tap tap tapping on the glass
tap tap tapping on the glass
Or, the scam-filled spooky saga of the Fox Sisters.
Hi friends,
I first heard this story at a presentation I went to in the pre-COVID days, titled delightfully “Seances of the Victorian Era Unveiled.” It was held in a requisitioned funeral home, and I cannot emphasize enough how haunted it was. Maybe that’s why their story spent so long filed in my mental “spooky bitches” file cabinet that I didn’t realize it also belonged in the “lady dirtbags” file cabinet, but these three ladies contain multitudes, and so I’m happy to share them with you this week.
Without further ado, it’s my pleasure to introduce:
The Fox Sisters, AKA Creepy Victorian Bitch 1, 2, and 3
The time is the late 1840s, the place upstate New York. Two of the Fox sisters—Maggie, age 14, and Kate, age 11—came tearing out of the house and burst into a neighbor’s living room, beside themselves with exciting news. They had just heard the tell-tale rapping of an otherworldly spirit, who was apparently living in the walls of their bedroom.
The neighbor was skeptical at first, but like every white person in a horror movie, they decided to go next door anyway to see what was going on.
And sure enough, in front of the neighbor and also their mother, Maggie and Kate called up a spirit who was only too happy to address the assembled company.
Mrs. Fox: “Now girls, you’re sure it’s a ghost and not you two just fucking around?”
Kate and Maggie: “Honest, ma! Ask it a question!”
Mrs. Fox: “Um. OK. Ghost, please count to five.”
Disembodied Tapping Sound: TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP
Mrs. Fox: “If you are an injured spirit, tap three times.”
Disembodied Tapping Sound: TAP TAP TAP
Mrs. Fox: “If you truly have otherworldly knowledge, tap us the age of our neighbor.”
Disembodied Tapping Sound: TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP
Neighbor: “This seems like an inefficient way to—”
Disembodied Tapping Sound, who was not finished yet: TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP TAP
Since it was well-known in the mid-19th century that the most common way for spirits to speak from beyond the veil was by tapping on things, this was taken to be proof positive that Kate and Maggie could speak to ghosts. And Mama Fox freaked out.
Honestly, I might’ve freaked out a little too, in her place, because Kate and Maggie made the baller move of referring to the ghostly visitor as “their friend Mr. Splitfoot.” Which is unironically fucking terrifying. If I have kids and they start pointing behind me and saying “Mom, Mr. Splitfoot is here!” I am burning down the house.
To protect her two young daughters from their scary tap-dancing invisible devil friend, Mama Fox sent them away to stay with their 35-year-old sister Leah, who lived with her husband in Rochester, New York. Which, really, was a hell of a choice.
What Las Vegas is to gambling, 19th-century Rochester was to weird offshoots of spiritual movements. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had just sprung up near Rochester like 15 years prior, and the townspeople were generally hungry for any story that involved the supernatural or the unexplainable. Even more importantly, Leah Fox was a stone-cold liar and absolutely ready to use her two younger sisters to make a buck.
This all led to the only thing it could possibly have led to: Leah, Kate, and Maggie heading out on Stage One of their Ghost-Tapping Spiritual Medium Extravaganza Tour.
Toe-tally Spooky
The three sisters started summoning up Ol’ Mr. Splitfoot to answer questions for Rochester’s upper crust, but word spread quickly, and they started doing bigger venues. Before long, they were traveling the East Coast, playing big theaters in New York to audiences including James Fenimore Cooper and Sojourner Truth. “The Fox Sisters and The Mysterious Tapping Noise” had passed its out-of-town tryouts with flying colors, and now it was time for Broadway, baybee.
Which of course raises the age-old question:
WAS IT OR WAS IT NOT GHOSTS?
Spoiler: it was not ghosts. Maggie, Leah, and Kate were liars who were apparently making the tapping sounds themselves by cracking their own toe joints under the table.
[Obligatory two-minute pause while everyone reading this newsletter tries and fails to crack their own toe joints loud enough to be heard from the back of a New York theater.]
I love this for them: a low-tech, elegant, deeply weird solution that fools almost the entire East Coast. And man, were they bold about it. Not only were they the first people in America to come up with the idea of summoning ghosts in front of an audience for money, but they absolutely dared the skeptics to come at them and tell them they were liars.
Between 1850 and 1880, no fewer than nine scientists formally examined the Fox Sisters’ claims of conjuring up the devil. Every one of them published a report that essentially said “Bro, these three ladies are making a mysterious tapping noise under their skirts, honestly it sounds like they’re just cracking their toes real loud.”
But did this dissuade the Fox Sisters from charging their entry fee and continuing to summon up Mr. Splitfoot in front of their awestruck fans? Absolutely the fuck it did not. They just ignored the scientists and kept going.
And people ate this shit up. At the height of their fame they were doing three shows a day in New York, and Maggie and Kate took the show on the road to Ohio, Missouri, DC, and Pennsylvania.
Surprise Guests: an Arctic Explorer and a Founding Father
The sisters carried on with their schemes through the 1880s, with Leah, the oldest, mostly at the forefront. With her newfound fame and ghost-summoning powers, she married a wealthy Wall Street banker after the death of her first husband, and she mostly just kept on supervising the charade until her death.
Maggie, the middle sister, fell in love with an arctic explorer while on tour in Ohio and married him in 1852. The arctic explorer was aggressively against spiritualism and made Maggie promise to stop speaking to ghosts. Maggie promised, and held to that promise until her husband died mysteriously just five years later, at which point she immediately went right back on the ghost circuit. Did Mr. Splitfoot kill the arctic explorer so he could keep having chats with Maggie? I’m not not saying that.
Kate, the youngest, married another spiritualist and went absolutely off the fucking deep end. Ghost tapping? So 1849. Kate started branching off into other brands of spiritualism like automatic writing and actual visual apparitions of ghosts. On one notable occasion she claimed to have summoned the literal ghost of Benjamin Franklin, which she proved when the ghost used her hand to announce himself by writing his name.
(Yes, this means she literally wrote down the words “Ben Franklin” and shouted “the ghost made me do it!” It’s not the boldest use of automatic writing we’ve seen in this newsletter, but it’s up there.)
It is, perhaps, a bit redundant at this point to say that Kate is my favorite of the sisters, but obviously Kate is my favorite.
All this smoke and mirrors and invisible Founding Fathers was exhausting, though, and before too long Kate became an alcoholic on top of a ghost whisperer. And, pissed off at her older sister Leah for essentially recruiting them into child-labor ghost-adventures, she went to the New York World in 1888 and told the reporter that the whole thing was a scam.
This, understandably, dealt a bit of a blow to Leah’s ongoing spiritual performances. After about a year, Kate recanted her testimony, saying that the spirits had compelled her to give false testimony. This half-assed excuse didn’t really hold up, obviously, but the scheme was more or less at its natural end. Kate died a few years later, quickly followed by both her sisters.
I hope all three of these goth con artists are having a great time playing with Mr. Splitfoot in the afterlife. You go, you spooky bitches.
Want More Spiritualism?
The ebook of the historical mystery A Deadly Fortune, by my friend Stacie Murphy, is on sale this week for just $1.99, and besides which it is amazing. It stars amateur detective Amelia Matthew, who must use her suddenly acquired ability to contact the spirit realm to uncover a deadly conspiracy in the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. It’s a hell of a page-turner, and I can’t think of anything else in this economy you can get for less than two bucks, so pick yourself up a digital copy on Kobo, Amazon, or wherever you buy your ebooks.
As for me, I’ve finished the last of my developmental edits for Let the Dead Bury the Dead, which means it’s off to the copy editor shortly! If you see me slowly descending into madness over the next month or so over how to consistently transliterate Cyrillic words and phrases into English, that’ll be why.
Also, I teased this on Twitter, but I have a special two-part dirtbag extravaganza about Lord Darnley, the worst man in history, planned for when this newsletter breaks 500 subscribers, and we’re getting thrillingly close. So if you needed an added incentive to subscribe or share, there we are.
Until next time, keep practicing your toe-cracking, because I know at least half of you are still trying to do it right this very moment,
-Allison