Margaret Fox and Catherine Fox

Margaret Fox and Catherine Fox (respectively, born October 7, 1833?, near Bath, New Brunswick [Canada]—died March 8, 1893, New York, New York, U.S.; born 1839?, near Bath—died July 2, 1892, New York City) were American mediums whose highly publicized—and profitable—séances triggered an enormously popular fad for spiritualism in the mid-19th century.

The Fox sisters moved with their family to a farm near Hydesville in Wayne county, New York, in 1847. The next year there began to spread through the neighbourhood stories about strange sounds—rappings or knockings—in the Fox house. The noises were ascribed to spirits by many, including Margaret and Catherine, and soon the curious, the gullible, and the skeptical alike were coming in droves to observe for themselves. Their sensational reputation spread rapidly. An elder sister, Ann Leah Fish of Rochester, New York, quickly began managing regular public demonstrations of her sisters’ mediumistic gifts. She took her sisters home with her, and soon the “Rochester rappings,” in a code whereby “actual communication” could be made with the spirits, were famous throughout the region.

In 1850 the three women traveled to New York City to begin holding regular, and quite lucrative, séances. Prominent intellectual and literary figures took them seriously. Horace Greeley was convinced of the authenticity of the sessions, and in the New York Tribune he enthusiastically endorsed the Fox sisters’ activities. With their subsequent tours of the country, spiritualism became a fad and the subject of major controversy as well. Dozens of imitators, including Victoria Claflin Woodhull, began performing as mediums, and a great deal of cultist and pseudoreligious crusading sprang up. No organized body of spiritualist thought or technique had previously existed; modern spiritualism and mediumism dates from the time of the Fox sisters.

Margaret attracted the attention of the explorer Elisha Kent Kane, who tried to persuade her to give up spiritualism and to seek an education. After his death in 1857 she claimed to have entered into a common-law marriage with him, and in 1865 she published his letters to her, possibly somewhat altered, as The Love-Life of Dr. Kane. After her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1858, she seldom served as a spirit medium.

For Kate a Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge was established in 1855 to sponsor free public sittings. Her séances gradually came to feature not only rappings but music, materializations, spirit writing, and other manifestations.

By the mid-1860s the stress of publicity and performing, together with the cultist aspects of spiritualism that they never really comprehended, had driven both sisters to drink. In the 1870s the sisters traveled to England, where spiritualism attracted a considerable following. Kate married Henry D. Jencken in 1872 and thereafter used the name Fox-Jencken. She returned to the United States in 1885. Three years later her children were taken from her because of her alcoholism. Shortly thereafter Margaret appeared at the New York Academy of Music and confessed that the entire matter of spirit rapping had been a hoax. She and Kate had begun it, she said, as a prank on their superstitious mother and had contrived the sounds by various means but principally by movements of their toes. The ranks of confirmed spiritualists, by then legion, condemned her confession as a shabby lie, told probably for money and possibly under the influence of alcohol. Soon thereafter she retracted the confession and returned to spiritualism for her livelihood. Both sisters’ last years were passed in poverty.