S2 – 3: A Spirit Globe

Andrew Jackson Davis, a relatively ordinary child. When her family was still in New York, living at Aiden Blue's utopian community Hopeedale. Aiden's daughter Abby was Corrus teacher, and her notes from the time give us one small clue to the future that was coming for Cora. Abbey wrote that the girl was an excellent performer. She shone in the theatricals they held at the community school even more frequently.

Friends and relatives remarked that Cora was sensitive. She was always a well of emotion, apt to burst into tears or laughter at a moment's notice. An unkind word, a misunderstood expression, or any surprise affected her deeply. She wasn't particularly precocious for her age. They said. She liked school, but she wasn't over studious. Intelligent, but a bit of

a dreamer, they said. So it was no surprise on that warm Wisconsin afternoon, with the sounds of other children playing around her, and that she fell asleep, But in doing so, she also fell into history. When she woke up, Cora found that her slate was covered in writing. Guessing that one of the other kids had done it as a joke, she went into the house and asked her mother to help her wipe it clean. Cora's mother took the slate from her, but froze when she read the words.

It began, my dear sister, and at the bottom it was signed with the name of Cora's aunt, who had been dead for decades. What scared her mother, though, was that some of the kids who had been outside with Cora had knocked on the door an hour before. They told her they'd seen something strange that Cora had been writing in her sleep. She scrubbed off the slate and handed it back to her daughter without a word, but

it put her on alert. Two days later, as Cora's mother sat sewing, she saw the girl again start to doze in the heat of the day. When she tried to wake the girl up, Cora didn't respond. She started to worry that Cora was coming down with some kind of sickness, but she also noticed a strange trembling motion in Cora's hand. Remembering the slate, she stopped trying to wake Cora up, and instead she put a pencil in

the shaking fingers, and Cora began to write. One message after another flowed out, signed by different members of the family, all of them were dead. They shured her that Cora wasn't being harmed, she was simply put the perfect vessel for them their new means of communicating with those on earth. This time, Cora's mother didn't keep the news to herself, so in the house was crowded with visitors who all came to see the girl who could write in her sleep.

One German doctor, who was familiar with mesmerism, proposed to Cora's parents that he should put Cora into a magnetic trance to see if she could speak with the spirits on command. They must have agreed. In the following days, Cora and the German doctor were working together for long hours inside her parents home, treating patients and providing diagnoses, sometimes for up to six hours a day. In the blink of an eye, Wisconsin had its own miracle girl,

one who could open graves in her sleep. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. The news spread like lightning. Of course, after sitting in spiritualist seances at Hopedale, Cora's parents could hardly be confused about what they were witnessing. As he talked with the neighbors, her father, David realized that his

family were the first spiritualist to reach Wisconsin. He'd come to launch the western branch of Aiden BLUs Hopedale Community, but Cora's new spirit messages had become more important than any utopian experiment, so he took up the mantle of missionary for this new age of spirit revelation. David's teachings kindled just as many flames of fear as it did lamps of inspiration. For example, Mary Folsom, the eighteen year old teacher at Cora's school, was deeply shocked by all

of it. She was a devout Christian, and in her view, it was her lessons that should fill Cora's slate. Cast from the seed of authority in favor of the girl. Mary fumed from the sidelines. Surely there was only one way to understand her displacement by mysterious intelligences from the spirit world. Cora was in the grip of demonic possession, so Mary took the prayer. She begged that the evil influence over the girl would be cast out, and then

she waited for results. The stories kept coming, though in fact it seemed like Cora's trances were happening more frequently now. Even as Mary's anxiety grew, Cora's family moved forward and embraced their new mission. One Sunday morning, most of Mary's relatives decided that instead of attending church, they were going to as Seiance with Cora to hear from the spirits. It was everything the young teacher had feared. They apsed out of the house, much to Mary's fury, leaving her

behind with her father. While they were gone, though, Mary felt the spirit power for herself. She was in the kitchen laboring over the dirty dishes when an invisible weight slammed into her body, crushing her to the floor. Some voice in a language she didn't know or understand, launched from her mouth, The sound brought her father in, but there was nothing he could do to break her free from whatever pinned her down. In fact, Mary later said that she felt it lift her off her knees and

lead her toward her father's Bible. Mary's hands flipped frantically through the pages, where her fingers traced the words visions, dreams, signs, wonders, miracles. When the grip of the power left her, Mary and her father were both shaken, but her anxiety was also gone. The spirit power hadn't driven her away from God, but toward him. She was left with a fresh determination to seek out Core and talk with the spirits. When she finally sat down with a girl, things started the way

she expected. A strange voice was speaking rapidly from the eleven year old in a language Mary couldn't understand. But then her own moth started to move. Suddenly she was talking with Cora in German. The two of them traded comments while they're puzzled. Families watched from around the room. Cora's German mesmerist translated for the crowd in wonder you See. Mary didn't know German, and she certainly hadn't taught her

student to speak it. Soon enough, Mary was following in Cora's footsteps around Waterloo, dispensing medical advice from the spirit world. As far as they were concerned, the miracles that have been promised and the Bible had finally arrived. But Mary quickly found that she had simply stepped from one side of the argument to the other. She knew she had switched sides, but as far as the local churches went, she had crossed a line. The churches in Waterloo held

a revival meeting. Pastors took turns preaching against the growing interest in speaking with the dead. Even the local doctors took a turn urging their neighbors to come to them for medical advice rather than a pair of young girls with no medical training claiming to get their messages from spirit powers. But these warnings landed with a thud. After all, the people they were shouting against were teenagers who said they just wanted to be obedient and follow the truth.

What threat could these girls pose against the authorities and their community. Here's historian and browdy. In some ways, the spirit medium is like a mirror image of the ideal Christian woman. At the same time that she pushes the characteristics of the ideal nineteen century Christian woman to its extreme. So you know, what's sometimes referred to as the cult of true womanhood in the nineteen century posits the notion and that women by nature are pure, passive, and pious.

If women have these spiritual qualities more than men do, then they can sense spirits. They are perfectly suited to be vehicles for divine knowledge. Cora, Mary, and their families were too certain of this new power to be put off by the outbursts of scared leaders who saw their followers slipping out of their hands. The power that spoke through the young girls was greater. David found himself in

a fight for his daughter's legitimacy. He spent every waking moment of the next few months traveling the region and proclaiming the amazing news of his daughter's contact with the dead, often accompanied by Cora and her German Mesmerist, to demonstrate that the dead were striving to reconnect with the living.

An outpouring of spirit voices followed in their awake, and rather than catching the spirit of revival from their local churches, the communities around Waterloo, Wisconsin, began to sprout with new mediums at the horizons of American life. This exciting new religion was finding a foothold. Wisconsin was just the beginning. In fact, spiritualism was about to rush from local spectacle into a global movement on a whirlwind world tour. That's thanks in part to Daniel Hume. Daniel was from Scotland,

raised by his aunt and uncle. He traveled with them to the United States when he was only a few years old, where they settled in Connecticut. His mother was finally able to join them when Daniel was seventeen, but shortly after their reunion she died. We can imagine how cruel a loss it was for Daniel too. Apparently his mother thought it was cruel as well. On a night soon after her death, when Daniel was looking into the dimness of his bedroom mirror, a movement caught his eye

in the room behind him. In the reflection, he saw an empty chair sliding slowly across the floor toward him. He whipped around, only to find there was no one else in the room. Other more familiar events began tapping sounds on his headboard when he would lie down to sleep, tapping that then followed him to breakfast in the morning. Soon, anytime he sat down to eat with his aunt and uncle, it was like someone was drumming on the table with

their fingers. Later, the table and sometimes the chairs started to shift without being touched. Daniel's aunt, who had heard about the rappings in Rochester and like so many others, believed them to be the work of the devil, called in all three of her towns ministers. When they observed the phenomena around the boy, they confirmed her fears. She was so terrified that Daniel simply had to leave. He went to live with a friend nearby, who took the news about the events with much us fear. He wasn't

the only one either. In fact, Daniel kept his head through it all because he remembered what had always been said about his mother. She had been a seer, She had always had the second sight, and she reportedly knew what was happening to her loved ones, no matter how far away from her they were. So when the knocking began, Daniel knew why she was still watching over him from

beyond the grave. And then Daniel's story hit the papers. Suddenly, despite what the minister said, Daniel was in demand among his neighbors. Soon enough, the homes of the curious in his neighborhood were playing host to turning tables and rocking chairs. His aunt may not have wanted him in her house, but there were plenty who did so. Daniel went on the road, and then in March of eighteen fifty one, he took a fateful invitation to hold a seance in

the house of a woman named Maria Hayden. A group that gathered that night settled themselves around a large, heavy table and reached out for each other's hands. The pad and of what we think of today as a seance was already starting to come together. Here's historian John Busher. They typically would sit around in a table and join hand and wait for things to happen. Light tree usually turned down fairly low, and one of them would act as a medium. Sometimes things would happen that we're not

just what you might think of as messages. This was one of those times. When Maria Hayden and her husband William joined their guests in a circle. They laid their hands flat on the surface of the table as they've been taught, and hushed voices. They asked any nearby spirits to come and show them what they could do through Daniel's mediumship. 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 it 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. There was such a world shaking experience that William Hayden wrote a report that was published in the local paper. Again, Daniel's profile was raised, and interest in the powerful manifestations of spirit presence grew. But Daniel wasn't the only medium

to leave that seance. After that night, Maria Hayden herself seemed to become more sensitive to the w old of the spirits, a result of her encounter with a powerful young Scott, no doubt. Soon enough the Hayden's were hosting even more seances around that heavy table. But now it was Maria who had become the instrument of the spirits. They had crossed the greatest divide imaginable, the one between

life and death. News of Andrew Jackson Davis's harmonial philosophy had reached England, and that news brought curious mesmerists to American shores, men like George Stone. Stone was an electro biologist, along with being a fan and follower of the J. Stanley Grimes school of freno magnetism we talked about in episode one, and George wanted to see for himself the most striking success of Grimes methods. He wanted to witnessed

the power of the spirits speaking through American mediums. So by the end of eighteen fifty two, Stone was in Connecticut, where he was welcomed in by Maria Hayden. No one recorded what took place at those sittings, but George was clearly overcome, he urged Maria to return with him to England and demonstrate her abilities. There. He told her that the British public would rejoice to witness the new revelations. Maria agreed, and when she arrived, she took a room

in London and sent out advertisements. An American spiritualist medium had arrived, but she found that George Stone wasn't quite so spot on about her reception, at least not in London, where American newspapers had often treated spiritualism with skepticism. The British press blasted it with outright scorn. The London Times flat out declined to publish her advertisements, while other papers

lit into her with relish. It was, as a spiritualist historian would later put it, a storm of ribaldry, persecution and insult. And even though Maria was deeply hurt by her handling in the British newspapers, she experienced the old truism as well, that there's no such thing as bad press, she also had connections to draw on. You see, she was able to get a sitting with Robert Owen, the Scottish industrialist. His utopian communes had been part of that

American Wave of social experiments a decade earlier. His travels in the US had already earned a macrowd of American friends, and his love for the Shakers opened his arms to Maria.

At eighty three, Robert was coming to the end of his life, but when he sat with Maria Hayden to hear from the spirits, it was no doubt because he'd never lost his curiosity or pioneering spirit, and of course, with old age taking hold of him, it would only make sense that he would want to hear from those who had crossed the threshold that he himself was quickly approaching.

He was convinced by the miss serious noises, and he became Maria's most important British convert to spiritualism, and he laid down a path that would lead his son to the Fox Sisters in the coming decades. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we. Of course, it helped that George Stone wasn't the only English doctor working with

the medical mesmerism and electro biology. In fact, the chief medical magnetizer in all of England, a man named Dr John Elliotson, had some very distinguished patients, many of whom were British writers William Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett's father were among his clients. For Dickens in particular,

the arrival of American spiritualists was exciting. You see, he had traveled through America in eighteen forty two and tried to get an invitation to a Shaker meeting so that he could hear from the spirits in those closed communities. But Shakers weren't interested in becoming pop culture entertainment and he was turned away. So Dickens and others in his circle queued up eagerly to question the spirits when they had heard American mediums were in London. Others had more

luck than Charles Dickens. An English shoemaker named David Richmond had joined the Shakers in eighteen forty six and lived in the community for five years. He wasn't a writer looking to collect curiosities, though he himself became a Shaker. In fact, when he returned to England in eighteen fifty three, he came home as a Shaker missionary. He started in his hometown of Darlington, preaching about the power of Shakerism

and contacting the dead. While American celebrities like Maria Hayden were making inroads into London's upper crust, David Richmond was welcomed by industrial workers and followers of Robert Owen, especially in Yorkshire. Richmond's table turning manifestations won a host of converts, especially among working people who had had enough of churches, governments and bosses telling them what to do and what

to believe. Here's author and journalist Mary Gabriel. Europe was on fire, for it was a movement called Springtime of the people, and the people in Europe actually revolted against their kings, their governments. They were happy enough to fill their coffers with the proceeds of industrialization, but they didn't

want to make the social changes that were required. The everyday folks, you know, the the farmers, the small trades people, the people who were forced off their lands and moved into cities, were being buffeted by forces that were so much greater than them. They fled to the cities and started filling tenements and factories with their work. Spiritualism inspired one labor organizer to launch the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph, and

as David Richmond traveled from factory to factory. The newspaper joined him and continued to attract readers to the seance table. By the end of eighteen fifty three, some industrial towns in Britain were drawing the same packed crowds to spirit demonstrations that had filled the Corinthian Hall in Rochester. It should come as no surprise that there were many communities across Europe, places like Germany, Italy and elsewhere, that also took up seances and spirit circles, sort of like family

welcoming home the offspring of an American cousin. Everywhere that the news of spiritualism traveled, it followed audiences wrestling with new ideas, just as they were in America. And it's crucial to remember that many of the intellectual and scientific novelties that laid the groundwork for American spiritualism originally came from Europe in the first place. The spiritualist radicals believe that Karl Marx had been mistaken when he wrote that

a specter is haunting Europe. He dispensed it as a simple metaphor for spiritualists, though the statement was something more. It was literal truth. Louis was an alchemist of religious thought. Like Andrew Jackson Davis, he mingled Emmanuel Swedenborg's theology of the spirit world with the electoral biology of men like Stanley Grimes or John Elliotson. But Louis Alphonse Kiana had a more privileged view on some of those ideas. You see,

he was in Paris, the heart of Mesmerism. Mesmer's magnetism had been all the rage among the city's aristocrats during the seventeen seventies. It survived the French Revolution that scattered Mesmer's followers to the wind, and even managed to bounce back from a government commission that condemned Mesmer's idea of a universal fluid in seventeen eighty four. Louis was another

of the spiritualist to come from the working class. A cabinet maker who earned his living by the sweat of his brow, Louis crafted his theology and long weary nights of study with a sawdust still clinging to his clothes. Like Andrew Jackson Davis and England's David Richmond, he also turned his powers of magnetism toward healing, but he focused

on a special category of ailments sleepwalking. Ever since France mesmer Most French magnetizers had been interested in the ways that charismatic men of the upper class could impose their willpower and aggression on others. It was an ongoing battlefield

and the war of ideas for equality. Like the flip side of the American religious idea that women were more open to the spirits because of their passive, willing souls, some French mesmerists continued experimenting with the idea that naturally strong, willed men could dominate more passive minds by manipulating invisible psychic forces. Louis was no aristocrat, but he was still charmed by the idea of wielding power over more passive Parisians and who could be more passive but also more

puzzling than a sleepwalker. He could shape oak and pine to his will, but could he wield magnetism like a chisel to sculpt the minds and bodies of other people. He was in the early eighteen forties that Louise started trying out magnetic trances on a childhood friend, Adele, who had been a sleepwalker ever since she was young. At first, it worked like a charm. In fact, Louis claimed that he'd even cured her, but that's when the spirit started

speaking to her. Some of their revelations sounded like the same sort of thing that Andrew Jackson Davis would hear. The spirits helped Adle diagnosed diseases around her and even prescribed cures. Others wanted to tell family members about the way that they had died. But something more terrifying started happening to adult during these seances. You see, when a spirit would take hold of her and speak through her mouth,

other things would happen to her body as well. In fact, as Louie would later write, the wounds and diseases that had killed the spirits began to appear on Adele's body. She would suffer from coughing fits, Terrible burns would bloom on her skin once she started choking so hard she couldn't breathe, and after another trance, a fit of thrashing and screaming to over her body and left her out of her mind for days. Nothing Louis tried would send the spirits out. Finally, at his wits end, he prayed

to the spirit of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Adele finally relaxed and lay at rest. It seems it took a power greater than Louis to command the wild spirits. His book describing these seances arrived on store shelves in eighteen forty eight, just as a revolutionary spirit was gripping Paris for those who felt the heartbeat of an age of freedom. The nation had been sleepwalking under the influence of powerful leaders

for far too long. In February of that year, huge crowds of demonstrators revolted, took the city and declared the Second Republic. Revolutionaries struggled for power with government officials who wanted to repeal reforms and returned to social hierarchy. It was the perfect moment for spiritualism. Here's Emily Clark, Associate professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University. There was something very countercultural about spiritualism, especially in any place that had

a history of church and state being connected. Spiritualism really issues denominational institutional structure, especially in a place like Great Britain where there's a lot of spiritualists, or even in France, these countries that have a much longer history of church and state being connected. Here you've got this countercultural religious movement in this combustible atmosphere. Louis organized the Society of Spiritualist Magnetizers of Paris. For three years, they experimented together

and published reports of their amazing contacts. When news arrived from the United States that the spirits had begun to speak there as well, interest finally exploded even beyond French borders for what they called the tablea tournant, the turning tables. The wild freedom was short lived, though. Napoleon, the third nephew of the infamous emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, retook the government

in the Middle Terry Coup. He joined the Catholic Church in trying to ban publications and suppress social clubs clubs Like Louise, it didn't help that the church authorities were absolutely convinced that spiritualism was demonic. They even formed new police forces to stamp out seances any source of inspiration that might undermine the authority of tradition. But like Maria Haydn's husband being dragged around the room beneath his spinning

oak table, government forces found themselves running in circles. Reports had already started to filter back to Paris from German newspapers that spiritualism was catching on there as well, far beyond Young Napoleon's reach. Some French spiritualists even fled the country, finding refuge beyond its borders, where they continued to turn tables. Among them was France's own literary giant, a man who shared Charles Dickens interest in the ghosts of the past, present,

and future, a man named Victor Hugo. In eighteen fifty three, Victor Hugo was in exile when he fled the oppressive regime back home, he found a safe place for his family in the English Channel on the Isle of Jersey. Victor's grief over France's squashed revolutions would echo through his literature for the rest of his life. Sheltering on the island with his family and some of his closest friends,

he struggled to find hope. That September, a visit from another Parisian writer prompted him to turn his attention to the new fire burning across Europe with condemnation from the Church. Some French spiritualists and curious friends had taken up table turning simply for the allure of the forbidden, But Hugo wasn't just looking for an afternoon of taboo amusement. In fact, when he first agreed to a science, nothing happened. If he'd only been looking for entertainment, he would have given

up right then and there. But Hugo and his friend tried seance after seance for weeks on end, despite never receiving any message at all. That is until one afternoon when the whole Hugo family sat for one final session, which Victor's friend described in a later memoir. At first, things were as silent as ever, but after a few minutes, a sharp crack split the air. It was like some ancient barrier to the spirit world had finally split open, and a new power was ready to flow through. Under

the Hugo family's hands, the table began to tremble. Victor's wife and children started wondering aloud, what was happening? Was the spirit there in the room? In response, the table tilted to one side and started tapping out answers on the floor. The spirit identified itself. It was Victor's beloved daughter, his favorite child in fact, who had drowned an aboding accident years before. For Victor, when she passed away, the future had died with her. But now she was seeking

to him again. Her mother wept. The spirit offered up memories of beautiful times with the family and answered questions that only she would know. Victor's friend, who had also known the girl, agreed with the rest of the family that he distinctly felt her presence. The tables tapping reassured Victor that his daughter was at peace. She watched over him. She saw that he still prayed for her every night, and she was grateful. But she had another message for

her family too, one about politics and power. According to the journal of Victor's friend, the spirit went on to assure them that Napoleon the thirds Empire would be overthrown and the Radical Republic would be restored, so they shouldn't give up hope on their vision of a future liberty. It was exactly the reassurance that Victor needed. After such a compelling session, Victor and his family threw themselves into seances for the next year. They held them constantly, and

the results were miraculous. Over the next twelve months, Victor Hugo received messages from the spirits of all kinds of people, not just family members either. Just like Isaac Post messages started to come from those he most respected French writers like playwrights Moliere and Jean Baptiste Racine. Even philosophers and religious figures stopped by his table to talk. Shakespeare once appeared and used the tedious system of table tapping to dictate the first act of a new play for Victor.

Jesus himself appeared to him, giving his blessing to their work. Here's Emily Clark once again. Spiritualists had a very keen sense of history. They were receiving information direct from the source, even if that source had died decades centuries before. Spiritualists could become part of that story. They could become part of that story of human progress, even if it was just a small group that maybe no one would ever

hear of them. You know, Benjamin Franklin knew who they were, or the spirit it of Benjamin Franklin knew who they were, and so they got to feel like they were part of something so much bigger than themselves. Like the reformers in Rochester who found guidance and courage in the spirit messages from George Washington or William Penn. Victor Hugo found hope in the new wave of revelations from his own forebearers. It was an assurance that things were never too far gone.

His beloved family could be regained, and so could his nation. Despite the collapse of the Second Republic, Victor and the radicals could be certain that they were on the right side of history. By now, it's clear that spiritualism was not just an insignificant historical fad. In Spain, it caught the interest of the royal family, and Denmark, a book published about Daniel Hume captured the public imagination and provoked

at least one leading politician into outright obsession. In fact, it's easy to trot out these details about its rapid spread, or about the interests of royal families and famous writers to prove that point. But one of the things that's so remarkable about spiritualism is what happened in England and in Rochester through this movement. People who would otherwise have been overlooked. Girls on a country farm and workers in a Yorkshire factory were being heard across the world. Take

Emma Floyd. She was born to a simple London schoolmaster in eight three. When she would later make a name for herself, she would write that the neighborhood where she grew up was the resort of thieves, murderers, and outcasts. Not an auspicious place to start a life of worldwide renown, and things only got worse when Emma's father died, the oldest of four children. It wasn't long before Emma needed to help support her family to keep them all out

of the workhouse. Emma later wrote that she was never young, joyous, or happy. What she did have, though, was music. Like Leah Fish, Emma started working life as a music tutor. She was talented enough, though, that she didn't stick to just teaching. Within a year, she was performing publicly on stage, and that's what brought her to the attention of a man named Pierre, the heir to a French piano empire. His family had fled the dangers of Paris for the

safety of England. When he heard Emma play in his London shop, Pierre offered to loan her an instrument of her own if she would agree to spend some time every day playing in his showroom. It was only a matter of time before things had settled down enough for him to return to Paris and to bring Emma along with him. It was a faithful offer because Pierre brought something else to his new family's music business, an interest

in the occult. During the day, Pierre started offering space in his shops to a group called the Orphic Circle. Their rituals included drawing transvisions from sleepwalkers and clairvoyant children. In the tradition of French mesmerists, often they wanted someone to set the mood. Soon enough, Emma was performing accompaniments for their seances. It must have been quite the change

for Emma. One moment she woul Is working at a piano shop to entice visitors to buy expensive instruments, and the next she was being asked to help a group of occultists channel spirits from the world of the dead. But it didn't take long for the Orphic Circle to determine that Emma was a suitable instrument herself. They figured out that they could easily magnetize her, and once she was in a trance, she could play any piece of

music they wanted on command. For a while, this became Emma's routine, but word got back to Emma's mother with an ominous tone. Her daughter was trapped in Paris under an evil hand, satanic influence, and the physical evidence supported their fears. The Orphic Circle was ringing her out like an old rag. Injuries from over exertion during trances shredded Emma's singing voice. Her mother demanded her return to England, where she demanded her to get rest and then find

normal work on the stage again. But Emma would never forget the power that had moved through her. So maybe it's no surprise that when Maria Hayden arrived in London, Emma soon started to make public appearances alongside her as a second medium. Then, in eighteen fifty she would even sail for America. Following an invitation to perform in one of the grandest cities in the country, Emma was headed

to Broadway. Before we move forward, we need to take a step back back, before Kate and Maggie Fox held a seance in Rochester, before Cora Scott filled that blank slate with other worldly writing, Before Emma sat at the Orphic Circle's piano. Before all of that, there was bell and like the girls we've met so far, she would come to carry the mantle of modern spiritualism into the eighteen fifties. Here's Margaret Washington, professor of History and American

Studies at Cornell Universe City. As she would say, she was practicing it before she even knew that there was something called spiritualism. Bell was born in the same land where Andrew Jackson Davis would grow up in the eighteen twenties. But Bell was older than Andrew too, and her experience of life in the Hudson Valley couldn't have been more different than his. She was born sometime just before the year eighteen hundred, but the dates isn't recorded. You see

right there in New York. Bell was born into slavery. Here's Margaret Washington again, she would say, and actually she did say that when she was born, there were no ships, there were no steamboats. It was a whole different world. If you can imagine living in rural Hudson Valley, New York in the wintertime and not having shoes. That was the fate of the enslaved African Dutch people where she grew up, and that was pretty much her fate. Bell

was never educated as a child. She never went to church, but Belle's mother gave her a deep sense of faith that was a mixture of pious Dutch Calvinism and the traditions of her African heritage, and even from a very young age, Bell had a second sense, clare of voyance that seemed to guide her through life. And it was through people like Bell that African spirituality would come to be another major influence on American spiritualism. Spiritualism has interesting

connections to what we call africanity. The idea of people connecting to the other world was something that Africans took as just common. I mean, that's just the way it was. There really was no break between the earthly life and the life of the beyond. One of the formative experiences for Bell, the one that confirmed her spiritual sensitivity and set the course for her life in motion, was the

death of her beloved father, James. James had been the headman for a powerful landowning family who for a time owned two million acres of land in New York. But as James got older and could no longer work, they left him to fend for himself when he went blind, though there was little he could do to care for himself, after all, most of his children had been sold away from New York. When she could slip away, Bell would do what she could to care for him, but it

was hardly enough unable to build himself a fire. A cold New York winter froze his isolated cabin and killed him. When he died, the White family offered to provide a funeral. The funeral consisted of this pine box and lots of rum, and that was basically sort of a high falutint funeral for a slave. For Bell, it was so disgusting. She remembered that, and she took comfort in the feeling that came over her afterwards, and it stayed with her the rest of her life. It was the sense of her father,

his guiding presence. She always said that throughout her life she and her father talked to each other. She maintained that she was channeling her father on many occasions. That was very important to her. He was her shining light. She makes us very clear in her narrative how important he was to her. So from the time that she was young, Belle would turn to spirit voices when things became difficult, whether it was the spirit of her father,

her shining light, or the Holy Spirit of God. One of those difficult days came on July eighteen seven, when the man who enslaved her broke his promise you see, he had struck a deal with Bell the year before. She'd been his captive for eighteen years, but he told Bell that if she and her partner worked especially hard, they would earn their freedom. When the day came, though,

he laughed in her face. He claimed that she hadn't kept her side of the bargain, despite years of his bragging to others about her strength and stamina, saying and I quote, she's better to me than a man. Furious with frustration, Bell looked for direction. She had created a little island in the middle of the river, and that was where she would go and talk to God. She went to her little island area and she asked God what she should do because he had broken his promise.

And God told her she should leave, And she said, well, how can I leave? They'll see me? And God told her to leave. Just before daybreak, when everyone was still asleep, the household woke up to find the kitchen empty. Bell was gone. She had walked away from her enslavement with her infant child in her arms. It was her first step towards becoming one of the most powerful and popular spiritualist preachers in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

She was on her way to becoming a guiding light for the abolitionist movement and a clear voice that called the nation to live up to its promises, and it was her first step toward becoming the woman that changed the face of America, a woman that we know today as Sojourner Truth. 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.

Bell would later talk about these divisions in New York as a spiritual contest like the one between Babylon and Israel, a contest for the soul of the nation. But for too many women like Bell, that fight was not just

a metaphor. Her story makes clear what was at stake in the battles she would fight for the rest of her life, whether the next generation of black Americans would continue you to be shuffled from bondage to bondage for the profits of powerful slaveholders, or whether black families would be able to break the system of channel slavery. Rebell The fight was as personal as it gets, but Bell didn't struggle alone. Together with her friends and the anti

slavery societies of the Northeast, including those in Rochester. She became part of something bigger, a movement, a driving force of radicalism and revolution, a force that was all too familiar to someone else, the Spiritualists. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by 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 Unobscured as a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.