By Daniel Stashower,
the author of "Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle"
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; C09

THE RELUCTANT SPIRITUALIST

The Life of Maggie Fox

By Nancy Rubin Stuart

Harcourt. 393 pp. $25

"American spiritualism--a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers--was born out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death," writes Nancy Rubin Stuart at the beginning of "The Reluctant Spiritualist," her fascinating biography of Maggie Fox and the dawn of the movement. "But to literalists, spiritualism's true spark came in 1848 from something no more or less powerful than a bored teenage girl."

To be fair, the literalists have a point. Maggie Fox was not quite 15 years old in the winter of 1847, when she and her family moved from Rochester, the "first inland boom town"of Upstate New York, to the relative backwater of Hydesville. Lonely and discontented, Maggie began to prey on the vulnerabilities of her gullible and well-meaning mother, for whom the existence of ghosts was a matter of utmost gravity. Together with her 11-year-old sister, Katy, Maggie contrived to fill their saltbox farmhouse with strange and seemingly inexplicable rapping noises, intended to suggest the presence of restless spirits. At first, the girls tied strings to apples and bounced them along the floor, mimicking the sounds of ghostly footsteps. Next, they taught themselves to snap their toes as if snapping their fingers, which could be done surreptitiously--while their feet were tucked away under a table or behind a chair. In this way, the Fox sisters were able to produce eerie noises, and also to cause furniture to vibrate and move.

On March 31, 1848, the girls took their prank to the next level. "Mr. Split-foot, do as I do," called Katy, snapping her fingers several times. An equal number of raps came back. Maggie, following suit, clapped her hands four times and commanded the spirits to answer. Four raps were heard. Mrs. Fox was convinced: Her daughters were communicating with the spirit realm.

Even now, as Stuart explains, Maggie and Katy were prepared to confess to their ruse--they deliberately chose the eve of April Fool's Day for their demonstration--but Mrs. Fox's guileless and wholehearted acceptance of the phenomenon made it difficult for the girls to back down. As they later admitted, their mother, "in her earnest belief, poor soul, excited us to do a great deal more than otherwise, we would have done."

What started as a game now began to spiral out of control. Neighbors were summoned, then clergymen. In each case, Maggie and Katy provided ever more convincing manifestations of their peculiar talent. "Confessing now would have incurred their parents' wrath," Stuart writes, "perhaps even the wrath of their preacher." If nothing else, Maggie was no longer bored.

Any thought of dropping the charade was abandoned when Leah, their formidable older sister, entered the picture. Scenting opportunity, Leah molded her sisters into a commodity. "[Katy] and I were led around like lambs," Maggie later recalled. Soon the Fox sisters were giving public demonstrations, braving open hostility (at one appearance, a barrel of warmed tar was found) but also finding powerful support. The girls became sought-after celebrities, their influence spreading to New York City, Philadelphia and beyond. They also won the favor of such exalted figures as Horace Greeley, who used the pages of his New York Tribune to praise their "perfect integrity and good faith."

Today, at a remove of more than 150 years, it is easy to shake one's head and wonder how so many people could have been gulled by the snapping of toes. The great strength of Stuart's book is that she provides the necessary historical context, and shows the deception gathering force by slow degrees against a climate of willing belief. "Admittedly, the girls were growing up in an age of trickery," Stuart writes. "Professors of chemistry invited members of their audience to inhale nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Still other experts on the new 'science' of phrenology--a reading of personality from bumps on the head first described by eighteenth-century European Dr. Joseph Francis Gall--made a living by fingering the skulls of their audiences. . . . Shadow-boxers, mesmerists, and hucksters sold powders and elixirs purported to cure everything from acne to cancer."

At the same time, Stuart convincingly places the Fox sisters at a nexus of social and political change, most notably the suffrage and abolitionist movements, whose proponents were powerfully drawn to the notion of otherwise meek and helpless girls in command of potent forces. If those forces were a sham, they represented something that was not--a yearning to believe in the possibility of contact with dead souls. This yearning, as Stuart demonstrates, was not easily derailed. Even Maggie's public denunciation of spiritualism in later life failed to lay the matter to rest. Within a year, she had yielded to her fate and returned to the seance table.

Stuart's book is presented as "the first authoritative biography" of Maggie Fox, who is easily the most intriguing figure in the drama, and it draws a great deal of additional interest from Maggie's unorthodox marriage to the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane. Possibly this approach was chosen to distinguish this book from last year's "Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism," by Barbara Weisberg, which covers much of the same ground. Be that as it may, Stuart's book is a welcome addition and offers a great deal of fresh insight into the bored young girl with the toes heard round the world.