The Sisters Who Spoke to Spirits

After an encounter in their bedroom, two women found fame helping nineteenth-century mourners speak to their dead. The religion they inspired lives on to this day.

Illustrations by Aimee Bee Brooks

“Rap, rap, rap! Rap, rap, rap! Rap, rap, rap! Lov’d ones are rapping to-night. Heaven seems not far away; Death’s sweeping river is bright, Soft is the sheen of its spray.”

—Emma Rood Tuttle, “Spirit Rappings,” c.1880

“THERE IS NO DEATH. THERE ARE NO DEAD.”

— Engraving on a stone Spiritualists erected in 1927 on the site of the Fox family home

The vibrant, pretty Fox sisters played in this western New York forest until their mother called them in for dinner. In their simple dresses, coats, and long dark braids, they ran through weeds and stomped in ice puddles. Clever Maggie, fourteen, and ethereal Kate, eleven, lived in a land of magic, sprites, and the devil, known in these parts as Mr. Splitfoot. Whether romping among the trees or going about their chores, they kept each other entertained with stories and songs. And when they lay down to sleep at night, it was side by side.

“Hydesville is a typical little hamlet of New York State,” Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would later write of the Foxes’ hometown in his 1926 book The History of Spiritualism, “with a primitive population…[It] consists of a cluster of wooden houses of a very humble type. It was in one of these…that there began this development which is already, in the opinion of many, by far the most important thing that America has given to the commonweal of the world.”

Doyle was talking about none other than those two little girls in the woods.