Victorian Occult
Spiritualism, urban myths and 19th century superstition
On 1 April 1848, ten-year-old Catherine Fox and her sister Margaret, 14, received a mysterious visitor at their home in New York – a ghost. The spirit, which went by the name Mr Splitfoot (a popular name for the devil at the time) communicated with the girls through a series of ‘rappings’ – tapping out messages on a hard surface. It was able to discern their ages and answer questions they put to it. Later, the phantom claimed to be the ghost of peddler Charles B Rosna who, five years earlier, had been murdered and buried in the cellar.
As a result of these strange events, the girls and their supposed powers caught the public’s attention. They first visited Rochester and demonstrated their ‘rapping’ for a paying audience, later making regular appearances in
New York City. Having performed for such personalities as historian George Bancroft and novelist James Fenimore Cooper, the girls became a popular entertainment act and news of their otherworldly abilities spread to Great Britain. Of course, no one took any notice that the day the Fox sisters first ‘communed’ with Mr Splitfoot also happened to be April Fool’s Day.
“The Fox sisters created the first craze for spiritualism,” says Simone Natale, author of Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism And The Rise Of Mass Media Culture. “What I find interesting is that the emergence of spiritualism is considered to begin in the small town of Huddersfield in the state of New York, where they first reported experiencing this phenomena. However, really their demonstration in Rochester should be considered the beginning.
This was the first time spiritualism was presented as a sensation to a paying public. The Fox sisters also had managers and people who handled their relationship with the press, so there was an element of show business.”
Soon other mediums appeared, demonstrating their abilities in return for money. In the US and Europe, a spiritualism craze began as mesmerism, mediumship and magic fuelled the public imagination, seemingly in contradiction to the simultaneous growth in rational and scientific thought. The Victorian relationship with the supernatural is an interesting one in the supposed age of scientific reasoning, the era of Darwin