Posted by mystery_girl The man had been a peddler who had known the lady of the house. She invited him inside, and he was never seen alive again. His pack and several of his wares, though, were found in the house. The maid who worked in the house at the time reports having seen the ghost of the peddler, but the Foxes knew nothing about this situation when they bought the house … and started seeing the ghost. The girls discovered that they could communicate with the spirit by asking him to make a series of knocking or rapping sounds in response to their questions. It was this way that the family determined that a man had been murdered in the house and buried in the cellar. It wasn’t until after the Foxes had been out of the house for years that the skeleton and peddler’s pack were discovered in the cellar, confirming the story of the girls who, by the time of the discovery had lived as celebrities and died in shame as “frauds.” The Fox sisters were eventually celebrated mistresses of spirit contact, early pioneers in the Spiritualist Movement. They toured the world for years before people stopped believing in their performance. The women both had unhappy and unsatisfactory home lives, and they eventually confessed, in response to public pressure, that they had faked the knocking sounds. They end years for both women were tragic. They were reviled among the paranormal and spiritualist community. However, before her death, Margaret Fox recanted her “confession of fraud.” She said that she and her sister had not made the noises, and indeed, they had not ever been adequately reproduced by those who tried to prove their assumed trickery. My friend, Michael Keene, is a filmmaker near Rochester who makes short films about the history of Western New York. His film, “In Search of White Crows,” is about the lives and deaths of the Fox sisters. If you’re interested in more info, you should check out his website at www.ad-hoc-productions.com. (The illustrations for the films are beautiful!) Link: http://www.ad-hoc-productions.com
on 9/8/2007, 5:15 pm
74.132.190.172
The Fox sisters were young girls when their contact with the spirit world began. They had moved into a house in Western New York where, some time earlier, a man had been murdered.
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