The Hydesville Rappings ("Mr. Splitfoot")

December 11, 1847. John D. Fox moved his family into a rented cottage in Hydesville, in the Town of Arcadia, Wayne County, New York. It stood about 30 miles east of Rochester. With him came his wife Margaret and their two youngest daughters, Maggie and Kate Fox. Maggie was in her fifteenth year, and Kate was about twelve.

Earlier tenants had their own stories. A daughter of Hannah Weekman woke screaming that something cold had moved over her head and face. Jane C. Lape saw a man in the bedroom, in a black frock-coat and cloth cap.

In late March 1848 the noises began. Knocks on the floor of the east bedroom. Footsteps in the pantry. Mrs. Fox said the sound was not very loud, yet it jarred the bedsteads and chairs. "It was a tremulous motion, more than a sudden jar."

Friday, March 31. Kate clapped her hands. "Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do." The raps followed with the same number. Mrs. Fox asked the noise to rap her children's ages, and each was given correctly. Was it a human being? No rap. Was it a spirit? Two raps.

Mrs. Redfield came in at about 7:30 pm. William Duesler arrived around 9 pm, sat on the bed and felt it jar with each sound. Question by question, the raps told of a thirty-one-year-old man whose throat had been cut with a butcher knife in the house about five years earlier and whose remains lay in the cellar. Charles Redfield went down with a candle, and the raps answered only when he stood over one spot. He stepped aside, and the room fell silent.

Arthur Conan Doyle later wrote that seventy or eighty people came that night. Of April 1, Mrs. Fox recalled: "It was said there were over three hundred persons present." E. E. Lewis soon gathered 22 signed statements. Lucretia Pulver, once a hired girl in the house, remembered a peddler in a black coat. "I never saw him after that."

The raps followed the girls to Rochester, where three committees examined Maggie and her elder sister Leah at Corinthian Hall in November 1849. None could identify a method. In February 1851 three Buffalo doctors, Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee and C. B. Coventry, argued that the sounds came from the knee joints. When the knees were held, no sounds were heard. The Seybert Commission later concluded that such effects could be "easily produced by fraudulent methods."

October 21, 1888. At the New York Academy of Music, Maggie Fox told about 2,000 people how she said the trick had worked while Kate watched. First came an apple on a string, bumped against the floor, then joints and toes. "We were very mischievous children and sought merely to terrify our dear mother." In November 1889 she recanted, saying she had been pressured and paid.

In 1904 the Boston Journal reported that a skeleton had been found in the cellar walls after a false wall collapsed. A physician's report in 1909 noted chicken bones among the remains. Joe Nickell later found that at least part of them were animal.

The cottage was moved to Lily Dale, where it burned in 1955. The Hydesville plot is now a Spiritualist pilgrimage site, remembered as the place where modern Spiritualism began. The story still opens the same way. A child, a clap, and Mr. Splitfoot answering.