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2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
2 episodes with hydesville
Les sœurs Fox, Margaret et Kate, sont souvent considérées comme les fondatrices du spiritisme moderne. Pourtant, derrière leur célébrité et leur influence sur le mouvement spirituel du XIXᵉ siècle, se cache une gigantesque imposture qui a trompé des milliers de personnes pendant des décennies.Les débuts du phénomène spirituelEn 1848, Margaret (15 ans) et Kate Fox (11 ans) vivent à Hydesville, un petit village de l'État de New York, avec leurs parents. Un soir, elles prétendent entendre des bruits étranges dans leur maison : des coups frappés, qui semblent répondre à leurs questions. Elles déclarent qu'un esprit communique avec elles, affirmant être celui d'un colporteur assassiné dans la maison.Rapidement, la nouvelle se répand et attire la curiosité. Un système de communication est mis au point : une frappe pour "oui", deux frappes pour "non". La famille Fox et leurs voisins sont convaincus d'assister à un phénomène surnaturel. L'histoire prend de l'ampleur et bientôt, des séances de spiritisme sont organisées publiquement.L'essor du spiritisme et la célébrité des sœurs FoxEncouragées par leur sœur aînée Leah, qui voit une opportunité lucrative, les deux jeunes filles commencent à donner des démonstrations à New York et dans d'autres grandes villes. Elles deviennent de véritables stars du spiritisme, inspirant d'autres médiums et contribuant à la popularité croissante du mouvement.Dans les années 1850, le spiritisme devient un phénomène mondial, séduisant des millions de personnes, y compris des intellectuels et des écrivains célèbres comme Arthur Conan Doyle. Les Fox Sisters en sont les figures de proue, organisant des séances où elles entrent en contact avec les morts, sous les yeux de spectateurs fascinés.L'aveu de la supercherieMais en 1888, Margaret Fox fait une révélation fracassante : tout était faux. Lors d'une conférence publique, elle explique que les bruits étaient produits par un craquement des articulations de leurs orteils et de leurs genoux, un talent qu'elles avaient développé dès l'enfance. Pour prouver ses dires, elle réalise la démonstration devant des témoins, mettant fin au mystère.Cette confession choque leurs partisans et affaiblit le mouvement spirite. Mais malgré tout, le spiritisme perdure encore aujourd'hui, preuve de l'impact durable de leur supercherie.ConclusionLes sœurs Fox ont bâti une légende sur un trucage habile, donnant naissance à un mouvement qui a marqué le XIXᵉ siècle. Leur histoire est un exemple fascinant de la crédulité humaine et de la puissance du désir de croire en l'invisible. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
The Redwood Coast Energy Authority is working to encourage new local generation of renewable energy through their redesigned "Feed-In Tariff" program, which provides about-market pricing and a streamlined contracting process to encourage the development of local renewable energy projects. This means projects like the new solar farm near Hydesville, a project brought forward by renewable energy developer EDP Renewables.Jocelyn Gwynn of Redwood Coast Energy Authority and Kendra Kallevig of EDP Renewables join the show to discuss the Feed-In Tariff program and how we can help foster the development of local renewable energy projects.Support the show
Ouija boards, or more generally, “spirit boards” have antecedents going back to the very first days of the Spiritualist movement. We begin our show with a seasonally spooky visit to the cottage of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, where the ghost of a murdered pedlar supposedly began communicating with the family through a … Read More Read More The post Spirit Boards appeared first on Bone and Sickle.
Aujourd'hui, nous allons vous parler de trois sœurs qui ont bouleversé notre relation avec l'au-delà… Alors qu'elles n'étaient que petites filles, leurs dons ont vite fait leurs preuves. Partout aux Etats-Unis et jusqu'en Europe, les notables et les petites gens étaient prêts à payer pour communiquer avec les morts grâce aux talents des deux jeunes sœurs. Elles sont ainsi devenues les premières médiums du monde et ont fondé une nouvelle religion. Leur nom : les sœurs Fox. Tapez un coup pour oui et découvrez leur True Story ! Une maison pas comme les autres... L'histoire des sœurs Fox commence par un banal déménagement. Margaret, ou Maggie, 12 ans, Catherine, appelée Kate, 10 ans, Leah, leur grande sœur, et leurs parents viennent s'installer à Hydesville, à 50km de la grande ville de Rochester où ils habitaient auparavant. Leur père David, un pasteur, se réjouit de pouvoir offrir à sa famille une charmante maison avec un grand jardin. Mais ses filles sont beaucoup moins enchantées : quitter la ville pour la campagne, c'est l'ennui assuré… Pour découvrir d'autres récits passionnants, cliquez ci-dessous : Le couple Lucie et Raymond Aubrac, l'incroyable récit de ces héros de la résistance : les fugitifs (1/4) Le couple Lucie et Raymond Aubrac, l'incroyable récit de ces héros de la résistance : “La dernière colonne” (2/4) Le couple Lucie et Raymond Aubrac, l'incroyable récit de ces héros de la résistance : arrestation et torture (3/4) Le couple Lucie et Raymond Aubrac, l'incroyable récit de ces héros de la résistance : le sauvetage d'une femme amoureuse (4/4) Ecriture : Karen Etourneau Réalisation : Celia Brondreau Voix : Andréa Brusque Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
MariaTherese & Uffe samtalar med Sabina Bergstedth om vad som hände i Hydesville 31a mars 1848. Systrarna Fox från New York spelade en viktig roll i skapandet av modern spiritualism. De tre systrarna var Leah (1814–1890), Margareta (även kallad Maggie) (1833–1893) och Catherine (även kallad Kate) Fox (1837–1892). Hemsida: www.mithera.se Sabina nås enklast på hennes Instagram @lagom_spirituell
Back into the full swing of things with part two of this spooky topic. This week we finish getting into the deep roots of Spiritualism and the way it has evolved over decades. The three Fox sisters first started communing with ghosts in Hydesville, New York. But as you can assume the story gets deeper and deeper. What started as simple prank became a life in shambles. Thanks for listening and remember to like, rate, review, and email us at: cultscryptidsconspiracies@gmail.com or tweet us at @C3Podcast.We have some of our sources for research here: http://tinyurl.com/CristinaSourcesAlso check out our Patreon: www.patreon.com/cultscryptidsconspiracies. Thank you to T.J. Shirley for our theme.
We are back after our holiday vacation. This week we get into the deep roots of Spiritualism and the way it has evolved over decades. The three Fox sisters first started communing with ghosts in Hydesville, New York. But as you can assume the story gets deeper and deeper. We look forward to you all enjoying our latest topic and look forward to the conclusion next week. Thanks for listening and remember to like, rate, review, and email us at: cultscryptidsconspiracies@gmail.com or tweet us at @C3Podcast.We have some of our sources for research here: http://tinyurl.com/CristinaSourcesAlso check out our Patreon: www.patreon.com/cultscryptidsconspiracies. Thank you to T.J. Shirley for our theme.
Vi missade förvisso Halloween, men vi vidhåller vår inaktualitet. Här kommer det gamla avsnittet från 2019 (277) om spiritismen och tron på spöken och andar som bredde ut sig under slutet på 1800-talet och början av 1900-talet. Ett par systrar lär sig kommunicera med andarna genom knackningar i väggen och blir världsstjärnor. Lyssna på våra avsnitt fritt från reklam: https://plus.acast.com/s/historiepodden. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Cette nuit de tempête du printemps 1848, Kate et Maggie Fox, 14 et 11 ans, ne sont pas très rassurées. Les deux sœurs viennent d'emménager dans leur nouvelle chambre dans la maison délabrée que leur famille a acquise à Hydesville, un patelin paumé de la région des Grands Lacs américains. La pièce sent l'humidité et la moisissure. La fenêtre a du mal à fermer.Mais ce qui les inquiète le plus, ce sont les bruits nocturnes de cette demeure étrange.Réfugiées sous la même couverture, les deux soeurs tressautent à chaque nouveau grincement suspect.Quand soudain des coups sourds résonnent juste au-dessus de leur tête.
The Fox Sisters... Kate, Maggie, and Leah... a name synonymous with modern-day Spiritualism. How did this new movement explode from Hydesville, New York to taking over two continents? 175 years later, many people still try to explain the different scenarios and expose the ominous sounds that were heard, one night, that disrupted the sleep of two young girls and their family, and ultimately changed how we think about immortality. Watch the video version here: https://youtube.com/live/I8quauy1XZ0Support the showFollow Us On Social Media
In 1848 two young sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox, began talking to a mysterious presence that had been making rapping sounds in their Hydesville, NY home, much to their parents' and neighbors' amazement. They couldn't have known that they were setting into motion a religious and social movement that would span centuries, captivate millions, and give a voice to the voiceless. This week, Hannah tells Katy about the Fox Sisters and their "rapping" phenomenon that took upstate NY by storm in the mid 19th century. The girls discuss the ins and outs of Spiritualism vs. science, how the water table works, why being a medium was a great career choice for women, and so much more! Pour your wine and gather your friends for this spooky tale of science and spirits! For more information on David's search for a kidney, please see the following links: Article written by Rebecca: https://byrslf.co/a-surprisingly-simple-way-to-save-a-life-78954e14aea4Renewal: https://www.renewal.org/ Direct email (specific to David): R25663@renewal.org 718-431-9831, ext. 209Questionnaire with Mt. Sinai: https://www.mountsinailivingdonation.org/Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/3390150567981252Contact info for Rebecca and David: david.slakter@gmail.com rebecca.sealfon@gmail.comSources: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/04/in-the-joints-of-their-toes/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Fox-and-Catherine-Foxhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmerhttps://www.historynet.com/the-fox-sisters-spiritualisms-unlikely-founders/https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sistershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborghttps://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1848?amount=1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Kent_Kane#Death_and_legacyhttps://msmagazine.com/2019/10/29/waking-the-witch-the-feminist-history-of-spiritualism/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_telegraph_lineSupport the showFollow us @thetaleswetellpodcast on Facebook and Instagram, or thetaleswetellpodcast.comSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/thetaleswetellpodcast?Click here for merch!
Episode #254 | Big Hairy Summer, Week 9! Actress Chirstina Brucato & Producer Adam Volerich (The Foxes of Hydesville) join the BCC Bois for a spooky discussion about famous mediums Franek Kluski and Jan Guzik summoning hairy hominds form the beyond. Get ready for the perplexing history of Sasquatch seances! -- BCC IS SPONSORED BY... HelloFresh: Go to http://www.HelloFresh.com/50BCC and and use code 50BCC for 50% off plus free shipping! Füm: Head to http://www.TryFum.com and use the code BCC to save 10% off when you get the Journey pack today -- SHOW INFORMATION Bigfoot Collectors Club is produced by Riley Bray. Listener-Files Submissions: BigfootCollectorsClub@gmail.com. Bigfoot Collectors Club Merch: https://store.bigfootcollectorsclub.com Instagram: https://bit.ly/3W7izlL | Twitter: https://bit.ly/3CDTpo2 Patreon - BCC The Other Side: https://bit.ly/3CGjYcd Follow Suneaters on Spotify: https://bit.ly/3XnD4vS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we welcome Christina Brucato and Mara Kassin from The Foxes of Hydesville podcast to tell us about the Fox sisters, who founded spiritualism by selling their services talking to the dead (or did they?)Listen to The Foxes of Hydesville hereAvailable on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Mystery Team Inc. is a comedy podcast about unsolved mysteriesWatch on Tiktokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@mysteryteamincFollow on Instagram for Updateshttps://www.instagram.com/mysteryteaminc/Intro Song by Sunday Cruisehttps://sundaycruiseband.com/https://www.instagram.com/sundaycruiseband
It's our third go-round with Indiana Jones and R.L. Stine, and believe you me, this charming rogue is extremely trigger happy suddenly. We welcome Adam Volerich to discuss the many times Indiana Jones chooses between two things that are both heinously violent, and what that says about the nature of his universe. Ultimately, the way he treats his friends might be the make or break choice that beckons survival or death. Check out Adam's Film podcast, Eye of the Duck! : https://eyeoftheduckpod.com/ Check out the audio drama Adam produced, The Foxes of Hydesville! : https://pca.st/nq7w5mv4 Subscribe to our Patreon!: patreon.com/authorizedpod Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/authorizedpod Instagram: instagram.com/authorizedpod Follow us on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/AOverbye/ https://letterboxd.com/hsblechman/ This Thursday on Authorized: Mark Stay completes the duology with Jewel of the Nile --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/authorizedpod/support
It's our third go-round with Indiana Jones and R.L. Stine, and believe you me, this charming rogue is extremely trigger happy suddenly. We welcome Adam Volerich to discuss the many times Indiana Jones chooses between two things that are both heinously violent, and what that says about the nature of his universe. Ultimately, the way he treats his friends might be the make or break choice that beckons survival or death. Check out Adam's Film podcast, Eye of the Duck! : https://eyeoftheduckpod.com/ Check out the audio drama Adam produced, The Foxes of Hydesville! : https://pca.st/nq7w5mv4 Subscribe to our Patreon!: patreon.com/authorizedpod Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/authorizedpod Instagram: instagram.com/authorizedpod Follow us on letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/AOverbye/ https://letterboxd.com/hsblechman/ This Thursday on Authorized: Mark Stay completes the duology with Jewel of the Nile --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/authorizedpod/support
A mediados del siglo XIX el movimiento espiritista emergió con fuerza y se extendió rápidamente por Norteamérica, y pronto por Europa y América Latina. Su ideario y muchas de sus prácticas tuvieron una destacada presencia en la sociedad, encontrándose entre las creencias que marcaron la heterodoxia espiritual.El documental sonoro de Ana Vega Toscano Espiritismo y heterodoxia explora sus importantes relaciones con las utopías sociales, la ciencia y los lenguajes culturales y artísticos. El inicio del movimiento se sitúa en los sucesos que tuvieron lugar en el hogar de la familia Fox en Hydesville (Nueva York). Allí tres hermanas dicen escuchar golpes y presenciar distintas manifestaciones extrañas; inventan un código para comunicarse con un supuesto espíritu de una persona asesinada. A partir de ahí, surge una explosión de interés por todo Estados Unidos, y ya en 1853 en Europa causa furor el fenómeno de las llamadas mesas giratorias o parlantes.Casi paralelamente en Francia inicia su actividad Hippolite Leon Denizar Rivail, conocido por su pseudónimo de Allan Kardek, figura que marcará profundamente la evolución del movimiento. Kardek realiza una síntesis del pensamiento espiritista, utilizando elementos del socialismo utópico, de los neopitagóricos e incluso algunas claves del pensamiento cristiano primitivo, presentando especial acento en la creencia en la reencarnación.De marcado carácter utópico, el espiritismo de esta época busca solucionar los males de la humanidad profundizando en la espiritualidad. Pretende una vida más justa e igualitaria por lo que presta atención a la ayuda social, así como a la enseñanza universal. Su ideario se inicia con la consideración de la existencia de otros planetas habitados y la aspiración a una mayor evolución espiritual situada en el futuro o en otros mundos. Igualmente ofrecerá un destacado papel a la mujer, que presentará gran protagonismo como médium y divulgadora.En España hubo numerosas figuras en el seno del movimiento, desde artistas a políticos, entre los que destaca la escritora y periodista Amalia Domingo Soler (1835-1909), muy admirada y respetada en su época. Punto álgido para el movimiento será la celebración del I Congreso Internacional de Espiritismo en Barcelona en 1888, coincidiendo con la Exposición Universal.Paralelamente, en el siglo XIX la ciencia vive un momento de expansión a la par que emerge el concepto del subconsciente. Los científicos recurrirán a la figura del médium como objeto de investigación. En España Ramón y Cajal, Josep Comás Solá o Víctor Melcior Farré, entre otros, se acercarán al tema.Documentos RNE cuenta en el programa con la participación de la catedrática de Literatura Española de la Universidad de Granada Amelina Correa Ramón, autora del libro Amalia Domingo Soler y el espiritismo de fin de siglo; el profesor del Departamento de Historia Contemporánea de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Carlos Ferrera, autor del estudio Heterodoxias espirituales y utopías en el siglo XIX español, y la investigadora Ramón y Cajal del CSIC Andrea Graus, autora del libro Ciencia y espiritismo en España: 1880-1930.Escuchar audio
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal
Enjoy Episode 1 of Evergreen, a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal
Evergreen is a sci-fi thriller that follows 7 of the world's greatest minds, who are trapped in a subterranean biosphere as an asteroid devastates the surface of the Earth. This 9-episode audio drama is the first from Hidden Signal, QCODE's new recurring series of mind-bending, immersive stories. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/hiddensignal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Enjoy Episode 1 of The Foxes of Hydesville, an audio drama inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now for more episodes. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When Leah Fox discovers her teenage sisters are "talking to the dead" in Hydesville, she leaves Rochester with her close friend, Adelaide Granger, to expose the hoax. But once they enter the shadowy backwoods of Hydesville... a terrifying reality begins to set in. This episode contains Adult Language. ~~~ All 9 episodes will be available for free, but QCODE+ subscribers get early, uninterrupted access to new episodes. Learn more at https://qcodemedia.com/qcodeplus. ~~~ Produced by Criminal Content and distributed by QCODE. Starring Carey Mulligan, Phoebe Tonkin, Mckenna Grace, and Christina Brucato. Directed by Shawn Christensen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville wherever you're listening now: https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Foxes of Hydesville premieres May 10 and is inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. Follow The Foxes of Hydesville on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. https://listen.qcodemedia.com/foxes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ian and Martin discuss the fascinating way how spiritualism and ghost hunting began - with a haunting in Hydesville, New York in 1888. The podcast discusses the original haunting and how it started spiritualism and ghost hunting. Topics covered include Poltergeist cases, Enfield Poltergeist, How Spiritualism Inspired a Northern England Revolution, Spiritualism as a social history and inspired the rise of Unions and the Suffragette movement. The Podcast also discusses if the Fox Sisters were fake, the strain of fame on two teenagers and also the people such as William Crookes, Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle who investigated and were involved in the start of paranormal investigation. As a conclusion to the podcast, we discuss how Spiritualism provided a greater impact after the First World War, and how society could have been very different without it.
Inspired by the true story of the Fox Sisters. This 9-episode swirling family epic (starring Carey Mulligan) follows the infamous mediums as they rise to fame in the 19th century when they begin conjuring up the dead... and inadvertently spawn a new religion: Spiritualism. ~~~ All 9 episodes will be available for free, but QCODE+ subscribers get early, uninterrupted access to new episodes. Learn more at https://qcodemedia.com/qcodeplus. ~~~ Produced by Criminal Content and distributed by QCODE. Starring Carey Mulligan, Phoebe Tonkin, Mckenna Grace, and Christina Brucato. Directed by Shawn Christensen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In honor of the Fox sisters and 175 years of Spiritualism
Lo que sucedió en 1848 en aquella modesta casa de Hydesville, en el estado de Nueva York, cambió la historia para siempre. Tres hermanas, las Fox, decían tener contactos con espíritus. Cuatro décadas después reconocieron el fraude, pero el espiritismo y la historia del ilusionismo ya había empezado a rodas. Las hermanas Fox serán las protagonistas del cronovisor en este programa junto a Jesús Callejo. Luego haremos el Camino de Santiago aragonés. Fran Lucas caminante y nos lo enseña, nos acompaña. Acabamos con el crítico de cine Joaquín Vallet, coautor del libro El universo de Lola Flores (Notorius Ediciones 2022) con el que hablamos del centenario del nacimiento de Lola Flores, sin lugar a dudas, la más grande
Las hermanas Fox se presentan en los libros de parapsicología como las iniciadoras del espiritismo y en los libros de historia de la magia, como las primeras “magas” contemporáneas. Y todo por los supuestos hechos extraños que decían se habían producido en su casa de Hydesville siendo niñas en 1848. Jesús Callejo nos cuenta en este cronovisor la verdadera historia de lo que pasó
En 1848 las hermanas Fox vivían en una granja en Hydesville, un pequeño pueblo del norte del estado de New York, donde nació el "espiritismo". Las Fox son las principales impulsoras del espiritismo moderno al ser testigo de una serie de fenómenos paranormales en una habitación de su casa.Kate Fox, la hermana mayor, gritó a la nada en el cuarto: "Haz lo que yo hago". Dando palmadas la niña decía: "Vamos a ver, cuenta: uno, dos, tres". Los extraños golpes sonaron una, dos, tres veces. La madre, quien escuchó todo desde otro punto del hogar, entró asombrada y asustada, para presenciar lo que sería el contacto con un espíritu.En este episodio Juan Jesús Vallejo nos traerá una sesión de espiritismo en vivo con el médium Mikel Lizarralde, estudiante de Marilyn Rossne, una de las mejores médiums que existieron en el mundo.¡Si quieres saber qué pasa en esta sesión espiritista, quédate en este nuevo episodio junto a Juan Jesús Vallejo!00:01:03 ¿Qué perturbaba el sueño de la familia Fox ?00:04:57 ¿Qué es la psicografía?00:07:00 ¿Todos podemos entrar en contacto con el más allá?00:14:04 ¿Por qué los chamanes encendían luz en medio de la oscuridad?00:20:19 ¿Cómo una persona puede llegar a ver más allá de los límites?00:24:14 ¿Quién es Marilyn Rossner?00:27:09 ¿Cómo se da cuenta de que es un meidum?00:32:28 ¿El alma sigue viviendo después de que nuestro cuerpo muere?00:35:53 La ciencia busca entender la telepatía00:40:14 Los nuevos paradigmas de la vida00:41:59 ¿Cómo es el entrenamiento de un médium?00:43:23 Técnicas para desarrollar habilidades para ser médium00:50:18 La experiencia de Alejandro 00:53:57 Para ser médium solo se necesita la voz00:57:56 ¿Cómo es ser alumna de Mikel?01:05:27 La importancia de los círculos o grupos cerrados01:09:33 Yo sé la verdad: desde el cielo vemos todo.01:15:46 El misterio de fútbol01:20:56 A veces el alma inicia el viaje antes de que el cuerpo se muera.01:25:24 El mundo espiritual 01:28:25 ¿Qué son los archivos akashicos?01:35:19 El espiritismo moderno Allan Kardec01:39:11 El evangelio de espiritismo01:43:54 Conclusiones
Losses for embattled local candidates, Arcata appears to say no to the earth flag, protestors from a Eureka pride event made a disputed claim they were not the aggressors, a group of poodles was accused of significantly injuring a corgi at Trinidad State Beach, CBN is worried U.S. rep Jared Huffman will inspire other non-Christian politicians, the CBS drama ‘Fire Country' has been using Rio Dell to depict its fictional town, an allegedly errant driver was reportedly bitten by a pedestrian after an incident near Hydesville, Cal Poly Humboldt's president clarified comments regarding sexual assault survivors, HBO Max is streaming a new season of the Eureka-set show ‘The Craftsman,' event suggestions, and more. Humboldt Last Week is Humboldt County's news podcast brought to you in collaboration with Belle Starr Clothing, North Coast Co-op, Bongo Boy Studio, Photography by Shi, North Coast Journal, RHBB, and KJNY. Subscribe via Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get podcasts. Humboldt Last Week (new/alt/indie) Radiowith no commercials: humboldtlastweek.com/radio Also available via RadioKing app. Contact: myles@humboldtlastweek.com humboldtlastweek.com
Strange activity began in a country home in Hydesville, NY in 1848. Two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox began to communicate with a spirit. Within a year the sisters began demonstrating their abilities in public performances. The authenticity of their psychic abilities has been a controversial debate ever since. EVENTS: Haunted Screams Expo - Hampton, VA Sept 17-18 Midwest Monster Fest - POSTPONED UNTIL 2023 Sudbury Indie Creature Kon - Greater Sudbury, ON Canada - Sept 16-17 Scarowinds - Fort Mill, SC - Select Nights Sept 16 - Oct 30
En diciembre de 1847, la familia Fox se mudó a una casa situada en Hydesville, un pequeño pueblo del estado de Nueva York. El matrimonio vivía con sus dos hijas más pequeñas, Margaret y Kate. A los pocos meses, comenzaron a oírse ruidos extraños en la casa. Fue el 31 de marzo de 1848, cuando los “raps”, como se denominó a los golpes que se escuchaban, dieron inicio al espiritismo moderno. Jesús Ortega visita esta semana nuestra academia para hablarnos de las hermanas Fox, de Allan Kardec, de la Ouija… En definitiva, de la Historia y de historias del espiritismo. Adelante, tenemos un sitio reservado para ti en esta Academia de los Nocturnos. Créditos de las músicas: - “Helena's Lament” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): -http://uppbeat.io/t/kevin-macleod/lightless-dawn License code: GHLQNKPIBECSAVDR -http://uppbeat.io/t/spinnin-tape/no-joyce License code: JUYLRAH7OVALM3LC -https://uppbeat.io/t/danijel-zambo/walled-in License code: VRZNVUDDOHVE4Z6L
The Fox sisters were making a name for themselves as spiritualists even before their 1848 séance at Hydesville. In 1847, Maggie and Kate accepted an invitation to visit the home of a Rochester cordwainer and his wife. There they held the couple's hands while they communicated with spirits. The girls called out to Henry Snook, a peddler killed in a local stable fire and buried in an unmarked grave. When both Maggie and Kate identified the same body, the couple cut open the coffin and found it just as described. The girls also spoke to the dead peddler about shoes he had sold; that night, Mrs. Fox produced two pairs—one of which had been bought on Main Street, where Snook had never peddled.Welcome back to the Ghost Girl Diaries ChannelAs always I am your host, Krystal Leandra. Are you brave enough to join the circle?This is my Paranormal Podcast where we talk about everything haunted and occult. So join us! And hit that subscribe button! We have a WEEKLY PARANORMAL PODCAST that is broadcast live on Friday's at 4 PM PST/7 PM EST on Twitch.tv/theghostgirldiaries So set your alarms!Thursday uploads on reviews, paranormal content, and MORE!Subscribe to our YouTube Channel here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmBOUAqTwmIhpmHxF7MqoKA/joinBuy Krystal's book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578854708/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=ghost+girl+diaries&qid=1612579115&sr=8-1Buy Ghost Girl MERCH here: www.ghostgirldiaries.comPREVIOUS TOP VIDEOS FROM GHOST GIRL DIARIES •✔️ Nick Groff fired from Ghost Adventures & Ryan Buell's Apology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b37pOa0RjyE✔️ Paranormal Challenge: Episode 12 Jerome Arizona (Season Finale) Krystal Leandra:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdWK-Ub6O4w✔️ Zak Bagans: The Demon House Destroyedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsuLnD8QX5E&t=3sFOLLOW GHOST GIRL DIARIES:
Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Bienvenidos a este especial Programa para nuestros queridos y queridas mecenas, hoy con un tema interesantísimo y polémico: ¿Cuál es la verdad sobre las hermanas Fox?, ¿hubo impostura? ¿Por qué marca este asunto el comienzo de una nueva era en la Parapsicología, denominada anteriormente como "Metapsíquica", anunciando el inicio del espiritismo? Una aclaradora e importante "Clase" de Parapsicología al estilo socrático, con un Don Santiago caminando en plena naturaleza, subiendo una montaña con un viento y un sol justiciero que sin duda les llegarán también a través de las ondas. ¿Cuál es el contexto histórico en el que se insertan los primeros fenómenos paranormales espíritas con las hermanas Fox? ¿Cuál es la denominada "Biblia" del espiritismo? ¿En qué se basa su doctrina? El fenómeno de la mediumnidad con Daniel Douglas Home, la ouija, las mesas parlantes, o el ectoplasma entre otros. ¿Qué hecho trascendente para la Parapsicología ocurrió la noche del 31 de marzo de 1848, en el distrito Hydesville de Nueva York, en casa de Kate y Margaret Fox? ¿Cuál es la hipótesis de D. Germán del "Consciente trascendente"? ¿Cuál es ese nivel ontológico, que no se encuentra en nuestra dimensión, y en el que se halla la Causa paranormal? Referente al tan atractivo fenómeno de las parapsicofonías ¿cuándo se recogen las primeras voces psicofónicas? Los nombres de oro de la Parapsicología. Volviendo al "núcleo" de la cuestión ¿se producían auténticos fenómenos paranormales en casa de las hermanas Fox?, ¿qué opinión tiene D. Santiago al respecto? D. Santiago nos aclara los pilares para conocer toda la verdad sobre la paranormalidad ocurrida en casa de las hermanas Fox. ¿Qué diferencia a un auténtico científico de un cientificista? ¿Es lícito y moral cobrar por la presencia de fenómenos paranormales en un lugar? Apasionantes reflexiones filosóficas de D. Santiago que reflejan su altura intelectual y humana. Esperamos que disfrutéis de este especial Programa tan revelador, Programa de autor de D. Santiago Vázquez, especial para vosotros. Gracias por estar ahí y por pertenecer a "La Gran Familia de Más Allá de la Realidad". Un fuerte abrazo de D. Santiago, siempre cercano a vosotros. Se os quiere. *Si deseas ampliar tus conocimientos en Parapsicología, D. Santiago Vázquez pone a tu disposición el Curso de Parapsicología explicado en profundidad en 8 videos muy pedagógicos de gran interés, por tan sólo 59€. Solicita información a masalladelarealidad1994@gmail.com Puedes ver el trailer del Curso en la siguiente dirección: https://youtu.be/t8mSx1N1f9A?list=TLPQMTgwNDIwMjJJApLFVK46bA *Si te ha gustado el Audio pulsa el icono ME GUSTA, ya que de esta forma apoyas al Programa. * Si aún no te has suscrito a nuestro Canal de “MÁS ALLÁ DE LA REALIDAD" puedes hacerlo pulsando el botón correspondiente. * Puedes seguir también la actividad profesional de Santiago Vázquez en las REDES SOCIALES: - Canal de YouTube: Santiago Vázquez - Twitter: @svazquezgomariz - Instagram: santiagovazquezoficial - Facebook: Santiago Vázquez *Mail: cursosantiagovazquez2020@santiagovazquez.es Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
This week on #TheFriendZone, Dustin shares the toe cracking tale of Maggie & Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York. Black Business of the Week - America, Goddam https://www.amazon.com/America-Goddam-Violence-Struggle-Justice/dp/0520384490/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=america+goddam&qid=1649199207&sprefix=america+godd%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1 Wellness Segment - Good Molecules https://www.goodmolecules.com/products/caffeine-energizing-hydrogel-eye-patches?variant=31512203395172 THE FRIEND ZONE IS ON PATREON! Sign up now to catch our 4 spin-off shows (with audio AND video) plus our MONTHLY Livestream Tour: www.patreon.com/TheFriendZonePodcast Thank you to our Sponsors: Curology - Curology - Get started on Curology with a free 30-day trial at curology.com/friendzone. Just pay $5 for shipping and handling. Minnesota Public Radio - Join Grace, Amy and their exciting guests for something we all need - a show that focuses on joy. Follow The Antidote wherever you get your podcasts. Tushy - Visit Hello https://hellotushy.com/FRIENDZONE to get 10% off plus FREE shipping right now! ZocDoc - Go to https://Zocdoc.com/FRIENDZONE and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Then start your search for a top-rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. Follow us online: Twitter - www.twitter.com/friendzonepod Facebook - www.facebook.com/thefriendzonepodcast Patreon - www.patreon.com/thefriendzonepodcast Discord - discord.gg/Jee2cwfAdz Have a GREAT day!
We're back with a packed episode! Also, our bff EDIE is back on the pod today, woohoo! We start out in New York City 1996 with Kevin's True Crime Story. He tells us all about the tragic killing of Angel Melendez, one of the iconic Club Kids of the New York party scene. Before this gruesome death, The Club Kids were a brash, in-your-face, fabulous, party machine full of misfits, weirdos, and queers, including RuPaul, James St. James, Angel Melendez, Amanda Lepore and Lady Bunny. Anyone else who didn't fit in during the daytime was invited to the party. Unfortunately, drugs, an excess of debauchery, and Rudy Giuliani led to the downfall of queer nightlife. But the gruesome killing of Angel by Club Kid impresario Michael Alig and his friend Freeze Riggs shocked everyone. It's not for the faint of heart. Then, for the Spoopy Story, Miss takes us to 1848 Hydesville, NY to tell us about the Fox Sisters and their spiritualist abilities. Well, they weren't so much 'abilities' as scams, but for a long while, they made their money. Source notes found at www.creepyinqueeriespod.com. Follow us on Instagram @CreepyInQueeriesPod. We've joined Facebook! Help us build our following there please! @CreepyInQueeriesPod. Follow us on Twitter @C_InQueeries. Follow us on TikTok @creepyinqueeriespod. Email us at creepyinqueeriespod@gmail.com.
In the first episode of a 2-part series on Victorian-Era Spiritualism, I will briefly describe what inspired this movement and its core beliefs, then focus on Maggie and Kate Fox, who are credited by many with helping to put the beliefs of Spiritualism into practice in Hydesville, New York, in 1848. ***** Email: thevictorianvarietyshow@gmail.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/victorianvarie1 If you'd like to support the show financially, you can do so here: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/marisadf13 I'd greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts, as that will help this podcast reach more listeners! ***** References Abbott, Karen. “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/ American Hauntings Ink. “The Haunted Museum: The Fox Sisters. The Rise and Fall of Spiritualism's Founders.” https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/foxsisters Askins, Alice. “Very Mysterious: The Fox Sisters and the Spiritualist Movement.” https://historicgeneva.org/recreation/fox-sisters/ Diniejko, Andrzej. “Victorian Spiritualism.” https://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/religion/spirit.html Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Fox Sisters.” https://occult-world.com/fox-sisters/ Highland, Maria. “Victorian Spiritualism and Séances.” https://reframingthevictorians.blogspot.com/2014/03/victorian-spiritualism-and-seances_12.html Mad Halloween. “How the Fox Sisters Gave Rise to Modern Spiritualism.” https://madhalloween.com/how-the-fox-sisters-gave-rise-to-modern-spiritualism/ Occult Museum. “Speaking with Spirits: The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism.” http://www.theoccultmuseum.com/speaking-spirits-fox-sisters-birth-spiritualism/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marisa-d96/message
They were the biggest names in spiritualism and they were also frauds. We share the sad history of The Fox Sisters on this episode of Unpleasant Dreams. -- Cassandra Harold is your host. EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold. Jim Harold is our Executive Producer. Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media. Sources & Further Reading: Abbot, Karen. “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism.” Smithsonianmag.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/ Retrieved 14 November 2020. Buzzfeed Unsolved. “The Spiritual World of the Fox Sisters.” Youtube. 2 October 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPPgwh4yk2Q Lyttelton, George. Dialogues of the Dead. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17667/17667-h/17667-h.htm Retrieved 14 November 2020. Nickell, Joe. “A Skeleton's Tale” Skeptical Inquirer vol 32, no 4. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2008/07/a-skeletons-tale-the-origins-of-modern-spiritualism/ Retrieved 15 November 2020. O'Connell, Rebecca. “The Rise and Fall of Five Claimed Mediums.” MentalFloss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69973/rise-and-fall-5-claimed-mediums Retrieved 14 November 2020. Stuart, Nancy Rubin. “The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism's Unlikely Founders.” Historynet. https://www.historynet.com/the-fox-sisters-spiritualisms-unlikely-founders.htm Retrieved 14 November 2020. Wehrstein, KM and McLuhan, R. “Fox Sisters.” Psi Encyclopedia. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/fox-sisters Retrieved 14 November 2020. You can find EM Hilker's full article that this podcast was based upon HERE and a transcript of the podcast version below: PODCAST TRANSCRIPT The Fox Sisters The spiritualism movement of the early-to-mid 1800s captured the hearts and minds of a great many people. Spiritualism was the belief that the spirits of the dead are not only able to communicate with us, but are eager to share their wisdom with the living world. Spiritualism flourished at a time when Mesmerism was a growing interest on the heels of The Second Great Awakening. This was a fifty year period of religious revivalism, and a curious populace were seeking answers amid the confusion of the day. The Spiritualism movement has given us modern-style seances and stage mediumship; it's what popularized commercial fortune telling. The term “seance” itself (introduced into the language sometime between 1795 and 1805) merely means a “sitting”, though the spiritual concept is older. George, First Baron Lyttleton, famously featured discussion with the deceased in his 1760's work of fiction, Dialogues of the Dead. Seances have been divided into four categories: religious, stage mediumship, leader-assisted, and informal social seances. Although, all of the proceedings are considered a part of the spiritualism movement. The Fox sisters are credited with launching the movement, but its origins stretch back further than that. Emmanuel Swedenborg, who lived more than a century earlier, experienced a divine revelation in which he learned that communication with the spirit world and with God is possible through a certain mental state. He felt that the body was simply a vessel for the soul, and that Hell and Heaven will attempt to influence mortals to do good or evil, though the mortal in question is free to choose their path as they wish. According to Swedenborg's beliefs, the path to Heaven or Hell is forged by your actions in life. These ideas would eventually lead to the formation of the New Church and the Swedenborgian Church in North America. The other oft-credited influence on the spiritualism movement is Franz Mesmer, the founder of “animal magnetism” or mesmerism (more commonly known as hypnotism in the modern day). The original concept went far beyond simply putting someone into a trance –Mesmer believed animal magnetism could hold the cure for powerful healing; the trancework was only a small part of his theories. The concept of going into a trance, however, would be a tremendous influence in coming years for the spiritualism movement. The women known as “the Fox Sisters” are three of the seven Fox children: the youngest two were the core of the Fox Sisters: youngest daughter Catherine “Kate” Fox and her slightly older sister Margaretta (“Maggie”). When everything began, Kate and Maggie were in their early teens and their eldest sister, Leah, was an adult in her own home. Leah would eventually ‘manage' the girls, though not tour with them, and was really only a part of the action for a handful of years. The girls would later say that they began this whole thing as a prank played on their credulous mother. That is certainly consistent with the evidence we have of the early days of mysterious rappings and knockings. In early 1848, the Fox family began to hear mysterious sounds in their house in Hydesville, New York. The noises seemed to resemble footsteps or someone knocking. On March 31, 1848, Kate decided to try to “communicate” with it. They called the entity “Mr. Splitfoot,” and it frightened their mother terribly. Maggie took pity on her mother and tried to explain that it was meant as an April Fool's joke, but her mother would not believe it. The girls continued the “communication” in the home over weeks and months. Eventually, the family told their neighbours of these mysterious happenings, who told other people in turn, as neighbours do. It didn't take long before there was a hubbub surrounding the Fox household. In the following year, 1849, the girls were sent to Rochester, New York, to live with their siblings, to try to escape both the haunting and the attention of the curious. Despite this, the phenomenon followed them to their new homes. Leah supported their reputation as mediums, and introduced them to her friends, the Posts. Amy and Isaac Post were luminaries in the local mesmerism movement. They wanted to explore the girls' abilities and invited the Fox sisters to a small party in their home. The Posts planned to conduct a seance with the girls as part of the evening. The party and seance were successful, and it was here that the spirits conveniently mentioned that Leah also possessed the gift. The party was in fact such a success that the Posts rented a large room in Corinthian Hall and the Fox sisters showcased their abilities there. The girls began holding regular seances for pay in New York, which were incredibly popular. Among the people attracted by these seances: were journalist and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant and abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth. Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer”, was impressed by the girls' abilities and lent them his support, and therefore credibility, as they became more and more well-known. With this traction, Maggie and Kate embarked on a tour of these shows in the area, while Leah stayed behind and worked as a medium in her own right. In 1851, Fox family member Mrs. Norman Culver confessed to being aware of the fraud, which was disclosed to her by Kate. This impacted their popularity very little, though critics began to guess at various ways that these girls could be perpetrating a hoax. Mrs. Culver alleged, and several critics correctly guessed, that the raps were produced by the girls “cracking” joints in their feet and knees. The spiritualism movement was entirely unaffected by the criticism of the Fox sisters, and both they and spiritualism continued to become more and more popular. The following year after Ms. Culver's confession, 17 year old Maggie met skeptic and Arctic explorer Elisha Kane (a-lai-sha). Kane fell deeply in love with Maggie despite his beliefs that she was a fraud. Under his influence, she began to drift away from the spiritualist movement. Tragically Kane died in 1857, just shortly after a small informal wedding ceremony. Though the two considered themselves married, they allegedly lacked an actual marriage certificate. The actual legal status of Elisha and Maggie's marriage was unclear, the confusion around which resulted in Maggie being ousted from the will by Kane's family members. Perhaps related to Maggie's exclusion from the will, later that same year, the youngest two Fox sisters made an attempt at a prize offered by the Boston Courier to anyone who could prove the legitimacy of mediumship. The reward equaled $500 (roughly $14,150 in modern day American currency). On the whole, aside from this attempt, Maggie continued to reject spiritualism as she fell further and further into poverty. Kate continued on alone with her mediumship during this period, and in 1871 moved to England to pursue spiritualist opportunities there. The following year, she married fellow spiritualist HD Jencken. They had two sons, and a seemingly happy life until Jencken died in 1881. Each grieving deeply, both Maggie and Kate had begun to self-medicate with alcohol. By 1888, both women had become alcoholics. Leah, continuing to operate as a medium herself, grew concerned with Kate's alcoholism and her ability to care for her two sons. Word of this spread, and Kate's two sons were briefly taken from her, though restored to her care after intercession by Maggie. Maggie was already out of the spiritualism movement and had been for some time, and Kate was livid that her abilities as a mother had been questioned. Thus, on the 21st of October in 1888, perhaps partially in revenge against Leah, perhaps partially out of financial desperation, Kate and Maggie came forward. The two were paid $1500 (roughly 41,000 USD today) by a reporter to confess their crime at the New York Academy of Music in front of 2,000 people. They also made a number of anti-spiritualist statements during this period, with Kate calling it “one of the greatest curses that the world has ever known.” In November of the following year, Maggie recanted her confession. This was due to her own financial needs as a result of having drunk away her confession fee, and growing pressure from other spiritualists. Maggie attempted to practice spiritualism once again for whatever meagre work she could get, but her reputation both as a spiritualist and as a skeptic was ruined in one fell swoop. She would spend her few remaining years in poverty, as would Kate. Leah predeceased Maggie and Kate, having died in 1890, not on speaking terms with either sister. The youngest two Fox sisters died within a year of one another in Brooklyn, New York (Maggie on the 8th of March in 1893 and Kate on the 3rd of July in 1892). The Fox Sisters left us very little writing. Maggie did not publish her own work, but she did publish the love letters written to her by her husband, entitled The Love Life of Dr. Kane, giving us a small window into their lives. Leah published a book called The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, in which she outlined her career as a medium. Spiritualism continued on after the passing of the Fox sisters, and continues to this day. People still hold seances very similar to the Fox sisters', and people continue to occasionally hear rappings they attribute to the spirit world (correctly or otherwise). One only needs to look at virtually any television listing to find an assortment of ghost-hunting shows; and one can find a psychic willing to give you a reading in virtually any modern-day town. Bookshelves in your local bookstore are filled with books on finding your own psychic gifts, and many famous names have been associated with spiritualism: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Bangs sisters, Mina Crandon, Leonora Piper, and Harry Houdini (the latter admittedly as an enemy of spiritualism). As an odd sort of afternote, to the excitement of those who still believed in the legitimacy of the sisters, in 1904 it was said that a “body” had been discovered in the house that the girls had lived in, where they had claimed to be in contact with the spirit of a murdered peddler. No record has ever been found of the peddler they'd described, and the bones, of which there were only a few, turned out upon examination to be animal bones.
It looks like a small desk without any legs, just sitting there on a table, a well-fashioned rectangular wooden box containing within it a drawer that pulls out to reveal a crucifix, a journal, a spoon, bottle of white powder and sundry other items that, when attached to the device on top of the box, did something very special, or at least, that's what was claimed. The device is symmetrical and in its center is a glass column surmounted by a small cast iron skull wearing a helmet and within the glass column one can glimpse a brass bell suspended on a chain. On either side of the glass column are two black horns, much like the ones you would later see on Edison's talking machines and to their sides, a set of brass balance scales, connected to weights. Near the rear on each side are two glass Crookes solar radiometers, those little glass spheres you can still buy with a metal spinner in the center, moved by the sunlight and photons. There are other strange contrivances attached to this peculiar amalgam of technology, but exactly what the purpose of this device is was made clear by its inventor over a hundred years ago and it was so famous and its purpose so spectacular that it made the national papers and was the talk of the nation. This was purported by its inventor and his followers to be a ‘living machine,' designed and created by angels for the sole purpose of….well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. It would be best to begin at the beginning and tell the story. If you look closely at this curious device, you will see engraved in a small brass plate the words, “New Motive Power” and the name John Murray Spear. In the summer of 1818, a young woman named Mary Shelley was spending an unsettling vacation with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron in a villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. During a bout of cold weather the poets decided to have a contest to see who could come up with the strangest spooky story from among them. In a fit of creative energy seldom seen in literature, 18 year old Mary Shelley created what most people consider to be the founding work of science fiction, Frankenstein. From an assemblage of dead tissue and body parts, Doctor Victor Frankenstein creates a new being, the first and only one of his kind, known only as ‘the monster'. The work was fiction, of course, but it was timely. Science was the new frontier and people, though fascinated with it, knew very little about it. Indeed, science seemed to promise everything that magic used to describe. Her work became famous on both sides of the Atlantic and in all probability fed the imagination of the protagonist of our tale, John Murray Spear. His interest in electricity, to be specific, would lead to a contraption that would be part perpetual motion machine and part Frankenstein's monster and it would all happen with the help of Heaven above. John Murray Spear was born in Boston on September 16, 1804. By all accounts, and there are many, he was brought up to be thoughtful, compassionate and mindful of his fellow man. Named after the actual founder of the movement known as Universalism, he was destined to be connected with Heavenly pursuits for his entire life, even though life wasn't easy for John and his brother Charles who had to fend for their mother and grandmother while still children after their father died. There was work in the factories of Dorchester where they worked impossible hours to make ends meet, but through the ministration of their Sunday school teacher, both the brothers learned to read and write, giving John a way out of the factory and into the position of apprentice shoemaker. Things began to look up for him, but looking up was about to change his life forever. Like his namesake, John Murray Spear felt a calling to become a preacher. He was kind, gentle, thoughtful and full of love and generosity and though he was self-taught and never attended seminary, he began preaching and was well-received. He became an ordained Universalist minister in 1830. He married and the couple had five children. Not bad for a poor boy from Dorchester. He was particularly concerned with the abolitionist movement and he gave help to those people of color who had made it north and to freedom, only to find themselves also desperately poor and in need of assistance. Spear had a reputation for doing the work on the ground, walking among the poor, and he became very respected in his community. But something happened to John Murray Spear, something dreadful. During the winter of 1844-1845, Spear was speaking out in Portland,Maine to a mass of people who raged into a mob and beat him senseless. Spear was saved by an old friend, Oliver Dennett who also carefully nursed him back to health. To what extent his injuries included some kind of brain damage, we can never know, but something was changed in the mind of Spear, and he was not in tune with other places, other beings… Shortly after Spear recovered, his friend Dennett died. One can imagine the sense of loss Spear must have felt, but even stranger what sense of wonder must have pervaded his mind when he sat and watched his hand - seemingly of its own accord and without his own volition, picked up a pen and began to write message to him from, of all people, his dead compatriot - Oliver Dennett. The first note Spear received in this way instructed him to find a man named David Vining and help him. Even stranger, the note was signed by none other than Oliver. There is a condition known to modern medicine as Alien Hand Syndrome. It occurs when a person's hand seems to have a mind of its own and cannot be controlled by the owner of the hand. It is often the left hand and according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, there are a variety of causes to this frightening condition: temporal lobe epilepsy, brain surgery, stroke, infection, tumors, aneurysm, among others. Given the fact that Spears had been beaten by an angry mob, is it possible that he had some kind of event or damage that initiated this syndrome? As with many who have suffered from it, it eventually faded and Oliver stopped writing letters, but before he did, Spears became convinced that he was in contact with the dead and that this automatic writing that was occurring came straight from the spiritual realm. But what is so strange is that David Vining was real. Time after time, Oliver directed Spear to people who needed his help. Spear was indefatigable - willing to travel far on these missions from the dead. Word of his connection to the spirit realm and his good works began to spread. In 1848, the Fox sisters, Catherine and Mararetta, began the Spiritualist movement in the United States. While still children, the sisters began to witness strange rappings in their house in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York. One thing led to another and soon, the nation was introduced to the idea that it was possible to talk to the dead, and that almost everybody could do it. Mediums could act as connections to those who had passed on and great comfort could be had about the life of the world to come simply by attending a seance and witnessing the demonstrations of the mediums. Of course John Murray Spear was aware of the movement - he had to have been. It was all the rage. And as he wondered about the actions of his hand and how the process was working, he could find no better explanation than that of being possessed by a kindly spirit, a goodly being who had taken care of him, still working from beyond the grave. Of course, we would have had no idea about anything as modern as Alien Hand Syndrome. To that end, Spear dove into the spiritualist movement. He gave spontaneous lectures where he allowed himself to be the medium through which other voices spoke. Already well-known and well-thought of, he became a celebrity of sorts. He attended seances and came to believe that he was not only dealing with the spirits of the dead, but also with spirits of a different sort altogether - angels...angels of electricity… During a deep trance among his followers, he willingly surrendered by body to that of seven spirits whose task it was to use his body as a vessel with which to construct the new motive power of the age, an age of enlightenment and of power that would flow directly from Heaven in the form of… well, we really don't know. An aficionado of magnetism and electricity, his angelic engineers conceived of a machine that would have analogues to a heart, to lungs, to all of the systems of the living body, but they would be mechanical in nature and would, once animated, move forward without any further input of energy. The machine would be built, but the spark of life would need to be imbued by another sort of power altogether. And so his followers donated over $2000, a huge sum of money in his time, and he spent the better part of a year building the Heavenly Machine from which the greatest gift of Heaven would flow. There were no blueprints. It was built from day to day, like Mrs. Winchester's house, with plans abandoned or changed or dropped at the whim of the celestial voices speaking through John Murray Spear. There was a revolving steel arm surmounted by two steel balls, both with embedded magnets. There are obvious positive and negative aspects to the machine, with zinc and copper plates - this was an electrical child being built by a man touched by...well, again, we're not sure. But as the months passed and word of his wondrous machine reached the masses, the newspapermen followed its evolution. He promised that this device would be Heaven's greatest gift to Man, a kind of Christlike telephone from which we might speak to God or at the very least, it would provide unlimited power to move the world into a new, more perfect state. The world had heard all of this kind of thing before with one singular exception: John Murray Spear had nothing of the charlatan about him. In fact, he was singularly unassailable because he had put himself on the front line for those in need, had championed for just causes and had even suffered at the hands of unruly mobs when standing for what was right. All those who came into contact with him truly believed that he was in earnest and that he was a good man who had the spiritual health of the nation in his heart. He made no money from his project. All of the funds raised went toward the construction of the device. His prayer gatherings were widely attended and for all the people knew, this man was in touch with the angels, and how the world needed such a thing was clear to them all. But the machine just kind of sat there and did nothing. No trouble, he insisted. It is but a vessel, like a human body, and it needed to be imbued with life. For that, he explained, people needed to remember that in nature, life was not perpetuated unless male met female. For this new Prometheus to come to life, a female influence would need to ignite it and for that, he searched for and wide for the child's mother. Two newspaper editors seized the opportunity to help Spear search for her. S. Crosby Hewitt and Alonzo Newton knew a good story when they saw one and they made sure there were headlines as the search progressed. It wasn't long before the angels told the world the name of the new Mary: Mrs. Semantha Mettler, the wife of a Boston doctor. She was also, not coincidentally, a medium. When she joined the room, Spear went into one of his trance states and she, like those in the room, had to ask themselves if they were in the presence of the Heavenly host itself when he spoke. The newspapers chronicle what he said that day when the mother met her child. In his trance state, the angels spoke: “How fondly, how constantly, how widely is this one beloved! How beautiful is the influence this woman exerts! Wherever she is she attracts In this particular she possesses a most remarkable character. Her friends know no bounds to their affection for this one; and there is nothing which they would leave undone to gratify her. There passes from this woman a very marked influence. It is not precisely the religious influence; it is not precisely the moral influence, it is not precisely the practical influence; but it is, so to speak, a compost of all; and these are charmingly intermingled, imparting a most adhesive influence. This medium has been commissioned to widely instruct this woman for a high purpose. There is before this woman a new and beautiful labor. At 10 o'clock tomorrow the purpose of his mission to this place will be unfolded. Let this woman be in the region of the tranquilities at that hour.” Beautiful labor: these were the words spoken by Spear while under the influence of the angels. And that was her purpose for this woman was supposed to be the conduit that would shunt the power of life from the celestial realm to the machine, spurring it into life, and in a sense, she was to give birth to it. After all, Spears had worked on the machine for nine months... The next morning, at 10 o'clock, Mrs. Mettler was brought into the chamber with the machine and went into her own trance, all while being witnessed by Spear and his followers. Soon, she began to experience all of the symptoms of labor. It was as though she was undergoing the full gestation of a child in the matter of an hour and the mechanism was designed to absorb her maternal influence. As she moved and writhed and moaned, the witnesses observed something no less than marvelous. As reported that evening in the Boston's New Era newspaper, “THE THING MOVES!” That day, the world changed. In Lynn, Massachusetts, a thing made of metal, chemicals and wood, began to pulsate like a heart. The monster had been given the spark. According to Spear, this living child would grow and soon would move the wheels of the world, replacing all other means of moving machinery. It would take over all. How strange it must have been there that day to watch the machine move. One must wonder, though, if these people had any idea how electricity worked and how copper and zinc react when a current is applied to them? The basic dynamics of a simple electric motor was not known to the world yet, but Spear may have touched upon something that a fellow from Vermont did in 1834, not many years before. Thomas Davenport invented the first battery powered electric motor to power a small printing press. A well-read man like Spear may have heard of Davenport's achievement, but may not have understood the forces involved. Electricity seemed magical, moving things with unseen forces. Perhaps Spear was correct in that one day, electricity would power the world, overwhelmingly moving the machines of industry, replacing water power and that of the steam engine. Certainly this extraordinary claim seems pretty commonplace today, but in his day, no one knew that. Perhaps it was nothing more than the movement of a metal plate responding to a magnetic field. People believed that invisible spirits could rap and tap and communicate through mediums. Why not build a machine to channel the power of God? News of the movement of the new machine spread throughout the land, but those who did not take to communicating with the dead and the ways of the spiritualists had no use for such practices. To a mainstream religious American audience, this might even have hinted of witchcraft and magic. Instead of being divinely inspired by the angels, was this some Devil's work? Reports claim that John Murray Spears' machine was destroyed by an angry mob, tearing it to pieces and trampling it beneath their feet. Spears faded into obscurity after that. He never thought to rebuild the machine and his hope to tap into an invisible power that might move the machines of the world was forgotten. Except it wasn't. An invisible force does move the machines of the world - electricity. He must have believed it would work and in his own way, he was right. It wasn't a hoax, as far as the idea goes. Given the knowledge of his age, we might even look back upon him, strange as his sensibilities seem to us today, he really did want to gift the world a very real power. Just not what he thought it was. And his machine? We thought it was destroyed - it was reported as such, but in 2019, in Greely, Colorado, a Miss Akerman passed away and her home, full of hoarded objects, was being cleared when the machine showed up resting in her attic. It must have sat there for one hundred and fifty-six years. If it isn't the real machine, even though it is clearly labeled, it certainly looks like the God machine of John Murray Spears. Whether or not it works remains a mystery, but then again, such things as this beg for speculation and make us wonder, “what makes it tick?” For that matter, what makes one want to know? Better to ask how a persons' hand might write messages of its own volition and how this alien hand could lead to a machine that claimed to be a robotic body for God. Sources John Murray Spear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Murray_Spear https://uudb.org/articles/johnmurrayspear.html http://www.danbaines.com/blog/john-murray-spears-mechanical-messiah-discovered-in-colorado-attic/3/7/2019 Alien Hand Syndrome The National Library of Medicine - Alien Hand Syndrome
It looks like a small desk without any legs, just sitting there on a table, a well-fashioned rectangular wooden box containing within it a drawer that pulls out to reveal a crucifix, a journal, a spoon, bottle of white powder and sundry other items that, when attached to the device on top of the box, did something very special, or at least, that's what was claimed. The device is symmetrical and in its center is a glass column surmounted by a small cast iron skull wearing a helmet and within the glass column one can glimpse a brass bell suspended on a chain. On either side of the glass column are two black horns, much like the ones you would later see on Edison's talking machines and to their sides, a set of brass balance scales, connected to weights. Near the rear on each side are two glass Crookes solar radiometers, those little glass spheres you can still buy with a metal spinner in the center, moved by the sunlight and photons. There are other strange contrivances attached to this peculiar amalgam of technology, but exactly what the purpose of this device is was made clear by its inventor over a hundred years ago and it was so famous and its purpose so spectacular that it made the national papers and was the talk of the nation. This was purported by its inventor and his followers to be a ‘living machine,' designed and created by angels for the sole purpose of….well, we're getting ahead of ourselves. It would be best to begin at the beginning and tell the story. If you look closely at this curious device, you will see engraved in a small brass plate the words, “New Motive Power” and the name John Murray Spear. In the summer of 1818, a young woman named Mary Shelley was spending an unsettling vacation with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron in a villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. During a bout of cold weather the poets decided to have a contest to see who could come up with the strangest spooky story from among them. In a fit of creative energy seldom seen in literature, 18 year old Mary Shelley created what most people consider to be the founding work of science fiction, Frankenstein. From an assemblage of dead tissue and body parts, Doctor Victor Frankenstein creates a new being, the first and only one of his kind, known only as ‘the monster'. The work was fiction, of course, but it was timely. Science was the new frontier and people, though fascinated with it, knew very little about it. Indeed, science seemed to promise everything that magic used to describe. Her work became famous on both sides of the Atlantic and in all probability fed the imagination of the protagonist of our tale, John Murray Spear. His interest in electricity, to be specific, would lead to a contraption that would be part perpetual motion machine and part Frankenstein's monster and it would all happen with the help of Heaven above. John Murray Spear was born in Boston on September 16, 1804. By all accounts, and there are many, he was brought up to be thoughtful, compassionate and mindful of his fellow man. Named after the actual founder of the movement known as Universalism, he was destined to be connected with Heavenly pursuits for his entire life, even though life wasn't easy for John and his brother Charles who had to fend for their mother and grandmother while still children after their father died. There was work in the factories of Dorchester where they worked impossible hours to make ends meet, but through the ministration of their Sunday school teacher, both the brothers learned to read and write, giving John a way out of the factory and into the position of apprentice shoemaker. Things began to look up for him, but looking up was about to change his life forever. Like his namesake, John Murray Spear felt a calling to become a preacher. He was kind, gentle, thoughtful and full of love and generosity and though he was self-taught and never attended seminary, he began preaching and was well-received. He became an ordained Universalist minister in 1830. He married and the couple had five children. Not bad for a poor boy from Dorchester. He was particularly concerned with the abolitionist movement and he gave help to those people of color who had made it north and to freedom, only to find themselves also desperately poor and in need of assistance. Spear had a reputation for doing the work on the ground, walking among the poor, and he became very respected in his community. But something happened to John Murray Spear, something dreadful. During the winter of 1844-1845, Spear was speaking out in Portland,Maine to a mass of people who raged into a mob and beat him senseless. Spear was saved by an old friend, Oliver Dennett who also carefully nursed him back to health. To what extent his injuries included some kind of brain damage, we can never know, but something was changed in the mind of Spear, and he was not in tune with other places, other beings… Shortly after Spear recovered, his friend Dennett died. One can imagine the sense of loss Spear must have felt, but even stranger what sense of wonder must have pervaded his mind when he sat and watched his hand - seemingly of its own accord and without his own volition, picked up a pen and began to write message to him from, of all people, his dead compatriot - Oliver Dennett. The first note Spear received in this way instructed him to find a man named David Vining and help him. Even stranger, the note was signed by none other than Oliver. There is a condition known to modern medicine as Alien Hand Syndrome. It occurs when a person's hand seems to have a mind of its own and cannot be controlled by the owner of the hand. It is often the left hand and according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, there are a variety of causes to this frightening condition: temporal lobe epilepsy, brain surgery, stroke, infection, tumors, aneurysm, among others. Given the fact that Spears had been beaten by an angry mob, is it possible that he had some kind of event or damage that initiated this syndrome? As with many who have suffered from it, it eventually faded and Oliver stopped writing letters, but before he did, Spears became convinced that he was in contact with the dead and that this automatic writing that was occurring came straight from the spiritual realm. But what is so strange is that David Vining was real. Time after time, Oliver directed Spear to people who needed his help. Spear was indefatigable - willing to travel far on these missions from the dead. Word of his connection to the spirit realm and his good works began to spread. In 1848, the Fox sisters, Catherine and Mararetta, began the Spiritualist movement in the United States. While still children, the sisters began to witness strange rappings in their house in the hamlet of Hydesville, New York. One thing led to another and soon, the nation was introduced to the idea that it was possible to talk to the dead, and that almost everybody could do it. Mediums could act as connections to those who had passed on and great comfort could be had about the life of the world to come simply by attending a seance and witnessing the demonstrations of the mediums. Of course John Murray Spear was aware of the movement - he had to have been. It was all the rage. And as he wondered about the actions of his hand and how the process was working, he could find no better explanation than that of being possessed by a kindly spirit, a goodly being who had taken care of him, still working from beyond the grave. Of course, we would have had no idea about anything as modern as Alien Hand Syndrome. To that end, Spear dove into the spiritualist movement. He gave spontaneous lectures where he allowed himself to be the medium through which other voices spoke. Already well-known and well-thought of, he became a celebrity of sorts. He attended seances and came to believe that he was not only dealing with the spirits of the dead, but also with spirits of a different sort altogether - angels...angels of electricity… During a deep trance among his followers, he willingly surrendered by body to that of seven spirits whose task it was to use his body as a vessel with which to construct the new motive power of the age, an age of enlightenment and of power that would flow directly from Heaven in the form of… well, we really don't know. An aficionado of magnetism and electricity, his angelic engineers conceived of a machine that would have analogues to a heart, to lungs, to all of the systems of the living body, but they would be mechanical in nature and would, once animated, move forward without any further input of energy. The machine would be built, but the spark of life would need to be imbued by another sort of power altogether. And so his followers donated over $2000, a huge sum of money in his time, and he spent the better part of a year building the Heavenly Machine from which the greatest gift of Heaven would flow. There were no blueprints. It was built from day to day, like Mrs. Winchester's house, with plans abandoned or changed or dropped at the whim of the celestial voices speaking through John Murray Spear. There was a revolving steel arm surmounted by two steel balls, both with embedded magnets. There are obvious positive and negative aspects to the machine, with zinc and copper plates - this was an electrical child being built by a man touched by...well, again, we're not sure. But as the months passed and word of his wondrous machine reached the masses, the newspapermen followed its evolution. He promised that this device would be Heaven's greatest gift to Man, a kind of Christlike telephone from which we might speak to God or at the very least, it would provide unlimited power to move the world into a new, more perfect state. The world had heard all of this kind of thing before with one singular exception: John Murray Spear had nothing of the charlatan about him. In fact, he was singularly unassailable because he had put himself on the front line for those in need, had championed for just causes and had even suffered at the hands of unruly mobs when standing for what was right. All those who came into contact with him truly believed that he was in earnest and that he was a good man who had the spiritual health of the nation in his heart. He made no money from his project. All of the funds raised went toward the construction of the device. His prayer gatherings were widely attended and for all the people knew, this man was in touch with the angels, and how the world needed such a thing was clear to them all. But the machine just kind of sat there and did nothing. No trouble, he insisted. It is but a vessel, like a human body, and it needed to be imbued with life. For that, he explained, people needed to remember that in nature, life was not perpetuated unless male met female. For this new Prometheus to come to life, a female influence would need to ignite it and for that, he searched for and wide for the child's mother. Two newspaper editors seized the opportunity to help Spear search for her. S. Crosby Hewitt and Alonzo Newton knew a good story when they saw one and they made sure there were headlines as the search progressed. It wasn't long before the angels told the world the name of the new Mary: Mrs. Semantha Mettler, the wife of a Boston doctor. She was also, not coincidentally, a medium. When she joined the room, Spear went into one of his trance states and she, like those in the room, had to ask themselves if they were in the presence of the Heavenly host itself when he spoke. The newspapers chronicle what he said that day when the mother met her child. In his trance state, the angels spoke: “How fondly, how constantly, how widely is this one beloved! How beautiful is the influence this woman exerts! Wherever she is she attracts In this particular she possesses a most remarkable character. Her friends know no bounds to their affection for this one; and there is nothing which they would leave undone to gratify her. There passes from this woman a very marked influence. It is not precisely the religious influence; it is not precisely the moral influence, it is not precisely the practical influence; but it is, so to speak, a compost of all; and these are charmingly intermingled, imparting a most adhesive influence. This medium has been commissioned to widely instruct this woman for a high purpose. There is before this woman a new and beautiful labor. At 10 o'clock tomorrow the purpose of his mission to this place will be unfolded. Let this woman be in the region of the tranquilities at that hour.” Beautiful labor: these were the words spoken by Spear while under the influence of the angels. And that was her purpose for this woman was supposed to be the conduit that would shunt the power of life from the celestial realm to the machine, spurring it into life, and in a sense, she was to give birth to it. After all, Spears had worked on the machine for nine months... The next morning, at 10 o'clock, Mrs. Mettler was brought into the chamber with the machine and went into her own trance, all while being witnessed by Spear and his followers. Soon, she began to experience all of the symptoms of labor. It was as though she was undergoing the full gestation of a child in the matter of an hour and the mechanism was designed to absorb her maternal influence. As she moved and writhed and moaned, the witnesses observed something no less than marvelous. As reported that evening in the Boston's New Era newspaper, “THE THING MOVES!” That day, the world changed. In Lynn, Massachusetts, a thing made of metal, chemicals and wood, began to pulsate like a heart. The monster had been given the spark. According to Spear, this living child would grow and soon would move the wheels of the world, replacing all other means of moving machinery. It would take over all. How strange it must have been there that day to watch the machine move. One must wonder, though, if these people had any idea how electricity worked and how copper and zinc react when a current is applied to them? The basic dynamics of a simple electric motor was not known to the world yet, but Spear may have touched upon something that a fellow from Vermont did in 1834, not many years before. Thomas Davenport invented the first battery powered electric motor to power a small printing press. A well-read man like Spear may have heard of Davenport's achievement, but may not have understood the forces involved. Electricity seemed magical, moving things with unseen forces. Perhaps Spear was correct in that one day, electricity would power the world, overwhelmingly moving the machines of industry, replacing water power and that of the steam engine. Certainly this extraordinary claim seems pretty commonplace today, but in his day, no one knew that. Perhaps it was nothing more than the movement of a metal plate responding to a magnetic field. People believed that invisible spirits could rap and tap and communicate through mediums. Why not build a machine to channel the power of God? News of the movement of the new machine spread throughout the land, but those who did not take to communicating with the dead and the ways of the spiritualists had no use for such practices. To a mainstream religious American audience, this might even have hinted of witchcraft and magic. Instead of being divinely inspired by the angels, was this some Devil's work? Reports claim that John Murray Spears' machine was destroyed by an angry mob, tearing it to pieces and trampling it beneath their feet. Spears faded into obscurity after that. He never thought to rebuild the machine and his hope to tap into an invisible power that might move the machines of the world was forgotten. Except it wasn't. An invisible force does move the machines of the world - electricity. He must have believed it would work and in his own way, he was right. It wasn't a hoax, as far as the idea goes. Given the knowledge of his age, we might even look back upon him, strange as his sensibilities seem to us today, he really did want to gift the world a very real power. Just not what he thought it was. And his machine? We thought it was destroyed - it was reported as such, but in 2019, in Greely, Colorado, a Miss Akerman passed away and her home, full of hoarded objects, was being cleared when the machine showed up resting in her attic. It must have sat there for one hundred and fifty-six years. If it isn't the real machine, even though it is clearly labeled, it certainly looks like the God machine of John Murray Spears. Whether or not it works remains a mystery, but then again, such things as this beg for speculation and make us wonder, “what makes it tick?” For that matter, what makes one want to know? Better to ask how a persons' hand might write messages of its own volition and how this alien hand could lead to a machine that claimed to be a robotic body for God. Sources John Murray Spear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Murray_Spear https://uudb.org/articles/johnmurrayspear.html http://www.danbaines.com/blog/john-murray-spears-mechanical-messiah-discovered-in-colorado-attic/3/7/2019 Alien Hand Syndrome The National Library of Medicine - Alien Hand Syndrome
Aujourd'hui, nous allons vous parler de trois sœurs qui ont bouleversé notre relation avec l'au-delà… Alors qu'elles n'étaient que petites filles, leurs dons ont vite fait leurs preuves. Partout aux Etats-Unis et jusqu'en Europe, les notables et les petites gens étaient prêts à payer pour communiquer avec les morts grâce aux talents des deux jeunes sœurs. Elles sont ainsi devenues les premières médiums du monde et ont fondé une nouvelle religion. Leur nom : les sœurs Fox. Tapez un coup pour oui et découvrez leur True Story ! Une maison pas comme les autres... L'histoire des sœurs Fox commence par un banal déménagement. Margaret, ou Maggie, 12 ans, Catherine, appelée Kate, 10 ans, Leah, leur grande sœur, et leurs parents viennent s'installer à Hydesville, à 50km de la grande ville de Rochester où ils habitaient auparavant. Leur père David, un pasteur, se réjouit de pouvoir offrir à sa famille une charmante maison avec un grand jardin. Mais ses filles sont beaucoup moins enchantées : quitter la ville pour la campagne, c'est l'ennui assuré… Une histoire incroyable à écouter dans ce podcast. Pour découvrir d'autres récits passionnants, cliquez ci-dessous : Major Taylor, le champion oublié Coluche, la vraie “histoire d'un mec” Lucie de Pracontal, la mariée au destin tragique... Ecriture : Karen Etourneau Réalisation : Celia Brondreau Voix : Andréa Brusque Voir Acast.com/privacy pour les informations sur la vie privée et l'opt-out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
O moderno espiritualismo foi um movimento que se iniciou no século 19, a partir dos fenômenos nas casas das irmãs fox, nos EUA, em Hydesville, Nova Iorque. A partir disso se propagou por toda Europa, possibilitando mais tarde o surgimento da doutrina espírita kardeciana, na França. Um simples introdução ao kardecismo ou um movimento de efervescência social e espiritual? É o que discutimos nesse episódio. Quem gostar nos siga nas redes.
Hi there Ichabodicans! We love you and so does Ichabod! This week we are talking about the humble beginnings of spiritualism in the bosom of the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate. It began in the tiny town of Hydesville, New York and spread to Rochester where the first Fox Sister Seance was held. Join us as we try to determine if the Foxes were Legit or full of Bullshit.
Spiritualism began during the 1840s in Hydesville, NY and adherents believe spirits of the dead can and do want to communicate with the living. By 1897, Spiritualism had more than 8 million followers, including: Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Victorian seances were presided over by mediums who could dictate the spirits' message by means of rapping or knocking. Talking Boards, also known as witch, spirit, oracle or channeling boards were sometimes used. As talking boards became more mainstream and needed no medium, they soon found their way into many American homes.
This episode blends fictional stories with factual ones to bring you the best creepy goodness to chill your heart! What is the invisible beast that slays in Berkley Square? What restless spirit cries for help in Hydesville? Who are the dark strangers? Dare you listen and find out? Yes! Let the shivers flow!
The three men made their way down the lonely trail that skirted the fields outside of Machiasport, Maine. These hills were wide open and bare, but the trees in the distance belied a deep forest toward the west and if they listened intently, they might have heard the waves in Machias Bay. It was dusk and the last light of the setting sun burned a bright red gash across last grey light of day. One of the three was a skeptic, certain that the events which had been occurring for the past six years were nothing more than an elaborate hoax played out to fool the locals into believing that it was possible to speak with the dead. His mission was to stop this foolish dependence on chicanery and parlor tricks and get the people back to believing properly about the living and the dead. The other two had seen the spirit before, had even had conversations with it, but that had been in the confines of the cellar of Captain Blaisdel and his family. They knew it was real. They were there as witnesses. Besides, this meeting was something else entirely and none of the three knew how this rendezvous with the dead would turn out. The year was 1806. For the past six years, a ghost had been speaking from beyond the grave to hundreds of locals in the Machiasport area. This was a good fifty years before the Fox girls of Hydesville, New York began hearing rappings in their house and started the American Spiritualist Movement which still lingers in our modern world as the NSAC (National Spiritualist Association of Churches). Situated on the edge of the new country, this out-of-the-way Maine hamlet would serve as the locale for the largest mass witnessing of a ghost in American history. Reverend Cummings, the skeptic on his was to the rendezvous with the ghost, claimed that he had his doubts. What would happen on the edge of that barren field that night would change his world forever and help him prepare a view of life after death that took the world by storm when the Fox girls popularized the idea of communicating with the dead more than half a century later. The Machiasport Ghost been called 'America's First Ghost,' but that would be stretching the truth. Certainly the new world had its share of hauntings long before 1799. Native Americans have passed down their stories of spirits by the oral tradition for centuries. Folklorists can call upon hundreds of stories of hauntings and specters from each of the original thirteen colonies. But the difference between these hauntings and the Machiasport haunting is that they were old and based upon memory alone, with few witnesses. The appearance the ghost of the woman in the cellar of the Maschiasport home could be dated and witnessed by dozens of living people. Also, the ghost appeared at a time when science and the value of impartial observation was beginning to become valued over time-honored belief and superstition. The other difference between this haunting and the others that came before it was that this ghost wanted to talk and well over two hundred people claimed to have heard her spoken words. Over a hundred also claimed to have seen her while she spoke. Stranger still, many in the crowd knew her while she was alive. It was like she had never died. If you've ever spent time alone in a house, you may recall that there are moments when you can swear you've heard a voice. You can't really make out the words and if you live in the city, it's easy to write it off as a conversation between two people walking outside as they pass your house. If you live in the country, however, it's harder to find an explanation for the sound. The experience can leave you with goosebumps and a sudden urge to get in the car and go for a long, long ride. Many people who claim to live in a haunted house describe the experience of hearing the mumbled sound of someone talking, but it's faint and indistinct and comes and goes quickly. Most people go about their business and try not to ponder the cause. Such was the case for Captain Abner Blaisdel and his family at their house at Machiasport in the year 1799. Blaisdel was a respected member of the community and a regular churchgoer. He wasn't one to fall for gimmicks and foolhardy ideas. But that didn't stop him and his family from being the one place in the community where the spirit decided to take up residence and begin talking. At first the voice was quiet and almost not there. They weren't enough to spook the Captain and his family, merely enough to inconvenience them.The sounds and noises went on for months and then, on the cold day of January 2, 1800, the voice suddenly gained a more sophisticated manner of speaking. They could distinctly hear words now. Stranger still, the sound seemed to be coming from their cellar. The voice sounded like a woman. With stout heart, Captain Blaisdel entered the cellar and listened. When he had heard enough, he asked the disembodied voice who she was. "I'm the dead wife of Captain George Butler, born Nelly Hooper," replied the voice, which has been described as "shrill, but mild and pleasant." Nelly Butler had indeed died a few years earlier at the tender age of twenty-one. Captain Blaisdel was not a medium, yet he was able to clearly speak to someone who obviously wasn't physically there with him in the cellar. He knew both of the men whose names were mentioned by the spirit and he also knew that neither of them would appreciate the idea that their dead beloved Nelly was back among them and able to talk. Her father, Dennis Hooper, only lived six miles down the road. Her widow, George, lived nearby, as well. The voice requested an audience with the two men and asked Captain Blaisdel to send for them forthwith. When asked why she was in the cellar and not in the house above, the voice explained that "I don't want to frighten the children." There are not many instances of the sudden appearances of spirits who can simply speak to the living without some kind of intercession. Today when such ideas are contemplated, one thinks of this kind of communication as impossible, or at least impossible without mediums, ouiji boards, trances and seances. Yet here was an instance of a simple man having a conversation with a dead woman he might have passed on the street merely a few years before. He reluctantly did as the spirit asked and sent for the two men. When they arrived, he sheepishly explained why he had summoned them in the dead of winter. Abner Blaisdel communicated to the pair that they had been hearing things for about six months and only recently had the sounds turned into a full-bodied human voice. Father and son-in-law listened with what one can only imagine was trepidation and suspicion. But there was only one way to prove the otherwise stalwart Captain Blaisdel wrong and set this matter to rest: they would go into the cellar and have a chat with their Nelly...or not. If they heard nothing, that would be the end of that. When they emerged from the cellar, they were pale and wide-eyed. After asking the disembodied voice a series of questions that only Nelly Butler could have answered, they were convinced that this was indeed her spirit come back to commune with the living. She knew the answer to every question. Later, her father would write,"I believe it was her voice." A few days later Abner's son came into the house visibly shaken, claiming that on the way home he had seen a woman in white floating above the fields. Things escalated when, the following day, the voice in the cellar loudly accosted the son asking him why he hadn't said hello to her when he saw her. In such a small community it didn't take long for word to get around that Captain Blaisdel had a ghost in his cellar who could talk to you. As the weather turned warmer and over the course of the next few years, scores of people visited the Blaisdel house and walked down the steps into the cellar to listen to Nelly Butler. What did she talk about? She spoke of redemption, of righteousness, and she also gave predictions. She prophesied that her widower would marry a Blaisdel and that they would have a child soon after. She spoke of family matters to people who she had known in life and gave advice. She predicted correctly the death of at least three local people. She took questions from the people and claimed to be neither a demon nor a witch. She is quoted to have said to a group of visitors, "Although my body is consumed and turned to dust, my soul is as much alive as before I left my body." She wasn't there to scare them but to guide them. For a ghost, she seemed quite pleasant. People would crowd into the cellar and sing hymns pray, and call to the spirit to appear and the eventually she would take form, indistinct at first, but eventually they saw her and she would move about and among them. It was a religious experience for those involved, a deeply spiritual moment that impressed upon everyone in attendance that there was life after death: they did not need to doubt. Then, in May of 1800, in front of at least twenty witnesses, she took a step forward from wherever she resided and appeared, materializing in front of the crowd. She was wearing a 'shining white garment'. One of those present wrote, "At first the apparition was a mere mass of light, then it grew into a personal form, about as tall as myself...the glow of the apparition had a constant tremulous motion. At last the personal form became shapeless, expanded every way and then vanished in a moment." She made a request that her child be reburied with new rites, which was done. Those in attendance at the re-interment of the body claimed that she appeared to them at the graveside to share in the moment. But this apparently wasn't her unfinished business. Word of the ghost spread quickly and her reputation grew. But such association with the dead would not stand forever. The local townsfolk were becoming used to Nelly's presence, many even visiting her on a regular basis like they might call upon an old friend. There was one person in the town, however, who was determined that this was an elaborate hoax and he was bound and determined to prove it. The Reverend Abraham Cummings did not believe in ghosts. As far as we was concerned, the spirits of the dead didn't linger. They went to perdition or paradise and could not choose to stay. As far as he was concerned, the only living person who had ever died and returned to tell about it was quite familiar to him . The locals didn't need Nelly to prove the existence of a life after death when they had the Son of God. Cummings was an educated man, a graduate of Brown University in Providence, and a man who believed in progress instead of superstition. It was time to end this nonsense once and for all. As an educated man, he would use the light of reason to shine in that dark cellar and end this series of events. He began by interviewing his parishioners, at least twenty-seven of them, each one certain of the veracity of her existence. They all told the same story - a spirit had returned from the edge of life to tell them truths and guide them. That didn't deter him. The time had come to take on this spirit head on. Though he had avoided meeting with Nelly because agreeing to do so would simply prove her existence to his parishioners, he set up a meeting of sorts, away from the cellar and the prying eyes of the public. He asked her father and a friend to accompany him on a walk. Captain Blaisdel asked Nelly's spirit to meet the Reverend in the open, in a field near the house but away from the road. She agreed to the personal interview. In his book Unbidden Guests, author William Oliver Stevens writes of the meeting. He gathered his information from Reverend Cummings own writings. He writes, "About twelve rods ahead of [Rev. Cummings] there was a slight knoll...[where] he could see a group of white rocks...showing dimly against the dark turf...Two or three minutes later...one of those...white rocks had risen off the ground, and had now taken the shape of a globe of light with a rosy tinge. As he went toward it, he kept an eye on it for fear it might disappear, but he had not gone more than five paces when the glowing mass flashed right to where he was [and] resolved itself into the shape of a woman, but small, the size of a child of seven. He thought, "You are not tall enough for the woman who has been appearing among us." Immediately, the figure expanded to normal size...and now she appeared glorious, with rays of light shining from her head all about, and reaching to the ground." This was the last time anyone saw or heard from the spirit of Nelly Butler. Apparently her connection with a man of God was enough to finish her business. But it was only the beginning for Reverend Abraham Cummings. From that moment on, he was transformed. The greatest skeptic had become the greatest believer. Here was definite proof that life continued after death. This ghostly appearance only served to fuel the fire of the good reverend's devotion to the precepts of the Christian religion. He left the Machiasport area and traveled widely, preaching about the life of the world to come as evidenced by the visitation that he had witnessed. He recorded the incident in the book he published in 1826, entitled, Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense: In which is contemplated the doctrine of spectres and the existence of a particular spectre addressed to the candor of this enlightened age. When we consider that by the date of the publication of his book, America would soon be immersed in Spiritualism and the idea of speaking with the dead would enter the mainstream. The Reverend Cummings was recalling a set of events that gave credence to this rather radical set of paranormal ideas that was taking America by storm. IS it possible that the Fox girls might have read his pamphlets? Spiritualist Churches rose up seemingly overnight and with the loss of so much life in the coming years as a result of the American Civil War, the stage was set for an entire nation of grieving people to seek communication with their dearly departed loved ones. Later, in 1888, the founders of the Spiritualist Movement itself would reject the idea of spiritualism, claiming that it had all started as a hoax with an apple tied to a string making raps on the floor. The Fox sisters eschewed their previous claims, calling the modern movement "an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world." Though the sisters died soon after in abject poverty, the idea of mediumship and speaking to the dead gave them a comfortable income over the years. Motivated and managed by their older sister, they turned their ruse into a regular enterprise. Even though they claimed that the entire idea of spiritualism was a hoax, that didn't stop the Spiritualist movement from continuing to grow. Vestiges of it still live on today. But what about the Machiasport haunting? No one made any money as a result of it, though it gave the Reverend Cummings a reason to continue his life's work with more vigor for years to come. What makes the Machiasport Haunting important in the history of American paranormal studies is its early date and the number of witnesses who wrote about and claimed to have seen and spoken with the dead woman known to the world as Nelly Butler. No other haunting has had so many witnesses. Also, the mood of this haunting was enlightening rather than frightening, which is singularly rare and seems to compare only to such events as the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Catholic circles. We can even make the claim that this was the first documented haunting in the history of the United States. Because these events took place in an earlier time, modern people might tend to think of them as slightly foolish, perhaps even as a kind of parlor fiction designed to entertain listeners on long, dark nights by the fireside. Whatever people heard and saw in that cellar in Machiasport in the year 1800 and beyond, they believed it was a ghost. These weren't people prone to flights of fancy. These people were the epitome of the Yankee hands-on, problem-solving spirit, practical in every way. If the appearance of Nelly Butler's spirit was a fabrication created by the Blaisdel family, they must have been among the greatest charlatans ever to walk the earth, or beyond. The questions remain: was this a ghost or a demonic intruder? Was this hope from Heaven or was this a lie perpetrated to lure believers into a false hope? How could such things be? We will never know. SOURCES Citro, Joseph A. Passing Strange: True Tales of New England Hauntings and Horrors. Shelburne, VT: Chapters Pub., 1996. Print. America's First Ghost http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/classics/americas-first-ghost#_ Bangor Daily News: "Is Maine Home to America's First Documented Haunting?", Oct 31, 2015 http://bangordailynews.com/2015/10/30/living/is-maine-home-to-the-first-documented-ghost-story-in-the-us/
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