The Fox Sisters

Summary

In March 1848 raps in the Fox family's house at Hydesville, New York, were taken for messages from a spirit, and the séances of two of the daughters, Margaret and Kate, became the founding story of spiritualism. In 1888 Margaret showed a New York audience how she had made the raps with her own joints; in 1889 she retracted.

The retraction offered no evidence. The method had been found in 1851 by three Buffalo physicians, who heard plenty of raps while the sisters' knees were free and none while they were held.

What is documented

Hydesville. The earliest account examined here, Capron and Barron's Singular Revelations (1850), says the family had been kept awake by knocking "for several nights" before the evening of 31 March 1848, when they called in the neighbours. Questioned by the girls' mother, Mrs Fox, and then by neighbours, the sounds were taken to identify a spirit: a peddler, 31 years old, murdered in the house for his money by a person who had lived there some years before. Further questioning fixed the sum at $500 and the time at about midnight on a Tuesday. Every detail of that story came from questions answered by raps.

Rochester, 1849. On the evening of 14 November 1849 a lecture on the manifestations was given at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, with the sounds audible in the hall. Committees appointed at the public meetings investigated for three days and, by the supporters' own account, failed to find the cause.

Buffalo, 1851. Three physicians of the University of Buffalo, Austin Flint, Charles A. Lee and C. B. Coventry, examined the sisters. Their report, reprinted in 1888, describes sittings with the heels resting on cushions and the toes raised, and with the knees held. There were "plenty of 'raps' when the knees were not held, and none when the hands were applied", except once, when Lee deliberately relaxed his grip, faint raps were heard and he felt the bone move. They concluded that the "Rochester knockings" came from the knee-joint. Leah replied in the press, with a long letter in March 1851.

The confession. On 21 October 1888 Margaret, by then Mrs Margaret Fox Kane, appeared at the Academy of Music in New York and, in the words of Reuben Briggs Davenport's account, "demonstrated the falsity of all that she had done in the past". Davenport's book, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, published that year "by authority of" Margaret and Kate, gives her account. The raps began as a children's trick. The eldest sister, Leah, learned the method from them and practised it with her own toes. Davenport reports her as saying that her muscles and toe joints were "so educated by long practice" that she could rap with no perceptible movement. She located the sound in the toes; the Buffalo doctors had located it in the knee. Davenport called their report "erroneous as it was in its conclusions", but said it held so much truth that Leah was at first staggered by it.

The retraction. In an interview reported in the New York Press on 20 November 1889, Margaret said she wished she "could undo the injustice I did the cause of Spiritualism". She blamed "persons inimical to it" who had held out "promises of wealth and happiness", and credited the retraction to "the silent impulse of the spirits". Arthur Conan Doyle, a committed spiritualist, wrote in 1926 that a letter of Kate's pointed to "pecuniary temptation" behind the confession, and that Margaret found there was little money in it.

The bones. A dispatch dated Rochester, 22 November 1904, printed in the Boston Journal of 23 November and reproduced by Doyle, reported that the owner of the Hydesville house had found "an almost entire human skeleton" between the earth and the cellar walls, and claimed that it cleared the sisters "from the only shadow of doubt held concerning their sincerity". A physician who examined the bones reported, in an account published in 1909, that he found "only a few ribs with odds and ends of bones", among them some chicken bones, and that he had since heard that someone had put them there as a practical joke.

Leading explanations

The sisters made the raps with their joints. Established. The Buffalo physicians stopped the raps by holding the knees, and felt the bone move when the grip slackened. Margaret described the method in 1888 and performed it on a stage. The sources differ only on the joint.

Communication with spirits. Rejected. The raps were produced at will by the people claiming to receive them, and ceased when their joints were restrained. The retraction, which Doyle and other spiritualists cited, offered no counter-evidence and attributed itself to the spirits.

Current status

Debunked. The raps were made by the sisters, as their own demonstration and an independent medical test show. The retraction of 1889 withdrew the confession but not the evidence, and gave spiritualism a reason to regard the matter as open. The registry does not.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.