On a cold evening in March of 1848, just as the Fox family settled into their beds, the disturbing noises began again. According to Margaret Fox, for the past two weeks each night in their Hydesville, NY, home had been the same. “It sounded like someone knocking in the east bedroom,” she stated in a signed confession. Margaret continued: “The first night we heard the rapping we all got up, lit a candle, and searched all over the house.” Nothing was found. On March 31, the noises were heard by the family again. This time, Margaret’s youngest daughters, Margaretta and Catherine (known commonly as Kate), age 15 and 11 respectively, answered by snapping their fingers. The spirits replied. After their initial shock, the girls demonstrated their finding to their parents. Soon the family invited their neighbors to witness these strange occurrences. Although skeptical at first, their neighbors were surprised, shocked and soon convinced that they were witnessing “spirit rappings.” Margaretta and Kate were communicating with the dead.

According to accounts, one of the first spirits the girls communicated with was a man who had been murdered years earlier, buried in the Fox family’s house. This spirit spoke through raps, confirming information with one rap and denying with two. When Ann Leah Fish, the oldest of the Fox sisters – then married and living in nearby Rochester, NY – heard about these events, she offered to take younger siblings under her care. The “Rochester Rappings,” as these events came to be known, opened the world to the dead and formed the basis for the religion of Spiritualism.

The notion of Spiritualism is rooted in the thought that the spirits of the deceased can return to the world of the living, most readily with the intervention of a medium. Through séances and ghostly apparitions, loved ones could return for a brief time with messages of hope, truth or warning for the living. [Previous examinations of the Fox Sisters and the rise of Spiritualism can be found in the Fall 2005 and Summer 2014 issues of Western New York Heritage, respectively.]

The Rochester Rappings soon drew the attention of three professors from the University of Buffalo: Drs. Austin Flint, Charles Lee and Charles Coventry. When the doctors took notice of the Fox sisters, the women were already quite famous. They had appeared throughout New York State in Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and New York City. Wherever the sisters travelled, the mysterious knocking sounds followed. Newspapers like the New-York Tribune and the Buffalo Daily Courier ran daily accounts of both believers and skeptics. Religious authorities attempted, yet failed to explain the unsettling sounds. Well-respected ladies and gentlemen became ardent supporters of the Fox sisters and Spiritualism. But many doubters also arose. An account from the Rochester Police Department recalled “the tremendous excitement over the matter, when those mysterious noises were first heard.”

Since private investigations into the nature of the Fox Sisters’ rappings did not come to any solid conclusions, several public meetings were held in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall. Neither of the committees, which were established to investigate the rappings at that time, were able to account for the noises heard. At the end of the last public Rochester examination in December 1849, police had to intervene. Visitors in the crowded town hall had armed themselves with fireworks, prepared to attack the sisters.

Indeed, sensational accounts surrounded the Fox siblings. Surely, it was these stories that sparked the curiosity of Drs. Flint, Lee and Coventry in Buffalo. As men of science, the supernatural claims of the Fox sisters promised a tantalizing investigative challenge. They were, after all, members of an emerging group of physicians who eschewed the more traditional apprenticeship model of medicine for a university education. Flint, Lee and Coventry believed the best way to expand their professional knowledge and authority was through direct observation, hypotheses development and experimentation, each hallmarks of the scientific method. With the ascension of the Fox Sisters, séances and spiritualism into the American consciousness, the doctors had found a new phenomenon ripe for a rational and scientific explanation.

Three Men of Science and Medicine

Dr. Austin Flint was perhaps the best-known of the three doctors. Born October 20, 1812 in Petersham, MA, Flint descended from three generations of physicians. His grandfather (of the same name) was an eminent surgeon who served during the Revolutionary War. His father, Joseph Henshaw Flint, was a highly respected doctor in western Massachusetts. Flint spent time at Amherst College before graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1833. In 1836, after working in Boston for several years, he established himself in Buffalo. By 1841, Flint was admitted to the Erie County Medical Society and one year later he was appointed Health Physician of Buffalo. Already highly regarded for his diagnostic skills, it was in this capacity as a public health officer that Flint’s renown as a researcher grew.

During the fall of 1843, a fever epidemic spread throughout the small town of North Boston, NY. Of the town’s 48 residents, 28 suffered from the illness. Ten of these individuals eventually died. After a thorough investigation, Flint identified the illness as Typhoid Fever and isolated the source to a contaminated well whose water had been tainted after its use by an out-of-state visitor. His subsequent publication in the American Journal of Medical Sciences officially announced the nature of Typhoid Fever as being a water-borne illness and is now acknowledged as a seminal work on the topic.

Perhaps Flint’s biggest accomplishment, however, was his role in the establishment of Buffalo’s first university, the University of Buffalo in 1846. Founded as a medical school, Flint was instrumental in the creation of what is now one of the largest universities in New York State. With fellow physicians, James Platt White and Frank Hastings Hamilton, Flint secured the support of four key professors from Geneva Medical College (a well-regarded, early medical school in Geneva, NY) and together these men opened their new institution in the former First Baptist Church on the corner of Washington and Seneca Streets in downtown Buffalo. Drs. Charles A. Lee and Charles B. Coventry were two of the professors from Geneva, becoming Buffalo’s first professors of Pathology and Materia Medica and of Physiology and Medical Jurisprudence, respectively.

Born in Salisbury, CT in 1801, Dr. Charles Alfred Lee was initially interested in joining the Congregationalist ministry. He enrolled in Williams College before going on to Berkshire Medical College in Pittsfield, MA where he graduated in 1825. He was a prolific writer and well respected for his pieces on medical statistics, epidemiology and pathology. While at Geneva Medical College, as the Dean of the Faculty, he was a key voice in the acceptance of Elizabeth Blackwell, who, in 1849, was the first American woman to graduate with a medical degree.

Dr. Charles Broadhead Coventry was born in April 1801, in a small town just outside of Utica, NY. Like Flint, Coventry was also born into a family of physicians. Although often ill as a youth, he was a devoted student. In 1822, when his health improved during early adulthood, Coventry entered an apprenticeship within his father’s medical practice. He also enrolled in lectures at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Western New York, or Fairfield Medical College, as it was commonly called. He graduated in 1825 and soon after became a member of the Medical Society of Oneida County. He was a noted proponent for the humane treatment of the insane, and in 1843 helped to establish the New York State Lunatic Asylum in Utica, NY, a model institution for the treatment of the mentally ill.

As men that moved in academic and professional circles far above the average citizen, a sense of benevolent paternalism came naturally to the doctors. When a social situation arose that a less informed individual might misunderstand, these men felt a duty to educate and enlighten. Whether it concerned a mysterious illness, the education of a woman in a medical college or the treatment of the mentally ill, the doctors saw reason as the key to understanding. When dealing with spiritual matters however, the doctors would soon find that even reason had its limits.

The Buffalo Examination

In 1851, the Fox sisters arrived in Buffalo, offering séances at the well-known Phelps House hotel and boarding house (where, incidentally, Dr. Coventry also happened to reside). After an anonymous visit to one of these gatherings, Flint, Lee and Coventry published a letter in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser on February 17, 1851. Being led there by curiosity and driven “to prevent further waste of time, money, and credulity,” they claimed that the noises could be attributed to Margaretta, the younger sister. The doctors explained in their letter that they reached this conclusion by the scientific method of exclusion. First, they assumed “that the manifestations are not to be regarded as spiritual.” Second, they presumed that the rappings are not produced by instruments or other similar artifacts, since the sisters have repeatedly been examined by “lady committees.” A mechanical device in the room was likewise excluded, since the sounds seemed to come from many different locations. What the doctors did suspect however, was “that the sounds were due to the agency of the younger sister, and that they involved an effort of the will.” Even though they had not yet physically examined her, the doctors were absolutely convinced that it was Margaretta who produced the noises “through…voluntary muscles, upon the joints.” They backed their thesis by mentioning “[a] highly respectable lady, of [Buffalo],” examined at an earlier date, who could produce strikingly similar sounds with her knee joint.

This letter to the Commercial Advertiser was an aggressive move by the doctors. During the 19th century, many people did not believe in the infallibility of medicine. This was an era when many competing medical theories existed. For example, the doctrines of homeopathy and botanical medicine were nearly as popular with the general public as the doctor’s own traditional, allopathic medicine. Also, in publishing their letter, the doctors risked insulting followers of Spiritualism (and possibly potential students and patients), who were thankful for the Fox sisters and their seemingly remarkable abilities. Given these circumstances, the doctors must have been quite secure in their theory. Indeed, they most likely saw it as an opportunity to enhance their medical authority.

Furthermore, aiming to debunk the spiritualist claims of women of such notoriety would certainly bring with it a certain amount of exposure and publicity for the University of Buffalo Medical College, only five years old at the time. Early institutional records show the university was regarded as a business as well as an educational institution. By directly challenging one of the great cultural developments of the 19th century, the doctors looked to engage more directly with day-to-day life and to throw their profession, their reputation and their institution into the ring with hopes for a swift and orderly cultural victory.

The Fox sisters were quick to react to the doctors’ charges. On the next day they sent a card to the Commercial Advertiser claiming they were interested in “discover[ing] the origin of these mysterious manifestations” themselves. Ann Leah Fish and Margaretta Fox challenged the doctors to visit them and to investigate the source of the rappings. Flint, Coventry and Lee accepted the offer and met the sisters at the Phelps House, where the Foxes were accompanied by three male and three female friends.

The full account of the examination from the doctors’ perspective can be read in the Buffalo Medical Journal of March 1851. The examination itself was a delicate matter, since the two sisters had to be touched and partly restrained. Once they were seated on a sofa, the knockings suddenly began. To assure that the sisters could not claim otherwise afterwards, the doctors asked the talkative spirits if they would indeed answer during the investigation. The answer was affirmative. The proposed examination had three segments. During the first, the two women were seated upon two chairs and their heels were placed on cushions and on the sofa. This prevented them from putting pressure on their feet. Just as the doctors had expected, no rappings were heard when the sisters were in this position. Ann Leah was allowed to sit in a neutral position toward the end of this experiment, and as no sounds emerged, the doctors focused ever closer on the younger sister. After Margaretta resumed “the usual position on the sofa, knockings very soon began to be heard.”

The doctors moved on to the second phase of the investigation, which included firmly grasping the knees of both mediums for several minutes. Only when the knees were not held were the rappings heard. Dr. Lee even reported feeling these raps when he slightly relaxed the pressure upon Margaretta’s knee. The third phase, which was to include bandaging the sisters’ knees, was never performed. The doctors were unable to procure the necessary appliances to render the leg immovable and so they abandoned this phase of the experiment. They were not interested in affording the mediums a chance of triumph. A report published soon afterward in an 1851 volume of the Buffalo Medical Journal concludes that while the doctors were not convinced the knee was exclusively the source of the sound before the experiments, afterwards they were certain of it. “[T]he Rochester knockings emanate from the knee joint.”

Clearly, the sisters told a different account of the examination. Ann Leah, in her book The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, published decades later in 1885, compared Flint and his fellow doctors to early disbelievers of Galileo’s theory of heliocentrism. She criticized the doctors as speaking from “Olympic height of professional Authority.” She also spoke of the doctors’ assumptions of the sisters’ guilt as enormously hostile. She satirically questioned how she and her sisters could have been wearing out their knee-bones for nearly three years and still manage to walk. Furthermore, the sisters emphasized the doctors’ charges were an insult to their dignity as women. This was a clever move. The Fox’s entered the historical scene during a time when females were beginning to break out of their traditional roles. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention was held, the first women’s rights convention in American history. The sisters painted the doctors’ attempt to debunk them as simply another attempt of male-dominated society to put enterprising women back in their social place.

Ann Leah further maintained that the poor spiritual showing during the examination was because the spirits were not willing to manifest themselves fully in such an unfamiliar and hostile situation. She also charged that Lee, Flint and Coventry had willfully disregarded the rules drafted by the Fox sisters when they consented to the examination. Again, her aim was to call into question the doctors’ credibility. In truth, the doctors had ignored some of these rules. To the doctors, petty rules were simply roadblocks, drafted to obscure the Fox sisters’ tricks. Scientific findings demanded the doctors follow their own protocols.

The examination sparked a new series of public discussions. On February 25, 1851, the New-York Tribune published a letter written by Dr. Lee. He explained the examination findings in greater detail, attributing them to the partial lateral dislocation of the knee joint. By spending more time with the sisters after the experiments, Dr. Lee witnessed rapping sounds seemingly emanating from tables and doors. Only if Margaretta Fox was in close proximity, though. He attempted to educate readers on the various ways sound waves could be transmitted through solid objects.

The next day, letters-to-the-editor poured in to the New-York Tribune, many critical of the doctors’ findings and methods. Supporters of Spiritualism pointed out that other spirit manifestations, many more remarkable than rapping, could be witnessed during séances. Floating tables, musical instruments played without being touched and messages from disembodied voices and spirit slates offered proof of the spirit realm. These believers would not accept anything else.

And so the doctors made another discovery: more rational, mundane explanations were not seductive, not as powerful as an encounter with the intoxicating influences of the unknown. In one of his replies to his detractors, Dr. Lee stated “two or more of these [letters] are from lecturers, whose pecuniary interest is to keep up the delusion and prevent any satisfactory explanation from being believed by the public.” He continued, and mentioned that all other spiritual phenomena would be rationally explained in the future, but he himself had “other business to attend to.” And so both sides moved on.

Aftermath

The Fox sisters left Buffalo on February 25, 1851, for less tumultuous pastures in Cleveland. Ann Leah later referred to this phase of their career as their highly successful “Ohio Campaign.” By 1854, the ideals of the Fox sisters and other like-minded individuals had permeated American culture to such a degree that Spiritualism was estimated to have attracted 1-2 million followers. The doctors likewise returned to their day-to-day duties as professors and clinicians. Yet the events of that examination were never fully left behind by either side. In 1854, while in Paris, Austin Flint discussed with his French colleagues at the Academy of Sciences his earlier findings regarding the anatomical nature of spirit knockings. Spiritualism had been gaining a foothold in Europe around this time. In fact, a German doctor named M. Schiff began receiving credit within European medical circles for discovering the true source of sprit rappings. Flint found this development particularly irksome as during his visit he pressed the French Academy to acknowledge that his similar conclusions predated Schiff’s. Even after gaining the support of the French Academy, such misinformation continued to circulate around Europe. In 1859, the editorial department of the Buffalo Medical Journal published a small piece on the continued European confusion regarding M. Schiff’s experiments and stressed that priority should indeed be given to the findings of Buffalo’s own Drs. Flint, Lee and Coventry.

Dr. Lee found himself in the midst of a mild controversy when, while speaking to a group of students from Sterling Medical College in Ohio in 1854, he compared the followers of homeopathy to those of Spiritualism. “[P]eople do not become converts to any particular system of Medicine or doctrine of Theology, from the amount of proof…in their support, but rather from the peculiar constitution and tendency of their mental organization….a believer in Homoeopathy will be, most likely, a believer in Spirit Rappings and Mesmerism.” Lee’s comparison, reproduced in the February 1854 issue of the American Journal of Homoeopathy, was not received kindly by homoeopaths. Homoeopathy followed Lee’s statement with one of its own, which included a scathing critique of Lee’s “exceedingly moderate reasoning faculties.”

Apparently undaunted by such hullabaloo, Dr. Lee wrote a letter to the editor of the New-York Tribune that appeared in the July 22, 1859 edition. He reminded readers of his earlier writings on the subject, before reminiscing on the matter. After the experiments with Flint and Coventry, while teaching in Maine, he was asked to lecture on the subject of spirit rappings. With some searching, he found a local man who could produce similar noises when flexing his ankle joint. The man consented to help and during the presentation, Lee’s assistant gave “a more striking illustration of ‘spiritual knockings’ than the Foxes ever dreamed of,” Lee said. “What was very ludicrous, however, was that several in the audience, who now for the first time had witnessed anything in the ‘spiritual knocking’ line, and had remained skeptical, became zealous converts to the doctrine of Spiritualism…” In fact, Lee had actually considered traveling with his new assistant to “blow Spiritualism and ‘spirit rappers’ sky-high by our demonstrations,” but changed his mind after seeing the audience reaction in Maine. Somewhat bemused, he closed his letter to the Tribune with thoughts of the Fox family: “If they were to publicly acknowledge their imposture…it would not diminish the number of their followers,” Lee wrote.

Decades later in 1888, the Fox sisters did just that. The years leading up to their confession had not been particularly kind to the Foxes. Although Spiritualism and mediumship enjoyed enormous success, the Fox sisters suffered from in-fighting, poverty and alcohol abuse. Ann Leah grew vocally critical of her sisters. She critiqued Kate’s purported drinking and questioned her ability to raise her children. When a bitter feud erupted between the sisters, Margaretta and Kate stood on one side, Ann Leah on the other. Decades of pent-up resentment and anger surfaced suddenly when the younger Fox sisters’ desire to injure Ann Leah culminated in a grand exposé held in New York City on October 21, 1888. On that day, an exclusive article ran in the New York World. “I do this, because I consider it my duty…” Margaretta began, “After I expose it I hope Spiritualism will be given a death blow. I was the first in the field and I have the right to expose it.…My sister Kate and I were very young children when this horrible deception began.…We were very mischievous children and sought merely to terrify our dear mother…” Later that evening, Margaretta, with Kate in attendance, appeared at New York’s Academy of Music and took the opportunity to formally renounce Spiritualism. Although reportedly “delivered…in a fragmentary and mirth-provoking style,” in which she scanned each sentence on her pre-written confession before “turning to the audience and slowly repeating it,” the truth was revealed: it was Margaretta’s big toe that had been rapping all those years. She then “sat on a chair, with her feet on a sounding-board, so that the raps might be distinctly heard.”

In her confessional autobiography, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, published at the end of 1888, Margaretta repeated the public declaration she made earlier in New York: Spiritualism was rooted in a joke shared between herself and Kate. It had all been a magic trick, so convincing to contemporaries that the sisters, led by oldest sister Ann Leah, understood it as a way to make a small fortune. On this topic, Margaretta mentions that even though they made up to $150 a night (approximately $4,200 in 2016 dollars), “she [Ann Leah] pocketed this.”

After choosing such a path, Margaretta continued, it was impossible to get out of the business. At the beginning they feared their parents’ punishment, and years later they feared disappointing their numerous believers. Furthermore, throughout the years many committees tried to debunk the mediums and with each successful dodging of the truth the sisters were spurred further on down their path of deception. In her book, Margaretta mentions though that Professors Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee and Charles B. Coventry of Buffalo, struck very close to the truth:

“The theory that they advanced was that the mysterious noises were produced by some one of the articulations of the body. Their assumption was that it was the great joint of the knee which produced them…had they investigated other joints of the lower limbs, besides that of the knee, they must have inevitably arrived at the correct conclusion.”

The Buffalo doctors moved on from the realm of spirits, never able to convince Spiritualism’s most ardent believers of any duplicity. All three of the Buffalo doctors died before Margaretta’s confession. Both Kate and Margaretta eventually died of complications related to alcohol abuse, penniless and shunned. Ann Leah lost her younger two sisters due to stubbornness and greed. Still, the Fox sisters’ story demonstrates people’s enduring desire to connect with the deceased, the allure of the mystical and the unknown and the temptation of money, as well as the place of science, medicine and religion in 19th century Western New York. All these issues are still present, still rapping at our modern consciousness.

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