Heaven-sent to Hydesville

Talking to the Dead

Kate and Maggie Fox and

the Rise of Spiritualism

Barbara Weisberg

HarperSanFrancisco:

324 pp., $24.95

*

In the mid-19th century, America was an adolescent country, struggling awkwardly westward toward its full growth, arrogant in the way of untested youth and as yet unravaged by the Civil War. It’s not too surprising that a potent social and religious movement of that defining century was begun by adolescents. Americans have always believed inordinately in the special wisdom of youth.

The teenagers in question were sisters Kate and Maggie Fox; the movement they helped launch was Spiritualism, a quasi-religion based on the beliefs that life persists after death and that the living can communicate with people in the “afterlife.” “Talking to the Dead,” by former TV producer and documentary filmmaker Barbara Weisberg, tells how the Fox sisters, beginning at ages 11 and 14, respectively, transfixed a nation with tales (and demonstrations) of contact with spirits from beyond the grave. The “seance,” complete with mysterious raps, apparitions, table lifting and messages from restless spirits, was essentially born with these two New York farm girls.

The America of 1848 was a rich breeding ground for belief in miracles and mysteries as new ideas about religion and the nature of reality intrigued Americans. Mesmerism, an “electromagnetic” treatment that preceded hypnosis, was a popular drawing-room entertainment as practitioners induced trances in willing subjects; at evangelical revival meetings, believers spoke in tongues and fell to the ground in ecstatic reveries. An obsession with death and mourning also was taking hold. Consolation could be found in evocations of dead children or spouses, of Founding Fathers such as Ben Franklin, who would come right into one’s parlor, so believed the thousands who either witnessed the sisters’ performances or were inspired by news of them.

The book’s strength lies in the wealth of detail about the girls and the unpredictable arc of their lives, including alcoholism, bereavement, destitution and a celebrity almost unknown for women at the time. Less than two years after astonishing their neighbors with loud raps in their Hydesville farmhouse -- raps that began to spell out answers to questions -- the Fox sisters were marketing their talents to an audience of hundreds at a public hall in Rochester.

As their fame grew -- they traveled to New York City and held court at Barnum’s Hotel, were heralded by newspapers and hosted by such luminaries as editor Horace Greeley and novelist James Fenimore Cooper -- critics kept up a drumbeat of skepticism. The girls submitted to almost humiliating tests of their talents, including being physically restrained and even “disrobed with the exception of their nether garments.” No one could agree that they had been proved false.

Weisberg provides admirable social context for the girls’ misadventures as mediums, noting that they pushed the boundaries of middle-class morality by daring to have a calling other than motherhood and marriage. She also conveys a vivid sense of their personalities: the sparkling, challenging, mischievous Maggie and the more spiritual, otherworldly and vulnerable Kate.

But her dogged, chronological account begins to feel episodic and shapeless -- as if she’s at the mercy of her material rather than master of it, especially in her waffling on the question of whether the Fox sisters were frauds.

She tells us in the introduction that Maggie publicly confessed to exactly that in middle age (and then recanted on her confession), but she hints repeatedly throughout the book that the sisters may indeed have successfully communicated with spirits. “They were ... endowed with unusual openness and sensitivity, whether to the messages of the spirits or to the spoken and unspoken wishes of other mortals,” Weisberg writes early on. Amid wild tales of seances replete with sounds of a ghostly carriage being driven around the room, spirit orchestras playing in closets, windows and doors banging open and closed, phosphorescent spirit figures flying through the air and tables floating toward the ceiling, such parsing becomes repetitive, even frustrating.

In the end, Weisberg doesn’t explain how such “phenomena” convinced so many people, what kind of group-hysteria theories or even magician-like sleight of hand might account for their success. Though the girls’ story is fascinating, it feels, finally, unsatisfying to read that Weisberg herself can “still imagine different scenarios to explain the strange sounds that were heard one night in the little-known hamlet of Hydesville in Arcadia, that disrupted the sleep of two young girls’ parents and changed how we think about immortality.”