So what are your thoughts about this episode in particular?

I feel like it's going to open, open some eyes, and it's going to, bring, Oh, what am I looking for?

Awareness of their lives that people never heard of before.

And, oh, I didn't know about them.

And so it's going to be a more eye opener and more for the spiritual world.

Psychics.

And a lot of people that are in the broom closet— —Right—are going to like, oh, it's not evil and and be able to express themselves.

I think that's one of the things about these little girls that really attracted people to spiritualism.

It was the fact that they were a nine and 11 year old.

These little girls weren't getting money.

They were just saying wha the spirits were telling them.

Well, most kids under five ar connected to the spirit world.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Children are curious by nature, but two little girls in Hydesville, New York, took their curiosity to the next level when they devised a way to speak to the dead.

It's funny how people think that history is boring.

But do we even know what's going on inside these pages?

It's still being written, and it's packed with wild stories and unexpected twists.

Im here to tell you the stories behind the history Its complicated.

Messy.

And often times bizarre and strange.

You are about to learn that this is not your average history lesson.

I'm Christine Darrow, but you can call me.

Maggie and Kate Fox moved with their family to Hydesville, New York, which is about two hours from Watertown, in 1847, an event that would change the course of the sisters lives forever and lead to what is now known as the modern Spiritualist movement.

Well, welcome to the Fox Sisters property.

This is the enclosure where the original house used to sit on top.

So we're actually standing in the basement, which has about ten feet of this.

Fill the stone.

A lot of people love to come in here and see the enclosure from 1812, but I think the highlight is always this section over here, which is actuall what they call the fourth wall.

And the fourth wall was built to conceal the peddler's bones.

And so that would be that section right there.

So the Fox Sisters story begins.

Actually, back in 1847, when the family first moved here.

They were looking for a short term rental so that they could build a house on the foothills of their son David.

And David lived two and a half miles up the road on Parker Road.

So when the Fox family first came here, the first thing Mrs.

Fox said when she walked through the door was, this house is haunted.

There was a Mr.

and Mrs.

Bell living in the house prior to the Fox family, and that's reall where the story kind of started with the peddler visiting and then the peddler mysteriously disappearing.

The Bell's lived here for, a little while, and then they moved out due to poor health.

Then the Weekman family moved in and they were experiencing strange noises as well as the Bells.

However, when the Fox family moved in, they probably wouldn't have been aware quite yet.

Other than Mrs.

Fox walking in and saying that she had a feeling this house was haunted.

So Kate and Maggie came up with this rapping system, mostly because that's what they were hearing.

So they would go to bed at night and they would start hearing tapping noises.

And it was very subtle at first.

Sometimes they would think that it was someone tapping on the window and they would call out and their father would go and look and see if anybody was outside.

When there really was no one there.

Then they would hear it again.

Gentle wrappings on, you know, the door, and he would look and no one was there.

And I think over time, the girls just kind of, you know, being young preteens, they would have tried to push that boundary of, oh, let' see how far we can go with this.

And then started mimicking the sounds.

Intrigued by these two girls who could speak to the dead, I reached out to someone local who has had plenty of experience in doing the same.

My name is Wilson Stevenson.

I am a psychic medium.

That means I can spea to the spirits and I can predict somewhat for the future.

How that works is, I connect when I connect with, the spirit world.

I can help.

They help me do readings and, make, Oh, how do I want to l say that?

They help me make to make predictions and, the reading themselves.

But the future predictions are also because we are free will, does not mean it's concrete, but it gives people guide.

When I first realized that I was could do this when I was 30.

I always knew stuff, but I just knew it.

So even as a kid, I would know things.

But when I went to a psychic she told me I could do this too, but I was negative, and I always saw I did see death.

I did see that bad things happening.

So I turned that into a positive aspect.

One of the biggest things I do remember is when I was ten, I had a dream of my cousin dying, and he was ten.

And two weeks late it happened exactly that aspect.

But my mother and my grandmother and our family always talked about this kind of stuff.

And so, I, I always thought everybody could do it.

I think as a young kid, everybody is in tuned into the spirit world until theyre five.

If you have a family that believe in spirits and believe in this, then they encourage it to keep going.

But if your family don't believe in it, they killed that psychic ability you had to the as a child.

Because everybody has a form, a psychic ability, like it or not.

And that just knowing or seeing or hearing or, you know, a deja vu, when the people talk you out of it, then, or fear kicks i and then you it's what's wasted.

With Wilson's own experiences echoing the Fox Sisters, who or what did they make contact with on the night of March 31st, 1848, a date that is credited with the birth of the modern spiritualist movement.

So the wrappings were actually made by a gentleman named Charles B. Rosna, and he was a peddler who came door to door selling his items.

And he had come to the cottage around 1846, and he was welcomed in by Mr.

and Mrs.

Bell, who had lived in the cottage at the time, and mysteriously disappeared.

The girls, when they moved in in 1847, they were hearing the rapping noises.

They didn't really know what was making those noises until they asked, and they were asking yes and no questions and getting rapping noises back in affirmation.

It was actually their brother David, who came down hearing about everything that was going on down here, who came up with the idea o writing letters of the alphabet on pieces of paper and having the spirit answer correctly when they pointed at different letters.

And that's how they found out what his name was.

The girl's communicating with Mr.

Rosna, asking him where he had been buried, came out to them as hi saying he was in the basement.

So he was telling them that he had been buried in the basement of the home.

Their brother David, and a few of the neighbors actually went into the cellar and started digging.

They got about two feet down and the cellar started to fill up with water, so they had to kind of give that up.

They also tried again in July, but it was unsuccessful again.

So unfortunately the only information they ever got was he had been murdered.

He named his assailant and said he had been buried in the basement.

He did say it was Mr.

Bell that killed him.

However, Mr.

Bell was never charged and gave several statements and getting several statements from neighbors, saying that he was a very upstanding citizen and that he would never do anything like that.

But it was very suspicious that the peddler visited the Bell family and then after that disappeared, and then shortly after he disappeared their health started to decline.

And that's why they left the house.

Much has been written over the years about perceived hoaxes involving the discovery of Rosnas body and the false wall.

The New York Freeman reported in their April 10th, 1886 edition that Rosnas body was buried in a well hole in the cellar, ten fee deep and covered with quicklime.

A search was mad and the remains of a human body were found, as described by the rapping spirit.

Some questioned whether Charles B. Rosna existed at all, at least perhaps under that name.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a dedicated and lifelong spiritualist and prominent supporter of the Fox Sisters and their claim, though he doubted the Rosna name entirely.

This begs the question how does a psychic medium handle skeptics?

I have a lot of people that will call me if they're, they feel like the house is haunte or there's something going on.

A lot of times they're not haunted.

It's just it's their loved ones.

But fear kicks in, and once fear kicks in, then that becomes haunted.

When it was somethin nice and simple, just, you know, mom, stop it and say hi, and you freaked out and you made it sound like it was something evil when it once wasn't.

the way I look at skeptics, is I encourage them, but they don't bother me, but I will not be disrespected.

So anyone that's a nonbeliever, and they start to disrespect me, I just stop and tell them, you have your beliefs, I have mine, we're done.

But, I like skeptics.

When I do group readings, I have sometimes a skeptic there because the wife dragged husband there and they end up getting the reading and they leave with tears in their eyes, going like, when are we were seeing you?

I've never had to deal with people disrespect me or I'm thinking, is that it is not from God because I don't go to anybody and give anybody a reading unless they come to me.

I don't walk in the store, or walk up to people and say, oh your grandmother's here.

No, if you don't come to see me, you don't connect with me.

Then I don't connect with you.

I think it's disrespectful to go into somebody else's energy without them knowing it.

So to me, it's my energy is pure upfront because I don't let in, I don't go toward people who are skeptic.

I've had, people come even, give me a fake name.

And thinking I was looking at the up on Facebook or research before they got here and the way that I knew what more than they thought I was going to know.

And I won't— —even though I get something and I keep telling them this is what I'm getting or tell me no, I'm going, well, this is what I'm getting, you know, you take it as you want to take it.

And then they, you know, come back, tell me.

Well, you are right.

Maggie and Kat had an older sister named Leah who lived in Rochester.

Seeing her little sisters as a moneymaking opportunity.

Leah booked the Corinthian and charged admission for the public to witness her sisters communicating with the dead.

So Corinthian Hall was a huge theater.

It was a very large venue, so to speak, of the times.

And once word got out that these girls had this ability to communicate with spirits, there were men, scientists, physicians, other people who were accusing them of trickery.

And one of the ways they thought that they could catch them was by putting them on display.

At first they stood, fully clothed.

And then as they, you know, the men, some of the women in there, because, of course, they would have had a chaperone and their mother.

But when this was happening, they couldn't come up with any explanation of how they were doing it.

And so the next thing wa take your socks off, take your, you know, your dress off, take your undergarments off.

There was no physical or scientific explanation as to ho they were making these noises.

Word of the girl's verified mediumshi abilities spread like wildfire.

As newspapers worldwide bega reporting on these young girls who could talk to the dead, the girls are summoned to the white House.

When President Franklin Pierce lost his only surviving child in a train acciden on the way to his inauguration on January 6th, 1853.

Riddled with guilt, his wife Jane Pierce, enlists the help of the Fox Sister to summon the spirit of their 11 year old son, Benny Pierce.

Tragedy would strike the white House again on February 20th, 1862, when President Lincoln's 11 year old son Willie Lincoln, dies of typhoid fever.

Mary Todd Lincoln, having lost both of her young sons to illness, fell into a deep depression that could only be lessened by communicating with her dead sons.

She, too, would enlist the help of the Fox Sisters.

The Fox Sisters were not the only mediums to visit the white House, where President Lincoln would continue to attend seances in the Red room.

He had one spiritualist medium that he consulted regularly by the name of Charles Colchester, who ironically, was also the personal medium and friend of none other than John Wilkes Booth.

During his readings, Colchester urged Lincoln to heed his premonitions of the president's assassination.

As Lincoln tol his cabinet members and friends, I cannot be shut up in an iron cage and guarded.

A president must go among the people.

One man's lif is as dear to him as another's.

And if a man takes my life, he may be reasonably sure that he will lose his own.

These words proved to be prophetic for Lincoln, as he was shot by Booth, and then Booth was shot shortly after.

But then again, Lincoln did consider himself a bit of a psychic.

After he won the 1860 election, Lincoln confided in his wife that when he gazed into his mirror, he saw tw reflection, staring back at him.

The first was solid and the second reflection was faint and ghostly.

He interpreted this to mean that he would serve out his first term, but would b assassinated during the second.

Colchester was so insistent that the president would be murdered, that after the assassination of Lincoln, the police issued a report wanting Colchester for questioning.

Colchester fled Washington, D.C.

to New York where he was promptly arrested, not for the murder of Lincoln, but for operating without a license nor paying taxes.

Colchester was eventually tried and found guilty, and a Buffalo Court.

Following President Lincoln's assassination in 1865, the Fox Sisters lives wer marked by increasing hardships.

Both Kate and Maggie struggled severely with alcoholis and faced financial instability, leading to public disputes and personal decline.

Not to mention disavowing the very movement they created.

So as the girls got older and became women, Maggi actually met an Arctic explorer.

When she was around 16.

He was quite a few years older than her, but they fell in love.

That was probably her biggest downfall, was falling in love with this gentleman.

He went on a exploration that was to last for years.

He married her in a secret ceremony and basically asked her to step back from readings and spiritualism, which she did, and wait for him, which she did.

Kate, on the other hand, during this time she took care of her parents until they both passed and then decided to go to England.

She went to England.

She met her husband over there and was happily married with two children.

When Maggie found out that her husband had died from malaria on his trip, she literally was broken.

There was no coming back for her.

They say that she was delirious.

She had started drinking.

Her lif really took a downward spiral.

During the course of her later life, she went to visit her sister in England, but on her way home, she was met in New York City by a reporter who knew she was down on her luck, and he approached her and asked her if she would be willing to confess that this whole spiritualist movement had been a hoax and would offer her $1,500.

And because she was so down on her luck, and probably becaus life had been so hard for her, she agreed to do it.

Despite Maggie recanting her paid confession a year later, in 1889, the sisters failed to reclaim their former fame or financial stability.

Their final years were marked by severe alcoholism, poverty, and public obscurity, largely alienated from the spiritualist movement they had founded.

The three died within five years of the confession.

Leah, in 1890, Kate in 1892, and finally Maggie in 1893, ending their lives in destitution.

Spiritualism, however, continued to flourish with the founding of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches the year of Maggie's death, and the movement still continues today with private and gallery readings like the one here in Philadelphia, New York, with psychic medium Wilson Stevenson.

whos my psychic over here?

Ive got angels and Ive got the E.T.s.

in this group.

So someone is very intuitive over here who has a lot of deja vu a lot of dreams, intense.

I have a lot of deja vu.

Do you think about somebody and they call you or show up?

I want to go back.

My brother and I, he would be like, I was just going to call you, and Im like I was just thinking about calling you.

Sometimes your are so real that you— Yeah, sometimes, but not every night.

I have about four dreams a night God.

I dont sleep.

And none of them come true.

I recommend to do a dream log.

and just jot it down and youll learn your symbols and learn what they mean But youre intuition is a lot stronger than you realize.

You meet somebody and you like instant like, or no like.

Yeah.

And when you give them a benefit of the doubt they end up stabbing you in the back.

Right.

Youre—80% of the time you are right on the money.

Could you tell my husband that, <LAUGHTER> Because hes not watching the show.<MORE LAUGHTER> Well, as long as you dont dream of killing him.

<LAUGHTER> You wouldnt look good in orange <MORE LAUGHTER> This much antifreeze.

Not this much.

<LAUGHTER> But then dont come see me afterwards.

<MORE LAUGHTER> To understand spiritualism today, it is important that historians, such as Tracy Murphy, preserves this heritage for others to appreciate.

The only thing I would lik to add that I would love to show you is actually one of the things that I, two of the things that I have that are very precious to me.

And one of them, when we were doing the, the dig of our property, the whole enclosure was underground.

You could not see any of it unless you knew what you were looking for.

And we were able to come when they were doing the dig out.

And one of the neat things that we found was the skeleton key that w believe went to the front door.

Oh, wow.

So we think this is the key that goes to the front.

I met this woman who called me up one day and said that she had found something in her great aunt and uncle's dresser drawer.

Now, the story is her great aunt lived down the street or down the road, actually lived down the road from me.

And when she was a young girl, her and her sister came here to the property in 1916 when they were taking the original house apar to be transported to Lilydale.

And that said, great aunt took one of the boards from the original house and wrapped it and kept it in her drawer.

And then when she passed, they found it, and this person called me and said, I have something that belongs to you.

She even wrote, board fro Hydesville spiritualist house.

And the minute she laid it in my hands, I, I knew, I just knew this is the only piece from the original house that we have.

Because the original house burned in Lilydale.

So these are very special things.

They don't normally stay here.

I do bring them home because we don't want to lose them.

And, they're just very, very sacred to me.

I met Wilson at a gallery reading just like this, where he picked me out of the audience and told me that I was going to hav two sets of twins in two years, and that the oldest set were going to be girls.

Today, my twin girls are 15 an my second set of twins are 14.

Coincidence?

You decide.

Till next time I'm your host, Christine Darrow.