Waking the Witch by Pam Grossman

Author:Pam Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

BELIEF IN SUPERSENSORY female powers far outlasted Shakespeare’s time, and it presented itself in new skins and semantics 250 years after he penned Macbeth. During the Spiritualist movement of mid-nineteenth- century America, the word witchcraft would not be used nearly as often, but the constituent parts of femininity intersecting with phantom forces remained the same.

In 1848, the adolescent sisters Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, made quite a commotion when they told people of the strange rapping sounds they heard throughout their house. In the ensuing months, they began to communicate with “Mr. Splitfoot,” the devilish name they gave to the spirit that they said was the source of the knocking. According to the girls, this entity later identified himself as the ghost of one Mr. Charles B. Rosna, and he told them that he had been murdered and buried in their cellar five years prior. Alarmed neighbors came to dig beneath the house. When they found some pieces of bone, an investigation commenced, and a local man was arrested for the alleged murder. Word spread of the shocking incident, and soon the Fox farm was overrun by people who wanted to meet the girls who talked to the dead. Amid the hubbub, eleven-year-old Kate and fourteen-year-old Margaret were collected by their thirty-three-year-old sister, Leah, to come live with her in Rochester. But they could not escape the rumors of their revenant-canoodling.

The girls confessed to Leah that the whole thing had been a hoax (though they would later recant). Rather than blow their cover, Leah smelled opportunity. She began having them hold paid séances and appointed herself the “interpreter” of the rappings. Their reputations quickly grew, and they attracted both the interest of curious paying visitors and the scorn of local clergy, who called them heretics and witches. Demand for their services began coming from far and wide, and soon they were traveling to places like New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, to demonstrate their miraculous mediumship. Large crowds of believers and skeptics alike came to see the supernatural sisters. But their impact was to be much larger than they ever imagined. The craze for having heart-to-hearts with the disembodied began to take hold.

The time was ripe for it. Certainly people had long attempted to speak to the dead. But mid-nineteenth-century America was a hotbed of alternative spirituality, especially throughout what came to be called the Burned-Over District of upstate New York. Some groups sought to reject the Calvinist idea that all souls were damned from the start, and that only the most pious people could be saved. A faction of radical Quakers was particularly invested in the idea that all human beings were equal regardless of race or gender—a sentiment that was beginning to catch on in more open-minded circles. Communication with the other side seemed to confirm that bodies were mere shells and that the spirit was what truly mattered. People throughout the US and Europe began holding séances in their parlors and using methods

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