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Hey, it was just as sensational in the 19th century |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 11 August 2004 |
SAL Dunn
Snitch Columnist
The Fox sisters formed a strange friendship in the spring of 1848. Their shy bud, Mr. Splitfoot, began dropping in uninvited for near nightly chats with the teenyboppers.
Since their nocturnal visitor spoke solely via loud raps, and the girls bunked in with their parents, Ma and Pa Fox soon became agitated. Particularly when Mr. Splitfoot announced that his murdered bones were buried in their basement.
As Mrs. Fox recorded in an affidavit, on the night of March 31, 1848, her youngest, Cathie, commanded to the empty air, “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot,†and clapped her hands in rhythm.
“The sound instantly followed her with the same number of raps. When she stopped, the sound ceased for a short time. Then Margaretta said, in sport, ‘Now, do just as I do. Count one, two, three, four,’ striking one hand against the other at the same time, and the raps came as before.â€
After wowing their rural neighbors with this supernatural stunner, and sludging the cellar to salvage a partial human skeleton, the Foxes’ Upstate New York farm became as famous as Lourdes, Guadeloupe or even Graceland. P.T. Barnum, king of the carnival cons, showed up to offer the girls top billing on a cross-country spookfest.
Soon, Mr. Splitfoot was sharing the spotlight with deceased hall-of-famers like Ben Franklin. Equally soon, the famous proved psychically unreachable, apparently having shuffled off the afterlife’s coil just as clue-clutching historians began to pepper the teens with tough questions.
Though wiseguy Americans quickly jeered the ghost-touting Spiritualists, the other-worldly movement gained a hold among our British cousins. For half a stuffed-shirt century, even the most eminent Victorians cherished a solidly respectable belief that they could see dead people.
The industrially-revolutionized British Empire conquered much of the globe, yet even its new science and techno powers couldn’t conquer death. Almost as many Victorian children died as lived. A stiff-upper-lipped culture, though, confined grief to displays of lifeless hair-braided jewelry, chilled marble replicas of little arms and hands, and other macabre mementi morii.
With its promise of an orderly, reachable afterlife, Spiritualism thrived within a decade of its trans-Atlantic transplant. Nearly every Brit alive tried to reach out and touch someone dead. Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, Prime Minister Gladstone, scientists, politicians and noblemen regularly attended seances. Even Queen Victoria placed a late-night punker to the late Prince Albert in his can.
From out of the nowhere into the here, the crush of heaven’s gate-crashers crossed all class lines. Music halls pushed spectralists who could conjure up threatening ghosts five times weekly and twice Saturdays. Smoke, mirrors and a light projector provided the prompt poltergeists.
Savvy social-climbing hostesses knew that an hour in a dimly lit room with a few thrills and chills could make the dullest party zing. And, if normally repressed guests gave in to heightened emotion in the dark, well, what happened in Mayfair stayed in Mayfair.
Besides, the seances themselves provided plenty of flesh-tingling. Any amateur could table-tap or -turn, but fashionable fests featured show-stoppers with phantasmal floating heads and melting hands. Medium Florence Cook could summon her ectoplasmic gal pal, Katie King, to dish the dirt from the other side of the Big Nap. Daniel Douglas Home could float to the ceiling or in and out of windows, propelled by unseen hands.
Spiritualism later flickered as method-minded skeptics began debunking the most outrageous charlatans. Inflatable heads and torsos, wax hands, gauze veils, phosphorus, wires and projecting rods shed light on all the spooky tricks.
Florence Cook’s “spirit guide†was grabbed by a sneaky circle-breaker at a lace-cuff affair. The ghost turned out to be wearing a very substantial whale-bone corset beneath her wispy shroud. D.D. Home was accused of mass hypnotism. Finally, even the aging Fox sisters confessed they’d hoaxed their childhood hauntings for fun and profit. The girls had secretly snapped their horny toes to pop out Mr. Splitfoot’s replies.
The ghost-busting craze faded under the lustier lights of 1920s movies. Today’s spiritualists have been downgraded to daytime television. The ghosts of its former glory now glide in the guises of Miss Cleo, John Edwards, and the Pet Psychic.
http://national.snitch.com/2004/08/09/dunn |
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