Rapping, Gently Tapping--Who You Gonna Call ?!

 

 

The Fox Sisters

 In 1850, near Rochester, NY  13 year old and 15 year old sisters, Leah and Margaretta Fox started playing a joke on their mother, cracking their toes and dropping apples on the attic floor, convincing their mother and their neighbors ghosts were communicating with the girls.  Thus, started the modern era of the paranormal as the “rapping” craze swept the nation.

    It did not take long before the girls were making money giving seances.  Their eldest sister took charge of them, and they never did tell their gullible parents the truth. 

Though unmasked as "humbugs" early and repeatedly, the Fox sisters continued to hold seances.  They soon had competition. Dozens of imitators started giving seances, communicating with spirits "rapping" their answers back from the beyond. Young women in particular were “using society’s natural modesty” to conceal cracking their toes, or other gimmicks beneath long dresses and petticoats. 

Even when one of the Fox sisters finally told the truth in the mid-1880s, millions did not believe her. 

    On April 23, 1853, a Maryland newspaper, The Cecil Whig, published a scorching jeremiad against spiritualist, some of which is reproduced below:

…our age has produced a class of supernaturalists, respectable in number, who recklessly advocate and urge their reckless theories concerning some alleged mystic principle, which—according to their irrational hypothesis –has been wont to manifest in a very singular and surprising manner, a marvelous power in the production of certain anamolous (sic) turnings and rapping of stands, tables, etc.

… The idea of a table being set in motion by a spirit is so totally absurd and inconsistent with human reason, that it defeats itself at once.

Though the explanation advanced by the electrician is more plausible than the former, it is obviously altogether hypothetical and contradictory to facts. But, that the various motions of the stand is owing to purely to the instrumentality of a physical force exerted by the infatuated enthusiast (yet he being absorbed in the heat of imagination is rendered unconscious of it,) no sound and mature mind can hesitate to admit.

… Having treated mainly of the causes, we will in the next place turn our attentions to the effects of the humbug.

For an illustration of the magnitude and enormity of the evil which has been occasioned by this destructive species of humbuggery—we need only refer to the statistical accounts of the various lunatic asylums in the Union and consider the prodigious number of lunatics, who owe their insanity to the influence of this destructive allusion (sic).

Before 1861 most Americans died at home or nearby with relatives cleaning and caring for the body and burial giving more reality and closure to survivors. In the Civil War many young men died far from home, often their bodies never found or buried too far away to be visited. The solace of communicating with the dead cast aside logic and proof. Demand for seances increased.

The deceits became more elaborate with well known “spiritualists” employing advance teams to enter a town to pick up odd and intimate bits of information on townspeople for the medium to employ to prove authenticity. One medium openly demonstrated on stage to an audience that she could crack her toes loud enough to be heard at the back of the theater, then denounced the various fakes—and proceeded to demonstrate her “mind reading” and communication with the spirits by using the information her advance team had gathered.

Another variation on the scheme was for the young woman “medium” to have a confederate at the table, supposedly a stranger, do the toe cracking and other rapping.

Even more blatant, a furniture maker advertised to “rappers” their line of special tables and chairs designed to create “rapping” noises.  A concealed string and/or button could move a wooden stick concealed in the table leg or surface. 

The Cecil Whig (MD) April 23, 1853

SPIRIT RAPPING MACHINES-The N.Y. Journal of Commerce says, a manufacturing house in the city is engaged in making “medium tables,” for people who live by their wits. The table is like an ordinary one, with a top formed of thick board; but concealed within a cavity, in the latter is a small apparatus with a kind of hammer for producing the” raps.” The hammer is so constructed with a wire running down through the table leg, that the latter has only to be in contact with a nail head, or something of the kind in the floor to enable the operator to produce the raps, by means of galvanism.

Theories of “magnetic fluids and electricity” were propounded by some serious investigators of the phenomenon as well as hacks and quacks employed by the spiritualist’s team. Some claimed the dead person’s soul lingered in an interim “bardo” before being transported to Heaven or Hell and beyond being able to communicate.

Preachers denounced seances as blasphemous and/or fraudulent, while other religious leaders claimed the communications with the dead proved the existence of God and the existence of Heaven and Hell. 

On the other hand…

The “Rochester Knockings.”  We learn by the Jonesville (Mich.) Telegraph, that the “rapping spirits” have made their appearance in Hillsdale County, and are creating quite a disturbance among the usually peaceful inhabitants of the town. The scene of operations is the residence of Deacon Stevens, and the Deacon and family have left the Congregational Church because the spirits have declared it unorthodox.

New York Herald December 26, 1850

Séance early 1850s 

    Debunkers such as Professor Anderson and others made almost as much money as many of the “Rappers” by giving lectures and demonstrations of the “Rapping Humbuggery.”

New York Herald April 14, 1853

Professor Anderson is at present in Baltimore giving his grand entertainment at the Holliday Street Theater to the largest audiences ever assembled within its walls. He will appear at the National Theater in Washington, DC and the 18^th April inst. Which will finish his Southern tour—he having performed before three hundred and sixteen thousand American citizens in the South , during a period of six months. He will soon have the honor of making his third appearance in New York, and give a series of entertainments, which will include a number of new and startling wonders in natural magic. Professor Anderson flatters himself that he is too well known to the citizens of the Empire City to require the puffery of any of the conceited and blundering conjurors who have lately sprung up in America. Since he had the honor of appearing his extraordinary success has called into existence a host of itinerants, who have neither name nor fame in this or any other country, and whose abortive and unartistic performances are as great a humbug as Spirit Rappings. Professor Anderson will, for the first time, give his expose, and lectures, viz.: astrology, clairvoyance, second sight, &c, &c. This extraordinary juggle and most pernicious delusion has caused seventeen persons to commit suicide, and sent 573 to the lunatic asylums through the Union. Anderson’s History of the Spirit Rappers—from their origin in Rochester up to the present time, with an explanation of the whole machinery, and system adopted by the Spirit Rapping confederacy. 

The Fox sisters circa 1857