In the mid-19th century, in the small village of Hydesville, New York, a man was awakened at night by a knock on his door. There was no one outside the door, however. But as soon as he went to bed again, there was a knock again and, despite the repeated repetition of this phenomenon, he could not understand its reasons.
After some time, his little daughter woke up screaming at midnight and said that a cold hand had touched her face.
That was the end of it until, eighteen months later, Methodist Fox and his wife and three daughters moved into the house. In February 1848, one evening, when the children had been put to bed, a peculiar knocking began again. One of the girls jokingly began snapping her fingers, and the knocking continued in time with these sounds.
The girl shouted: "Now count one, two, three, four," and so on; before each number she clapped her hands. The unknown creature tapped out the same number of blows. Then Mrs. Fox asked him to count to ten, after which ten beats were heard. Then she asked about the age of the children, and for each of them the corresponding number of blows was obtained.
After that, she asked if a human being made such a knock, but received no answer. When she asked if it was a spirit, and to the request, if the answer was yes, knock twice, followed by two blows. She continued her questions further and learned that this spirit was a shopkeeper on earth, lived in this very house, was killed here and buried in a cellar.
Fox family. The Fox sisters became popular mediums.
Subsequently, when examining the cellar, a skeleton was indeed found there. This fact attracted the attention of the neighbors, who in large numbers came here to hear a strange knocking, which has not ceased to be repeated since then; nobody could understand its reason. The Fox family was recognized as possessed by the devil and excluded from the Methodist Church; shortly thereafter, she left for Rochester.
However, here they started knocking again. Since it took place only in the presence of children, it was assumed that it was they who produced similar sounds in some way. Therefore, a commission of the most respected persons in the city was appointed, with instructions to investigate the case. She did it carefully, put the children barefoot on the pillows and made sure they had no shell to knock on.
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Despite such precautions, the knocking continued to be heard on the floor and on the walls, the reason for it remained hidden. In the evenings, many people began to come to the Fox family to hear this suspicious knock; usually gathered around a rather large table, and sounds seemed to come from it.
Thus, the knocking of tables was discovered, and soon then the movement of the table, table rotation. Many people realized then that such sounds and movements can occur in their neighborhood, while other people have never noticed this. Thus, a special ability was established - mediumship.
Then, first in Rochester, and then in neighboring cities, public lectures on these wonderful phenomena began to be read. Thanks to this, the case became known in wider circles: they began to experiment with tables everywhere, and in a short time this movement spread throughout America and then passed to Europe.
It took a little time to discover that spirits can do more than just pounding table legs. All sorts of amazing phenomena began to be observed at spiritualistic seances, especially when people gathered around a table in a dark room.
Objects that were not touched by anyone started to move; musical instruments played whole melodies by themselves; mediums began to talk and report about things - which they could not know at all - all this indicated that higher intelligent beings were involved here.
Since all these facts were completely incomprehensible, they prompted scientists to carefully study them. A similar study was carried out by respected American lawyer Edmonds and professor of chemistry Gar. Both of them adhered to the spiritualistic teaching as the only possible explanation.
At the same time, however, serious objections arose against their conclusions: the American hypnotist Daudet saw uncertainty and unreliability in all Edmonds's descriptions, which do not provide any guarantees that the facts he observed were not the result of deception on the part of mediums in connection with known hypnotic phenomena. Thus, American scholars have failed to shield mediumistic phenomena from doubts.
As soon as the knocking stopped in Rochester, similar stories began in another American city, Stratford. This fact deserves special attention because it gave Andrew Davis, who was invited there, “hearing voices,” a reason to develop the whole theory of contacts between spirits and people. Davis was later named the first American medium.
This incident happened in the home of the preacher, Dr. Phelps. It began, as in Hydesville, with knocking and movement. Moreover, various objects in an incomprehensible way fell in the rooms, and even when the doors were locked, this did not prevent them from raising a kind of fuss. We saw one chair rise from the floor and sink five or six times on it with such force that the whole house shook and even the neighbors felt the impact.
A large metal candelabrum, which stood on the fireplace, was placed on the floor by an invisible force and hit it until it broke. In one of the rooms, figures appeared, formed from the clothes that were in the house; these clothes were arranged in such a way that they looked like people.
Most often, these phenomena were associated with the personality of the young eleven-year-old Harry Phelps. The unclean force tormented him in various ways: it tore his clothes, then threw him into a well, and once he was even tied up and hung from a tree.
Subsequently, all kinds of destruction began: windows and glassware were broken in the house; pages were torn from Dr. Phelps's notebooks in a locked desk; finally, even a fire broke out in it, so that many letters and manuscripts were burnt.
After this lasted for two years, they finally decided to enter into negotiations with the hostile forces in the manner indicated by the Fox family, and then these worries gradually ceased.
From the book "The World of Superstition and Magic"
