky. In 1852 she married Elisha Kane, an Arctic Circle explorer, who quickly became convinced that his new wife was a fraud. However, no husband managed to separate them. All of them began to make trips around the world managed by patrons interested in their gifts as mediums, and thus they toured practically all of Europe.

Over the years, the Fox sisters’ séances became more spectacular. There were not only sounds, but perfectly identifiable presences. The ectoplasm flowed generously from the girls’ mouths, noses, and various orifices, creating entities familiar to their sponsors.
Eventually the need to impress their audience made them more and more prone to mistakes. The three Fox sisters developed an obsessive addiction to alcohol, and their sessions were no longer the same. Already in the twilight of their careers they openly declared that they had committed innumerable frauds, but they assured that these arose in a second moment, and that at first both the appearances and the sounds were genuine, but that these mysteriously ceased when they left the Hydesville mansion. Together they announced that the spirit of Charles B. Rosma, who claimed to have been buried in the Hydesville basement, was real, but that his successors were not at all.

Faced with such a confession, no one gave them credit again. Newspapers gorged themselves on the story, even running confessions signed by the Fox sisters, and the matter eventually faded to oblivion.
On November 22, 1904, when all three Fox sisters were dead, the Hydesville house was examined by a real estate company that had recently acquired it. A chronicler from the Boston Journal was invited to the inspection, at that point, on a merely anecdotal basis. The party did not find anything strange, except for some objects that belonged to the Fox sisters. The only surprising discovery occurred in the basement, where skeletal remains of animals were found mixed with human bones, whose identity were never clarified.

https://dimidesan.com/differences-between-a-haunted-and-a-cursed-house/