In March 1848, neighbours crowded into a rented house at Hydesville, near Newark in Wayne County, New York, to hear noises that seemed to answer questions. Two daughters of John and Margaret Fox, usually known as Maggie and Kate, became the centre of the excitement. The rappings soon travelled into the public life of Rochester and helped establish modern Spiritualism. Yet the surviving documents tell several different stories: a local inquiry into unexplained sounds, a family history of spirit communication, and a later confession describing a childhood deception.
The strongest starting point is E. E. Lewis’s 1848 collection of signed statements. It was assembled close to the events, before decades of controversy accumulated. These statements establish what named people said they heard and how they questioned the sounds. They do not independently establish the existence of a spirit, a murdered traveller or a supernatural source.
The household and the night of 31 March
In her statement, signed on 11 April, the girls’ mother said the family had moved into the house on 11 December 1847. She placed the beginning of the noises about a fortnight before her account, describing knocks in the east bedroom and an occasional impression of a chair moving. At night the family lit a candle and searched. She also described a trembling sensation in bedsteads and chairs. This is a report of perceived sounds and vibrations, without a recorded physical measurement of either.
Friday 31 March was the turning point. Mrs Fox said the family went to bed early after disturbed nights. The younger daughter snapped her fingers, and the noises appeared to repeat the number of snaps. The other daughter tried counting and clapping. Their mother then requested ten sounds and asked for the ages of her children. In her account the responses were correct. The familiar dramatic story begins here, but its details should be taken from this early statement rather than silently filled out from later retellings.
The mother’s statement described Kate as about twelve and Maggie as in her fifteenth year. Later sources gave different ages, including Margaret’s much younger estimate in her confession. The discrepancy matters because it changes the picture of how young the participants were. This case does not depend on choosing a convenient age from the conflicting accounts; it depends on recognising that even apparently basic biographical details became part of the dispute.
How questions became a murder narrative
Mrs Fox asked whether the cause was human, then whether it was a spirit, assigning meaning to the presence or absence of knocks. Further questions produced an account of an injured man whose remains were beneath the dwelling. Her husband called their neighbour Mrs Redfield. Other neighbours followed, including William Duesler, Artemas Hyde and David Jewell. Mrs Fox reported repeated questions and repeated answers as more people arrived.
Duesler’s own statement is particularly revealing. He described asking whether a person had been murdered, naming possible methods, and reversing questions when no sound came. He counted through possible sums of money until a response was taken to indicate five hundred dollars. The resulting narrative included a throat cut with a butcher’s knife and concealment in the cellar. These were allegations constructed through a question-and-response procedure. They were not the findings of a police investigation or a confession by a living suspect.
Lewis’s text leaves a name blank in important passages concerning the supposed murderer. A responsible account should not turn such allegations into a solved historical crime. The method also raises an evidential problem: the questioners supplied the alternatives, while silence could prompt a reversed question. Agreement among witnesses that they heard a knock does not, by itself, validate the interpretation attached to it.
The cellar search and its limits
The noises prompted practical action. Mrs Fox said digging began in the cellar on Saturday night and continued until water stopped the search. She described the house overflowing with visitors; an estimate of three hundred people was explicitly something she had been told. She also acknowledged that she knew much of that evening’s proceedings only through others because she had gone elsewhere to sleep. Those qualifications are valuable features of the original testimony, easily lost in a compressed legend.
John Fox endorsed his wife’s account and said searches around the house had failed to discover an explanation. Duesler likewise presented the noises as something he could not account for. Lewis’s introduction relied heavily on the respectability and number of witnesses, while acknowledging the possibilities of supernatural action, trickery, fear or superstition. The pamphlet preserves an early investigation, but its confidence in the witnesses is an argument about credibility, rather than an experimental exclusion of every ordinary cause.
The early excavation described in the mother’s statement did not establish the identity of a murdered person. Later stories about remains and a named pedlar belong to a separate stage of the tradition. They should not be projected backwards into the April statements as though the questioning had immediately produced an independently verified body and victim.
From Hydesville to Rochester
The family’s older daughter Leah became an organiser and public defender of the phenomena. Her The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, published under the name A. Leah Underhill in 1885, is an extensive participant’s account. It includes documents and recollections concerning the move into Rochester society, sympathetic friends such as Isaac and Amy Post, public meetings and hostile investigations. It was written decades afterwards and explicitly defends spirit agency.
In her account of the Corinthian Hall period, Leah described committees searching for concealed apparatus and subjecting the sisters to intrusive examinations. She reproduced a certificate saying that sounds continued while the women stood on pillows with their dresses tied around the ankles. Such accounts explain why supporters thought ordinary trickery had been excluded. They also require careful attribution: the account and its selected documents come through a committed participant, and a failed search for a mechanism does not establish a supernatural cause.
The noise itself was only part of what changed. In a crowded bedroom a knock could be an alarming curiosity; in public demonstrations it could become a message about survival after death. Leah’s narrative shows how tests, sympathetic networks and arguments with critics became part of the movement’s growth. For this case, the Hydesville and Rochester phases form one connected history, rather than separate mysteries to be counted independently.
The Buffalo doctors and the problem of controls
Leah’s book also reproduces a statement dated 17 February 1851 by physicians Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee and C. B. Coventry of Buffalo. They proposed that joint movements could make sounds resembling the rappings, citing a woman who could produce similar noises with her knees. Leah rejected the explanation and challenged the doctors to examine the sisters. This exchange is more specific than a general claim that science either proved or disproved the phenomena: there was a proposed bodily mechanism and a dispute over whether it explained these performances.
One revealing episode appears in Leah’s own defence. During a Buffalo sitting when no raps came, she said a sympathetic man knocked on the back of the sofa behind her. She insisted that she recognised the sounds as false and rebuked him. Her interpretation defended the distinction between genuine and imitated manifestations. The episode also shows why knowing who could touch furniture, and distinguishing an actual source from an apparent direction, were essential controls.
Margaret’s confession and its withdrawal
In October 1888 Margaret publicly repudiated her mediumship. Reuben Briggs Davenport’s The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, first published that year, printed an authorisation attributed to Margaret and Kate and presented their story as an exposure. Davenport was openly campaigning against Spiritualism. His rhetoric should be distinguished from the specific admissions and demonstration he reported.
Davenport attributed to Margaret an explanation beginning with an apple dropped on a string and developing into joint-produced sounds. He described her appearance at New York’s Academy of Music on 21 October 1888, reproducing a newspaper account in which she removed a shoe and produced raps with her foot on a small wooden platform. Physicians from the audience reportedly examined the action. This supplies a reported ordinary method and an admission from a central participant, giving it a different evidential character from an outsider’s guess about hidden equipment.
The story did not end there. Margaret withdrew the confession the following year. The Society for Psychical Research’s historical overview discusses that reversal and the documentary disagreements. A withdrawal cannot erase the earlier admission and reported demonstration; nor should a history conceal the withdrawal because it complicates a preferred verdict. Leah’s defence and Margaret’s changing testimony must both be read with attention to their dates, purposes and circumstances.
What the record supports
Hydesville is exceptionally important as a documented origin story for a religious movement. It preserves named witnesses, an early pamphlet, described searches, competing physical explanations and the later statements of the people at its centre. It offers much firmer evidence for the development of belief and controversy than for the identity of an unseen communicator. The reported joint-sound demonstration provides a substantial reason to reject claims that rappings necessarily required spirit agency, while the surviving documents cannot reconstruct every individual sound heard over the following decades.
Sources and related reading
Primary sources: E. E. Lewis, A Report of the Mysterious Noises (1848), especially the statements of Margaret Fox, John D. Fox and William Duesler; A. Leah Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885), chapters I–V and XII–XIII; Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism (1888; linked transcription uses a later edition), especially chapters V–VI. These are historical claims and arguments, not interchangeable independent confirmations.
For documentary discrepancies and later developments, see the SPR overview of the Fox sisters. Related UKPX cases include Cock Lane’s answering noises and Crookes’s tests with D. D. Home. This article concerns historical reports; it does not identify a private residence for visiting.