Hydesville

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On the last night of March 1848, in a story-and-a-half framed cottage where two country roads cross in Wayne County, New York, the knocking that had robbed the Fox family of sleep stopped being noise and became language. The younger daughters — Margaretta, fourteen, and Kate, eleven — found that the raps would follow them: snap a finger, and the sound snapped back. Their mother, Margaret Fox, set the test that mattered. In the sworn statement she gave eleven days later, she asked the unseen rapper, if it was a spirit, “to manifest it by two sounds. I heard two sounds as soon as the words were spoken.” From there she worked the thing methodically — the ages of her seven children rapped out in order, yes-and-no questions answered without a miss — until the respondent had told her what it was: a man, murdered in that house, and buried under it.

Neighbors crowded in that night and through the days that followed. William Duesler of the adjoining farm pressed the questioning furthest, and rap by rap drew out the story the cottage had been keeping: a peddler, killed about five years earlier for his money by a former tenant — the narrative names him Bell — and laid beneath the cellar floor. Within weeks E. E. Lewis, an attorney from Canandaigua, had gathered some twenty sworn certificates from the family and their neighbors and printed them as a pamphlet — the earliest record of the founding night. Two of the story’s most famous ornaments are absent from it: the dialogue beginning “Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do” and the peddler’s name, Charles B. Rosna, both enter the canon only in later publications, and no peddler of that name has ever been traced.

The house itself was young and unremarkable. Dr. Henry Hyde settled the hamlet in 1815, gave it his name, and built the small framed cottage; the Bell family rented it from 1842 to 1843 and the Weekmans from 1843 to 1846, and both later figured in the murder narrative — the Weekmans recalled that the place was already disturbed in their time. John David Fox, a blacksmith and farmer of Methodist habits, took the tenancy on December 11, 1847, with his wife and their two youngest daughters. Three and a half months later the house made the family famous.

What began at Hydesville did not stay there long. A dig in the cellar in the summer of 1848 fought groundwater before it found anything; in late July the diggers brought up pieces of crockery, traces of charcoal and quicklime, some human hair and fragments of bone — confirmation enough for the household, nothing that would silence a doubter. Crowds made the cottage unlivable, and the family scattered, Kate to Rochester and Maggie to Auburn. In Rochester, in the circle of the Quaker reformers Isaac and Amy Post, the simple rap code of the cottage matured into the alphabet-calling by which the dead could spell, and at Corinthian Hall in November 1849 the raps passed three examining committees that found no mechanism. From that platform Modern Spiritualism went out into a culture that mesmerism and its trance subjects had already taught to listen at the borderland. The movement’s history belongs elsewhere; the cottage’s does not.

Forty years on, the founding night was tried in public by one of its own authors. On October 21, 1888, at the New York Academy of Music, before some two thousand people, Margaretta — by then Margaret Fox Kane — declared the rappings a fraud, begun with an apple bobbed on a string and perfected in the cracking of toe joints, and gave a demonstration in stockinged feet; her signed account in that day’s New York World explained that “the rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee.” Kate, sitting in the audience, let the confession stand. In November 1889 Margaret took it back, saying it had been extracted under financial and other pressure from Spiritualism’s enemies. Confession and recantation are both documented to the day, and the record holds them side by side. The sisters died within a few years of one another — Leah on November 1, 1890, Kate on July 2, 1892, Margaret on March 8, 1893 — and the cottage outlasted them all.

Its afterlife was stranger than its tenancy. In 1904 the east cellar wall of the then-vacant house gave way and exposed a double wall, with bones lying between the true foundation and an inner one; the Boston Journal of November 22, 1904 announced that the peddler had been found at last. Spiritualist literature has treated the find as vindication ever since — the house keeping its dead man’s word after fifty-six years. The documentary record runs the other way: a physician who examined the find judged it a scatter of mixed bones, some of them chicken, almost certainly planted as a prank. In 1915 Benjamin Franklin Bartlett of Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, bought the cottage, and in April 1916 he had it taken down and re-erected facing the Forest Temple at Lily Dale, the Spiritualist camp in Chautauqua County — the movement’s founding relic translated bodily to its living center. There the cottage perished in the small hours of September 21, 1955, no cause ever fixed to the blaze; the salvaged artifacts went to the camp’s museum, and the ground it stood on became the Fox Memorial Garden.

How the founding night was written down and argued over

The paper trail begins with E. E. Lewis, A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox (Canandaigua, 1848), the pamphlet of sworn certificates collected in April 1848 and recorded at WorldCat; Paul J. Gaunt’s collation of that original against the reprint that carried the story to the world, summarized in KM Wehrstein and Robert McLuhan’s “Fox Sisters” in the Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research, 2018, updated 2026), established that the Splitfoot exchange and the name Rosna grew in the retelling, most luxuriantly in Leah’s 1885 memoir. Frank Podmore’s Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism (Methuen, 1902), readable at the Internet Archive, remains the psychical-research tradition’s sharpest cross-examination of the certificates, adverse by avowed design. Barbara Weisberg’s Talking to the Dead (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004) is the standard documented biography of the sisters and of the household itself; Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits (Beacon Press, 1989; 2nd ed. Indiana University Press, 2001) sets the cottage in the reform culture of upstate New York’s burned-over district and traces what the raps set moving among women in particular. The 1904 skeleton received its modern examination from Joe Nickell, “A Skeleton’s Tale” (Skeptical Inquirer, 2008), who confirmed the planted-bones verdict and found that the trunk displayed at Lily Dale entered the story without documentation — a concession its own curator made to him in 2006.

Hydesville kept the ground. On December 5, 1927, the Spiritualist publisher M. E. Cadwallader raised a stone obelisk on the empty site; John Drummond, a Canadian-born Spiritualist settled in the hamlet, rebuilt the cottage board by board from period barn timber on the original stone foundation; the replica burned beyond repair in 1983, and Drummond died attempting a second. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches took ownership in December 1999, exposed the original foundation, and enclosed it under a protective structure at what is now Hydesville Memorial Park, at the corner of Hydesville and Parker Roads. Around it stand the markers, the meditation garden, and Cadwallader’s obelisk, whose inscription says what the house was for: communication with the spirit world was established here on March 31, 1848 — “There is no death. There are no dead.”

→ Related: Lily Dale · Spiritualism · Mesmerism · Victorian Psychical Research Spr