Talking to the Dead Quotes

“The Fox sisters also had a genius for collaboration. With help from their mortal visitors and perhaps from immortal ones as well, the mediums constructed stories about the past, present, and future; they listened to voices from within and without and wove them into narratives in a process that—to use terms familiar today—was interactive and branching. They were storytellers who created an exciting, involving forum—the seance—in which all participants could tell themselves a different version of the tale.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“A new field of study, neurotheology, explores the possibility that certain religious and visionary experiences—for example, a sense of oneness with the universe or union with a greater power—may originate within a particular part of the human brain. Curiously enough, a phrenologist named Joseph Rhodes Buchanan posited a not dissimilar theory in 1841: he identified a specific spot on the human head that when stimulated, he wrote, produced visions of spirits.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Older occult organizations persisted after World War I, some of them having splintered off from the Theosophical Society or been influenced by it, others drawing on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism for their ideas. New groups arose as well. Interest in alchemy and astrology and other bodies of esoteric lore were commingled, particularly in Austria and Germany, with a mythology manipulated to stress racial superiority, secret rites of initiation, and a millennial expectation of a new world order. Groups such as the Ariosophical societies, which proposed the existence of a psychic energy perfectly realized in what the organizations’ members called the Aryan type, represented a small but significant factor in the rise of Nazi ideology.10”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Home’s book, Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, a work that castigated a number of mediums for faking manifestations and duping clients out of their fortunes, said not a word that was disparaging of Kate or Maggie Fox.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“The medium Daniel Dunglas Home did more than anyone else to intensify interest in Spiritualism throughout Great Britain and Europe.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“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”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“It was one of Dr. George Taylor’s contributions to the health of the nation to create new and improved steam-powered massage and vibratory equipment for curative purposes. Many of his machines were intended to treat “female pelvic complaints.” One piece of equipment consisted of a padded table with a large opening through which a vibrating sphere massaged the patient’s pelvis. The healthful afterglow generally left patients invigorated, although it’s not entirely clear they always acknowledged to themselves the exact nature of the relief they felt.25”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“In 1858 George Taylor had visited Sweden to investigate techniques of massage or “passive gymnastics,” methods that he understood could relieve the symptoms of chronically ill patients. On his return he had opened his own establishment. Housed in two handsome, adjacent townhouses on Sixth Avenue and West Thirty-Eighth Street, Dr. Taylor’s health sanitarium became one of the most popular and respected institutions of its day, a time when the wealthier middle classes, much like those of today, retreated to spas to benefit from regimens of water cures, exercise, massage, vegetarian diets, and—something that is offered rarely today—vibratory stimulation. Many of the treatments spawned by the craze for health reform were designed to cure neurasthenia and hysteria, along with symptoms such as listlessness and paralysis.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“The seance room increasingly became a private retreat from the realities of the outside world rather than, as it had been in the past, a gathering place for mortals actively seeking to understand the relationship between the concerns of this world and the next.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Emma Hardinge wrote that the war added two million new believers to Spiritualism. If the war stirred even one friend or family member of each dead or wounded soldier to think about spirit communication, it’s hardly surprising that interest grew. Over the next quarter century, estimates of the numbers of Spiritualists in the United States would range from one million to a highly inflated eleven million. Even the lower figure, however, took into account those who sympathized with the movement as well as those who identified themselves as committed Spiritualists.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“The victory of the industrialized North over the agrarian South placed immense power in the hands of captains of finance and industry such as Vanderbilt, Belmont, Gould, and Morgan, builders of railroad and banking empires. Victoria Woodhull, flamboyant medium and woman’s rights advocate, made her reputation by offering astute stock tips to Vanderbilt, providing him with the sort of practical suggestions that spirits in the past had steadfastly abjured. The spirits of deceased financiers became increasingly popular at other mediums’ seances, ready to dispense financial advice.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“At the end of the war New York, the city of excess, erupted in an orgy of celebration and display. Who could give the most extravagant ball, build the showiest mansion, summer at the most desirable spa, serve the most—and the most costly—champagne? It was a brand-new era, the Flash Age, when money was flaunted shamelessly as never before and stuffy respectability, at least in some circles, was only to be mocked. Henry Clews, Livermore’s former partner, was one of the small coterie of men who set the pace for the razzle-dazzle.22”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Last evening the Bayard family met at our house for spiritual manifestations,” Kate said. “The piano was sweetly played upon by spirit fingers, the guitar was played, then taken up and carried above our heads, each person in the circle was touched. The room was perfectly dark and all hands held. Dr. Bayard and family said that they had never passed a happier evening in all their lives.” Kate cheerfully confided that her headaches had been cured by a healing medium and that she was planning to attend the opera with Mrs. Walter that night.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Many of the Fox family’s close friends were discovering their own gift for mediumship. Isaac Post found that if he entered a trance, he was guided by the spirits to write down their messages. In 1851, the year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in serial form and Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Moby Dick were published, Isaac compiled messages from William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others into a three-hundred-page volume called Voices from the Spirit World; Being Communications From Many Spirits by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. The messages, Isaac said, had been transcribed through automatic writing that sometimes occurred in the presence of “A.L. Fish (a rapping medium).” In 1852 Charles Hammond, the Universalist minister who had watched in awe as the furniture danced and floated in front of him at one of the sisters’ early seances, produced a book called Light from the Spirit World; The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Manifestations also were becoming more diverse. Mediums performed ever more astonishing feats of levitation: white-haired Henry Gordon was seen floating in the air across a sixty-foot space, balanced on nothing but one of Charles Partridge’s fingers. Trance mediums delivered inspiring addresses to large audiences on the pressing issues of the day, such as perfecting the body through diet and exercise or rehabilitating criminals through prison reform. Some mediums danced, others spoke in tongues. The number of healing mediums multiplied. To speed the process of spelling messages during seances, mediums began writing down the alphabet then pointing to specific letters rather than calling them out. In a room built by a man named Koons solely for the purpose of otherworldly communications, several spirits seemed to speak in their own voices, their words projected through a small trumpet.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Odic Force,”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“drew primarily on the ideas of their contemporary Andrew Jackson Davis, who in turn derived them from the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg—or from conversations, as Davis claimed, with Swedenborg’s spirit. Davis had already produced an astonishing body of lectures and books developing what he came to call a “harmonial philosophy” in which like attracted like. So great were the similarities and affinities between beings of both worlds, Davis had written, that the recently deceased often failed even to recognize that they had died. Naturally, they felt a profound attachment to the mortals they had left behind.8”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“when they lived in Rochester, every newspaper, parlor, and street corner buzzed with talk about mesmerism and phrenology, abolition and suffrage.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Amy and Isaac Post,”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Enclaves called phalanxes, experiments in communal living based on the ideas of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier, caught fire and burned brightly, if in most cases briefly. The religious community of Oneida, founded on the principles of a former theology student named John Humphrey Noyes, supported “complex marriage,” a system in which all community members were married to one another. In western New York, the time was always right for a new philosophy, theory, controversy, or utopia.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Rochester, at least among some segments of society, had become a more polite town, the Burned-over District, the region that surrounded it and that had been the scene of earlier revivals, continued to smolder with enthusiasms both religious and political.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Enthusiastic expressions of conversion abounded in the Burned-over District and, depending on the denomination, were encouraged and expected. Revival meetings, at which ministers exhorted sinners to convert and change their ways, became the scene of shouts and whispers, shakings and quakings, hand clapping and singing, speaking in tongues and falling down in trances. Women joined men in exuberant prayer. Smaller religious groups, including the Shakers and the Community of the Publick Universal Friend, also established sites for their members in western New York. Jemima Wilkinson, a woman known as the Publick Universal Friend, like Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers was believed by her followers to embody a divine spirit. Of more enduring significance than the Friend, in the 1820s an entirely new religion was born in Palmyra, New York, a town only ten miles from Hydesville, when the young visionary Joseph Smith claimed to discover two golden tablets on a hilltop near his home. The angel Moroni, Smith reported, had sent the tablets, which contained new revelations. Although no one except Smith ever saw the tablets, his assertions and teachings led to the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the members of which are popularly known today as Mormons.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Heightened emotion potentially posed another threat more serious than bad skin: hysteria. Doctors diagnosed the condition as a woman’s disease, believed to originate in the womb and to demonstrate female frailty and fallibility. Girls around puberty were particularly susceptible, doctors worried, to the fits and seizures hysteria could induce. How important it was, then, for a young woman to exercise self-restraint and to remain in a limited arena: the home.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism

“Death was a constant fact of life. The reaper struck with fire and drowning; typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and a host of other diseases; accidents that ranged from the swift shock of a horse’s kick to a slow-spreading infection from a cut finger; and suicide and murder. More than one-fifth of the children born died before their first birthday; at birth the average life expectancy for an adult was little more than forty.6 Medicine at best could offer a patient little help and at worst was lethal, an excruciating matter of bleeding, blistering, and purging with potions such as laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol.”
― Barbara Weisberg, Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism