Talking to the Dead (26 page)

In June Katie visited Maggie and found her sister drunk. Maggie's condition threw her into a depression; she returned to the Taylors exhausted and irritated. When she was about to leave, she removed her gloves and wrote a message. Holding it up to a mirror, she read it as though she indeed had no knowledge of its contents.

“It is about me,” Kate announced. “I know my name is written there.”

Throughout Kate's seances with the Taylors, messages sometimes seemed to be addressed to the medium herself, urging her to find another, better way. During a visit from Robert Dale Owen, who was greatly distressed by Kate's condition, the spirit of Professor K. sent a communication. It was conveyed by raps, with Kate writing down the words.

“We are happy to have Mr. Owen here this morning,” Professor K. acknowledged, “and we will register Katie's promise in heaven, in the home of her Mother: we will register it in flowers and her eyes shall some day behold it. Mr. Owen we will tell you how Katie can be kept from touching wine; by keeping her from temptation.

“Now go and rejoice Katie, and live,” the spirit counseled. “There are two paths, one happiness and peace, one misery and death! Choose the former and great will be your golden reward.”

K
EEPING
K
ATE FROM
temptation was on everyone's mind, and in June 1871 Benjamin Franklin's spirit gave the Taylors fair warning: it was time for Kate to go abroad, to seek a fresh start. The spirits tried to reassure Sarah, terrified as she was of losing her mortal link to her immortal children, that a change of scene was necessary.

The spirits too were “deprived of a sacred privilege,” they commiserated, “that of visiting you life-like and almost human. But time flies rapidly and we shall have Katie back, a new being. She will be benefited and changed, not only in habits, but in strength.”
¹

A week before thirty-four-year-old Kate was to sail that fall, Margaret Fox—now in the spirit world more than five years—used her daughter's hand to thank Sarah Taylor, perhaps for being a more protective parent than she herself had managed to be. As raps echoed around her, Kate scribbled on her mother's behalf, “When Cathy is with you I am happy and can enjoy the sunlight of heaven. Oh, would that she could ever be under the mantle with which you have so often covered her.”

Kate sailed for England on October 7, 1871, her spacious stateroom crowded before departure with well-wishers. Most were strangers to Sarah, but she guessed that they shared her painful feelings on that occasion, “that each had his secret heartache, not only at parting with Katie, but at seeing the very means of communication between them and some loved one, dearer to them than their own lives, the readable link between the two worlds, the key that opens the gates of heaven to mortals, borne far, far away.”

Kate was little more than an “unconscious, thoughtless child,” Sarah mused from her own self-absorbed standpoint, a child who “little realized the deprivations her best friends were imposing upon themselves, voluntarily for her sake!” Sarah added in resignation, “She is gone. The magnificent ship has left its moorings and Katie is riding the billows.”

Was setting out across the Atlantic Ocean for a foreign country an adventure for Kate or a terror? Did she look forward to meeting fellow Spiritualists there, or was she frightened of their scrutiny? Traveling with one of Charles Livermore's relatives, Blanche Ogden, Kate arrived in England safely, only to leave for France immediately. It's possible that she was “unwell”—a euphemism frequently attached to her binges—and that Ogden had hurried her off to recover in Paris before meeting London's influential Spiritualists.
²

First introduced to England in 1852 by Mrs. W. R. Hayden, an American medium and journalist's wife, Modern Spiritualism had sparked a furor of table tilting that rapidly spread. The next year, the scientist Michael Faraday, lauded for his research on electricity, had conducted investigations into the matter and concluded that the sitters' involuntary movements, rather than the spirits' strength, pushed ordinarily stolid tables into action. Despite his findings, table tilting continued to be practiced as a parlor entertainment, and a new device—the planchette, a precursor to the Ouija board—rivaled its popularity. For a time these activities were so engrossing that other serious investigations lagged.
³

The medium Daniel Dunglas Home did more than anyone else to intensify interest in Spiritualism throughout Great Britain and Europe. Born in Scotland in 1833, Home later claimed to have experienced clairvoyant visions already when he moved to the United States at age nine.
By the time he visited England in 1855, he had conducted seances that featured raps, strains of ghostly music, and the sight of spectral hands, often with the gaslights turned up in the seance room. He also had exhibited, according to many witnesses, a startling ability to levitate as well as to shrink and elongate his body.

Slim and striking, Home was a dandy with a mane of curly hair and a reputation for extraordinary charm, although one of his fellow mediums commented that his “intellectual ability is not high.” While Home never accepted payment for a seance, he didn't really need to. He stayed as a welcome guest—others called him a shameless freeloader—at the homes of his frequently wealthy fans. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was intrigued by him, even as her poet-husband, Robert, found the whole subject of Spiritualism so distasteful that he wrote a poem called “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” bitterly satirizing the barely disguised Home.

Sticks and stones did little to quell enthusiasm for Home, though, who continued to levitate his way through England and Europe. In the late 1860s he performed his most amazing feat by appearing, in the presence of witnesses, to drift horizontally out one window and, a moment or two later, to float back through the window of an adjoining room.

As in the United States, Spiritualism was hotly debated in the press and dismissed by many scientists, but it was rumored that Queen Victoria was no stranger to seances after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, and the subject had captured the attention also of the renowned physicist and chemist William Crookes. Later knighted for his discoveries in the field of vacuum physics, Crookes had become interested in investigating the afterlife in the late 1860s, perhaps not just for science's sake but also because of a brother's death. With Kate and D. D. Home both in London in 1871, Crookes hoped to hold seances jointly with the two of them.

Through no fault of his own, his initial contact with Kate was erratic at best. Crookes's index of the letters he received from her in the six months after her arrival is a shorthand record of her broken appointments, bouts of illness, lies, abject apologies, and occasional temper tantrums.
⁴
In late April 1872 Kate promised to reserve evenings entirely for his test seances, coupling her offer with the wistful request “Let us be
friends.” But her resolve turned out to be fleeting. A more ominous entry in his index appeared a few days later: “Fox, K. Ill. Sick. Glasgow. Mr. Livermore.” The connection between her illness and the banker's name may not have been altogether random. She had recently learned that Charles Livermore was in love, and she was soon to find out that he was planning to marry a woman twenty years his junior, news that surely had a powerful emotional impact on the medium, who for so many years had identified herself with Estelle's spirit.

Whether in response to Livermore's engagement or to the call of her own heart, thirty-five-year-old Kate entered at last into a serious courtship of her own. Her suitor, Henry Dietrich Jencken, was a friend of Crookes whom she had met at a reception on her arrival in England the previous fall. Tall, fair, and imposing in appearance, Henry was a man Kate later lovingly described to her fellow medium D. D. Home as “good and kind.” He was in his late forties and a widower, although his previous marriage had been an unhappy one. A respected barrister, he also had edited a compendium of Roman law used by many of his professional colleagues.
⁵

Spiritualism was a firm bond between Kate and Henry: his parents believed in spirit communication, and so too did their son. Moreover, Henry's family, like Kate's, was far from conventional. His father, a brilliant doctor, had fallen in love with a patient and an already married baroness—the woman who would become Henry's mother—in their native land of Estonia in the years shortly after the Napoleonic wars. She had left the baron and alienated their grown children to be with Dr. Jencken; the two of them subsequently had sons of their own. Eventually the couple moved to England but didn't find life there easy. Since the baroness had been disowned, and the non-English-speaking doctor initially had to struggle to find patients, Henry had grown up in a relatively poor household.

On September 1, 1872, three months after Charles Livermore wed his young bride, Henry asked Kate to marry him, a proposal she promptly accepted. That afternoon, as though buoyed up by good fortune, she sent Crookes a letter in which she promised to attend a seance with him every day for six months. But trouble followed immediately and contin
ued through the fall. She quarreled with Livermore's relative, Blanche Ogden, and announced that she no longer would share quarters with her companion. Notes in Crookes's index of letters refer to Kate on two consecutive days, not as “sick” or “ill” but as “drugged,” suggesting that she may have been under the influence of opium or another narcotic.

Henry Jencken apparently helped calm and stabilize his distraught fiancée, for on December 14, 1872, they were married as planned at St. Marylebone Parish Church in London, where Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had been wed a quarter century before. An imposing neoclassic building, the church had supplanted older structures on a site rich in history. The philosopher Francis Bacon had been married there, the poet Byron baptized there, and Charles Wesley buried there.
⁶
Although Kate's guests included the Duke of Wellington's son and a German prince, the departed notables threatened to outshine the living.

The wedding party itself was small. None of Kate's siblings came; it was a long distance, and they had families and responsibilities, although Leah might have enjoyed the excitement. Having emerged at last from her younger sisters' long shadows, she may have preferred to avoid celebrations where she couldn't command center stage.

Maggie, of course, was very frail. Kate also may have worried that her sister's addiction to alcohol would either ruin the occasion or disrupt her own valiant efforts at control.

The bride, groom, and wedding party arrived at the church at 11
AM
in three carriages drawn by milk white horses. Kate wore a simple white dress with a gold brooch at her neck and a half wreath of flowers brightening her black hair. According to the Spiritualist press, gentle raps during the ceremony announced the spirits' approval of the union, raps that grew louder and yet more jubilant later at the wedding breakfast. It was a chorus said to have been led by Margaret Fox, whose spirit, if indeed present, must have been overcome with relief and gratitude that her youngest child no longer faced alone the trials of the mortal world. Some guests also reported seeing the banquet table, laden with the wedding feast, levitate several inches as though to gambol in delight.

At the party's end the couple returned to Henry's fine home to begin married life and to start a family. Kate became pregnant almost
immediately. Settled at last, with a child on the way, she seemed free from her addictions for the moment. Although her newfound security and lifestyle might have permitted her complete retirement, she and Henry, like Leah and Daniel, continued to participate selectively in private circles and test seances.

In the spring of 1873 Kate and Henry attended four sittings with the medium William Stainton Moses, who had studied for a time at Oxford and been ordained a minister in 1863. Moses, who kept notes, provided possibly the only description of Kate's voice, commenting that she spoke rapidly, rather sharply, and with a slight Yankee accent. Her past troubles must have shown in her face, for it was so thin that he commented on how pronounced her nose and brow looked and how tightly compressed her mouth. But with her thick, dark hair and piercing purple-black eyes, she impressed him as “altogether a person out of the common.” He also noted with interest the powerful, peculiar “treble rap” that followed her.
⁷

However intermittently from 1872 on, she had been holding seances with Crookes as well, sometimes with Daniel Dunglas Home or other mediums present. Crookes established what he considered strict test conditions. Investigations generally took place in the light, unless darkness was necessary to frame a luminous apparition, and they were conducted in Crookes's own laboratory, among witnesses he had chosen personally for their reliability.
⁸

In an article later published in the
Quarterly Journal of Science,
Crookes discussed these seances in detail. Among the phenomena he witnessed, he listed “the movement of a heavy table in full light” when no one was touching it; the buoyancy of a fan that circled a table “without contact with any person”; floating, glowing orbs; the touch and sighting of spectral hands; and spirit writing.

Like other investigators before him, Crookes marveled at Kate's versatility, her capacity, he testified, to give a message via automatic writing to one person “whilst a message to another person on another subject was being given alphabetically by means of ‘raps,' and the whole time she was conversing freely with a third person on a subject totally different from either.” Home, famous for his levitations, in fact produced some of the most startling manifestations. “On three separate occasions have I
seen him raised completely from the floor of the room,” Crookes wrote, “once sitting in an easy chair, once kneeling on his chair, and once standing up.” But Kate outshone everyone in the “percussive sounds” that followed her.

“For power and certainty” of the sounds, Crookes asserted, “[I have] met with no one who at all approached Miss Kate Fox.” Other mediums, he explained, required the familiar setting of a formal seance, but not so Kate. She needed only to “place her hand on any substance” for sounds to ring out “like a triple pulsation,” loud enough to be heard several rooms away.

Crookes maintained, “I have heard [the sounds] in a living tree—on a sheet of glass—on a stretched iron wire—on a stretched membrane—a tambourine—on the roof of a cab—and on the floor of a theater.

“I have had these sounds, proceeding from the floor, walls, &, when the medium's hands and feet were held—when she was standing on a chair—when she was suspended in a swing from the ceiling—when she was enclosed in a wire cage—and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa.

“I have heard them on a glass harmonicon—I have felt them on my own shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them on a sheet of paper, held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one corner.”

Crookes's experiments point out, once again, both the precautions that investigators took to eliminate the possibility of fraud and the humiliations to which such tests frequently subjected the mediums—humiliations they endured for the sake of fame, money, attention, or truth.