By the 1840s, American preoccupation with death was widespread. The nation’s new cities were expanding, its immigration was at an all-time high and its factories and ports booming, all of which contributed to urban overcrowding and poor sanitation, which spawned epidemics of cholera, whooping cough, influenza and diphtheria. The mortality rate was on the rise. Nearly one-third of all city-born infants died before reaching their first birthday, and young mothers — bearing an average of five children each — were often fatally struck with puerperal fever. Death thus touched all families, leaving behind millions of relatives with memories of those who had passed to the other side.

Simultaneously, prosperity born of America’s urbanization and expanding economy flooded the marketplace with factory-spun textiles, dishes and furniture, prompting a new hope and materialism. In such an atmosphere, traditional religions like Calvinism, with its punitive doctrine of original sin, no longer seemed relevant.

A more significant approach to true worship of the divine, according to some, was brotherly concern for others expressed through meaningful social action. By the 1830s and ’40s, America’s new breed of humanitarians had founded dozens of charities and embraced social causes such as abolition, coeducation, temperance and prison reform. Still another symbol of that mood was the establishment of 40 utopian communities in America.

Contributing to that positive mood was America’s westward expansion. Frontier towns appeared seemingly overnight — so too did the nation’s expanding railroads, interlocking systems of canals and fleets of steam-powered boats. New inventions such as Morse’s telegraph suddenly linked once-remote cities and towns. By the late 1840s anticipation of a better life and the concept of progress had become a national expectation. It is an extraordinary era in which we live….The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief, proclaimed orator-statesman Daniel Webster in 1847.

While perhaps neither young Maggie Fox nor her sister Katy grasped the implications of their era’s zeitgeist, their eldest sister, Leah, had long hoped to embrace that promise. For years, the single mother had struggled to support herself and her daughter by giving music lessons to the offspring of Rochester’s wealthiest citizens.

Rochester had been prosperous even before its connection to the Erie Canal. Opened in 1825, the waterway linked the city to Buffalo to the west and Syracuse, Albany, the Hudson River and New York City to the east, and turned Rochester into America’s first inland boom town, as one historian dubbed it. Its wealth inevitably attracted swindlers, wastrels and atheists who, according to the local population, brought godlessness, poverty and the abuse of alcohol.

During the period of religious revivalism known as America’s Second Great Awakening, scores of charismatic preachers consequently appeared in Rochester and other Erie Canal communities to offer salvation through a variety of evangelical and innovative sects. Among them were the Shakers, Mormons and the Millerites, whose followers abandoned their worldly goods in preparation for a Second Coming, predicted for 1843 and ‘44. In the wake of the failed coming of the Day of Judgment and other religious exuberances, a spiritual cynicism settled over the area. To Leah Fox Fish, who had personally witnessed that evolution, the community seemed ripe for a new religious expression. A practical woman with an opportunistic bent, she had hastened to investigate the rappings associated with Maggie and Katy.

Determined to plumb the mystery, Leah drew her sisters aside and, promising to keep their confidence, wrested the secret of the raps from them. Repeatedly, Leah tried to reproduce the noises under Maggie and Katy’s tutelage, but could make only the faintest of sounds. Later, after inviting Katy to Rochester, perhaps to practice the rapping skills herself, Leah shrewdly claimed in her memoir that the ghost had followed her to Rochester and so disturbed her household that she was forced to move. Yet, Leah’s next residence, half of a two-family house, was adjacent to a cemetery — an odd choice for someone eager to escape hauntings.

Mrs. Fox soon joined Leah and Katy, with Maggie in tow. No sooner were the younger sisters united than they grew bolder, filling the house with even more raucous ghost disturbances. Leah eventually decided that it was time to share the spirits with others. Appointing herself as official interpreter of the raps, she demanded that Maggie and Katy conduct séances in Rochester under her tutelage. To bolt was impossible, Maggie later explained, for Leah threatened to accuse her and Katy of deceiving her with raps — just as they had their parents and the Hydesville community. Thus intimidated, an embittered Maggie later told the New York World, Katie and I were led around like lambs.

The very first to be invited were Leah’s closest friends, Amy and Isaac Post, a Quaker couple who were abolitionists, members of Rochester’s underground railroad and leading social reformers. Earlier, the middle-aged couple had rejected their Hicksite Quaker sect because of its intolerances and thus seemed well suited to receiving Leah’s new idea of spirit communication as a faith. When Leah described the hauntings in June 1948, the Posts initially laughed and then asked if the family were suffering under some psychological delusion.

The couple, however, like others of that era, had lost several youngsters to illnesses, and ultimately they agreed to participate in a séance. To their surprise the messages Maggie and Katy rapped out and which Leah translated were so personal as to be convincing. The Posts immediately became believers and were soon enthusiastically promoting their belief in the Fox sisters’ spiritual manifestations to others.

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