By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 5, 2026
Who Were the Fox Sisters and Why Do They Matter?
The Fox sisters were three siblings from rural New York whose claimed spirit communications in March 1848 launched modern Spiritualism. Maggie and Kate Fox, then teenagers, reported coded rappings from an unseen presence in their Hydesville cottage. Their older sister Leah turned the phenomenon into a public career. Within a decade, millions across two continents were attempting to talk to the dead.
The story of the Fox sisters reads like a small domestic incident that grew, by stages, into a transatlantic religion. A March night in a drafty cottage. A pair of frightened girls. An older sister with a sense for an audience. A Quaker household in Rochester that took the children in and decided the rappings were the voices of the dead. Inside two years, the rural anomaly had a public stage, paying audiences, and a national press willing to argue about it. Inside a decade, it had a literature, a clergy of mediums, and political allies among reformers who heard the spirits speaking, conveniently, against slavery and for the rights of women.
The sisters themselves did not survive the world they helped build. By the 1880s, two of them had collapsed into poverty and drink, and the youngest two would publicly confess fraud, then recant, then die within a year of each other in unmarked graves. The movement they unleashed continued without them. This is the history of a hoax that became a religion, and of the women who could not finally control either of them, set within the broader landscape of mystical and occult practices.
The Hydesville Rappings of March 1848
On the night of March 31, 1848, in the hamlet of Hydesville in Wayne County, New York, Margaretta Fox (1833-1893) and Catherine Fox (1837-1892) called their parents into the bedroom. The children, then aged fourteen and eleven, said an invisible knocker was answering their questions. The youngest, Kate, snapped her fingers and asked the presence to repeat. It did. Their mother questioned the rapper about the ages of her children, including a child who had died, and the answers came back accurately [1].
The Cottage and the Peddler Story
The Fox family had moved into the Hydesville cottage only the previous December. The house already had a reputation among neighbors for unexplained noises, and earlier tenants had reported similar disturbances. Once the family began coding the raps, asking for one knock for yes and two for no, an answer emerged. The rapper claimed to be the spirit of a peddler named Charles B. Rosna, murdered five years earlier and buried in the cellar [1].
No missing person matching the name was ever produced. Excavations of the cellar turned up partial bones and a few teeth, results that locals took as confirmation. In 1904, after a wall in the cottage collapsed, a fresh cluster of bones was found, and the Boston Journal reported the discovery as proof of the original story, as documented in the archival summary maintained at Wikipedia from contemporary press accounts. Forensic examination later identified at least some of the recovered material as animal bone. The peddler, in any historical sense, has never been located [1].
The Older Sister Steps In
Within weeks, the girls were sent to Rochester to stay with their older married sister, Ann Leah Fox Fish (1813-1890). Leah, a music teacher and a much shrewder figure than either of her younger sisters, recognized at once what the rappings might become. She moved the children into her house, hosted small sittings for friends, and began the slow work of turning a domestic prank into a public phenomenon. The Hydesville cottage was abandoned. The center of the story shifted to the city.
From Rochester to a National Stage
Rochester in the late 1840s sat at the heart of the Burned-over District, the corridor of upstate New York where Methodist revivals, abolitionist conventions, the Latter Day Saint movement, the Oneida and Shaker communities, and the women’s rights conference at Seneca Falls had all flared into existence within a single generation. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 had made the region a churn of new people, new money, and new religious experiment. The Fox sisters did not appear from nowhere. They appeared in the one place in America most receptive to their kind of news.
Amy and Isaac Post and the Quaker Network
Amy and Isaac Post, Hicksite Quakers and committed abolitionists, took the sisters in during the late spring of 1848. The Posts were no strangers to controversy. Their home was a station on the Underground Railroad, and Frederick Douglass was a regular visitor. They became early converts to the rappings, and through their dense network of reform-minded friends, the news of the Fox sisters spread laterally across the same lines that had been carrying the antislavery message for a decade, a transmission process traced in detail by the Society for Psychical Research’s Psi Encyclopedia [2]. This is the social fact that makes early Spiritualism legible: it traveled on a road already paved by radical reform.
Corinthian Hall, November 1849
On November 14, 1849, the Fox sisters gave their first public demonstration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester before a paying audience of about four hundred. Three committees of skeptical citizens were appointed in succession to discover how the raps were produced. Each committee, including a panel that examined the sisters in private and required them to stand on glass insulators or with their feet bound, returned to the hall and reported it could not detect the source of the sounds. The audience, primed for exposure, was instead presented with public bafflement. The reputation of the rappings, and of the sisters, hardened into something the press could not easily dismiss [1].
How Spiritualism Became a Movement
By June 1850, the three sisters were in New York City holding paid sittings at Barnum’s Hotel. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one of the most influential journalists in the country, paid a private visit, declared himself unable to explain what he had observed, and ran enthusiastic notices in his paper, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s biographical entry on the sisters records. James Fenimore Cooper attended a sitting and reportedly received raps identifying his deceased sister. William Cullen Bryant, George Bancroft, and other figures of the New York literary establishment attended sittings or wrote about them [3].
Andrew Jackson Davis and the Theological Architecture
The rappings were a phenomenon, not a doctrine. The doctrine came from Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910), a young clairvoyant from Poughkeepsie whose Principles of Nature: Her Divine Revelations had been published in 1847, the year before the Hydesville events. Davis described an afterlife of progressive spiritual development through seven spheres he called Summerland, blending Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions and Franz Mesmer’s theories of animal magnetism into a homegrown American cosmology. When the Fox phenomenon arrived a year later, his framework was waiting. Davis simply identified the rappings as the proof his system had predicted [3].
Spread by Press, Pamphlet, and Pulpit
Within five years, traveling lecturers, mediums, and trance speakers were active in every major American city and across Britain. Spiritualist newspapers proliferated, including The Spiritual Telegraph in New York and the Banner of Light in Boston. Estimates of adherents climbed steadily. By 1897, partisans claimed more than eight million believers in the United States and Europe combined, drawn mostly from the literate middle and upper classes for whom orthodox Christianity had begun to feel cold and the new geology and biology had begun to feel threatening [4].
Spiritualism, Reform, and the Civil War
The early Spiritualists were unusually political for a religious movement. The same Quaker-abolitionist networks that adopted the Fox sisters at Rochester were already advancing the cause of women’s suffrage. The historian Ann Braude argues, in her 1989 study Radical Spirits, that Spiritualism gave nineteenth-century American women their first widely accepted public speaking platform. To channel a spirit was to speak with an authority that ordinary social rules did not permit a woman to claim. The trance, paradoxically, was a form of free speech.
The War’s Ledger of Grief
The American Civil War of 1861-1865 produced an estimated 750,000 military deaths, more than any other conflict in American history. Households across the North and South were marked by sudden, often unwitnessed loss. The Spiritualist promise that the dead were not gone but only changed met an enormous emotional need. Mary Todd Lincoln, after the death of her son Willie in 1862, hosted as many as eight séances in the White House, an arc reconstructed in Karen Abbott’s Smithsonian Magazine essay on the period. President Lincoln himself attended at least one. Mary’s preferred medium for a time, Nettie Colburn Maynard, claimed to have produced trance speeches in the president’s presence on the question of emancipation [4].
Limits and Critics
Skepticism never disappeared. Michael Faraday’s experiments on the moving table, published in 1853, demonstrated that table-tilting could be explained by unconscious muscular pressure from sitters, not spirits. Robert Hare, a respected chemist, conducted laboratory tests and pronounced himself a believer, which his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania regarded as a tragedy of credulous old age. The historian Ruth Brandon, in her 1983 book The Spiritualists, traces the long parade of mediums caught with bell rings, hidden silk threads, gauze, phosphorus, and confederates. The movement’s own ranks supplied many of these exposures.
The Sisters’ Lives After Fame
Maggie Fox traveled to Washington in the 1850s and met Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), the celebrated Arctic explorer. Their courtship, recorded in surviving letters, was passionate and complicated by Kane’s wealthy family, who disapproved of a medium. Kane died of stroke in Havana in 1857. Maggie always insisted they had been married in a private declaration, and she took the name Margaret Fox Kane for the rest of her life. She converted to Catholicism in his memory and left the séance circuit for several years before drink and need forced her back [3].
Kate, London, and the Jenckens
Kate Fox built a career as one of the era’s most credited physical mediums and traveled to England in 1871, where she gave sittings under controlled conditions to the chemist William Crookes. Crookes published a series of reports describing phenomena he could not explain, including raps audible at a distance from the medium’s body. Kate married H.D. Jencken, a London barrister and Spiritualist, in 1872. The couple had two sons. Jencken died in 1881, and Kate, like her sister, declined into alcoholism. By the late 1880s, both younger sisters were poor, ill, and estranged from Leah, whose third marriage to the wealthy insurance broker David Underhill had moved her into a stratum the others could not reach.
Leah’s Book, the Sisters’ Resentment
In 1885, Leah published The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism under her married name, Underhill. The book recast her own role as the indispensable manager and mentor of the founding mediums. Maggie and Kate, reading from their tenement rooms, were furious. The conditions for what came next were laid in that anger as much as in their poverty.
The 1888 Confession and the 1889 Recantation
On the night of October 21, 1888, Margaret Fox Kane stood on the stage of the New York Academy of Music. A reporter from the New York World had paid her fifteen hundred dollars for a signed exposure. With Kate seated in support, Maggie removed her shoe, placed her right foot on a small wooden stool, and produced loud, sharp raps audible throughout the hall of more than two thousand people. Three physicians from the audience came to the stage and verified that the sounds came from her toe joints, snapped against the wooden surface by trained control of the muscles below the knee, in the demonstration recounted by History.com from contemporary newspaper coverage [5].
The Mechanics of the Raps
In her signed confession, Maggie described how she and Kate had begun cracking their toes and ankle joints as a prank to frighten their mother in the spring of 1848. The sounds, she explained, came from snapping the second joint of the big toe against the bones beside it, a trick she said any practiced child could learn. Knuckles, knees, and other joints could be added for variety. Kate, sitting silently in a box that night, did not contradict her [5]. The performance was the most thorough public exposure any of the era’s celebrated mediums received.
The Recantation
The confession was less stable than it appeared. By November 1889, just over a year later, Margaret had retracted it in writing. She blamed her own state of mind, the fifteen hundred dollars, and pressure from anti-Spiritualist Catholic clergy. Believers were unmoved by the original exposure and unmoved by the retraction. Skeptics were unmoved in the other direction. The movement had grown beyond the women who had begun it. Both Maggie and Kate died in 1892 and 1893 respectively, in poverty, within nine months of each other. They were buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn [3].
What Historians Now Say
The careful historical work on the sisters, including Barbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead (2004) and Nancy Rubin Stuart’s The Reluctant Spiritualist (2005), takes the 1888 confession as substantively reliable while complicating the picture around it. Toe-snapping accounts for the rappings. It does not, by itself, account for the broader reception. The historiographic question that survives is not whether the original phenomenon was a child’s trick. It is why so many serious people, in two countries, on either side of a confession and a recantation, found the basic claim of the survival of consciousness so necessary that the trick scarcely mattered.
That second question opens onto territory the simple fraud narrative cannot cover. The Civil War’s mass bereavement, the strain of new science on old theology, the political work that female mediums could do under the cover of trance, the genuine philosophical attractions of an experimentally testable afterlife. The Fox sisters lit a fuse. The powder had been laid for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Fox sisters’ rappings begin?
The Hydesville rappings began on the night of March 31, 1848, when Margaretta and Catherine Fox, then aged fourteen and eleven, called their parents into the bedroom of their Wayne County, New York cottage. Spiritualists later observed March 31 as Hydesville Day, the foundational date of the modern movement.
Who were the three Fox sisters?
Ann Leah Fox (1813-1890), the eldest, managed her younger sisters’ careers and married three times, the last to the wealthy insurance broker David Underhill. Margaretta Fox (1833-1893), known as Maggie, became the movement’s most public face. Catherine Fox (1837-1892), known as Kate, gave the most credited sittings under scientific observation, including those of the chemist William Crookes in London.
How were the rappings actually produced?
In her 1888 New York Academy of Music demonstration, Margaret Fox showed that the sounds came from snapping the joints of her toes against a wooden surface. With practiced control of the muscles below the knee, she produced raps loud enough to fill a hall of two thousand. Knuckles, knees, and other joints could be used for variety.
Why did Spiritualism spread so quickly?
Spiritualism arrived during a period of rapid religious experiment in the Burned-over District of upstate New York, traveled along Quaker abolitionist networks already practiced at moving controversial ideas, and offered an experimentally testable afterlife to a literate public losing confidence in older theology. The Civil War’s mass bereavement after 1861 deepened its appeal.
What was Andrew Jackson Davis’s role?
Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) supplied the theology that the Fox sisters’ phenomena lacked. His 1847 Principles of Nature described a tiered afterlife of progressive development called Summerland, drawing on Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer. When the rappings began the following year, Davis identified them as confirmation of his system, and his framework became the doctrinal core of organized Spiritualism.
Did the Fox sisters’ confession destroy the movement?
It did not. By the time of the October 1888 confession, Spiritualism had grown well beyond its founders, with millions of adherents, an established press, and decades of independent mediums and writers. Believers regarded the confession as a product of poverty and pressure, and Margaret recanted it in November 1889. The movement continued and remains organized today.
What happened to the Fox sisters at the end?
Both younger sisters died in poverty within nine months of each other. Kate died on July 2, 1892, of complications from alcoholism. Maggie died on March 8, 1893, in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. Through the kindness of supporters, they were buried together at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Leah, who had married well, had died in 1890.
Was there a real peddler buried in the Hydesville cellar?
No verifiable evidence ever produced a missing peddler named Charles B. Rosna. Bones found in the cellar in 1848 and again after a wall collapse in 1904 were partial and, on later examination, included animal remains. The peddler is best understood as a narrative element generated by the rappings rather than a confirmed historical victim.
How many people followed Spiritualism at its peak?
Reliable figures are difficult, since the movement had no central membership. Partisan estimates from the late 1890s claimed more than eight million believers across the United States and Europe combined. Even discounting that figure for advocacy inflation, the movement was clearly large enough to support a national press, traveling lecturers, and dedicated congregations in every major city.
