Welcomed, unobscured a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky. It was six blocks from Amy's house to the publishing office. In the morning, she and Isaac would even walk together.
His pharmacy was only one block farther. I like to picture them walking side by side, Isaac's neatly trim beard worn in what today might be called an Amish style, and with a winter as cold as the one in February of eighty eight, Amy no doubt would have worn a heavy rap when they reached Buffalo Street, today's main street in Rochester. We might imagine Amy holding a gloved hand up to wave. As Isaac continued on to open the pharmacy, where he filled prescriptions from Rochester's doctors and
sold oils, paints, dyes, salves, and various instruments. Amy would have stepped into the publishing office for the North Star. There was plenty of work to do. Through the doors, Amy passed the office where Frederick Douglas and his business partner William c Nell were preparing the print the next issue. The summer before, Douglas had traveled west through Pennsylvania as far as Ohio, where he had been mocked attacked and
run off stages by white mobs. But across the Midwest he had also been welcomed by black communities, and Douglas knew he needed to continue supporting them. Rather than retreat to Boston, Douglas moved to Rochester, the point between the coast and the frontier where the message could fly out to a nation. When Amy stepped into the printing office, she could have asked Douglas how his family was doing. His wife, Anna had just arrived in Rochester with their
three boys. Isaac had even helped them move into their small apartment downtown, where they would live until they found a suitable house. After a chat with Frederick, Amy most likely climbed the stairs to the second floor and unlocked the new reading Room, an office for the Western New York Antislavery Society. It was part library, part consignment shop, where Amy worked with friends to plan meetings, supply local families,
and raise funds for anti slavery projects. Because she supported Frederick's cause at every turn, and he supported hers as well. You see, while Amy was working with the Anti Slavery Society, she was also on the cusp of something new. She and her friends like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth County Stanton were about to put out a call for a convention to discuss equal rights for women. Frederick Douglas would immediately
print their announcement in The North Star. From the beginning, the papers front page carried the declaration that right is of no sex, truth is of no color. God is the father of us all. The North Star embodied the fusion of movements at the center of Rochester life, and Frederick Douglas and Amy Post both knew that they were working at an amazing time. Thanks in no small part to their efforts, the year would leave its mark on history.
Here's historian Molly McGarry. In the year alone, revolutions ignited across the world, from France to Brazil, but also from Sicily to the Austrian Empire, and revolutions swept the globe during that year. Also in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto, opening with the line a specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. And in that same year, two young girls heard communicates from a very different sort of specter, giving rise to great different revolution.
Had been a year full of surprises for many people, but there was still one more on its way. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Mankey. It started as a small frontier village. In fact, the majority of its first settlers were black when it was founded by Nathaniel Rochester and the twelve people he kept in slavery. In fact, less than two decades before Amy and Isaac arrived, Rochester had been home to just over one thousand people, surrounded by
fertile land. Though Rochester was a bread basket, grain mills popped up in clouds of fresh flower, and by eighteen thirty four, when it was officially chartered as a city, Rochester had become home to thirteen thousand people. The city was booming, and that was due in large part to
the Erie Canal. Here's author and journalist Nancy Ruben Stewart Upstate New York in particular, it was a very prosperous area because the every canal had opened, and so all the produce and all the furs and all kinds of other things that were coming from the north could now come down through the canal into the Hudson and down to New York City. The farmland in the region made it ideal for communities like the Quakers who wanted a
place where they could live on their own. So as Rochester shipped out new tons of flower, the radical ideas growing in that same soil traveled with them. Here's Molly McGarry once again. Douglas's North Star Circle in Rochester was a key center in a global movement for freedom, and that newspaper is crucially important. Douglass organizing was important, but there are also figures like Harriet Jacobs, who went on to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
who landed in Rochester. At the same time, while Isaac and Amy worked with Frederick Douglas at home in Rochester, Isaac's brother served as the North Stars reporter on Long Island. Through growing networks of friends, family, and correspondence, the cities around the Northeastern United States were becoming more and more connected. Of course, boomtowns don't make for the most stable homes.
When communities along the Erie Canal swelled with the ranks of new residents moving inland, it made life around Rochester difficult for families who wanted to establish farms and make a life for themselves. People like John and his wife Margaret. When they put down stakes in the eighteen twenties, John fell in with a crowd of other men who arrived hoping to strike it rich, and he picked up their
habits too, liquor cards, gambling on horse races. What little money John and Margaret brought with them vanished into the night, and soon enough John along with it. Now abandoned, Margaret had retreated to Rochester, where her sister offered her a room to stay in. She did her best to raise four children without their father, including the oldest Leah, and a son named David, but it was a hard life. Margaret's heart broke as Leah was entrapped by an older
man when she was just fourteen. He only stayed long enough for Leah to take his last name Fish and give birth to their daughter, before he tossed Leah aside and traveled farther west. Eventually, John returned, arriving in town, and he had a new outlook on life. A revival preacher had swept through the countryside, and it brought the man to his knees. He rejoined his wife and children in Rochester, determined to rekindle their dream of farming their
own plot of land. David and Leah stayed behind in Rochester while John and Maggie crossed Lake Ontario into Canada. This time, John was determined not to get sidetracked, and they started that new farm, but they started a new family as well. Margaret gave birth to two more daughters in the eighteen thirties, who they named Maggie and Kate. But the fire of John his new religious devotion couldn't
thaw that cold earth. After scraping out what they could from the Canadian soil and missing their older children, they returned to Rochester's embrace in eighteen forty four. That's when they found themselves welcomed by Isaac and Amy Post, who hosted them on Sophia Street. The families became fast friends. Maggie and Kate also got to know their older sister, Leah,
and Maggie bonded with Amy Post. The older Quaker woman working so hard to bring a new world into being, somehow found time in the midst of organizing to offer attention to the younger daughters of an unstable family. For a while, John was able to support the family as a blacksmith, but the lure of working the land continued to call, and by the mid eighteen forties, John and Margaret's son, David, was a man with a family of
his own. After growing up in the city with Margaret, he'd inherited a farm from an uncle in Arcadia, New York, and eventually moved there with his wife and three children. A host of relatives live within only a few miles. A new center of gravity for the family began to form, and it drew John and Margaret out into the countryside more and more often. It did, not, however, have the same appeal for young Maggie and Kate. During one visit in eighteen forty seven, John and Margaret sat down with
David to discuss life in the country. Despite all their setbacks, their eyes still lit up when they thought about living in the rolling pastures. From her chair in the corner, Maggie saw how much this dream meant to her father, but for her it only despired creeping dread those rolling hills. To her, they were crushingly dull. To her friend and mentor, Amy Post. Maggie eventually wrote, I love the noise and
confusion of the city. I am like the woman who becomes so accustomed to her husband snoring that I could not go to sleep without it. If their mother saw any of Leah in fourteen year old Maggie, the girl's talk of husbands would only have made Margaret more determined and to move the family out of the city. So Maggie must have been upset when David told the family that the Hides, who owned most of the land around
David's farm, needed a new blacksmith. In December of that year, John and Margaret packed up fourteen year old Maggie and ten year old Kate, alongside what furniture and tools they had, and took a wagon out on Wayne country Road, and in doing so, they left the Posts and their circle of radical friends behind for now, at least. It was already winter. There was plenty of land on David's farm to build a second house for his parents, but there
just wasn't time. So John and Margaret made a fateful decision. They rented a little house from the Hides to wait out the season. It was hardly more than a single story box, but it would suit the family's needs for the few cold months. John liked that it was conveniently located near the Hides Forge and the rest of the family appreciated the two stone is that would keep the
house warm. There was even a basement and attic and a buttery off the kitchen, which meant a few nooks and crannies to keep their belongings out from underfoot while they hunkered down under the New York's nose. But the girls there were also new chores, hauling water and wood, helping their parents clear the snow. Other than that, though, there was very little else for a teenager like Maggie to do besides attend the local Methodist Episcopal church and
the red clabored schoolhouse in the neighborhood. Those long cold days left her dreaming of city life, dreaming of some company. Here's Nancy Stewart once again. The whole family had come from Rochester. So you have this fifteen year old board Maggie Fox. She wants to be back in Rochester. She's a teenager, obviously, uh and Katie who will a little sister will follow her. And the mother is so superstitious, and they'd live in this old farmhouse and they start
thinking about, well, who lived there before? People lived here before? Did people die here before? Maggie's loneliness Maybe why John and Margaret decided to add one more to their household. Sometime after they arrived, they brought Leah's teenage daughter to come stay with them in Hydesville. She was only slightly older than Maggie herself, so maybe she could keep the girls occupied. And it was on one of those first nights during their cousins stay in Hydesville that the Fox
family first heard the strange sounds. Creaking eaves and running mice were all sounds they would have been familiar with, but the sounds they began to hear at night were something different, something strange that they couldn't quite place. A series of thumps in the room where the family would lay down to sleep, almost as if someone was walking around. Then the sounds moved into the wall. It was as if someone was standing beside the beds where they slept,
knocking on the bed frame with an invisible hand. At one point, while trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from, John stood outside the bedroom while Margaret stood inside. Suddenly the knocks rang out again, this time from the door between them. A few months later, Maggie would tell a lawyer that on the first night they heard the rapping, they all got up, lit candles and
searched the house from top to bottom. The noise continued while they were hunting, always coming from the same place in the bedroom. It wasn't loud, but it was as real as anything she'd ever heard. It shook the beds and chairs too. In fact, when she held her hands against the bed frame, she said, there was a feeling of what she described as tremulous motion. But that was only the beginning. In mid March, Maggie and Kate said goodbye to their cousin, who went back to her mother,
Leah in the city. Just before things exploded into action on the night of Friday, March thirty one. Margaret said that the family was determined to get a good night's rest, so they decided to go to bed early. She was anxious about the strange noises, but she set her jaw and pulled up the covers. They were all still awake when the noises began. At Margaret later described it. Kate was the first to sit up in bed, and she decided that when the knocks came, she would snap her
fingers in response. Come they did, and right on cue, Kate snapped her fingers then, and this is what began to really startle Margaret, the rapping sounds replied. Maggie sat up too, and said out loud into the air, now do as I do, count one, two, three, four, clapping along. In time, the knocking sounds obeyed her, which left Maggie frozen by fear and the girls silent. And that's when their mother took over. She asked aloud that if the
sound was a spirit, it should knock twice. After a breath, two knocks rang out, with the girls silent in the opposite bed, Margaret haltingly asked a series of questions, and each time the knocks answered her. Through these responses, they learned that the specter had once been a thirty one year old man. And as more and more details followed, I can only imagine the panic that caught in Margaret's throat. He'd been killed just two years before, he claimed, right
there in their house. When John stepped into the room, he found his daughters paralyzed by fear and his wife shouting questions to the wall. But he heard it too, her questions, the knocking sounds answering back all of it, and the couple knew that whatever they were witnessing it was beyond them, so John bundled up and set out to fetch the nearest neighbors. When he returned, he and the neighbor found the girls still in bed, still terrified,
and still clinging to each other. With more witnesses in the room, Margaret asked the same series of questions and got the same answers as before. By the end of the night, a total of four families had been called to the Fox's house, including the Hides and their adult son, David, and before long they were all communicating with the knocking sound. Through their questions, they sketched out a picture of the
man life and his death. The listeners crowded into the room as the spirit wrapped out that he had been a traveling pedlar, and that he had been murdered in that very bedroom, his throat cut with a butcher's knife before his body was buried beneath the dirt floor of the cellar. The information set the group in motion. They did with so many following waves of spiritualists would do too. They put the spirit to the test. John, his son David, and the Hides all went down to the cellar to
start digging. But the first weeks of spring of eighteen forty eight had been wet. Their shovels sank into the damp cellar floor and water oozed up, making any attempt at discovery impossible. For the moment. With a story of such a gruesome crime hanging in the air, the mood
that first night must have been somber. Fear and curiosity, fascination and confusion, attired and dirty circle of neighbors asking themselves if they'd really been speaking with the spirit, what had they witnessed in the middle of that spring night. It didn't take long for it to become clear that something irresistible had burst forth. Word got out. Less than two weeks later, John said that hundreds had already visited
the house. Among them was a lawyer who rushed to Hydesville on April eleven and started taking statements from the witnesses. John told him that curious visitors were coming so often that he couldn't even work at the forge, and his family no longer had time to cook, clean and live their daily lives. Maggie, though, must have loved it, but John was still at a loss regarding the eerie phenomenon. After two weeks of deep consternation, and scrutiny. He still
couldn't make up his mind about the sounds. He desperately wanted to view them as something natural and explainable, which was certainly the more sane path to take. The alternative, though, while a lot less believable, was also more frightening. Something supernatural was at work. Leah Fish hovered over the piano bench her students plunked out the basics that she was
teaching them upright. Pianos were the centerpiece of every middle class parlor, and Leah had carved out a living for herself and her daughter by guiding the children of aspiring Rochester families through the foundational elements of music. It was a respectable profession for a single mother, one of only a few that were. On that morning in May, the music lesson was interrupted when a student's mother rushed into
the room and pulled Leah aside. She was followed by a man who had just come from a visit to see Leah's parents in Hydesville. With the introduction barely made, he flipped open a fat notebook and started peppering her with questions. But Leah had no idea what the man was talking about. To answer her he introduced a set of freshly printed pages. It was a pamphlet with the headline Mysterious Noises, which reported on the various statements that he had taken in Hydesville. It was the first that
Leah had heard of the uncanny visitation. Within a few hours, though, Leah, her daughter, and two friends were all on an overnight package delivery boat steaming down the Erie Canal towards Hydesville. Leah found her parents home abandoned. They had taken up shelter at David's house nearby, and when Leah arrived, she saw a ragged Margaret with a bible clutched to her chest. The family had been thrown out of the local Methodist
Episcopal church. Word had gone around that Little Kate said the spirit's name was Mr. Splitfoot, and the story had shocked the minister. Blasphemy, he had said, devil worship. The whispers were flying throughout the neighborhood. The blacksmith had brought hammer and tongs to Hydesville, they all said, But he had also brought something else too, his two daughters and their bond with Satan. The church had accused the family of witchcraft before telling them to leave and not come back.
Perhaps there wasn't much distance between Rochester and sale him. After all, Leah and her parents put their heads together, they all agreed that the girls should be split up. If the spirit was real, maybe he was attracted to one of the sisters in particular. Guessing that it was Kate, they decided she would be the one to leave the farm. Leah worked quickly, taking her youngest sister back to Rochester
with her. Separating the sisters didn't stop the troubles, though years later Leah would publish an account of what happened when they reached the city. The girls, she said, were too scared to sleep alone that night, so Lea brought them both into her bed before she could fall asleep, though their screams of fear broke the silence. With Kate in the bed beside them, her daughter said a cold hand had passed over her face, and then another crept
down her back. Leah leapt for her Bible and began to read it out loud, but as she would later recall, the girls continued to feel something unseen touch their bodies. When Leah put out the light and slid the Bible under her pillow, something pushed it back out and onto the floor. They had no peace and no sleep until the light of dawn started to filter through the window and the room fell blissfully silent. But other voices would fill that silence as the Fox family tried to adjust
to their new life. That energetic lawyer wasted no time distributing his pamphlet throughout the city. He had the sense that a printed report of the rumors, full of eyewitness interviews that he himself had recorded, would fly off the shelves, and his instincts proved correct. His pamphlet, called Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D. Fox in Hydesville, poured fuel on the whispers, helping the
news spread like wildfire. But when Amy and Isaac Post first heard the rumors about the hauntings in Hydesville, they laughed. In a letter from that November, Isaac would tell a relative that at first he and Amy paid no more heed to the news than to the old Salem witch stories. He said. Leah would write that the Posts had and I quote, no little amusement at our expense. In reality, though, Amy and Isaac were torn between two opinions because their
dismissive chuckles were slowly giving way to concern. Was it possible, They asked themselves that the girls and their mother were suffering under some psychological delusion, But they changed their tune. A short while later, when Isaac and Amy dropped by Leah's house to check in on their young friend, they found the household in a panic. You see that piano where Leah taught her music lessons. Well, the instrument was closed and locked because it was the evening, and yet
it was somehow still playing music. One sound in particular too, a low base key solemn and distinct, slowly tolling like a death kneel. It shot the Posts so much that they went out and brought back another couple to observe the scene. Close friends, fellow abolitionists, and fellow Quakers. These were the post's most trusted advisors, just kind of people Isaac and Amy would want helping out in such a
sort of mystery. When they arrived, they settled in to watch the piano, and then they listened as the note continued to play. In response, they fell to their knees and started to pray, their hands opening to Leah and the girls as they said out loud, sustaining this family. Oh God, you're chosen instruments for the benefits of mankind. The dead have never really been silent. From the beginning. Spiritualists were quick to point out that miraculous visitations, spirit messages,
and bedroom apparitions were nothing new. As we discussed in the first episode, the fox sisters weren't even the first people in the eighteen forties to speak with the spirits of the dead. Far from it, here's historian Kathy Gutierrez. Scholars do like to throw down about dating spiritualism to the Foxes. There are always women in transits, right. That is one of the few cross cultural truisms, and that is clearly a way for women to find a way
to speak powerfully from the margins. What makes Nidsville important, right, It's it's a haunting, It's a poltergeist. There were plenty of people like the foxes own Hydesville minister who responded in their own time worn way with fear, and that was just as true in the bigger community of Rochester. As the story grew from a whispered rumor to something more persistent, local pastors continued to declare that these were
stories of witchcraft and demonology. Critics who didn't know the Foxes the way Isaac and Amy did, well, they had their own reaction. They laughed off the stories as a joke. But it wasn't just friendship with Leah and Maggie that made Amy willing to listen to the spirits. It was also her Quaker beliefs. Here's historian and Browdie. Quakers in particular had already a notion that the individual contains within themselves a perfect transcript of ultimate truth, so we should
look within ourselves to know the mind of God. And that notion of what Quakers call the inner Light was very close to what spiritualists would do when they looked to individual mediums to hear the voices of spirits. So the seance had some commonalities with a Quaker meeting, where Quakers sit in silence to await the voice of God. That's what spiritualists are doing. Also, they're waiting for a
spirit voice. In fact, you might even say that it was these particular Quakers, Amy and Isaac Post who gave spiritualism the flavor of Quaker spirituality, because in the days after they heard the death knell from Leah's p n know they may have heard the echoes of their own losses, their own grief. The friends who advised them well, they had also have been pushed out of their Presbyterian congregation for campaigning against slavery, and all of them had started
to spend more time with the Fox sisters. One afternoon, when they were all gathered at Amy and Isaac's home, they tried to have a deeper conversation with the spirits or spirits that were following the girls. Amy would later recall watching her friends, a middle aged couple seated beside Maggie in rapt attention. She said, it was as though they stood before the judgment seats of God. They were asking gentle questions, and the thumps and knocks were answering back.
A new form of devotion was beginning to take shape. Amy and Isaac were beginning to see things in the same way as their friends. We do not get answers without one of the sisters present, Isaac wrote in a letter. The girls were indeed the instruments of some spiritual power. So Isaac said about devising a system to link the tapping sounds to the alphabet, And that's when something even more uncanny happened. You see. Leah had started suffering from headaches.
Isaac guessed that he could offer her some relief through one of the common remedies he prepared every week as a pharmacist. Amy was also known by her friends to have a knowledge of herbal and traditional medicines. But nothing helped. Leah continued to groan in pain until Isaac decided to try the new science of the mind. He decided to magnetize her. It should come as no surprise that when Isaac followed the directions for mesmerism, Leah fell into a
trance in the dark. She suddenly found that she was surrounded by the spirits of the posts, dead loved ones. Their young children appeared, a son who had died in eighteen forty four, and a daughter dead since eighteen thirty seven, and then Amy's dead sister, And this sister had a message to share with Isaac. She wanted him to know that she was pleased by their marriage, by their love for each other. It was right and good, and we
can only guess how much this meant to him. But the questions came to Amy, and Isaac wanted to believe these messages, and wanted to believe that their children were content and happy in the spirit world. But how and why were these spirits speaking now? What made it possible that in past ages spirit visitors were so rare and mysterious, while in the spirits could hold such easy conversations, and
the spirits didn't mind answering. In fact, in one of the first seances, Isaac got an answer to this question from the spirits of his dead mother. A reformation is going on in the spirit world, she told him. These spirits seek the company of honest men. They had messages to deliver, and they were reaching out to reformers who would be willing to act on their plans. Amy and
Isaac knew just the people. They gathered a small group of friends to meet weekly and take down the messages from the other I, Kate, and Maggie would open themselves up to the spirits, who would flood the room with knocking sounds. Leah would serve as an interpreter. Over the next two years, a host of spirits marched into Amy and Isaac's home and spoke to them. Through the Fox Sisters.
They heard messages from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They heard from Quaker leaders like George Fox, and William Penn. Benjamin Franklin even showed up too, and he filled in another piece of the puzzle. Death hadn't stopped him from inventing, he said, and he had discovered a reliable way for the dead to reach out to the living. Back in seventeen forty eight, when he was still alive, Franklin had sent electrical pulses through a wire across a river outside Philadelphia.
Exactly one century later, his work had bridged a deeper divide. It had only required human instruments who were suitable to carry their messages into the land of the living. Instruments like Kate and Maggie Fox. These ghostly figures the founders of the nation and the religious tradition that gave the Posts their place in the world. They brought a message and a challenge. They were dead, but not gone, because the Posts who had inherited their work still had much
to do. In a time when Amy Post, Frederick Douglas, and so many others were working diligently to reform society in the material world, it somehow made sense to these radicals that they would also be greeted by a great reformation. Among those living after death. Frederick Douglas even published reports about these new spiritual investigations in his paper The North Star. Powerful news was heading out into the world. The spirits were awake, and they had something to say. The telegraph
reached Rochester in eighty six. Sure, it was a system under the control of inventors and investors who had profit in mind, but to a city shaped by the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, well, it was as much a miracle as it was a machine. In fact, Rochester was the center of interest in building telegraph systems all across the United States, especially for stagecoach operators who
lost their living with the new canal opened up. Gravity and electricity were new marvels, proved to exist but barely understood. Communication over telegraph lines came in code, a series of pulses that needed to be interpreted by operators who knew the cipher and mesmerists were revealing the previously untapped potential of the human mind. What could be better suited to these new horizons of science than the tapped out messages of the spirits. Right from the start, Isaac post saw
the similarity. Soon enough, he and his fellow believers were calling the Fox Sisters their spiritual telegraph, and they didn't fail to connect the spirit rappings to the trans visitations that Andrew Jackson Davis was receiving in New York City. His book was on sale in Rochester bookshops. By making it clear that the spirit of revelation hadn't limited itself to one place. The spirits were everywhere on the move. When the news of the mysterious noises reached Andrew Jackson Davis,
he was hardly surprised. In fact, he would later claim that on March thirty one, when the spirits of the dead Pedler revealed itself to Kate and Maggie, a voice had spoken to him, saying, brother, the good work has begun. Behold, a living demonstration is born. Here's Kathy Gutierres once again. When he here's about the Fox Sisters and the so called mysterious wrappings, he melds his world view with their experiential ritual, if you will, and that was the marriage
that needed happening. He gave theology to their ritual, and they brought ritual to his philosophy. As the post practice that ritual new manifestations of spirit power appeared. Not only did the circle of friends hear rapping sounds, but the spirits grew powerful enough to start making the tables move, rocking and rotating as the visitors asked questions. The spirits,
you see, wanted revolution, and they got it too. That July, Amy Post and Frederick Douglas joined their friends and allies like Elizabeth Caddy Stanton and Lucretia Mott at the Seneca Falls Convention, where they made a landmark declaration of the civil, political, and religious rights of women. They were just as concerned with their rights in their religious spheres as in the civic and political spheres. They cared about whether they could vote in their churches as much as whether they could
vote for the school board or the Senate. That's an browdie once again. The very table they right the famous Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence that gives the first real statement of women's rights in North America. That table, which is now in the Smithsonian, had been rocked by spirits at the convention. Frederick Douglas was the only black attendee and the only black signer of the
Declaration of Sentiments. He published a report on that convention in The North Star, probably declaring that winning equal rights for women would be simple justice. It was news that drew more and more new neighbors to Rochester who wanted to serve the cause, including a young woman named Harriet Jacobs,
who had escaped from slavery in North Carolina. Here's Molly McGarry in Harry Jacob's moved to Rochester to help run the anti Slavery Reading Room, which was located above the offices where Frederick Douglas published The North Star and at that time and probably in that place, Jacobs also be gan a lifelong friendship with Amy Post. In fact, Harriet had recently left New York City when word reached her there that mercenaries were on the way to recapture her.
When she arrived in Rochester, she was welcomed into Amy and Isaac's home, and she joined them around the table both for meals and for spiritualist seances. At Amy's urging, Harriet began working on her memoir. When it was published, her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would be a landmark in American literature and a boost to the abolitionist cause. But the Rochester circle also shared the conviction that the living and the dead were working together
to launch a new age of spiritual reform. The Spirits agreed with them. If they were going to really make a change in the world, though, they needed to address the public. It started small. Isaac and Amy helped to organize sittings with the Fox Sisters, filtering out the unsavory characters, of course, but also keeping the setting harmonious and the
attendants limited. At demand kept growing. More and more seekers were making their way into Rochester, all while other religious experiments were falling flat and communities along the canal were folding, looking for guidance, for connection and for the next step to take in their lives. People knew to the city were open to something that could be seen and heard, something that could be witnessed. After a year of closed sittings, the Spirits spoke up. They were ready for a wider
audience in a private seance just for the Posts. The Spirits spoke through Leah, telling Isaac to rent Rochester's Corinthian Hall for a whole three nights for the first time ever. They were going to throw the doors open wide to a paying crowd. It was time for the Spirits to take the stage. They had no trouble getting the word out. When November four arrived, over four hundred people crowded into
Rochester's Corinthian Hall. They'd come to hear for themselves whether the mysterious noises were a divine revelation or just a back country ruse. The first person to take the stage was Eliab Caprin, another excommunicated Quaker as well as a friend of the Posts, a utopian socialist, and a fellow member of the anti slavery movement. It was his task to describe in full what had happened around the Fox Sisters from Hydesville to the Post's home, and to prepare
the way for Amy and the girls. Amy Post waited in the wings while he spoke. It was a time when women still couldn't speak in public without first being introduced by a man, and I can imagine the words of the Declaration of Sentiments echoing in her mind. Compelled to submit to law in the formation of which she had no voice, Amy was doing everything she could to change that. After Eliob finished speaking, Amy Post stepped to
the front. She was no stranger to crowds in that city, whether hospitable or hostile, and Moments later, Leah Fish joined her with her sisters Kate and Maggie Fox in tow Then they took their seats around Eliob and began their demonstration. Here's Nancy Stewart, the press is there, one of Horace Greeley's reporters there from New York. There are other reporters there from the Rochester papers an elsewhere upstate New York.
And there's a committee appointed to examine the girls, particularly Leiah and Maggie at this point, to find out they're making these sons with their body. The audience themselves selected their own skeptics for the committee. They included doctors, lawyers, and even a judge who had attended the meeting. The panels would observe private sciences in the afternoons and report
back to the audience in the evening. One group committee of ladies was chosen to take the Fox sisters into a room where the girls were stripped and subjected to minute examination, like a jury of seventeenth century Salem women looking for witch marks. Even as the girls were bundled and bound in various uncomfortable positions, the knocking sounds continued to fall on the floor all around them each night.
The panels announced that they were and I quote, unable to discover any fraud or trick by which the girls produced the raps. In fact, they began to witness even more unsettling things. Once, when the committee had gathered around the table with the girls, it started to turn beneath their hands, just as Isaac and Amy had witnessed before. One of the men, thinking that it was a simple trick, asked everyone to leave the table and stand against the walls.
Then he asked the spirits to turn the table again. At his request, it began slowly to spin, as if it were being moved by unseen hands. Naturally, it all made for quite a show. Reports were splashed across the regional papers. Elliot Capron began begging Margaret Fox to let him take her daughters on the road and share their revelation with the world. When the spirits were asked, they
knocked their approval. For years, the news from Rochester and the Frontier Farms had reached New York with the latest on radical organizing and new arguments for women's equality in black freedom. Now, though the political and intellectual reputation of Rochester rested in the hands of three young women and a new phenomenon that demanded attention at the crossroads of science, spirituality,
political philosophy, and not least of all, entertaining spectacle. If they decided to travel with Capron purely because he had a flair for the dramatic, they didn't choose wrong. Under his guidance, the Foxes rented rooms at A. S. Barnum's Hotel in New York City. Then he launched the marketing blitz, peppering New York's streets with advertisements for public demonstrations, which would be held three times a day, and the price for admission just one dollar. Aidan Blue rejoiced. He welcomed
the arrival of spiritualism to his utopian community, Hopedale. In fact, it's not so much that spiritualism became a movement, but rather that it came into one. The first groups to get word of the revelations were the Quaker communities in Long Island, Nantucket, Philadelphia, and across New York State. Elliot Capron's Auburn Circle, for instance, had long been home to an interest in mesmerism and magnetic healing. In the years before those spiritual instruments recruited him as a stage manager.
The other early adopters across the US were other utopian communities, North Star subscribers, and others who had already had connections to Rochester through speaking tours, newspapers, and abolitionist visions. But that was only the beginning. News of the spirit contact in Rochester spread along the channels between like minded communities of reformers, disaffected ministers, and religious innovators in the United States,
channels that have first been opened by Andrew Jackson. Davis's transvisions of divine harmony were quickly spread west, reaching towns in Indiana, Ohio, and beyond from his home in Massachusetts. In Hopeedale, Aidan Balu tracked this progress. He was still writing those sermons and essays that rallied others to his cause. Any and every subject that fell in front of the radical x universalist received a lengthy treatment, and in time
spiritualism was no different. It offered his community a fresh wind, a new source of truth, and a beacon fire around which the hungry souls of his flock could gather. Among them were a couple named David and lo Denzis Scott, who had been charmed by Aiden's vision of living out
a practical Christianity. They were in Hopedale when the community started to experiment with trance sittings and attempts to contact the spirits of the dead, and strange things started to happen when the believers gathered together at the same time. Though Aiden came to David with an idea, Hopeedale, you see, was full. In fact, they were running out of land for all the new peace bolt trickling in. So the two men drew up a plan to launch a new branch of Hopeedale farther to the west in the state
of Wisconsin. It was rich with oak groves and well watered meadows, so they had heard, and David and Lodenza, along with their children in tow, would serve as Hopeedale's advance party. When winter finally cleared in early eighteen fifty one, they boarded a steamer called the Globe and headed toward the town of Waterloo to put the plan in motion. That plan, though it was about to change. You see.
David and Lidenza's children were along for the ride, including their youngest daughter, Cora, and her life was in many ways like those of the Fox girls. A ten year old who had been carried from town to farm and then back to town as her parents had tried to find their place in the American landscape. But in the fall of eighteen fifty one, a visitation would strike her like lightning, an unexpected power that would transform her into
something new. Going forward, she would be a guiding voice and a central figure in the world of spiritualism, and would be for the rest of the century. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. Next time on Unobscured, suddenly the table started to turn beneath their hands. Some of the guests were startled and ducked under the table to see if
anyone was pushing it around. Even though the table was large and heavy, it rotated smoothly until the group lifted their hands off of it, and then it stopped. William Hayden, convinced it was a trick, gripped the table with his hands and tried to turn it using his own strength, but it wouldn't budge until he let go. That is, then, even though no one was touching it anymore, the table
resumed spinning, this time faster than before. William tried to grab the table to make a stop, but when that didn't work, he climbed underneath it and wrapped his arms around the table legs. It dragged him in a slow circle across the floor. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh
Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at History unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Yeah. Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Menkey.
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