Talking to the Dead by Barbara Weisberg

Author:Barbara Weisberg [Barbara Weisberg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061755163
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

“MY DREAMS ALWAYS PROVE FALSE”

WITH MAGGIE AWAY at school, supported by Kane and in retirement from public seances, the responsibilities for mediumship in the Fox family—both spiritual and financial—fell entirely to Kate and Leah. Sixteen-year-old Kate was hired by Horace H. Day, a wealthy businessman and the publisher of a magazine called the Christian Spiritualist, to hold free weekly meetings open to the public. The annual salary of twelve hundred dollars was excellent, but the work was hard, no longer fresh and exciting. Emma Hardinge, an English actress turned trance speaker and historian, also held meetings in the same building, and she sympathetically observed “poor patient Kate Fox, in the midst of a captious, grumbling crowd of investigators, repeating hour after hour the letters of the alphabet, whilst the no less poor, patient Spirits rapped out names, ages and dates to suit all-comers.”1 Yet compared to the weekly salary of three dollars made by a woman who worked in a textile factory, Kate was doing well.

Both Kate and Leah continued to hold seances for their private, paying clients, although now the two sisters lived and often worked separately, in part because the breach between Leah and Maggie over Kane had left scars. On her visits from Crookville, Maggie visited only her mother’s house.

After Calvin’s death in 1853, forty-year-old Leah moved first to Irving Street and then to Ludlow Street in Manhattan; Kate and fifty-seven-year-old Margaret took a home of their own on Tenth Street near Broadway. One visitor there, who called himself “A Searcher After Truth” waxed eloquent on the subject of Kate’s appearance, commenting on her hair—black “as the wing of a raven” and parted “in two simple curls, after the Madonna style, giving striking effect to a fair forehead of an intellectual character”—and on her eyes, which he observed were a brilliant black, but pensive beneath long eyelashes. She was dressed modestly in black silk, he observed, with a gold cross at her neck.

His enthusiasm for her beauty didn’t extend to her mediumship, however, for a spate of wrongly rapped answers dismayed him. Nevertheless, he remained curious enough to ask whether she had ever actually seen a spirit, and her answer seems to indicate that the spirits remained as alive to her, in reality or imagination, as they had been from the beginning. She replied that her grandfather, Jacob Smith, who had died in 1846, was often with her. Although she had never actually seen him, she knew by his characteristic actions, distinctive raps, and specific messages when he was close by.2

Jacob Smith seems to have been an influential spirit guide for Kate. For example, she once held a seance for the publisher and match manufacturer, Charles Partridge, at which a match boy’s spirit complained in cruel detail about the hardships of his life. Partridge took pride in his business, one that employed hundreds of people and turned out millions of matches, and he demanded to know who had sent such a rude and accusatory being. In response,

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