A Confession of Fraud Did Not Kill This Myth
What began as a prank soon turned serious, when an older sister of Katie and Maggie Fox, Leah, saw the potential for profit. So she began to book her younger siblings for sessions with people who were eager to pay for a chance to communicate with their departed loved ones. The girls’ act took off, and soon young Maggie and Katie Fox began to tour America. They kept it up for decades. Other charlatans saw the Fox sisters’ success, and jumped in on the act and claimed to be mediums themselves.
Finally, in 1888, a guilt-stricken Maggie Fox decided to clear her conscience. She confessed to the fraud, and let the world that the whole communication-with-the-dead-through-a-medium thing was just a myth. She demonstrated to an audience just how she and her sister had produced the knocks, with her big toe against a poorly balanced stool. Surprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – even after the con’s originator confessed that it was a con, and demonstrated how the con had been performed, the conned continued to believe in the con. Spiritualism and seances took a hit, but quickly rebounded and became even more popular.
