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Episode 49: The Wild Women of the Occult
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Welcome back Witches! This week's episode is going to profile a couple female occultist. So get in losers, and let's learn about the wild Madame Bavatsky and The Fox Sisters.
We would be forever thankful if you left our podcast a 5-Star review. If you really loved the show and want more Get in Loser content, check out our Supercast & Buy Me a Coffee links below. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @GetinWitches, on TikTok @weredoingwitchcraft or email us at weredoingwitchcraft@gmail.com. You can support our show through our
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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio- The Witch
References:
- Wils, Matthew. Spiritualism, Science, and the Mysterious Madame Blavatsky. (2016). https://daily.jstor.org/spiritualism-science-and-the-mysterious-madame-blavatsky/
- Guy, David. The Mysterious Madame B. https://tricycle.org/magazine/mysterious-madame-b/
- The Last Podcast on the Left Episodes 410-412
- White, Edward (2016). In the Joints of their toes. The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/04/in-the-joints-of-their-toes/
- Wikipedia. The Fox Sisters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_sisters
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Witchcraft Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Do you feel drawn to learn more about witchcraft and the occult, but feel lost in where to start? Then welcome to Get In, Loser, We're Doing Witchcraft, a podcast all about what it means to be a witch and where to get started on your journey. Join us as we navigate through various witchy topics and share what we have learned about the craft.
Madame Blavatsky's Mysterious Life
00:00:17
Speaker
So get in, witches, as we profile Madame Blavatsky and the Fox sisters.
00:00:54
Speaker
So to start this episode off, I just want to preface that
00:01:01
Speaker
like while I'm about to give you a ton of information on Madame Blavatsky, it's just going to barely scratch the surface on the mysterious life. And she is just like one of the most influential occultists of the 19th century. This woman lived an extraordinary life, maybe, we'll get into that later. And there are so many rumors galore surrounding her 20s.
00:01:27
Speaker
So I will be talking about Madame Blavatsky, and Sam is going to be talking about the Fox sisters. I don't know very much about Madame Blavatsky, so I can't wait to hear about her. So I have listened, and I've told you this before, I've listened to a lot of podcasts that talk about her. And if, like, like I said, I'm barely even scratching the surface with her, like her life was wild. And the information that's out there about her is like,
00:01:57
Speaker
There's so much of it. So if you want a true deep dive, if you listen to this and you're like, I need to know more, the last podcast on the left did a three-part series on her, and they're all over an hour long. So it's multiple hours of her. And I didn't even think about that when I was like, oh, I'm going to cover her. I didn't think about how much information was out there just on her.
00:02:21
Speaker
Again, I'm going to give you a ton of information. You're going to get a lot. But just know that her life was just so crazy. There's so much more than what I could cover in a single episode.
00:02:34
Speaker
So Madame Helena Blavatsky has been touted as being the most famous and notorious occultist of the 19th century and is considered to be the godmother of the New Age movement, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves there because there's a lot before she even gets to that point.
00:02:52
Speaker
She was born in 1831 to an aristocratic family in the Russian district of Ukraine, and her life prior to entering the US in 1873 is one that is shrouded in mystery. Her mother was a renowned novelist, and her grandmother was an artist and a scientist, though she lost her mother at the age of 11.
00:03:13
Speaker
She had a very limited formal education during her school years, but her grandmother had an extensive occultist library and she read every book she possibly could from it. And this really set her occult foundation. And she did this all before the age of 15 too. At the age of 17, and this is, I'm going to just start this with, this is probably one of my most favorite things about all of the information that I read. I love this.
00:03:42
Speaker
like single bullet point. So at the age of 17, she married Nickaphor Blavatsky, though she never intended to stay with him. So unbeknownst to Nickaphor, Helena had planned to flee Russia following her wedding, leaving Nickaphor behind. To her, the wedding was just a way for her to avoid the close supervision over young unmarried women of the time. So she just saw this as like,
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm tired of being told I can't go places or do things because I'm a single woman. So I'm just going to get married. And now I'm not single. And they can't help me. Exactly. But she just planned to marry this man and bounce, right? So Nickaphor caught wind of her plans. And she was forced to stay with him for three months. But the whole time, she denied him his quote unquote conjugal rights. So she just wouldn't have sex with him the whole time. So he sent her back to her father on the account
00:04:37
Speaker
of her difficult demeanor or I should say he attempted to send her back to her father on the way like she was supposed to be going to the train station and instead she just boards a ship to Constantinople and then at this point denies her family any means of contact with her for the next eight years.
00:04:57
Speaker
She's just like, fuck off, I'm going to Constantinople and nobody's going to hear from me again. Right? Yeah. I was like, this is fucking hilarious. I had to tell Anthony about it and he was like, that's wild. Yeah. A woman born well before her time. Literally.
00:05:22
Speaker
At this point, she leaves her family behind, her new husband behind, and just goes off on an adventure on her own. And this period of her life, there's no one thing that someone knows for a fact to be true. Everything at this point on her life is just rumors and claims. So one claim is that she spent her 20s living an immoral life throughout Europe.
00:05:52
Speaker
which why shouldn't she? Another set of claims state that she had multiple affairs to include a German Baron, a Polish prince, and a Hungarian opera singer. Others claim that she spent time in Tibet with spiritual masters. And then another claim is that she had an illegitimate child and she worked for a circus.
00:06:14
Speaker
so random. Yeah, that is really random. Yeah. And then someone else had claimed that during this time of her life, like prior to her move to the United States, that she was living in Paris working as a medium. She's also believed to have spent time in the Middle East and Egypt. But the most official version that people believe is probably the true version says that she
00:06:41
Speaker
spent this time of her life traveling through the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Central and South America just because she could. She wanted to learn about occult topics, she was drawn to science, and she felt that the Christian religion itself was severely lacking in both of these things. So she spent time traveling to other places and seeing what else was out there, what other types of spiritualism and occultism she could find and learn and educate herself in.
00:07:12
Speaker
So that's like the most official version that's probably the most true about her life. Because of her murky details, it's believed that her credibility, even to this day, stems from those that were both impressed and influenced by her.
00:07:28
Speaker
In 1851, she met Master Moria, who would go on to become one of her two teachers that she studied under in her lifetime. Prior to meeting Master Moria, she stated that she had seen him in her dreams and knew that she would one day study under him. The other teacher that she studied under was Koot Humi, which what a name.
00:07:55
Speaker
there are also like speculations that neither of these two men actually existed. Like supposedly there's no documentation of either of them. Yeah, like outside of what her and her like counterparts have said, apparently there's no other documentation on these two men. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, yeah. Blavatsky described Moria and Humi as
00:08:22
Speaker
adepts or guardians in the secret doctrine itself. And with these teachers, Blavatsky said she communicated telepathically. And it was through them that Madame Blavatsky ascribed the special knowledge that she acquired throughout her life. After her attempt at a life in Tibet, she returned to live with her family, meaning that at this point it had been at least eight years, right? So this would make her around the age of 25 at like the bare minimum.
00:08:51
Speaker
I only know that she didn't talk to her family for eight years. I don't know if that meant that eight years went by and then she corresponded with her family. So she's at least 25 at this point, but she could be a little bit older. Okay. So upon her arrival at the family home, strange things started happening.
00:09:09
Speaker
There were constantly odd noises and rapping sounds on the walls and furniture that occurred basically wherever she went in the home. Another weird occurrence that was noted by her sister was that one night, like they're sitting in this room of the house and
00:09:26
Speaker
All of the lights and candles in the room go out as if a gust of wind just blew them out. And when they lit a match to light them again, all the furniture in the room had been flipped upside down, but there was never a sound of furniture being moved in the house. It just silently flipped upside down. There is no way. My ass would be gone.
00:09:48
Speaker
shortly after this she left Russia again and rumor has it that she fought on the side of Garibaldi in Italy and this is probably my second most favorite fact about her well maybe fact about her so she has this friend named Colonel Alcott who later goes on to become like her co-founder for the Theosophical Society that I'm going to talk about later but basically she tells him
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, like, oh, you're a Colonel? I fought in the war too. And he was like, women don't fight in wars. And so she shows him this old entry on her arm. She was like, hey, check out my arm. And she tells him that, you know, she was like, fighting this guy. And he like swung a saber at her and broke her arm in two places from the blow. And he was like, interesting. And then she was like, oh, feel right here. She had a musket ball.
00:10:45
Speaker
embedded in her muscle, in her shoulder, and she had another one in her leg. So like, she very likely could have done this, but also everyone's like, what? You could have done this? Her life is just like, everything about her is like that, where it's like, maybe she did, like there's some kind of proof that maybe she did, but I don't know how. So to add to her mysteries,
00:11:14
Speaker
Many of her detractors push that because she was a white woman, she would not have been able to live, let alone just enter into Tibet at the time period that she claims to have trained there.
00:11:25
Speaker
And while there's not proof that she ever lived there, she had at some point somehow been initiated into the deeper side of the Mahayana teachings. Like there's documentation that she was initiated, but there's no proof that she ever entered Tibet. Like no proof that she ever lived there. No like other trail of her being there other than her name is in the initiations. What a lie. That is crazy.
00:11:55
Speaker
She's wild, I swear. She's like one of the most wild people I've ever read about. So because of her travels, she boasted a well-rounded education in Eastern beliefs, and her contribution to Western religion are said to be that she gave occultism an eastward orientation.
00:12:13
Speaker
while also helping to turn Europeans and Americans toward Eastern religion and philosophies. She's said to have been instrumental
Theosophical Society and Blavatsky's Influence
00:12:20
Speaker
in encouraging the West to turn toward India for spiritual enlightenment.
00:12:26
Speaker
There have been accounts of Blavatsky being discussed in interviews that helped give credit to her being different from what would have been considered the standard of the time, and all of it was given an admiration. Well, all of these were given an admiration. Of course, there were a lot of people that had some not great things to say about her as well.
00:12:48
Speaker
In an interview, her sister spoke fondly of her in childhood, stating, and this is a direct quote from the interview, for Helen, all nature seemed animated with mysterious life of its own. She heard the voice of every object and form. She claimed consciousness and being even for visible but inanimate objects such as pebbles, molds, and pieces of decaying phosphorescent temper.
00:13:13
Speaker
She also had a centenarian childhood friend named, and I know I'm gonna butcher this, there was no pronunciation on this, but it's, I think, Barnag Burak? Could be wrong, who knows. But he was known as a holy man, a healer, and a magician, and he was quoted saying to Blavatsky's sister, this little lady is quite different from all of you. There are great events lying in wait for her in the future.
00:13:41
Speaker
He's like, guess what? You guys all suck. She doesn't. She's going to go on to do great things. And author Rick Fields, this is a person that I'm actually going to reference quite a bit because he did a lot of writing on Blavatsky. So he said of Blavatsky that she did not put on spiritual heirs. She smoked tobacco continuously and has sheesh on occasion.
00:14:05
Speaker
and had a body-rebelasian wit. She was at once one of the boys, Alcott called her Jack, and an aristocrat who knew so little about cooking that she once tried to boil an egg by placing it on bare colts. She was a complex moody woman given to sudden alternations between flirtatious charm and violent outbursts.
00:14:28
Speaker
As I stated earlier, information surrounding Madame Blavatsky became clearer in 1873 upon her entrance into the US. Madame Blavatsky published many articles and papers surrounding her philosophy, tying science and religion together with Darwinism and Hindu cosmology and occultism that she felt the world needed as a separation from religion.
00:14:53
Speaker
Madame Blavatsky felt that her contemporaries needed a religion that could meet the challenge of modern thought, and she thought that occultism provided just such a religion. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with Colonel Alcott, aiming for a combination of science, religion, and philosophy. The society was formed in New York, and it still exists today. So just a little bit about the Theosophical Society and how it came about.
00:15:22
Speaker
Alcott and Blavatsky lived together, they wrote together, they learned together, though they were never linked, ever being romantic with each other. Alcott's original interest was in spiritualism, but Blavatsky explained that the occult philosophy behind spiritualism was much more important. In 1875, they attended a lecture together, and it was here that Alcott passed her a note that read, would it not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study?
00:15:52
Speaker
to which she just looked at him and nodded. Thus was born the Theosophical Society. For the Society, they wrote three goals. The first was to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood and humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color. The second was the study of ancient and modern religions, philosophies, and sciences,
00:16:16
Speaker
and the demonstration of the importance of such study. And the last was the investigation of the unexplained laws and nature and the physical powers latent in men. The society didn't actually do well in America. At the time, people were more interested in the spiritual aspect. They didn't really care about the occult portion that came behind that. So it didn't do well at all.
00:16:42
Speaker
So while she was known to have a connection to the dead, said to be able to communicate with her masters telepathically, and was generally considered to exhibit a power of some sort, she refused to share these things in a public forum and would only do so privately with those that she felt deserving of it. Which I feel like she gets a lot of crap for this, but also like,
00:17:06
Speaker
if I could do any of these things that she claims she could do, I also would not be like publicly out there doing them in forums, you know? Absolutely. And would also only share them with people that I felt like deserved it or were like confidants or whatever. So I don't know why she gets a lot of shit for that one, but she does. Yeah, because I feel like that would make me more... I feel like that would... I feel like I would believe her more than in that case because it's not like...
00:17:33
Speaker
She's not solely after money, which it's not really later for the box sisters. Yeah. Yeah, so
00:17:43
Speaker
Alka and Blabatsky, after a message from Moria, took the society to India, where its success was like off the charts. Both Gandhi and Nehru stated that the society helped lead them back into Hinduism. It was noted to be instrumental in reviving Buddhism after Christianity left its mark by forcing others to adapt to their beliefs.
00:18:07
Speaker
Going back to author Rick Fields, he stated in a book that in 1880 in Sri Lanka, Blavatsky and Alcott performed the ceremony of taking pencil, which is the five Buddhist precepts.
00:18:21
Speaker
While also taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, he stated that it was the first time the Sinhalese had seen one of the ruling white races treat Buddhism with anything approaching respect.
Controversies and Accusations against Blavatsky
00:18:35
Speaker
And it was as far as we've been able to discover the first time that Americans had become Buddhists in the formal sense. I love that. And it shouldn't have taken until the late 1800s for that. No, no.
00:18:50
Speaker
So she gets a lot of crap for things, but then you read things like that and you're like, just a woman before her time.
00:18:58
Speaker
In 1879, the two founded a journal called The Theosophist, which became Blavatsky's writing outlet for the next few years. In 1884, however, a housekeeper and Blavatsky's employee claimed that she helped stage fraudulent phenomena that got Blavatsky her following and her accreditation in the occultist and spiritual realm of the time. And just a little backstory to preface on this one is so
00:19:24
Speaker
while she didn't perform things in a public forum she would do so like in her own home with like a few trusted people or if somebody came to her for something she would do things for them and this housekeeper basically said that they had
00:19:43
Speaker
cut holes in the roof together so that she could drop things on people while Blavatsky was performing whatever it was that she was doing for them or there was like secret passageways in the house where she could go and make noises and rapping stuff. So like there wasn't ever any investigation into her home to see if these things like actually existed but the housekeeper
00:20:09
Speaker
attempted to first blackmail members of the society with this information, and when that didn't work, she went public with it, and this started to bring question into Blavatsky's position within the society. At the same time, the Theosophical Society came under investigation from the Society for Psychical Research, which produced a 200-page report that detailed Madame Blavatsky's alleged frauds.
00:20:35
Speaker
The author of this report was named Richard Hodgson, and he said that he saw Alcott as a windbag full of vanity. And he went on to describe Madame Blavatsky as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors of history. Because Blavatsky had refused any public presentation in the past, she had no evidence that the accusations were false. Yeah.
00:21:04
Speaker
You have to think too, especially with the housekeeper and stuff, I mean, obviously it was money motivated. And then during that time, even though spiritualism and occultism were more accepted than a couple of hundred years before that, yeah, they still were. Yeah. So after this, Madame Blavatsky became ill and she died in 1891 in London.
00:21:27
Speaker
But before she did, she composed a book that is said to be her greatest work in her lifetime. The book was called The Secret Doctrine, of which the unedited manuscript was reported to have been three feet tall and is founded on the following three propositions. The first is, there is one absolute reality which antecedes all manifested conditioned beings.
00:21:52
Speaker
The second is the absolute universality of the law of periodicity of flux and reflux and ebb and flow. And the third is the fundamental identity of all souls with the universal over soul.
00:22:08
Speaker
This book touched on the birth and structure of the universes, and yes, that's a plural universes, and the pilgrimage of man through a series of races. While Blavatsky lost some popularity amidst the fraudulent claims of the housekeeper, the Theosophical Society has continued to thrive even today, and she's still listed as one of the most influential occultists to have lived, and her works still influence her readers today.
00:22:36
Speaker
Wow, that's really interesting. I would love to read that secret doctrine. Right. The secret doctrine, I can't remember who said it, but one of the articles I read said it was like one of the greatest works to have ever been written by a woman on these topics. Wow. Yeah. It's crazy too is like,
00:22:58
Speaker
I'd heard about Madame Blavatsky, but never heard anything in detail about her. And all of the history, what we learn in schools, everything, it's so focused on men, regardless of if you believe nothing of that, of any sort of cultist, just the things that she was able to bring towards America and accepting other religions, and then also showing respect in India to Buddhism and stuff.
00:23:28
Speaker
You would think that we would learn more about her as like, this is an example of how to do it. But we don't. I feel like it just all goes back to like,
00:23:41
Speaker
this is one of those topics that we just don't talk about. You don't learn about these things. And the thing that I think is just crazy about her is she did all of this in a time where women didn't do these things. Exactly. She just always pushed and went against the grain and didn't give a fuck what anyone said, what anyone thought. When she was a single 17-year-old teenager,
00:24:05
Speaker
She was like, I can't do anything because I'm a single woman. So let me just go marry this fucking idiot and fuck off to Constantinople. Like, you know, like she just.
00:24:16
Speaker
She wasn't the norm. She wasn't the standard. She didn't care about those things. She wanted to learn and she didn't think Christianity included enough science, which it doesn't. We joke that I have Christian friends that
00:24:35
Speaker
And I, this has been a while since we talked about this. So you might not remember, but I literally have Christian friends that post on Facebook asking how to talk to their kids about dinosaurs because dinosaurs aren't real. And I'm just like science science is real. Exactly. Yeah. So she like, she saw that there was a flaw in that system and was like, we need to.
00:25:02
Speaker
high science and philosophy and occultism into these things that should have them anyways. She saw something lacking and was like, fuck it, I'll do it myself.
00:25:13
Speaker
Wow. And just the fact that we're not, like we don't learn about this. Like she was so ahead of her time, but even just like, especially as it comes to like American history and stuff, like we learn about, oh, founded on Christian values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We should be learning about this too. Well, and the founded on Christian values is false. Yeah. The founding fathers were polytheists. Like that is not your Christian values.
00:25:43
Speaker
And while, you know, like, like you said earlier, whether you believe in any of the spiritualism and the occultism portion of it. And of course, like there have been like negative things that she was a part of and there were some not great things said about her, but the things that she was able to accomplish just blows my mind, especially for being a white woman of the time. You know, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. So, but that's Madam Blavatsky.
00:26:11
Speaker
kind of. There's so much more that you could read about her and learn about her. Her life is just wild and crazy. So if this was interesting to you and you want to learn more, I highly suggest doing a little research, reading some of the books about her, or listening to other podcasts that also have done deep dives on her, like multi-episode deep dives, because her life is definitely worth learning about. She's so interesting.
The Fox Sisters and Spiritualism
00:26:41
Speaker
Yeah, she really is. I'll have to go back and listen to some of the deeper dive podcasts because I'm intrigued. But now we get to learn about the Fox sisters. There's a lot of negative talk about the Fox sisters. I will say I have read other things and heard people discuss them on podcasts before and they have talked about them in the sense that they're
00:27:11
Speaker
could have possibly been the fact that they might have been sensitive. And that could be very, I mean, you know, they picked up on a lot of energies, they could have been sensitive, but a lot of the things surrounding them have been disproved. And so there's a lot of like, while some parts could be true, most of it probably wasn't. So I think like with the Fox sisters, it sucks because a lot of it, like I said, was disproved and it gives like, you know,
00:27:41
Speaker
like a stain on the spiritualistic movement. That's not to say that psychic mediums are not real, that any of this stuff couldn't happen, but how they went about it, it was the wrong way, essentially. So the Fox sisters, the two main sisters, I mean, there was three, Maggie, Leah, and Kate.
00:28:06
Speaker
Maggie and Kate are the two youngest sisters, and they lived in the 1800s in Hidesville, New York, born to John and Margaret Fox. In March of 1848, the family started hearing raps, thuds, bangs, and cracks throughout their little one-bedroom cottage, and the banging and the thuds progressed throughout the month of March. They became louder and more aggressive,
00:28:31
Speaker
And it felt like as if the the banging and the wrapping came from the floorboards, the ceiling, the bedsteads, door frames, literally everywhere. And the family had had enough. So the parents asked for help from neighbors and Margaret, the mother, was convinced
00:28:47
Speaker
that this was the work of the devil because obviously. What else could it be? Yeah, what else could it be? The neighbors were brought in to help, but they were awestruck by the continued banging and rapping and cracking sounds that seemed to be coming from all around them. They would also come in response to questions asked by neighbors. They would ask like yes or no questions and then one rap for yes, two raps for no. It was crazy.
00:29:14
Speaker
So soon, the cracking and the banging was determined to be from the spirit of a 31-year-old peddler, who was supposedly murdered by a previous tenant and buried underneath the fox's house. The girls called the spirit Mr. Splitfoot, which was the nickname for the devil.
00:29:32
Speaker
No one at the time knew the name of the peddler, nor did they think of asking the spirit what his name was. So, I mean, obviously it's a bit sus. And there wasn't any definitive proof that a peddler did in fact get murdered in their home by a previous tenant, but people were called that perhaps a young peddler had indeed passed through the area a few years back.
00:29:56
Speaker
I mean, obviously a young peddler during that time, there's going to be that. Exactly. So some even reported that Maggie and Kate's older brother David found bones and a set of human teeth buried under the house. But again, no actual documented evidence exists of this. And
00:30:19
Speaker
I've even read another article where it said that what was actually dug up was like chicken bones and like rotted food, so I mean that's most likely the case. But there's also rumors that the peddler's name was actually Charles B. Rosna. Again, I don't know how they have this information. I feel like it's just been made up.
00:30:39
Speaker
But there was also a rumor that their house might have been haunted before the mysterious wrappings. And like with anything, I mean, you just have to take it with great assault. Yeah. So the lack of actual evidence didn't stop the story from blowing up though. And soon the girls were all over the newspapers and the family had to move in with the eldest brother, David, to escape the crowds of people who wanted to meet them because they had made contact with the dead.
00:31:09
Speaker
Outside of David, the sisters had an older sister as well that I mentioned before named Leah and she was a school teacher and Leah didn't even know about the whole situation until one of her students brought in a newspaper and was like, oh my God, look at this. Like she was a teacher in another town, like pretty far away. And so Leah read the newspaper and was like, what the hell? And then she like hauled ass home to figure out what that what was going on. And from there, like she talked with her parents and she thought her parents were like,
00:31:39
Speaker
what's it called? I can't think of the word when gullible. She thought her parents were super gullible. And Leah surmised that her sisters were not being truthful and
00:31:53
Speaker
Supposedly, Maggie and Kate admitted to Liet that they had learned how to crack their toes with no perceptible movement. And when they did this on wooden surfaces, it sounded louder and it would project the noise and make it sound like it was coming from other places in the house. Here's the thing though, that part to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I could see like, okay,
00:32:16
Speaker
maybe sometimes, but the family and even the neighbors were claiming that they were hearing the rapping sounds all around them. You know what I mean? You're like toe joint ventriloquy. I know. That part to me doesn't make sense. Later on down the line, when they get more famous, I'm just like, okay, yeah, totally bullshit. Yeah. At least for the house, this is what makes me believe that maybe there was something else going on
00:32:46
Speaker
at the beginning, and maybe it was a little bit haunted, maybe part of it was fake, maybe, you know, it just because some of that is maybe they use to that to kind of like exaggerate it in the future. Yeah, so Leah when she found out about this and she saw like,
00:33:05
Speaker
Okay. Well, they're getting a lot of attention. She made a plan and she was like, we're going to make us all rich. So she moved Kate and Maggie to her home in Rochester, New York, where she would charge people a dollar for visitors to conduct a seance with her little sisters. I wonder how much money that equates to today's money. Oh my gosh. I don't know. Let me look it up real fast. So a dollar and 18, what was it? Eighteen, like eighties.
00:33:34
Speaker
No, that wasn't 1880s. Was it 1848? I've lost my mind. I don't know. 1848. Okay. Hold on just a second. Let me see. Yeah, yeah. $3,757. So a dollar in 1848-ish would be worth close to $40. $40, yeah. Yeah. So of course, this spread like wildfire and the sisters became so famous. They were performing in packed theaters in New York.
00:34:00
Speaker
and all over New England. Most believe that the sisters were actual psychic mediums, but there were a few people who didn't believe what was happening. And Maggie was the victim of a lot of abuse by people who didn't believe them. And she was almost kidnapped by a group of men who didn't like the show. And I'm just like, what the hell? But I don't know why Maggie was more singled out as the victim of the abuse. I don't know if it was because she was older than Katie or Kate.
00:34:29
Speaker
for whatever reason, she received the brunt of all of the hate towards them. But also, like, this show sucked. We're taking you with us. Right. Yeah. Like, why? What? Just leave her alone, please? Creeps. Do a Yelp review and keep it on your way. Zero out of 10 stars. Right.
00:34:52
Speaker
So in November of 1849, both of the girls were over it. They even wrapped out with their toes. We will now bid you a farewell during a séance, and the spirits seemed to be quiet for a few weeks.
00:35:06
Speaker
However, like their sister was like, yeah, no, you're not stopping this. And we're getting rich. Yeah, forced them to continue on. And I'm just like, at this point, I mean, well, I know Kate was still younger, like she wasn't like an adult yet. But Maggie was like 18 at this point, I would just be like, you know what, says no, I, I'm not doing this anymore. Or I like make it the worst ever. So people quit coming.
00:35:32
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. Oh, weird. There's no spirits here. Nobody wants to talk. So by the 1850s, rapping had become such a craze throughout the United States. By October of 1850, families or there was 40 families in upstate New York who were claiming to have the same gifts as Kate and Maggie. And it reached all the way from like Virginia up through Ohio, encompassing hundreds of families
00:35:59
Speaker
who believed that they were also psychic mediums and could bring about this wrapping in their homes. Who knows if they also had weird toes that could do that. I'm not sure how they were doing it, but- Toe wrapping. Yeah, toe wrapping. Not only were more people cool to have this gift though, many people involved in the science community like Thomas Edison, many women's rights activists and medical doctors were all huge supporters of these occult practices.
00:36:27
Speaker
lend some credence into what was happening at the time. And when I was reading about this, it's not hard to understand why this was the case. And you touched on this already with Madame Blavatsky, but there was a lot of new advances in science and technology like the invention of the telegraph and railroads. And this led to mass production and mass immigration. And all of these were changing the landscape of the world. And some of these inventions like the telegraph
00:36:56
Speaker
seemed like magic because now you could communicate from New York all the way to California or in Europe. So it seemed magical and a lot of people who were uneducated didn't understand this type of technology. So because of this, spiritualism allowed people to look toward scientific methods to prove the afterlife and to prove that God existed.
00:37:21
Speaker
And there was a lot of proof throughout this that the girls were just making up the noises, but most people didn't really want to believe that. One of the biggest proof that the girls were making up the noises was the fact that a lot of the ghosts of famous figures made appearances at their séances like all the time.
00:37:39
Speaker
And one guy, because Benjamin Franklin was one of the ghosts that would often come through. But of course, like, he wasn't as articulate as he used to be in real life. You know, because these girls were like uneducated from like a one bedroom cottage. So they couldn't, you know, they couldn't talk like Benjamin Franklin. I mean, not that they were talking, but they were toe wrapping, I guess, too. They couldn't toe wrap in these.
00:38:05
Speaker
Benjamin Franklin style. Yeah. So people would be like, wait a second. I thought he was a little bit more articulate than like, he's less smart in the afterlife. All this makes me think of is in the office when Kevin starts using less words in his sentences. Yes. That's probably exactly what it was like. And then someone in the crowd was like, wait a second. Why use more words? Yeah.
00:38:33
Speaker
And then on one seance, cushions were placed between the girl's feet and the floorboards just to kind of like prove that their toes were not making the noise. And of course, during this session, no spirits came forward and there was no wrapping. But Leah had like
00:38:54
Speaker
of course an excuse for this. She said that it's because of the abundance of negative energy in the room and only those who were pure of heart who believed without question would be able to witness the girl's powers.
00:39:07
Speaker
Oh my god. I don't like Leah. Yeah, I don't either. She was the worst. They were also investigated by Charles Grafton Page in Washington DC in 1853. And basically he found that the source of the wrapping was coming from underneath the girl's long dresses.
00:39:25
Speaker
which he thought meant fraud because even during the seances, he would ask the spirits in the room for the noises to be transmitted elsewhere on the walls or behind him or closer to him. But it was always coming from the direction of the bottom of the girl's skirts. And when they would lift the skirts up, I mean,
00:39:48
Speaker
they could move their toes and crack their knuckles without their toes really looking like they were moving. So it was hard to tell. So throughout this time, even with the naysayers and people who did not believe them, spiritualism spread throughout Great Britain, thanks to Kate. There was a lot to be said for her spreading it. She was able to not only communicate with them, but was also able to bring them in their physical form.
00:40:18
Speaker
So it's unknown exactly how she did this because obviously with the toe cracking, that was kind of proven to be fake. But there was reports that the spirits would appear in a psychic light. And I'm not sure exactly how they did it at the time. No one came forward to actually prove how they did it. But supposedly she would bring
00:40:40
Speaker
physical form spirits to life. And then Leah, of course, capitalized on her sister's powers and made a ton of money. She gained social clout, status, power, and opportunities she never would have had had she just continued on life as a teacher. And I believe I read somewhere too that before her sisters became famous, not only was she a teacher, but she was a single mom too. So she had like nothing going for her. Yeah.
00:41:09
Speaker
but then after her sisters became famous, she ended up marrying a Wall Street banker. So she was living the high life and just abusing her sisters, which is terrible.
00:41:19
Speaker
She's the worst. She really is. Maggie and Leah both had a rough life. Maggie had the worst of it, though. She was the one, the burden of the performances mainly fell on, I think, because she was older than Kate. And she was berated and victimized, and even, as I said earlier, almost kidnapped. When she was 17, so this happened in 1852, she met Elisha Kane, who was an Arctic explorer and Philadelphia society figure.
00:41:47
Speaker
His family were super rich and well connected. They fell in love and he wanted to marry her. He genuinely loved her and cared about her, but his family was absolutely fucking not. Even though spiritualism was more widely accepted, like we talked about, it still wasn't accepted by everyone. A lot of people with old money and connections, they just thought they were complete frauds.
00:42:12
Speaker
And so before his last foreign expedition, Elisha and Maggie exchanged rings and a common law practice with the promise of a wedding when he returned. But he never returned because he ended up getting sick in Cuba and dying. Oh, no. Isn't that terrible? So Maggie was shunned by his family. She wasn't allowed to attend his funeral. And they rejected her claim that she was his common law wife, which barred her from his share of his estate.
00:42:41
Speaker
She was basically just left heartbroken and destitute.
00:42:45
Speaker
And after that, she became an alcoholic to deal with the grief and loss of Elisha, as well as the shame and hate that she felt because of the spiritualism fraud. And she had a lot of shame associated with that because she knew she was tricking people. And so she ended up confessing in 1888. She made a public confession stating that she and her sister were frauds and she included a full on demonstration as to how they faked everything.
00:43:13
Speaker
Kate at this point was also a widow and had also become an alcoholic. And she was there in the front row. I don't think she even got on stage, but she was in the front row and confirmed everything that Maggie confessed to. The only person that never came clean was Leah.
00:43:30
Speaker
And she called her sisters attention seekers who put their grubby material desires before truth and righteousness. Weird. Right. Weird. Weird. Even though she was the worst of them and forced them to perform knowing that this was fake. Afterwards, when it all was said and done, she was like, I had no idea. They tricked me too, guys. I had no idea. I was just getting rich off of it the whole time and climbing the social fucking ladder. Exactly. I had no clue. Yep.
00:43:59
Speaker
A lot of people go back to the fact that for this confession, Maggie was paid $1,500 for it. Let me look up how much that was in today's money because I probably should have done that when I was researching this because $1,500 is a lot in this money.
00:44:21
Speaker
in 1888 worth today, over $46,000, so $46,862 in today's money. She was paid a lot of money to confess that, which made many people who believe in spiritualism and believe the sisters think that this proves that they were not faking it because
00:44:44
Speaker
she was destitute at the time. She needed money. So at this point in her life, she would have said anything. Yeah. I mean, there is some truth to that. Like I do think, like I said, I think, you know, there has been discussion about like, maybe they did have some gifts. Because I mean, there's only so much that you can like trick people on with the whole toe wrapping. But if they weren't able to like in seances,
00:45:08
Speaker
tell people things about them that they wouldn't actually ever know, then I do think that there probably was some gifts there. But during this spiritualism craze, they're the ones who made it huge in America. But during this time, it wasn't just about me knowing something about you that I wouldn't know. It had to be over the top with all these effects and light and ectoplasm and
00:45:33
Speaker
spirits and noises and stuff lifting off the ground.
Confessions and Consequences of the Fox Sisters
00:45:37
Speaker
So, I mean, they probably wouldn't have ever been as famous if they had just been psychic mediums and were able to see things and know things without having anyone tell them. So, who knows exactly. But I mean,
00:45:54
Speaker
just a tragic end to these poor sisters. Their whole lives from the time they were little, their whole adult life was just full of shit. Exploitation. Yes, because they're a sister and it's terrible. Well, and you said Maggie got paid. Did Kate get paid anything for this confession? I don't think so. She didn't get on stage. Yeah, she just sat in the crowd. Wow. Yeah, really sad.
00:46:23
Speaker
That is sad. I had heard of the Fox sisters and I knew the general idea of who they were and what they did, but I didn't know anything else. I didn't know this full story, and that's just crazy and sad. That's a really sad story. It really is, and I'm just like, I could never imagine having little sisters and exploiting them like that for my own gain. Yeah.
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah, so that is the story of the Fox sisters. They may or may not have been complete frauds or you know, there could have been some truth to it. Who knows?
Episode Conclusion and Next Preview
00:46:57
Speaker
Who knows?
00:47:14
Speaker
That's it for this episode of Get in Loser, We're Doing Witchcraft. You can find our source material for this episode linked in the show notes. If you love this episode, we would be forever thankful if you leave us a five-star review on wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you really love the show and want more Get in Loser content, check out our Supercast link provided in the show notes or search the Supercast website for Get in Loser, We're Doing Witchcraft.
00:47:37
Speaker
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