1: Not a Cult

name of the show already getting spicy. The coach bus I'm on costs a little too much money, but it's only four hours and it's pretty quiet, and no one sits next to me, so it's fine. I don't think anyone else on this bus is going to Ghost Church, strictly based on the fact that the bus driver himself praise before we get on the bus. He said, is this so if you couldn't hear, he's saying, Amen, ride the bus, Mr Gregory, ride the bus, And so we do.

We ride the bus all the way to the tourist capital of the world, along with a camp of mystics about a half hour off. The camp um heading to is called Cassadega. It's just outside of Orlando and is a spiritualist camp, a place where mediums commune with the dead and have developed their own community since the late eighteen hundreds. The people around them find it to be the devil's work or at best a little weird. The tourists find it intriguing, and I want to know who

ends up in a place like this and why. I was brought up between many religions and we kind of believed in this stuff, but not completely. It's definitely not the kind of stuff that Mr Gregory would approve of. The religion and called Spiritualism, occasionally referred to as American Spiritualism, has been around in the official sense beginning in eighteen forty eight, although it's central concept that the dead don't

die has been around for centuries. Their newer idea is this that wanting to communicate with the dead is a good thing. So in this show, I'm taking you on

two different trips. The first is how spiritualism got to where it is now as a religion that came up with the Shakers and the Mormons, but never really caught on in a meaningful way due to repeated scandal or a religion that was begun completely by accident by two preteen sisters, as either divine intervention or, as many, including the sisters themselves, have suggested, a prank that turned into one of the only ways that an unmarried, lower middle

class woman could make a name for herself. The second journey is the one I took to Cassadega this year, where I got a chance to meet people in person, interview them, get to know what it's like to be a medium, and figure out what the funk is going on there and how in the short history of American spiritualism so much has changed, And of course I get to talk to the ghost. What I will disclaim at the beginning of all of this is that I don't

not believe in the concept of spirit. It's called spirit in the West, or chi or sock t in the East. I'm open to it. So this podcast isn't an endorsement, but I do find it important in my work and in my life in general to be open to things and take them seriously and report what I'm seeing and noticing and feeling as I go through that process. So there's a lot of ship I don't like about spiritualism, but there's a lot of ship that I do, and most of it I want to just present to you

to draw your own conclusions. I don't particularly care what you believe, and I won't force or harp anything that I believe on you or don't. This is a show about an endangered American legion, how it came to exist, who's drawn to it, and whether there's really any chance that will stick around. If you don't like it, you can take it up with the ghosts. Oh no, do I believe in ghosts? The show is starting good. That

closes o for reasons I don't completely understand myself. All roads have been pulling me to Florida for months, and when one is pulled to Florida, it's natural to want to pull back. There's this feeling of are you fucking kidding me? That's not very nice? Have I not suffered

enough in this life? But the thing is, the places that are a common punchline in the way that Florida is are usually pretty interesting places with pretty fucked up people, and not for nothing, almost always have free popcorn in their bars. I'm from a place like that too. Unfortunately, for Death and for Florida, it was in just a funked up enough headspace to consider going. So let's get started with some ground rules. What is spiritualism and what

isn't spiritualism. I've been to Cassadego once before with my mom in It's not something I would talk about much where I live in Los Angeles, and in part because it's such a Southern California cliche, and in part because it is the best way to start a conversation with someone extremely frustrating. I try not to be self conscious

about it. You know, it's my It's my personal belief that as long as you don't literally run your life by tarot cards and crystals, they're really no more harmful than a hobby like journaling or video games, or my favorite toxic trait that you're not allowed to say anything about having a lot of guitar pedals. I like a

level with you. I've spent way too much money about once a year getting my cards read, sometimes by someone who I felt was really attuned to me, and more often a failed actor aggressively pivoting into their new method role of being fine with it. There's even years I've gone twice. If I'm going through a breakup, you know, I'll go twice. There's something comforting about it about imagining your life in an order. Oh no, here's the tower cards sudden of people. But okay, here's the Star card

that's renewal and and rest. You're right, I should go across the street to the place where they serve eggs like that. It's what the card said. During my last breakup, I found going to online videos of cards read by these upbeat young women who are cheering you on was really comforting. They kind of sound like this, this is Aso Taro. And in today's pick a card reading, we are going to be looking at how your person is currently feeling about you. And so by your person, I

mean ideally the person that you are thinking of. You might find another person comes through, or you might find I'm describing your feelings. Okay, fine, that's maybe maybe it's a little embarrassing, but you need it sometimes to cope, you know. But none of this is spiritualism. I want to be clear on that the general woo woo of it all intersects with spiritualism, but I'm not talking about something that broad because the idea has sort of spiraled

out in the last several decades. It's to the point where the phrase I'm more spiritual than religious is kind of a line that you hear from lapsed Catholics, but spiritualism itself is actually very specific. This series will address some of the cultures and ideas they pull from, going back hundreds of thousands of years, the lore behind seances, the appropriation of indigenous culture. The camp that I'm going to considers itself uniquely American. Whether you consider that a

pejorative or not is up to you. I well, I'm trying to put my opinions in this list, but obviously it is. My name is Jamie Loftus, and I love a freaky little American corner to wedge myself into. I grew up between a lot of different religions. I was baptized Catholic in a way that felt pretty mandatory, being raised by two lapsed Catholics in New England. And well, actually I've been sorting through my archives recently. This is what it sounds like to be baptized in New England.

I'm glad to you, becker Father. Okay, who is this, Jamie, Jamie, that's right, come right in, Please come right in, reach out, all right, and this is Jamie Bethany. Jamie Bethany, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But by the time I was forming sentient memories, we had already switched. My dad left the church in the weekly sense when his dad passed away, or transitioned to spirit in the

terms of spiritualism of ghost Church. So my mom and I sort of hop scotched over to a Protestant Congregational church that my cousins went to, and I liked it there. It was one of the only churches in town where queer people were welcome, where there was a gay priest.

It was fun, everyone was nice. I asked my mom as she liked our church more than the one she grew up in once and she sort of sighed and was like, at least they have the lights on here Jesus Christ, which I think is the second most two thousands eras scathing takedown of the Catholic church in Massachusetts,

second only to Spotlight. But after about a decade of that, we were bored, and my preteen frustration with the concept of a confirmation class happened to line up with my mom's midlife crisis where she got a tattoo and more relevant, wanted to start exploring the spiritualist ideas that her childhood best friend, my Annie Karen, had been exploring for years with her husband, my uncle Dennis. I love my Auntie

and uncle. They had a house with a backyard that just kind of smelled really good, and they had tarot cards and runs and this huge cabinet that was carved to look like a wizard. And these ideas were just so different from anything that I'd ever heard about religion or faith. And so once a year for my birthday, I would get to go see my uncle Dennis and

get a reading. Sometimes he'd use runs, sometimes he'd use cards, and I would sit quietly, like you do with relatives you only see once a year, and I would just listen to what each card meant and what that had to do with what the fifth grade was going to be like. One time we went to a pagan church that they recommended that was outside. There were these rituals

that were led by women who talked to trees. And maybe it was the harsh way that your eyes have to kind of adjust from a completely dark church where God is mad at you to standing outside where the trees are giving you advice about middle school. But it was a little overwhelming and we only went once and after that we quit church altogether. But around this time, in the mid two thousands, something was going on in

the US. There was this sudden increased interest in the concept called spirit, the idea that we didn't die permanently like atheist thought, but we also didn't go to heaven or hell or were born into sin like the Catholic Church said. The alternative was that after you die, you sort of stay local. You watched the people you cared about in life, you guide the living. There's a possibility that you could even live again, take some time off,

and then live again and again and again. There were suddenly these celebrity psychics, big names like James Van Prague that it materialized in the late nineties, followed by your TV personalities like Sylvia Brown and for me, John Edward and crossing Over brought a medium from Long Island, not to be confused with the Long Island medium into our living room via this guy in a tight sweater and glasses telling women who looked like my mom that the

dead aren't dead and that it's not scary. In pop culture, the idea of spirit was kind of all over the place. There were these more benevolent spirits. You know, you've got Devin Sawa showing up to your dance at the end of cal for with this vaguely Christian unfinished business, or you've got the Catholic interpretation of spirit just absolute scumspewing possession movies where your head turns around three hundred sixty degrees and you yell at a poor Catholic priest, what

did they ever do? Well? Uh, you can google that. In the religions I grew up around, the dead would be judged and God was piste off. They tend to view children as being born into sin and compel them to spend their whole lives pulling themselves out of it. But spiritualism takes the opposite tack. According to them, children are born into infinite potential and love, and his potential is only helped or harmed through their own actions in life. So what is Ghost Church? That's what I wanted to

learn going into this series. What I knew is that it's a religion, and it's a small all religion and one that combines more elements of Christianity than I realized. I was surprised to hear that, lacking a seminal text of their own, spiritualists list the Bible ever heard of her as their text. But most importantly, spiritualists don't believe

in heaven or hell. According to them, the dead remain among us, rejoining the energetic flow of the universe that surround us, and spiritualist mediums and healers are able to see clairvoyance here Clare audience feel Clare Touch. I love that one. It sounds like just like a cartoon character, Claire touch and receive mental messages from spirit. They do

believe that Jesus existed, but not that he was a god. Instead, he's repeatedly referenced as one of history's great spiritual healers and mediums, referencing biblical canon like his returning to Earth in spirit, is, ability to communicate with angels and ghosts, and the very concept of the Holy Spirit as proof that their religion is a part of the Christian expanded universe.

You may not be surprised to hear that a lot of Christians are really not thrilled to hear this, but as it evolved, American spiritualism went beyond diet Christianity minus heaven and help plus ghosts. Nowadays, spiritualists come to the religion from all kinds of religious backgrounds. Since the nineteen sixties, Eastern religions have influenced modern spiritualists and slowly introduced reincarnation concepts, with at least one medium working at Cassadaga now who

converted from Hinduism. There's also the New Age movement that layers onto spiritualism very well, and that's an important thing. The vast majority of spiritualists came from other religions, ones that they were either traumatized by or didn't incorporate the way they saw the afterlife, or didn't believe in mediumship.

I'll be talking to a number of mediums and community members who range from lifelong former Atheists to former hardcore Southern Baptists and what that transition looked like for them. Spiritualism doesn't tend to be multigenerational. It's just as individual and experience as the individual spirits that come through after they're fascinatingly Christian feelings Sunday services. And yet they also insist that there is a scientific basis for the religion

when I'm still trying to wrap my head around. This is a quote from the National Spiritualist Association of Churches Spiritualist manual quote. Spiritualism is a science because it investigates, analyzes, and classifies facts and manifestations demonstrated from the spirit side of life. Unquote. Ghost church is a holdover from the industrial illusition in nearly every way. It has one foot in classical religious ideas, the other in aspirational sort of

half proven scientific ideas. There's something about it that's optimistic and a little half baked all at once. Okay, so what isn't ghost church? Because when you bring up spirits and you bring up a small community in Florida, the first reaction you're going to get from most people is, well, that sounds like a cult. And stay with me here. It's not a cult, or at least not any more of a cult than any other religion. And honestly, if spiritualism was a cult, they'd probably be doing better numbers

in terms of membership and income. Spiritualism is a fringe religion, and I hear you cult cult, It's not a cult. I hear you again saying not a cult. Means cult, and usually you'll be right. But Spiritualism is not a cult, although it's formal numbers are small cult sized, one could say small enough in fact, that the manual I was just reading from admits on one of its first pages that there aren't a lot of people involved, and that there's really no concerted effort going on to change that.

It says, quote, this manual is designed to be a handbook for ministers, speakers, and students. It is hoped that spiritualists generally will find it helpful in presenting the teachings of spiritualism, and that in sections of our country where there are few spiritualists and no mediums or speakers, it will be an aid to willing workers in holding regular meetings or other services. Unquote, this rhetoric is just too chill to be a cult, but you don't need to

take my word for it. In her Cultish, Amanda Montell breaks down the mechanics of language and classical recruiting techniques of cult like atmospheres, religious or otherwise, ranging in severity from really intense peloton instructors and multi level marketing schemes all away to Jonestown and Heaven's Gate and she narrows down these classic cult red flags, including things like quote unquote truth telling, ceremonies to give the leaders as much

information about each individual as possible, complete immersion in the cult, no clear time when rituals have begun or ended, behavioral control think sleep deprivation, diet changes, schedule, dictation, the whole nine yards. A charismatic central leader, usually a man, and usually attracting young white women to the fold, where spiritualism doesn't. There's a lot of white ladies, but there's no young

people really at all. Doomsday rhetoric when a leader's power starts to slip, withholding information by minimizing or discouraging access to non cult information, threats or forced isolation if one tries to leave, and all of these emotions, stopping techniques to suppress any doubt, and whether the ghost aspect of all of this freaks you out or not. None of these red flags really apply to Spiritualism at all, so verdict not occult. There's a world in which I could

see them becoming a cult. I mean, after all, we're kind of in this cultural moment where interest in communicating with the dead, with mysticism, with pick a card, tero readings on YouTube are at an all time high, and the spiritualists who commune all over the country, mostly in lily Dale, New York, and Cassadega, Florida, tick literally all of these boxes. Spiritualism even blends a combination of religions

and buzzwords that should mean it's thriving. They borrow Eastern principles like chakras, indigenous ideas like spirit guides on this bedrock of diet, Christianity, and a belief in Jesus. Granted, they don't use many of these beliefs particularly well, but their batting average isn't any worse than a Gwyneth Paltrow type. But as it is, Spiritualism has no interest in being a cult, and they don't really have the runway to make it that way anyways. A lot of the mediums

in Cassadega have day jobs. Most of them live in the community but regularly leave to see outside family and friends, go shopping, see movies, move about the world as regular people. They don't have much of an alternative. There's no food store in Cassadega, and the only restaurant there is open four and a half days out of the week. Something

that becomes very problematic during my time. They're mediums make their own schedules, and for regular attendees of the Spiritualist temple, the parameters of when they are on and off ritual wise are pretty clear. They go to weekly services, they go to individual readings or scheduled classes. Members of the church tend to join and leave the religion pretty often.

At one spiritualist church in Massachusetts, a vice president of a dwindling congregation was the first to comfortably admit that the people who come to our church tend to float in during a difficult time in their lives, often when they are a loved one, are struggling with illness mental or physical, or while they're struggling with a loss, and then they tend to leave, sometimes never heard from by the church again. And so you got kind of the opposite of a cult. You get a religion that appears

to be on a very slow decline. Those most involved in spiritualism are the mediums themselves. In Cassadega, this means taking part in a three to four year education process that can't be done remotely. It means establishing yourself in the community consistently for at least a year before qualifying to live on campgrounds. It means demonstrating healing or mediumship

capabilities in public under supervision. They don't make it easy to have this job, and so the majority of mediums are either local to Florida with some free time after work or around their families, or, as I would soon learn, had left their previous lives to become mediums. A job that here doesn't result much in the way of financial stability or cultural acceptance. So why do people do it?

It's a question that I have had a somewhat difficult time getting answered because for a small community, Cassadega is very protective of their members from the press, meaning me. There's this pr screening team that seems to consist of basically everybody in town, all of whom must approve of your presence before they will talk to you. I contacted the camp several weeks in advance, and by the time I was getting on a plane to Florida, they had yet to decide whether they wanted me to come at

all or not. I was sitting at the airport eating a very sad looking donut the week before Valentine's Day to indicate yeah, things are going great, and my phone rings, and for the first but not the last time, I have this nervous response to see an area code from Florida.

On the other line is Pastor Deb, a woman from Jacksonville, Florida, who serves as in this order, a pastor in Cassadega, the head of public relations for the Cassadega Spiritualist Camp, and an I T specialist in Jacksonville who looks after her elderly mother. We've been emailing back and forth for around two weeks. Hi, I'm Jamie. I'm going to be visiting the camp in early February. Would it be possible to speak with someone? The answer was somewhat ambiguous. Can

I call you? Um? Sure, and so Deb calls me twenty minutes before I get on a plane. She has a thick but kind Southern accent, one that comes from Louisville, Kentucky, where she grew up, not Florida. Mediums in Cassadega are kind of like struggling character actors in Los Angeles, Like barely any of them are from their most of them moved with a desire to completely turn their lives around, and they all kind of give the area this like weird reputation. Deb is sweet but firm when she gives

me the rundown. Getting approval at Cassadega is not going to be easy, which is an amazing thing to hear when you're literally about to get on a plane. I put my phone on mute and deep throughout the rest of the brownie batter doughnut while she gives me the standard rundown of who she is and where she is. She has past her deb She has been in Cassadega since two thousand and six, she became a certified medium

in and she's currently vetting three different press requests. So she apologizes for the delay and getting back to me. Who am I? What am I doing? Comedian? Interesting? How does that factor into things? The camp, she says, is run by volunteers. They have a library, but it's only open two hours a week. The camp doesn't want to give anyone ongoing support with their little spiritualism project, thank you very much. And there's a whole public relations committee

that doesn't meet until four days after I leave. So there's absolutely no way that I will be approved to talk to anybody or experience anything on the record at this time. Essentially, I'm fucked. So Pastor deb gently sets some ground rules with me. Of course, she can't prevent me from visiting, but the mediums at the camp want to get a better feeling of who I am before they approve my presence whole sale. She encourages me to experience Cassadega, meditate in Seneca Park, get a few readings

of the record. Of course, walk the historical path through Colby Alderman Park, where the state of Florida recently installed historical landmarks to tell the partial story of American spiritualism. Take their historical tour, meet tourists in the nighttime spiritual Encounter or photography tour real Thing, see Colby Lake at sunrise. She's very passionate about her religion and tells me in this amazing soft voice, continuity of life, connecting with spirit

is very important to us. Did I know that this weekend was their Gala day fundraiser and that there would be mediums speaking on everything from ghosts to self esteem to a lighthearted recap of the Chinese New Year? I assure her I do know this, and then I'll be watching on zoom while a shuttle bus takes me from a talk in Tallahassee to the Super Eight in Orlando. I'll be staying at the night before visiting her church.

She seems gently optimistic about me. It doesn't sound like there's a lot of journalists looking to report on the camp in a positive sense with an open mind, But her recommendations are all made to me very much at arm's length, generously. Her message was this, have a nice trip.

We're watching you. Good luck. I don't wish the experience of feeling that your character is being quietly judged by a group of psychics, healers and mediums who buy their very job description, believe that they know whether your intentions are good or not, and based on my initial reception, it's unclear if Spirit is sending them the message that I am. Pastor. Dub doesn't think of this as psychic surveillance, though she assures me that the experience will be a

very relaxing one. She says, this will give you an opportunity to just be well sure being under light surveillance is still being technically, we do that all the time.

I want to circle back to one of the important distinctions that keeps American spiritualism from being a cult that lack of charismatic central leader, again ranging in harm from the terrifying the Jim Joneses is the Keith rn aias the Donald Trump's or in the non death cult sense, your peloton instructor millionaires, you'r Gwyneth Paltrow's, your Bezos is your Elon Musks. There is no real central figure in

modern spiritualism, which is unusual. Most major religions have central figures and founders, and the crop of religion that Spiritualism came up with. You've got Joseph Smith of the Mormons, Elder White of the Seventh day Adventists, and Lee of the Shakers, and on and on into today. Most religions still have a top brass figure, whether that's the literal pulpe of the Catholic Church, the chairman of the board

in scientology, the Dalai Lama. The list goes on. Spiritualism has its founders, but no current leader, and that is something that is very deliberately done. There's a lot of figures that had a hand in making American spiritualism the media frenzy turned religious fad, turned public joke turned low key ghost church. It is now, but I'm going to start with its two most central figures, Maggie and Kate Fox.

Here's how spiritualists acknowledge these figures. According to the National spirit List Association of Churches, Spiritualist manual quote, spiritualism has no beginning. Infinite intelligence is eternal, without beginning or end unquote.

But then they say this quote. We are gathered here to celebrate a most important event that happened in a humble cottage in the obscure village of Hydesville in the state of New York, on the thirty one of March in the year eighty eight, an event that was the beginning of the now worldwide religious and scientific movement known

as modern spiritualism. It was on this day and in this home, as you well know, that intelligent communication was established between the young Fox sisters, who were mediums and who were then living in this cottage with their parents, and the discarnate spirit of a man who some years before was murdered there unquote. And here's the real story

with less generalization and more citations. Huge shout out to Barbara Weissberg here, author of the wonderful book Talking to the Dead, The definitive Biography of Maggie and Kate Fox.

So let's get into it. There's a ton of information available on the Fox Sisters, which is already a massive feat for women of their time, or rather girls of their time, because the founders of spiritualism were both very young when the religion took off, because they weren't trying to start the religion that would grow, consume, and destroy their lives. The more showy, more money driven Spiritualism of the eighteen hundreds once claimed over seven hundred thousand publicly

associated members. For reference, there's around four thousand in the u S today. Prominent members included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Todd Lincoln, Horace Greeley, and those who interacted ranged from Henry Butler Yeats to Frederick Douglas to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harry Houdini. The Fox Sisters, who all of these cultural figures would have known and many knew personally, aren't brought up by New American spirituals very often, and

it's with good reason. By many they're remembered as irredeemable frauds. The original debunked celebrity mediums. Maggie Fox full name Margaretta was born in October of eighteen thirty three, and Kate Fox full named Catherine in March of eighteen thirty seven, so fourteen and a few days shy of eleven on March thirty one, eighty eight. They were the youngest of six born in Canada and recently having moved back to

the US. In the small community of Hydesville, New York, a suburb of Rochester that no longer even exists, they were staying in temporary housing while their father, John and older brother David worked on constructing a permanent home nearby. Maggie and Kate were the product of a second act in their parents marriage. Their four older siblings, Leah, Maria, Elizabeth, and David were all adults with families of their own.

Their parents, John David Fox and the sweet and eccentric Margaret Smith then Fox, had had their first four children between eighteen thirteen and eighteen twenty, later separating when John's drinking, gambling, and philandering pushed Margaret to the edge and she left him. She moved back in with her sister and continued to raise the kids, telling them about their grandmother's seeing power.

Maggie and Kaith's Grandma was said to have slept walk often in the middle of the night to stock spirits she saw in a graveyard nearby, and was sometimes followed by her husband. While Margaret raised the kids, John began

the work of trying to get his family back. The kids all moved away as they aged into adulthood one by one, but their father remained in touch and eventually returned as a sober, disciplined, and enthusiastic Methodist, essentially an intense Bible Christian with an emphasis on reformation and sobriety. His effort at self improvement worked and Margaret took him back.

She had originally really regretted getting married as a teenager, but she was impressed with the work that John had done on himself, and the two moved across the border from upstate New York to a small farm in Canada, where they had two last children, Maggie and Kate. The farm failed and the family moved back, leaving one of

their children, now married, Elizabeth Fox, behind in Canada. Interestingly enough, Elizabeth also claimed that she had second sight and is said to have correctly predicted that she would die at only seven. Although in the eighteen forties how big of

a swing is that really? Anyways, Back in New York, the kids were thrilled to be living near their older siblings, their brother David, who had a wife and kids, their sister Maria, who had married a cousin because eighteen forties, and their oldest sister Leah, a single mom in her mid thirties with a teenage daughter named Lizzie living nearby in Rochester. It's kind of funny how siblings can have the same parents but also have completely different experiences of them.

Leah was over a decade and a half older than Maggie and Kate and had grown up with a single parent and an absent alcoholic father, while Maggie and Kate had grown up in a stable, sober, nuclear unit. But their parents are the same people, just in very different phases of their lives, and this same decade and a half was marked by slow but steady social progress in

the historically progressive Rochester area. Leah had gotten married and pregnant at fourteen, the age Maggie was in eighteen forty eight, but the interceding years had made it socially acceptable for kids to be kids longer, with more of an emphasis on education and less of an emphasis on getting married young. The Fox family was close and would remain us for a long time, but it was complicated. They were lower middle class. They were able to survive, but really only

check to check. And Maggie and Kate had this level of education, stability, curiosity, and confidence that their older siblings just hadn't had access to. So Maggie and Kate are at the house on March one. The weather is bad, the kids are bored, and one night their mom has woken up by the girls crying out that there was a spirit in the room. She believed what her daughter had said about second sight, but she understandably treated her youngest kids with some skepticism. After all, it was the

night before April Fool's Day. But the girls wouldn't let up, saying that there was a spirit in the room with them who had been banging on their walls and floorboards in these sharp wraps. The raps were disorganized and inconsistent, but scary, and Maggie and Kate said that this spirit had replied to them when asked questions in this Morse code like way. It didn't take long for Margaret to become convinced that they were telling the truth, and John

quickly was too. I always think this part is funny because it's a it's a risk to call your neighbors over so soon after moving to a new town about there being a ghost upstairs. But the Foxes, they're just built different. They don't care. They're going to call you. So they call their neighbor Mary over to get her opinion on whether there is or is not a ghost haunting their teen girls. The neighbors were, to put it, kindly,

not into it. Maybe this all sounds a little weird and old timing, you know, sure, people in the eighteen forties in a rural area believing in ghosts. But we're talking about a very specific moment in history here. We're in up state New York, three months and mere miles from where the Seneca Falls convention is going to take place, becoming the seminal moment in starting the first wave of feminism in the US with all of the white feminist

problems that came along with it. In this year, slavery was still legal in the American South, and many in Rochester were advocating for abolition, and Frederick Douglas would start

his paper The North Star. It was a time where science was becoming a more normalized part of life, and inventions like sewing machines and ice cream, and ideas that had less staying power and objective truth behind it, like the skull measuring eugenic scam that is, phrenology, and the concept of electromagnetic fluid, a new theory about how spirit could exist within your own blood and create all of the matter that surrounds you. And at this same time,

there was a lot of religious changes going on. New religions like Shakerrism, Mormon as a and Christian science became popular during a second Great Religious Reformation in the US.

The concept of spirit communication had been in the popular consciousness here and there, particularly through the idea of Mesmerism, a concept developed by a man named Anton Mesmer that leaned into the electromagnetic fluid theory and life after death, and was popular enough during the eighteen forties that it's likely that the Fox Sisters would have encountered this idea. It was this dual time of progress and extreme anxiety

in the Rochester area. Religious enthusiasts were worried that science would undercut faith, and scientists worried that religion would resist empirical evidence over traditional ideas and values, and spirit communication became this rare opportunity to marry these two. It wasn't quite a religion, and it had the possibility to intrigue the scientific community as they were trying to figure out

exactly what was going on in place. Is like the foxhouse, So the neighbor Mary comes over and is like, guys, Maggie and Kate are bored. It's a rainy day, and they're fucking with you. But upon getting there, she is genuinely struck by how scared the girls seem. When she comes upstairs, Mary humors them and is a little freaked out when she does hear the raps herself. She asks the spirit if it knows how old she is, and it wraps out the correct answer, thirty three knocks in

a row. She later told a local journalist quote, By this time I became much interested unquote. Redfield invited her husband Charles over to investigate as well, and focused on calming the girls, who seemed afraid that the spirit speaking with them wanted to hurt them and thought that they had done something wrong. In a statement that would inform

the direction of the religion would go in. Mary told the girls that they've done nothing wrong by speaking with the spirit, and that it didn't want to hurt them, a far less scary interpretation than religions that push that children are born into sin and have to pull themselves out of it. Mary later described one of the girls as replying, quote, we're innocent. How good it is to

have a clear conscience unquote. In the Fox Sisters biography by Barbara Weisberg, the author makes special note of another contributing factor that would have been a motivator for the sisters, the fact that death was a far more common reality of daily life than than it is for modern Americans.

Life expectancy hovered somewhere around forty About half of the children born didn't survive to their first birthday, and illnesses like typhus, malaria, yellow fever, infections, accidents, and on and on. These were the olden times. On it people were dropping like flies, and the industrial revolution creating jobs and factories brought progress and shared ideas, and yeah, a bunch of

new ways to die very unpleasantly. The spirit rappings continued through Kate Fox's eleventh birthday and the whole neighborhood grew curious. Their brother David began staying at the house to keep the growing crowds outside. The Fox home at Bay, and the sisters heard rappings nearly every single night. As attention expanded in the community, some writers and locals agreed that maybe this was an April Fool's prank, but much of the neighborhood held the line because at this point they

had heard the rappings. Insisted that the girls weren't manifesting the noises on their own, and that Maggie and Kate had been terrified by what was happening for too many nights for the prank juice to be worth the prank squeeze. Dozens of people began gathering at the house every day to hear the rappings from the young girls themselves. The situation hovered somewhere between local sensation and free sideshow act

in a sleepy town where nothing really ever happened. Within the week, local reporter E. E. Lewis had taken it on himself to chronicle and distribute first and accounts of what was going on, producing a forty page pamphlet called A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the house of Mr John D. Fox in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County, authenticated by the certificates and confirmed by the statements of the citizens of that place and vicinity. Come on, we've

got to get a better title. Louis spoke quite a bit to Margaret Fox, the girl's mother, who was characteristically flustered, enthusiastic, and defensive of her youngest children. Here's how Margaret described what was happening in her home. Quote. The first night we heard the wrapping, we all got up and laid

a candle and searched all over the house. It was not very loud, yet it produced a jar on the bedsteads and chairs, one that could be felt by placing our hands on the chair or while we were in bed. It was a feeling of a tremulous motion, more than a sudden jar. The girls who slept in the other bed in the room heard the noise and tried to make a similar noise by snapping their fingers. The youngest girl is about twelve years old. She's the one who made her hand go As fast as she made the

noise with her hands or fingers. The sound was followed up in the room. It made the same number of noises that the girl did. The other girl, who was in her fifteenth year, then spoke in sport and said, now do this just as I do. Count one, two, three, four, et cetera, striking one hand and the other at the same time. The blows which she made were repeated as before. It appeared to answer her by repeating every blow she made.

She then began to be startled unquote. At this time it appeared that it was the same spirit returning to the Fox house every single night, a spirit that the family didn't know, but who seemed to know plenty about them. And yet he didn't seem angry in the way that your average movie Poltergeist would be. He was trying to tell them something, and it seemed important. What materialized in the communication over the next days was that the spirit had been murdered. He'd been killed by a man named Mr.

Bell on a Tuesday at midnight. He was a man whose throat had been cut. He'd been taken down to the cellar and not buried until the next night, when he was buried ten ft below. Margaret Fox continued telling the local reporter quote. I then asked if it was a human being that was making the noise, and if it was to manifest it by the same noise. There was no noise. I then asked if it was a spirit and if it was to manifest it by two sounds.

I heard two sounds as soon as the words were spoken, unquote. By the first week of April, word had reached the other Fox siblings, not through letters from their family, but by the press and popular discussion. Leah Fox caught wind of what her little sisters in Rochester were up to via one of her piano students, and she canceled the lessons that she had scheduled for the week, and so she told her teen daughter and two friends that they were going to go to Hydesville and see what the

hell was going on. Full disclosure, I had this episode almost ready to go when less than two weeks than this series began, my grandfather died. I really loved my grandfather. Um he was a real pain in the ass of a person, and for all of his faults, he really loved us. We didn't have a service. There's this thing with nineties some things where everyone they know is already dead, and if you make it far enough, you might just want to have your family spend that money paying off

your medical bills. But I went home and I saw my family because I just wanted to be with them and talk about him. And there are all these things you can learn about your dead grandfather when you go to Chile's with your family. Did you know that he was a shipyard engineer for thirty years? Uh? Honest to God, I didn't know. It's been a strange and painful time, in part because he didn't believe that anything happened to

you once you die. It was his feeling one that was shaped by being a prisoner of war and growing up without religion himself. The times that were good were earned, not divinely given, and after the first three decades of his life were shaped by poverty and struggle in life in a cage, he didn't think that there was anyone really looking out for us when he died. That was it is what my papa thought, and continued to think even after he wasn't in full control of his own thoughts.

His younger brother died a few years before he did, and every day he would tell people how much he missed him and that he didn't think that he would see him again. When he died. The show has been hard for me to put together because of how things are right now. You know, things are moving really quickly. People are being thrown back into the world without any quality control of who you meet, who you talked to, who you get to be after being lucky enough to

have survived the plague. For now, I don't know what I believe in most days, but today, when I'm recording this my bedroom, I can tell you for sure that I really hope that my grandfather was wrong, and that hope is what Ghost Church is built on. And so, to quote a very phrase, now, more than ever, I want to give Ghost Church a chance. This season, we're going to be taking a look at all of it.

The rise and fall of the Fox Sisters, the scientific movement behind spirit communication, the founding of Cassadeica, rivalries among mediums, the uncanny number of celebrities who became involved in the movement, being whisked away in the night to a Perkins restaurant, and why people are willing to sometimes give up their family, their friends, and their former life to communicate with spirit. I don't know what I believe, but I know that I would like to understand, and so I will see

you next week. Ghost Church is a Cool Zone Media production created, written, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus. The show is produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Speedy or Tease That's Sadie du Qui, Andy Moholt, Audrey Z Whitesides and Jolly Dubeck and music is by Zoe Flade