Episode Transcript
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0:05
Let's take a walk. On
0:07
my fourth day at the Cassadeca Spiritualist
0:09
Camp, I take a walk around Colby
0:12
Alderman Park, sprawling affair
0:14
that's now a nationally recognized
0:16
historic district and added in the waterproof
0:18
historical markers to match. Today
0:21
we're gonna be talking about the decline
0:23
of the Fox Sisters and one
0:25
of my most significant readings at
0:27
Cassadeca. But first, let's
0:29
take a stroll through Cassadeca, beginning
0:31
at the intersection of and
0:34
I'm not getting Mediumship Way
0:36
and Psychic Road. I know,
0:38
and I took a lot of audio as I was just
0:41
wandering around this neighborhood for consecutive
0:43
weeks, so to give you an idea of
0:45
the vibe. There's no
0:48
side box here. Feels very npr
0:50
of me to do. It feels very this American life.
0:52
I feel like a fucking dork. When
0:55
you get to Cassadega, you pass these
0:57
white cement pillars on Cassadeca
0:59
Road, and to your left is the Cassadega
1:02
Hotel where I'm going to be staying. It's
1:04
this big, haunted looking building that got
1:06
rebuilt in the twenties after burning
1:09
down, but has been out of the hands of
1:11
the Cassadega camp Proper for many
1:13
decades now, which, as we've discussed before,
1:15
has led to a lot of confusion
1:17
and drama in the community because
1:20
there are readings done at the hotel,
1:22
but not ones that are sanctioned by the
1:24
Spiritualist Proper. In many
1:26
ways, having this hotel bought out from
1:28
under them due to their own kind of chronic
1:30
brokenness is one of the hardest hits
1:32
Cassadega has ever taken. The hotel
1:35
is really important. It shares a name
1:37
with the community and has the only
1:39
amenities and restaurant, which
1:41
you need to know is called Sinatra's
1:43
Restaurante, where karaoke
1:46
nights get a little too loud for
1:48
the proper mediums across the street's
1:50
taste. On the days the restaurant
1:53
isn't open, you can either survive
1:55
on chocolate bars from the bookstore
1:57
or walk to the nearest gas station half
2:00
hour away. I opt for
2:02
both of these at multiple points in my trip,
2:05
and as we've heard several times, the mediums
2:07
who were trained at Cassadega don't
2:09
have the highest opinion of
2:11
the mediums and tarot readers who
2:13
work out of the hotel. Across
2:16
the street is a more sanctioned
2:18
area, the Andrew Jackson Davis
2:20
Building, this white, one floor wooden
2:23
structure that serves as both DeCamps,
2:25
bookstore, administrative office,
2:28
and activity center where I've
2:30
already been to message services and a
2:32
table tipping class, and sat in on
2:34
a class called Healing one oh one with
2:36
Reverend Dr Phil. I was not allowed
2:39
to record this class, but they were very welcoming
2:41
and we learned all about our chakras and Eastern
2:43
concept not originally associated
2:45
with spiritualism. We love it. And I spoke
2:47
to a particularly gossipy student who
2:49
told me that she knew that spiritual
2:52
healing wasn't a substitute for medicine,
2:54
but the healers at Cassadega had
2:56
done more than her physical therapist of
2:58
her had. Let's
3:00
keep moving, as I learned from the bookstore
3:03
manager selling a green. The bookstore
3:05
is a moneymaker for the camp. It's one of the
3:07
few places where the mediums can capitalize
3:09
on the average tourist's interests, selling
3:12
rarer spiritualist texts for the
3:14
true student, but also overpriced
3:17
crystals T shirts declaring
3:19
Cassadega where Maybury meets
3:21
the Twilight Zone. Two references
3:23
that make it no wonder. They're struggling to recruit
3:26
younger members. They sell candles
3:28
and magnets and those chocolate bars I was telling
3:30
you about. This is where the spiritualists
3:32
make good on people seeking mediumship
3:35
as comfort and self help. The
3:37
walls are lined with tarot cards
3:39
that their religion doesn't technically
3:41
endors. There are self help guides,
3:44
relationship manuals, guides
3:46
to the phases of the moon, one local
3:48
book about a boy who died of rabies.
3:51
I don't know did not look into this. Further
3:54
on the other side of the pillars are non
3:56
camp sanctioned crystal shops, stores
3:59
that have prices is jacked up into Los
4:01
Angeles territory. These unsanctioned
4:03
shops are even more low ceilinged
4:06
affairs with ten dollar clear
4:08
courts, crystals and tarot reading
4:10
rooms with walls so thin that
4:12
you can hear the college girl crying
4:14
about why her boyfriend won't take her back
4:17
while paying seventy five bucks for
4:19
a twenty minute reading. Walk down
4:21
a little further and you'll hit Sea Green's
4:23
Ghost Museum ten dollars for admission,
4:25
a business originally called the Cassadega
4:28
History museum, but was then rebranded
4:30
into a Haunted House due to lack of
4:32
interest in history. And
4:35
my favorite, the tiny post
4:37
office in Cassadega, one that
4:39
at every point seems to be
4:41
barely holding onto its justification
4:44
for existing. I walked back into
4:46
the camp. Down Stephens Street. You
4:48
pass a few double decker houses and apartments.
4:51
A big one is called Harmony Hall. It's
4:53
a ten apartment ramshackle structure
4:56
with a big sign out front. Some of
4:58
the mediums live here, others just actice
5:00
hear. What I do know, because I know you're wondering,
5:03
is that people fuck in Harmony
5:05
Hall, or at least they have fucked, because
5:07
I received roundabout word of at
5:09
least two babies that have been conceived
5:12
within its walls. I
5:14
walk all the way up to the biggest park
5:16
on this side of the camp called Seneca
5:18
Park, named for who founder George
5:21
Colby claimed was his indigenous
5:23
spirit guide who led him to the stolen
5:25
indigenous land he bought and converted
5:27
into Cassadega, a likely
5:30
story that will be unpacking next week.
5:33
I try to meditate and be present,
5:36
but it's hard because all I can hear is the
5:38
sound of roosters in the distance.
5:40
There are so many roosters
5:42
at this camp. I've run
5:45
out of things to explore, and I realized
5:47
that I'm kind of killing time. I'm
5:49
nervous because I'm about to get a reading
5:51
with the Reverend. Dr. Lewis,
5:54
a medium raised by mediums,
5:56
who doesn't just encourage you to record
5:58
your reading. He records for you,
6:00
handing me a high quality c D ram
6:03
upon payment. Do you know what
6:05
I had to go through so that you
6:07
could hear this audio? Have
6:10
you hand the met before? Kay?
6:13
Uh? Send me your stats where you just stop
6:15
me? Want you get
6:17
take it for you? For you?
6:21
It's time We've got to talk to Reverend Dr
6:23
Lewis. I'm going in so this week, not
6:25
only am I going to give you a look and
6:27
to listen to what a one on one spiritualist
6:30
reading is like, We're also going
6:32
to close out the story of Spiritualism's
6:34
founders, the Fox Sisters, at the
6:36
inflection point where the ideas
6:38
they popularized belonged to the
6:40
world and no longer to themselves.
6:43
How are you feeling? I feel like we should get a theme
6:45
song going. I okay,
6:47
it's starting awesome.
7:01
Shodakay.
7:44
Welcome back, listener, we have so
7:46
much to discuss. In our
7:48
last episode, we took a little detour to
7:50
speak with the people who run Cassadega
7:52
today, from the mediums themselves
7:54
to people who run the camps
7:57
day to day operations. And next week
7:59
we're going to take look at the camp's origin
8:01
story and all of the American appropriative
8:04
mess that comes with it. But before we can
8:06
get there, we've got to follow the story of American
8:09
Spiritualisms founders, the Fox
8:11
sisters, Leah, Maggie, and
8:13
Kate Fox to their stories end
8:15
and take a look at how their religion didn't
8:17
just outlive them, but sort
8:20
of killed them too. We left off
8:22
in eighteen fifty two and the
8:24
Foxes Leah now thirty
8:27
nine, Maggie nineteen, and Kate
8:29
fifteen went to Philadelphia
8:31
and it was there that Maggie met
8:33
a boy, and not just any boy,
8:36
a thirty two year old man, and so
8:39
not a boy, a very rich man.
8:41
His name was Alicia Clark Kane,
8:44
an Arctic explorer from a wealthy
8:46
Philadelphia family, you know, like one of
8:48
those rich guys that's like I can have a
8:50
job like like. But
8:53
anyways, that was what he was doing by the time he met
8:55
Maggie. Kane was a successful
8:57
explorer and he took an interest in
9:00
Maggie Fox. Definitely not
9:02
spiritualism. He asked her out
9:04
and took her on a date to his brother's
9:07
grave. A little weird, but
9:10
I guess a good place to bring a Fox sister,
9:12
and she did become pretty interested in him. Things
9:14
he did up quickly, and soon enough he was professing
9:16
his love for her, vowing to end
9:18
his engagement that his parents were forcing
9:21
him into. All while knowing that they
9:23
would never approve a match
9:25
with a middle class, new money girl
9:27
with no generational assets who
9:29
made her living talking to ghosts. Kane
9:32
kept her a secret from his family and
9:34
gave her the first of many ultimatums.
9:37
Yes, he loved her, but he could
9:39
only accept her as his wife
9:42
if she gave up the religion that she'd founded
9:44
with her sisters. Of course, Leah
9:46
Fox despised him to
9:48
some extent. This was sister Lee protectiveness,
9:51
but it could also be seen as a power struggle between
9:54
Leah and Alicia Caine to retain
9:56
control over Maggie Fox's
9:58
life. Kane's letters,
10:01
Uh will not endear you to him. He
10:03
says things like this, Oh, how much
10:05
I wish that you would quit this life of dreary
10:07
sameness and suspected deceit, he
10:10
would say to her in a series of deeply
10:12
nagging letters. In another, he
10:14
says this, I need hardly say that
10:17
I am gratified to find that you write so ably.
10:19
You have more brain than I gave you credit For
10:22
just one more, I promise you could
10:24
never lift yourself to my thoughts and my objects.
10:27
I can never bring myself down to yours.
10:30
What a dream boat. And
10:34
around this time, the Fox sisters
10:36
were securing some of their biggest supporters
10:38
ever, including their very first
10:41
president. During a trip to d C,
10:43
President Franklin Pierce and First Lady
10:46
Jane Pierce saw their eleven year old
10:48
son die before their eyes when
10:50
a train they were on derailed. Jane
10:52
Pierce w later do a mediumship
10:55
session with Maggie Fox, and
10:57
the sisters also met with a number of congressmen
11:00
and other DC locals. The religion
11:02
was catching on in a huge way,
11:04
in spite of charges of fraudulence
11:07
and the fluctuating reputations of the sisters
11:09
themselves. The next spring, Maggie's
11:12
new boyfriend Kane left for another Arctic
11:14
expedition, but not before
11:16
Maggie gave into his wishes and
11:18
agreed to leave spiritualism
11:21
and get an education according to his
11:23
specifications. While he was gone.
11:25
Maggie's departure from the fold put
11:28
extra pressure on a sixteen
11:30
year old Kate Fox, who was understandably
11:32
getting pretty burnt out from being worked
11:34
so hard as a kid, in spite
11:36
of the fact that they were making more money than
11:39
ever, more than seven times the
11:41
annual salary of the average female
11:43
factory worker. A few
11:45
years passed as Spiritualism
11:47
continues to expand independently
11:50
of the Sisters. By this time, it was
11:52
estimated that there were several hundred thousand
11:55
spiritualists in the US, and many
11:57
high profile spiritualists were
11:59
trying to get the phenomena experienced
12:02
within the religion investigated
12:04
and validated by petitioning Congress
12:07
for a government committee. This was at
12:09
a time where many spiritualists were
12:11
especially enthusiastic about the
12:13
scientific promise of the religion,
12:16
but most government officials were still
12:18
very dismissive. A former Wisconsin
12:20
governor's request for a government committee
12:23
was privately mocked as a cult science
12:25
and quickly dismissed. In eighteen
12:27
fifty five, the first volume of spiritualist
12:30
history called Modern Spiritualism,
12:33
Its Face and Fantasies, Its Consistencies
12:36
and Contradictions, was published by
12:38
Eliab Kaprin, and it was also this
12:40
year that Kane returned to
12:42
Maggie Fox. Maggie was
12:44
understandably thrilled. She was
12:47
pretty bored, wasn't loving school, and
12:49
missed conducting sciences with her sisters,
12:51
but she was determined to marry Alicia
12:54
Clark Kane. But instead of doing
12:56
that, he showed up at her home several
12:59
days after back from his mission with
13:01
the document. He wanted her to sign disclaiming
13:04
any relationship they'd ever had
13:06
together and demanded that she returned
13:09
all his love letters. I this
13:12
motherfucker came back and
13:15
said, just kidding, the
13:17
engagement is off. Signed this n d
13:19
A like he was writing a Marvel movie or
13:22
something. It makes me mad, because at this point
13:24
both of them were very public
13:26
figures. Kane's memoir of
13:28
his most recent expedition would become a
13:30
best seller that was second only to the
13:32
Bible when it was published, and
13:35
Maggie Fox was the founder of this
13:37
on the Rise religious movement. But in
13:39
Kaine's view, she was a reputational
13:42
liability new money,
13:44
so he gives her this n d A. She agrees
13:46
to sign it, but he changes his mind
13:48
and Maggie forgave him for maybe one
13:50
of the meanest things I've ever heard of
13:53
someone you were supposed to marry doing to
13:55
you. They began to see each other again, something
13:58
that didn't affect his reputation but
14:00
certainly affected her as an
14:02
unmarried woman who was supposed
14:05
to be having sex before marriage.
14:07
The Fox family was not thrilled about this, but Kate
14:10
and their mother, Margaret, were said to be in
14:12
attendance when Maggie and Kane were
14:14
unofficially married in a private ceremony.
14:17
It was a rushed circumstance. Kane was
14:19
said to be leaving for a book tour in England
14:21
the next day and allegedly said
14:24
to the family, Maggie is my wife
14:26
and I am her husband. Wherever we
14:28
are, she is mine and I am hers.
14:31
This ceremony's authenticity was disputed
14:34
later, and that is important because
14:36
Kane became ill on the way to
14:38
London and died shortly
14:41
after arriving. Death of
14:43
a himbo. You hate to hear it. Maggie
14:45
was very upset She fell into a nervous
14:48
collapse when she learned this, and the Kane
14:50
family was swift to cut her out of
14:52
their bottom line, claiming that their marriage
14:54
was not legitimate and any money
14:57
that Kane had appeared to have left behind for
14:59
her care was not intended for
15:01
her at all. It's around this time that Maggie
15:03
became plagued with increasing struggles
15:05
with alcoholism and finances.
15:08
She wrote this to Kaine's brother after
15:10
his passing. I know that the Doctor must
15:13
have left some message for me, and know
15:15
that you will not refuse to deliver it, even
15:17
though it gives you much pain in recalling the
15:19
name of him whose memory is and
15:21
ever will be sacred. I have always
15:23
held a religious faith in the deep sincerity
15:26
of the Doctor's love. Meanwhile, Leah
15:28
and Kate struggled with a series of blows
15:31
in their religion. In June of eighteen
15:33
fifty seven, they participated in another
15:35
highly publicized investigation,
15:38
this one by the Boston Courier to
15:40
prove the existence of spirit communication.
15:43
Harvard Study and Spiritualism had taken
15:46
down famous spiritualist adjacent
15:48
figures. The Davenport brothers
15:51
to be nothing more than excellent magicians,
15:53
who could appear and disappear and
15:55
create music from seemingly disembodied
15:58
places. Leah and Kate prevail
16:00
in this investigation, but barely.
16:03
The results of the study said that
16:05
there was quote a little
16:07
rapping by the Foxes, easily
16:09
traceable to their persons, and easily
16:11
done by others, without the pretense of
16:14
spirit, nor a table or piano
16:16
lifted, or anything moved a single
16:18
hair's breadth. So ends this
16:21
ridiculous and infamous imposture
16:24
unquote. As always, there
16:26
are two sides to this. It was speculated
16:28
that at least one Harvard man disliked
16:31
the Fox sisters in particular because
16:33
they were a friend of the deceased
16:36
Alicia Kane, and thought that his involvement
16:38
with Maggie Fox had led to his downfall.
16:41
You know how Harvard guys are always
16:43
bonding over ship that makes no sense. Maggie
16:46
had managed to hold on to the only proof
16:48
she had of her relationship with Kane,
16:50
these love letters, and converted to
16:52
Catholicism in eighty eight
16:55
in Kane's honor. Leah soon married
16:57
a rich Quaker who was obsessed with her
16:59
good for her, which allowed her to retire
17:01
from public sciences after ten years
17:04
of public pressure, Suddenly Kate
17:07
Fox was the last sister
17:09
standing to carry the religion on
17:12
her back, and they were not going
17:14
to make it easy for her. All
17:20
Right, We're back in Cassadega to a
17:23
different kind of medium carrying
17:25
a different kind of spiritualism on his
17:27
back. When I get to the Reverend Dr
17:29
Lewis Gates's door, I've already gotten
17:31
a few readings done at the camp. The
17:34
first was a tarot reading at
17:36
the Hotel Cassadega, where I'm staying.
17:39
The camp trained mediums don't seem to have
17:41
a ton of respect for the card
17:43
readers at the hotel, and sure
17:46
the readings are maybe a little overpriced,
17:49
but there are Casadeca mediums who charged
17:51
comparably, and the rivalry itself
17:53
seems kind of silly. Once you
17:55
actually see a medium
17:57
or a psychic from both parties,
18:00
they're both good. And I got to see a
18:02
terror reader just inches from
18:04
my hotel room, which was, for the record,
18:07
tiny haunted feeling and
18:09
a bathroom the size of a closet that I
18:11
soon learned does not get hot water.
18:14
Oh, in the best part, a sign that says do
18:16
not let cats into the hotel.
18:19
Our hotel does not allow animals
18:21
on the premises, and beside
18:23
that sign, without fail, there
18:26
were always two cats mewing
18:29
at the top of their lungs trying
18:31
to get into my room from the outside. One
18:33
of the better things about Cassadega is it has
18:35
a community stray cat feeding program
18:38
called can You figure cats
18:40
Adega? It's called cats Adega.
18:43
That is truly one of the only bridges
18:46
between the Camp Association and
18:48
their local counterparts. My
18:50
terror reader at the hotel was with a
18:52
woman about my mom's age early sixties,
18:55
and like most of the psychics and mediums
18:58
who work at the hotel, she had us
19:00
this pretty cool sweetheart deal. They
19:02
get to practice upstairs in this hundred
19:04
year old haunted hotel. They're given their
19:06
own hotel room to give readings in, and
19:09
they get to design it as they choose. The
19:12
room I walk into is covered in
19:14
pastel's, there a ton of light, and
19:16
I have a tarot reading that I would say
19:18
is pretty solid. It's funny to me
19:20
that so many spiritualists dismissed
19:23
tarot cards as strictly a parlor
19:25
game, not because it's technically
19:28
incorrect, but you might recall
19:30
the seance was considered a
19:32
parlor game for many years,
19:34
and many spiritualists used early
19:37
versions of the talking board, which
19:39
would become the Uiji board, which
19:41
was also a parlor game. The
19:44
modern spiritualist movements relationship
19:46
with tarot cards is kind of interesting to me at
19:48
the camp. Formally, it is not something
19:51
that is used or done, and seems
19:53
to even be kind of looked down on by
19:55
some mediums. My theory of why
19:57
they no longer tend to appear in
20:00
modern spiritualism, which is much
20:02
more focused on the mental, is because
20:04
of how many tools were proven
20:06
to be fraudulent in their era. But
20:09
it's a good reading. The terror reader pulls
20:11
cards and asks me about myself
20:14
and interprets what's happening. She
20:16
pulls the world card, she pulls the
20:18
three of sorts, the four of sorts, a
20:20
need to rest after getting stabbed in the
20:23
heart three times, And like any
20:25
good reading experience, some of it
20:27
is just weird. She says things like this
20:30
spirit wants you to hear living
20:32
in the past makes you dead in the
20:34
present. That was by
20:37
Bill Belichick, the football coach. I
20:40
also got a reading done with a formal
20:42
Cassadeca medium before I go see
20:44
Louis Gates. I meet with a former
20:47
Wall Street employee who moved to Cassadega
20:49
after eleven. She has me sanitize
20:52
my hands and the pen and the pad of paper
20:54
she gave me to take notes, no recording
20:56
allowed, and the reading is hit
20:59
and miss, like many readings are.
21:01
I don't think I'm going to be a fashion designer. I
21:03
wear like three shirts and one
21:06
pants. But she does channel
21:09
my grandmother incredibly well, giving
21:11
specific details down to the red
21:13
scarf that she'd wear to a church on Sunday,
21:16
the fact that she secretly smoked cigarettes
21:18
to the point that she was only caught with them
21:20
on the day she died out of nowhere, the
21:22
fact that my dad was around the same age
21:25
his dad was when he passed away.
21:27
So by the time I get to Reverend Dr Lewis
21:30
Gates, I'm a little guarded
21:32
at this point of seeing him all over the camp healing
21:35
it Sunday services, giving spirit
21:37
messages, and teaching the table tipping
21:39
class I took. He's a third generation
21:41
medium, so he knows American spiritualism
21:44
probably better than almost anyone
21:46
practicing in the country. When
21:48
he opens the door to greet me, he
21:51
just starts the second
21:53
he opens the door. I entered the house
21:55
he practices in with his wife, Marie
21:57
Gates, and he guides me right inside.
22:00
Waste no time. He's got a ton
22:02
of energy and he's recording the
22:04
whole thing on this CD ROM
22:06
recorder, which I wasn't even aware was
22:08
a thing that existed. But that means
22:11
you can hear it too. If I'm not looking
22:13
at you, I'm not. I'm not ignoring you on where you're
22:15
there. I just watched what they're doing your stuff. I'm
22:17
looking over there somewhere else, not
22:19
ignore you. Know you're there. I've
22:22
heard on like four reces and so a
22:25
little wired, and yeah, he's
22:27
a little wired. I've never heard so
22:29
many ideas channeled and thrown
22:31
out there from a medium so quickly
22:34
in what seems to be this effortless motion
22:37
that felt kind of jarring and kind of cool.
22:40
Not everything resonated or made sense to
22:42
me. In fact, listening back to this,
22:44
even less made sense to me than I thought
22:47
did in the moment, but some of
22:49
it felt true and resonant. You're
22:51
just kind of pelt it with information
22:53
and ideas, and even if something isn't
22:55
making sense to you, as he looks past
22:58
your head to the wooden floorboards to describe
23:00
something like this, a gentleman sitting up
23:02
there on the floor. I haven't figured out what he's
23:05
doing yet. I just don't fear what he's doing yet.
23:07
I feel like this passing was extremely suddenly,
23:09
extremely quickly passed, a
23:12
quick pass, but I feel like he was quite sick. He
23:15
was sick, he says, his body
23:17
was giving up on it. You barely have time to register
23:19
it before he's moved on to something else, in
23:21
which he and I'm paraphrasing, Loki
23:24
says, I'll never get married. He says this a lot.
23:26
If you're married, I don't see it. So if you're married,
23:28
I don't see it in the path behind yourself,
23:31
okay. Also, he says, I don't
23:33
belong in Florida, have no business, and the state
23:35
of Florida. I'm not going to kick him out and a
23:37
business here? Do you live here? Thank
23:40
God? It's
23:42
interesting because the reverend doctor
23:44
is going back and forth between psychic
23:47
abilities and medium ship abilities
23:49
here. As I've been told
23:51
by pastor not pastor dead before,
23:54
all mediums are psychics, but not
23:56
all psychics are mediums. Psychic
23:58
work as I understand in it is
24:01
more of the prediction of the future,
24:03
reading your energy, talking about the fact
24:05
that you're never gonna get married. Mediumship
24:09
is the guy sitting on the floor who died
24:11
suddenly, not channeling something
24:13
from the generalized universe,
24:15
but a message from a specific individual
24:18
spirit. Both of these practices
24:21
line up cleanly with themes that spiritualists
24:23
have followed forever, themes
24:25
of self improvement, general optimism,
24:28
the Golden Rule, and comforting
24:30
messages from this group of spirits
24:33
that are meant to be your guides through
24:35
life. And spiritualists have
24:37
always used this very American
24:40
individualist idea that it's not just
24:42
about hearing from the dead, it's
24:44
about hearing from your dead personality.
24:47
And all during my time with Louis, he throws
24:50
a lot out there. There's a guy named Don following
24:52
me around. There's a lady named Helen following
24:54
me around. There are several archangels
24:59
with him from people in your vibrasion. You
25:01
have a gentleman, two of them sitting over
25:04
there. Now, Yeah, you heard that we have
25:06
two guys in the room. You have a guy
25:08
in your viversion. You have a guy in your vibration
25:10
named don God guide for you,
25:13
guide for use false people times, definitely
25:15
guide for you. If you warking to Michael with you right
25:17
now, to archangels, you are for
25:20
you. Two guys in the room. He
25:22
keeps throwing stuff out there, and he doesn't
25:24
seem to care or notice if it hurts my feelings.
25:27
You're not looking to do calm.
25:29
You work for the rest of your life. You're not
25:31
Molly Homemaker. You not Florence
25:33
Nightingale. But they need to know that. People may know
25:35
that I'm not that I tell
25:37
people something's in your life. It's
25:39
not your surface, not your monkey, which you shouldn't
25:42
be on the first name basis of the clowns. There's
25:44
a lot of midsized dogs sitting underneath your
25:47
chair walking in here, sitting
25:49
underneath your chair. It's information,
25:51
information information. My spirit
25:53
guides want me to buy a comedy club. There's
25:55
a woman in my vibration who says I swear
25:57
too much. Someone's putting the Star of Day
26:00
of the necklace on me. Am I Jewish? No,
26:02
I'm not Jewish. Well they
26:04
put that necklace on me. This is
26:06
the Casadega way. The skeptics
26:08
will tell you that this is a combination
26:11
of hot and cold reading tactics.
26:14
Hot readings being a technique where
26:16
a medium uses what they could know
26:18
about you before you enter the room.
26:20
In my case, it's not hard to
26:23
learn that I am a comedian, for example,
26:25
and cold reading techniques where
26:27
no previous information is known, and
26:29
the psychic or medium throws a
26:32
lot of stuff at the wall and
26:34
either backs off or goes
26:36
in further on one detail,
26:39
depending on the physical or
26:41
verbal affirmations the sitter gives
26:43
them. And sure that will make
26:45
sense. But when a piece of information
26:48
hits from a medium, any
26:50
of that logic goes completely
26:52
out the window. In those moments,
26:55
it's all real. And I mean that no
26:57
matter how much you know, no matter how many
27:00
times the reverend doctor tells you
27:02
you're never gonna get married,
27:09
Well, you meet somebody to walk the faculty. And that's
27:12
me really looking for when it hits,
27:14
when there's no explaining it, no
27:16
amount of conventional logic is going
27:19
to talk someone who believes in it out of
27:21
it even a little. And this phenomenon
27:23
of belief had a huge effect
27:26
on the final days of the Fox Sisters.
27:29
So let's check in with them.
27:40
The last twenty five years of the Fox sisters
27:43
Lives is at times baffling
27:45
and other times tragic. While
27:47
interest in spiritualism continued to rise
27:50
in the US, especially when the absurdly
27:52
high number of Civil War casualties
27:55
starting in eighteen sixty one created
27:57
this understandably increased
28:00
interest in speaking with the dead, Maggie
28:02
and Kate in particular, began
28:04
to suffer more and more. Spiritualists
28:07
in the US at this time generally
28:10
accepted Abraham Lincoln's leadership,
28:12
but because the religion was popularized
28:15
by Rochester abolitionists,
28:18
Spiritualism waned in popularity
28:20
in the American South during the war, but
28:23
in the North it surged in a
28:25
major way. Spiritualist papers
28:27
really pushed supporters of their religion
28:30
to enlist in support of the Union. Spiritualist
28:33
historian Emma Hardened wrote, quote
28:36
spiritualists total unconcern
28:38
on the subject of death made them the
28:40
bravest of soldiers unquote. The
28:43
spiritualists also got their second
28:45
first Lady supporter after losing
28:47
her eleven year old son Willie to typhoid
28:49
fever in eighteen sixty two. First
28:52
Lady Mary Todd Lincoln became the latest
28:54
White House residents to engage with
28:56
spiritualism, and was said to have held
28:58
as many as eight seance as in the
29:00
White House. Their interests in spiritualism
29:03
and spirit photography,
29:05
a physical spirit manifestation
29:07
that shows you you're dead in ghost form
29:09
in a compact souvenir. Pick continued
29:12
after her husband's assassination as
29:15
the war continued. In eighteen sixty four,
29:17
one of the most significant moments in the
29:19
attempts to organize American Spiritualists
29:22
took place at their first national convention
29:24
in Chicago. There had been
29:26
some previous attempts throughout the eighteen fifties,
29:29
but as with all things
29:31
Spiritualists, and I'll say it most
29:33
leftist groups in general, they
29:35
were plagued with an inability to agree
29:38
on anything, and their inherent
29:40
resistance to declaring leadership
29:42
and hardline rules made it
29:44
very difficult to all get on the same
29:47
page, which stagnated growth. The
29:49
Fox Sisters did not attend this first national
29:52
convention, but the Spiritualists
29:54
did manage to unify on one issue,
29:56
rehabilitating the image of their religion
29:59
from al gations of fraud. A
30:01
statement from the convention read this, American
30:04
Spiritualism means something more than table
30:06
tipping and trumpet blowing, trance, speaking,
30:08
and size, seeing that the highest
30:10
conditions it imposes are not abnormal
30:13
states of beautified unconsciousness,
30:15
but a vigorous, healthful working state
30:18
for the practical attainment of physical and
30:20
spiritual freedom, purity, and growth.
30:22
In the eighteen sixties, twenty something,
30:24
Kate was now the only sister who
30:26
practiced in public. She was
30:29
still innovating science techniques and
30:31
was now working in automatic writing,
30:33
a process that involved transcribing
30:36
messages with her left hand in reverse
30:38
script while verbally channeling
30:40
as normal. It's around this time
30:42
in the eighteen sixties through the early
30:44
twentieth century that public demand
30:47
for more theatrical manifestations
30:49
of spirit came into practice.
30:52
Other examples included full
30:54
body manifestations, something
30:56
that Kate was said to do for a wealthy banker
30:58
client who had lost his wife. Again,
31:01
this brings up simultaneous questions
31:03
of whether Kate was responding
31:06
to public pressure for larger
31:08
physical manifestations, or,
31:11
as spirits are often accused of,
31:13
if she was exploiting the grief
31:15
of a wealthy man by claiming that
31:17
she could physically make is dead
31:20
return who boy.
31:22
By the end of the Civil War, more Americans
31:25
were killed than in World Wars one and two
31:27
combined. President Lincoln
31:29
was assassinated, and the extremely
31:32
fraught period of reconstruction
31:34
in the US began. According
31:36
to Emma Hardinge, the war resulted in
31:39
two million additional Spiritualist
31:41
converts, a huge moment for the religion,
31:44
although there was no guarantee that the
31:46
movement would continue to align with the
31:49
times. It was around this time
31:51
that both of the Fox sisters parents
31:53
John and Margaret, passed away,
31:56
further fracturing the sister's relationship.
31:58
And the loss of her mother drove Kate
32:00
Fox to begin drinking to excess.
32:03
Her sister Maggie was already too sick
32:05
to help her, and eldest sister
32:07
Leah strategically kept her distance
32:10
interesting sidebar here. In an
32:12
attempt to intervene with Kate's alcoholism,
32:15
a doctor friend arranged to have her
32:17
be checked into the facility of one
32:20
doctor George Taylor, an
32:22
American who would go on to invent something called
32:24
the manipulator in eighteen sixty
32:27
nine, essentially a huge machine
32:29
designed to make women come
32:33
I'm not getting it's a big old vibrator. The
32:35
attitude towards the Victorian vagina
32:38
was both misogynists in the expected
32:40
way and kind of roundabout
32:42
progressive by mistake. In
32:44
a society known for litigating the bodies
32:47
of marginalized people, the post
32:49
Civil War era saw women like Kate,
32:51
those with some of the most privileged in
32:54
the nation, diagnosed with hysteria.
32:57
Now we're all familiar with that, but one
32:59
of the proposed cures for hysteria
33:03
was quote tellific massage
33:05
to hysterical paroxysm
33:08
coming u so deviant
33:11
behavior from the owners
33:13
of Victorian vaginas could
33:15
be cured by coming, although
33:17
of course the procedures didn't make it
33:19
sound as if this had anything to do with pleasure.
33:22
In a culture that famously assumed that
33:24
pussy shunned squirt without the guidance
33:26
of good dick, and was predicated
33:28
on the idea that women were emotionally
33:31
and intellectually inferior, Thus
33:34
hysteria, there were doctors
33:36
whose job that was to make
33:39
you come. That's just history.
33:41
Dr Rachel Maine's, a sex historian
33:43
and the author of the Technology of
33:45
Orgasm, said this of
33:47
the good doctor George Taylor. Dr
33:50
Taylor advised colleagues that women would
33:52
tend to want more treatment than they really needed.
33:54
They would overdo it if you let them. H
33:57
These scamps, these freaks,
33:59
they're coming all over town. Hide
34:01
your children. Kate Fox's
34:04
time with Dr Taylor was by all accounts,
34:07
really fun for her. He'd pioneered
34:09
something called the Swedish Movement Cure, which
34:12
encouraged regular vibrator
34:14
stuff along with exercise,
34:16
massage, and all vegetarian diet,
34:19
and this worked for her for some time, but
34:22
of course it couldn't cure her
34:24
financial issues or her
34:26
addiction. Kate would occasionally
34:28
disappear for weeks at a time to conduct
34:30
seances for the Nuvaux Reach of
34:32
New York City, often being bribed
34:35
with alcohol and going on weeklong
34:37
benders. Eventually, Dr
34:39
Taylor and his wife Sarah decided
34:41
to protect Kate by allowing her to stay
34:44
at their facility free of charge
34:46
in exchange for some quid pro
34:48
quo seances, once again
34:51
meaning that Kate Fox was paying her
34:53
rent by keeping a couple in
34:55
touch with their dead children. Harriet
34:57
Beetristowe, author of Tom's Happen,
35:00
was also a
35:03
patient of Dr Taylor's
35:05
and attended seances where Kate continued
35:07
to manifest more and more physical
35:10
manifestations disembodied
35:13
hands, twinkling lights, spirit
35:15
portraits, likely influenced by
35:17
early spirit photography.
35:20
Still struggling with addiction that Kate would
35:22
sometimes channel medium's messages
35:24
that seemed to be directed
35:26
at herself. Here's an example.
35:29
Now, go and rejoice, Katie, and
35:31
live. There are two paths,
35:33
one happiness and peace, one misery
35:36
and death. Choose the former,
35:39
and great will be your golden reward.
35:41
By one spirit,
35:43
had Kate informed the tailor's that it was time
35:46
for their medium and residence to go abroad
35:49
via a popular spirit that Kate
35:51
would channel named Benjamin
35:54
Franklin. I'm serious.
35:56
You might remember from a few episodes ago that I
35:58
was kind of jar when finding out
36:01
a present day Cassadega medium
36:03
considered JP Morgan
36:05
to be one of his spirit guides. But
36:07
there is weirdly precedent for that
36:09
kind of thing. American and English
36:12
spiritualists would often channel historical
36:14
figures like this, that is, ones
36:17
highly glorified in their culture at
36:19
the time who are deeply entrenched
36:22
in these colonial and imperialist
36:24
myths. It's yet another example
36:26
of the spiritualist movement being generally
36:29
progressive, but still majority
36:31
composed of middle class white Americans
36:33
who were frequently tone deaf and self
36:36
centered, a major reason that the
36:38
religion has not diversified much
36:40
today and why as well discussed
36:42
next week. Black and brown spiritualists
36:45
felt ostracized from the movement and
36:47
would go on to form their own churches
36:49
and customs. The tailors weren't thrilled
36:52
to see the prone to relapse in Kate
36:54
leave, but she was now in her mid
36:56
thirties and there wasn't much they could do.
36:59
She left for England in late eighteen seventy
37:01
one and was thrilled to see
37:03
that spiritualism had taken off in
37:05
England significantly. By
37:08
this time, England had produced a number
37:10
of legendary mediums since the religion
37:12
was brought to the country in the early eighteen
37:14
fifties. There was a deed Home,
37:17
who I've mentioned on Ghost Church before, who
37:19
was known as one of the least debunked
37:22
mediums of the time, although
37:24
skepticism ran rampant there as well.
37:26
My favorite example is Victorian
37:29
writer power couple Robert and Elizabeth
37:31
Barrett Browning went to one of Holmes
37:33
seances in England, ones, intriguing
37:36
Elizabeth but prompting Robert
37:38
to write a brutal takedown
37:40
poem called Mr Sludge
37:43
the medium, look at me, see
37:45
I kneel. The only time I swear I
37:47
ever cheated, Yes by the soul of
37:49
her who hears your sainted mother, sir.
37:52
All except this last accident was truth.
37:55
It's really long. It's like this Victorian dis
37:57
tract It's goodd
38:00
Holme was also notable for allegedly
38:02
introducing spiritualism to a Russian
38:04
woman named Helena Blovotsky in
38:07
the late eighteen fifties, who spent
38:09
a lot of time defending spiritualism for
38:11
years, but was off put by their fraud
38:13
allegations. Eventually, using
38:15
a number of ideas she'd learned via her
38:17
travels in Tibet, India
38:20
and all across the East, she brought
38:22
concepts like karma and reincarnation
38:25
into existing spiritualist rhetoric
38:27
and founded her own movement, Theosophy
38:30
in eighteen seventy five, a
38:32
movement that was also played by accusations
38:35
of fraud. Queen Victoria was
38:37
rumored to have either attended or maybe
38:39
even held spiritualist seances
38:41
after the death of her husband, Prince Albert
38:44
in eighteen sixty one, so it was
38:46
an even bigger boon to the English spiritualist
38:48
movement. When v Kate Fox
38:51
married an Englishman, now
38:53
thirty five years old, she met a widower
38:55
named Henry Dietrich Jenkin, who
38:58
didn't just believe in spiritualists, so
39:00
did his parents. She had two kids
39:02
with him, Ferdinand and England and
39:04
Henry Jr. While visiting her sisters in
39:06
New York, and her happy married
39:09
life and ability to continue practicing
39:11
her religion kept Kate on the wagon
39:13
for a long time, but as always,
39:16
things remained needlessly chaotic
39:19
in America. In eighteen seventy
39:21
two there were two spiritualist
39:23
adjacent failed presidential
39:25
campaigns. Longtime Fox
39:27
family friend Horace Greeley, who
39:30
Kate had spent the summer getting an education
39:32
from when she was just a kid, had
39:34
failed in his presidential bid against
39:37
Ulysses S. Grant and died shortly
39:39
after in a sanitarium. More
39:41
interesting way, many American spiritualists
39:44
were embarrassed when a medium named Victoria
39:47
Woodhull became the first
39:49
woman to ever campaign for the American
39:51
presidency. Her campaign is
39:53
considered to be pretty historic now
39:56
but was treated like a joke in its day.
39:59
Woodhull had as a women's rights
40:01
advocate for years. She had
40:03
been pro abolition, She had been
40:05
a pusher of the concept of free
40:07
love, which at this time only meant
40:09
the right to get married, divorced, or
40:11
have children without social restriction.
40:14
And then there were some eccentric things.
40:16
She listed Frederick Douglas as her
40:19
running mate, which I guess
40:21
she never told him about. All
40:23
this to say, the Spiritualists did not claim
40:25
her, and her public presence was considered
40:28
to be an embarrassment to the movement,
40:30
because sure, ghosts are real, but
40:32
a woman for president, I'm going to
40:34
be sick. I have to get on that big
40:37
scary vibrator again. By the mid eighteen
40:39
seventies, Kayton Maggie's relationship
40:41
with their older sister Leah hadn't improved
40:43
very much. Kate wrote in a letter
40:46
to fellow medium D. D. Home that
40:48
my sister, Mrs Underhill, who was more
40:50
than twenty three years older than myself,
40:53
was always jealous of me, and when my
40:55
blessed mother died, we were not on speaking
40:58
terms, but she was working
41:00
on forgiveness, explaining that
41:02
at times I find the shadows of her unkindness
41:05
lingering in my heart. I tried to
41:07
remember that she is a changed
41:09
woman and a good woman, while
41:21
the Fox has continued to split hairs.
41:23
Loosely organized spiritualist camps
41:25
began to pop up all over the country, including
41:28
a camp of hundreds of tents in Lake
41:30
Pleasant, Massachusetts, as
41:32
well as the Cassadega Lake Free
41:34
Association in upstate New York
41:37
in eighteen seventy nine. Don't
41:39
be confused, this is not the same
41:41
Cassadega that I visited this year
41:43
in Florida. This is a sister camp
41:46
that was later named lily Dale in
41:48
nineteen oh six. Lily Dale
41:50
is still considered to be the most influential
41:53
spiritualist camp in the country, spanning
41:56
over eighty acres and briefly
41:58
being the site where the Fox is. His cabin
42:00
was relocated. Of course,
42:03
like all notable spiritualist buildings, it
42:05
burned down under mysterious circumstances.
42:08
In Kate's husband
42:10
died after they had a decade
42:12
of a happy marriage and two kids,
42:15
and Kate almost immediately falls
42:17
off the wagon and begins drinking again.
42:20
She traveled to Russia briefly after
42:22
being invited by a bureaucrat, and
42:24
is said to have held seances for the royal
42:26
family, but those times didn't last
42:29
very Long eight four brought
42:31
another round of prominent mediums
42:33
down with a study called the Seabird
42:36
Commission. It was an academic
42:38
study funded with money left behind
42:40
by spiritualist Henry Siebert
42:42
to confirm the phenomena of the religion
42:44
he dedicated his life too. Conducted
42:47
at the University of Pennsylvania. Maggie
42:49
met with them, and while her mediumship
42:52
wasn't disproven, that was
42:54
once again cast on how the
42:56
Fox spirit rappings were made,
42:59
as well as on other physical phenomena
43:01
like spirit photography and automatic
43:03
writing. The sisters were thrown
43:05
into conflict again when Leah
43:08
published her heavily editorialized
43:10
memoirs called The Missing Link
43:12
in Modern Spiritualism in five,
43:16
which Maggie and Kate did not like,
43:18
particularly because they were struggling
43:21
financially and with alcohol
43:23
as their older sister lived this comfortable,
43:26
wealthy life. In Everything
43:30
comes crashing down that
43:32
may, Kate Fox was arrested
43:35
and held for three hundred dollars in
43:37
the Harlem Police court on child
43:39
neglect charges. When the police
43:41
showed up, the boys were fined and healthy,
43:43
but Kate was in fact drunk,
43:46
and the boys, who were fourteen and twelve,
43:49
were sent to a juvenile asylum.
43:52
Once released, Kate was devastated
43:55
and embarrassed, admitting
43:57
to having quote intemperate
43:59
habits end quote, but strongly
44:02
denied that this had affected her parenting
44:04
and the impact that this arrest had extended
44:06
beyond the personal. For other prominent
44:09
spiritualists, Kate's arrest was an
44:11
embarrassment that further estranged
44:13
the religion's creators from
44:15
the religion itself. Maggie
44:18
was able to get her nephews out of the juvenile
44:20
asylum by sending a cable
44:23
posing as Kate's brother in law, Edward
44:25
Jenkin, reuniting Kate with the
44:27
boys, but that was only the beginning.
44:30
At this point, Maggie and Kate Fox
44:32
had been synonymous with spiritualism
44:35
for forty years, beginning
44:37
when they were about the same age as Kate's
44:39
sons. Spiritualism
44:41
had changed their lives completely,
44:43
for better and for worse. They
44:45
had become some of the most prominent
44:47
women serving as religious figures
44:49
in the world, but had become so
44:51
at the expense of their privacy,
44:54
their youth, and the majority of
44:56
their personal relationships. They
44:58
were predisposed to alcohol is m via
45:00
their dad, but these issues were
45:02
exacerbated by the stress and pressure
45:05
of constant investigations
45:07
and their status at different times in life
45:10
as unmarried or widowed women definitely
45:12
did not help. By this time,
45:15
Maggie had returned to occasionally
45:17
conducting seances for financial
45:19
purposes, while maintaining that
45:21
she was technically a Catholic okay
45:24
Messi. But forty years on,
45:26
the world still wondered did
45:29
they really believe in what
45:31
they had spent their lives doing. Maggie
45:34
Fox published an answer via
45:37
a column in the New York Heralds called
45:39
The Curse of Spiritualism,
45:41
in which she said that it was all
45:43
a lie. She explained that
45:46
she and Kate had been reassured by Leah
45:48
as children that their fraudulence was
45:50
okay and in service of something
45:52
greater, that spirit communication
45:55
was real, and that she had proved it
45:57
by having spirit rappings that Leah
45:59
her self produced assure her
46:01
younger sisters that they were doing the right
46:04
thing. Her Maggie Leah
46:06
had exploited a prank that they'd
46:08
played as board kids, convinced
46:11
them it was real, and spun it out
46:13
into a religion that had made her rich
46:15
and respected, while her kid's sisters
46:18
remained deceived and increasingly
46:20
destitute. Maggie takes pot
46:22
shots a lot of people in this column,
46:25
particularly Leah, but also
46:27
the general public who were enthusiastic
46:29
about spiritualism. She indicates
46:32
that she felt the public pressured
46:34
mediums into fraudulence with
46:36
increasingly ridiculous demands.
46:39
From her column, spiritualism is a
46:41
curse. God has set his seal against
46:44
it. I call it a curse for the vilest
46:46
miscreants make use of it to cloak their
46:48
evil doings. Fanatics ignore
46:51
the wrappings, which is the only part of the
46:53
phenomena that is worthy of notice, and
46:55
rushed madly after the glaring humbugs
46:57
that flood New York of
47:00
Lellah. Maggie indicated that she felt
47:02
it was Leah who had gotten Kate
47:04
arrested in the first place. When
47:07
she was interviewed in a follow up by The Tribune
47:09
in September, she
47:12
went in, we
47:14
were but innocent, little children. What
47:16
did we know? We get to know
47:18
too much. Our sister used us in
47:20
her exhibitions, and we made money
47:22
for her. Now she turns upon us because
47:24
she's the wife of a rich man, and she opposes
47:27
us both wherever she can. Oh,
47:29
I am after her. You can kill sometimes
47:31
without using weapons, you know. When
47:34
asked how the Foxes had produced the wrappings
47:36
all these years, Maggie promised
47:38
she would show the world at an upcoming lecture.
47:41
And what gets me the most out of this whole story
47:44
is Maggie saying that she never
47:46
believed that her older sister was lying
47:48
to her about spirit communication
47:50
being real until her own husband
47:53
died and never came back to talk
47:55
to her. Maggie continues,
47:57
why I have explored the unknown
48:00
as far as human will can. I
48:02
have gone to the dead so that I might get from
48:04
them some little token. Nothing
48:06
came of it, nothing nothing.
48:10
Kate fully supported Maggie, saying
48:12
that the majority of Leah's book was fiction,
48:15
and at a public showing in October,
48:19
Maggie showed the world how she and
48:21
Kate had been producing the wrappings
48:23
all these years, confirming
48:26
a lot of speculation from the
48:28
past four decades. She says,
48:30
at night, when we went to bed, we used to tie
48:32
an apple on a string and move the string
48:34
up and down, causing the apple to bump
48:37
on the floor. Or we would drop the apple
48:39
on the floor, making a strange noise. Every
48:41
time it would rebound. As people
48:43
have been speculating since the early eighteen
48:45
fifties. Maggie said the raps were
48:47
produced with their knuckles and joints,
48:50
fingers toes. Knees.
48:54
Oh my god, that's so cruel.
48:57
These women's knees were just destroy
49:00
roy. They were for sure double jointed,
49:02
but over time developed incredible
49:05
control over the motions of
49:07
their bodies. It's pretty fascinating
49:10
and kind of grotesque to think about. It's
49:12
not like athletic, but that kind
49:14
of mastery of your own tiny
49:17
bodily movements is just wild.
49:20
Uh. Maggie said that no
49:22
one ever caught on or mistrusted them when
49:24
spiritualism began, because they
49:26
were just kids, and that they were led
49:28
on by my sister intentionally and
49:31
by my mother unintentionally. She
49:33
called several physicians to the stage and
49:35
showed them how she did it. She moved
49:37
around her joints, and just as
49:39
always, the spirit raps sounded
49:43
around the auditorium.
49:45
The news called it the death blow
49:48
to spiritualism. Here were the two
49:50
girls, now women who had started
49:52
everything, publicly stating
49:54
that it had been a lie, and they regretted
49:56
it. All Spiritualism should
49:58
have ended right there and then. But
50:01
that's not really how believing in something
50:03
works is it? By this time,
50:06
spiritualism was in some ways
50:09
too big to fail. In addition
50:11
to large followings in the US
50:13
and Europe, a movement called
50:16
a Spiritismo, which will discuss
50:18
next week, had combined with other
50:20
spiritual traditions of enslaved
50:22
African people in Brazil, Cuba,
50:25
and Puerto Rico, to name a few. So
50:28
spiritualists did what you might expect,
50:31
once again, discredit and smear
50:33
the Fox Sisters by any means necessary.
50:36
Maggie was accused of disclaiming spirit
50:39
for financial reasons, of being
50:41
abandoned by spirit by lack of
50:43
faith, that she wasn't even relevant enough
50:45
to the movement for her opinion to matter. That
50:48
Kate was just falling into line with
50:50
her lie, just as she had fallen into
50:52
line with Leah all those years. Prominent
50:55
spiritualists turned on them as
50:57
they continued to tour the j K
50:59
spit Ritualism Is Fake lecture series.
51:02
They stuck by this for a good year.
51:04
But here's the part that's wildest of all.
51:07
A year later they took it
51:09
back. Maggie
51:11
apologized forever having said that
51:14
spiritualism was a lie, now
51:16
saying that quote would to God
51:18
that I could undo the injustice I did the
51:20
cause of spiritualism. She said
51:22
the Catholics had made her do it, and certainly
51:25
not that the wealthy spiritualists had
51:27
pressured her to recount her statements.
51:30
Maggie implied that she would do another
51:32
lecture tour the j
51:35
K. The JK spiritualism is
51:37
fake lecture tour is fake lecture
51:40
tour. It didn't work. Leah
51:43
passed away peacefully at home in eight
51:45
nine and her late seventies, the child
51:48
abuse accusations never really affecting
51:50
her, and in fact, the backlash
51:52
against her younger sisters only elevated
51:55
Leah's status among long time spiritualists.
51:58
Kate redacted all of her denied aisles
52:00
of her religion as well, and once
52:02
again started doing sciences for the
52:04
Vibrator family the Tailors, but
52:06
would still disappear on drinking binges
52:08
before passing away mid binge
52:11
at only fifty five in July.
52:15
Shortly before she died, she channeled the
52:17
spirit of Benjamin Franklin for the Tailor's
52:20
one last time, saying there
52:22
will be no loss. God bless
52:24
you now and forever. Maggie
52:27
was poor and living at a friend's apartment when she
52:29
grew sick in eight, dying
52:31
in her sleep at fifty nine. There
52:34
was no money left, but a friend arranged
52:36
for Maggie and Cake to be buried beside
52:38
each other. And
52:41
that's the story of the Fox sisters. They
52:44
are tough cultural figures
52:47
to parse. On one hand,
52:50
I'll be honest, Leah Fox feels like a
52:52
pretty standard girl boss of her
52:54
era, a single mom in her
52:57
thirties, barred from most lines
52:59
of work and certainly most lines of
53:01
power. She was a single woman who
53:03
couldn't even vote. When her little sisters
53:06
stumbled onto this local phenomenon,
53:08
she saw an opportunity and exploited
53:11
it to create space for herself that didn't
53:13
exist. But Maggie and Kate Fox,
53:16
that's a little harder. They were kids,
53:19
and it's much harder to understand what they
53:21
believed and what they didn't and
53:23
for how long. To this day,
53:25
people generally cast Maggie and Kate
53:28
as knowing that their seances were a
53:30
fraud the whole time. Here's a drunk
53:32
history clip to that effect. Spiritualism
53:35
has taken off of that point. And
53:37
so basically, when Maggie Fox
53:39
is done, made her
53:41
and her sister's irrelevant. So
53:43
after Maggie realizes that
53:46
her life is nothing when she's not a meeting
53:48
him, she just drank a bunch of boost
53:50
as she dined. But I
53:52
I don't know. I do believe that they were playing
53:55
a prank on their parents that got way blown
53:57
out of proportion. But I also
53:59
believe that if you're much older sister
54:01
tells you something is true when you're a child,
54:05
you will probably believe it. Faith
54:07
has skull fucked so many people, often
54:10
because of what they internalized as true
54:12
when they're very young. And if I were
54:14
an eleven year old told that not only
54:16
did a prank I pulled on April
54:18
Fool's Day have accidental
54:21
religious significance, but that that significance
54:24
made me a prophet that was going
54:26
to help my family, I
54:28
don't know. Every what would you do. I
54:30
don't know what I'd do. And however far
54:32
down the line, when you learn that things are
54:35
not as you've been told, whenever that is,
54:37
and it seems like Maggie and Kate had those
54:39
moments throughout their lives. By
54:42
that point, this deceit had determined
54:44
every area of their life and
54:47
stood to rob people of the comfort
54:49
that they had previously felt morally
54:51
confident in giving. If Maggie
54:53
or Kate truly knew that they were fraudulent,
54:56
that's up for criticism, and it should be in
54:58
particular. I don't think that any grieving
55:01
parents should be misled. But
55:03
there's too much gray area from me here. I'm
55:05
a grieving person doing way too much of
55:07
this ship right now. I'm making a wholes show
55:10
about shades of gray and skepticism
55:12
as it pertains to spiritualism. But
55:14
I still went to a medium last week, and
55:16
I don't know if I went for the truth, but
55:19
I do know that I went for comfort and
55:21
I got that. And if that medium
55:23
has a crisis of self three weeks
55:25
from now and contacts me and says
55:28
it was all a hoax, I would say
55:30
I still got what I paid for. But
55:32
I don't know. Everyone's different. Maggie
55:35
and Kate Fox were not perfect
55:37
baby angel religious profits that
55:40
they were often framed as, But I think
55:42
they're worth empathizing with. Well,
55:44
not so much on THEA for me. She lived till eighty
55:47
off their backs. As far as I'm concerned,
55:49
who cares faith is fucked
55:51
up when you're a kid and being lifted as
55:53
a prophet while propping up your older sister's
55:56
fraud probably doesn't help.
56:00
Over forty five years after two
56:02
sisters had heard wrappings in Hydesville,
56:04
the Fox Sisters were gone, but
56:07
spiritualism was just getting
56:09
started. And just a year after that,
56:11
the Cassadega Lake Free Association
56:14
decided it was time to open up a new
56:16
camp that would stay open year round
56:19
in central Florida. Speaking
56:21
of which, let's
56:23
see how the good referend Dr Lewis lands
56:25
this plane by September
56:28
this year. Not think you're in a relationship.
56:30
I think you could be in a very extremely powerful
56:32
friendship. Yeah, he's still telling
56:34
me that he doesn't think I'll ever be in love my
56:37
entire life. But it's fine.
56:39
We finish our session and I pay him
56:41
forty bucks for forty five minutes. And
56:44
for those not plugged into the going rate
56:46
for mediumship, this is low,
56:49
about half of what the other Cassadega
56:51
medium might visit charges. That's
56:53
another way that Reverend Dr Lewis is
56:55
old school. Past generations
56:57
of Cassadega mediums never won
57:00
it to charge for their work at all, Implying
57:02
to do so would be to cheapen their gifts
57:05
and make spiritualism less generally
57:07
accessible. Today's mediums
57:09
do charge different rates and
57:12
a showing of respect for each other's labor,
57:14
although it still is a controversial issue. As
57:17
I'm heading out, I asked the Reverend doctor
57:19
what the rest of his day is like, and he tells
57:21
me he has a session coming up this afternoon
57:24
he needs to get ready for. It's a family
57:26
of middle aged siblings who are looking
57:28
for buried treasure that a dead father
57:30
said might be buried somewhere
57:33
in their house. Delightful.
57:36
So no of the three readings
57:38
I have at Cassadega, two
57:40
of which from long time certified
57:43
mediums, nothing completely blew
57:45
me away. And that's fine for people
57:47
who come here. That's a calculated risk you take.
57:49
I think I saw them out
57:51
and not the other way around. Where
57:53
the situation can get predatory is
57:56
when mediums and psychics work
57:58
with the police, for example, an
58:00
issue we'll talk about in a future episode.
58:02
That's a hard line. If a medium is
58:04
seeking you to give false affirmative
58:07
hope, run the other way.
58:10
After I leave my reading with Reverend Dr Lewis,
58:12
I walked past the library, around the corner,
58:15
past the shop where they charged ninety bucks to talk
58:17
to you behind a thin sheet and back
58:19
to my hotel room where there's no hot water.
58:22
It's funny because I've walked around boast
58:24
of the camp at this point, around the
58:26
parks, the ferry trail, the huge Floridian
58:28
forest where there's a few marked bamboo
58:30
poles that memorialize where either a
58:33
hotel or a sanitarium burned down,
58:35
depending on who you ask, And I've
58:37
definitely been to the gas station. But
58:39
one element of the camp always stands
58:41
out, something that's visually and
58:43
verbally referenced all the time
58:46
because it is a critical part of
58:48
the founding myth of Cassadega,
58:50
and that is the Indigenous
58:52
spirit Guide. But for all the
58:55
talk of respecting and referencing
58:57
Indigenous culture, this is not
58:59
a history that's available in Cassadega
59:02
any more than the tragic side
59:04
of the Fox Sister story is one
59:06
that's ever referenced. So next
59:08
week we're going to tackle the next spiritualist
59:11
myth, the tangled colonial Mess,
59:13
and we'll take a detour to the world
59:16
of espiritismo. All that and
59:18
more on next week's post
59:20
Church. Ghost
59:23
Church is a cool Zone Media production, created,
59:25
written and hosted by me Jamie
59:27
Loftus. The show is produced by Sophie
59:30
Lichtman, edited by Ian Johnson.
59:32
Our theme song is by Speedy Ortiz,
59:35
That's Sadie Duplead, Andy Loholt,
59:37
AUDREYSI Whiteside and Joey Dubeck.
59:40
Music is by Zoe Bade.
59:43
Special thanks to guest voices this week
59:45
Ian Johnson, Sophie Lichtman, Sharene,
59:48
Lonnie Units and Caitlin Drante
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