I would like to thank my colleague Petra Feld (University of Kassel) who discussed this article with me several times and sacrificed her time to proofread it.
1 Reuben Briggs Davenport, The Death-Blow to Spiritualism, Being the True Story of the Fox sisters (New York, 1888; reprint, 1976), 151-9.
2 Ibid., 154-9.
3 Mary Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Württemberg, and Prussia (New York, 1983), 137-52.
4 Slater Brown, The Heyday of Spiritualism (New York, 1970), 98.
5 Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, 1989), 12-16.
6 For a more detailed account, see Ernest Isaacs, "The Fox Sisters and American Spiritualism," in Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, eds., The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 79-110.
7 Ann Leah Underhill, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (New York, 1885; reprint, 1976), 74.
8 Davenport, Death-Blow, 83.
9 Braude, Radical Spirits, 10-19, 58-61; Isaacs, "Fox Sisters," 80-1, 96-9.
10 Although the Spiritualists were clearly disappointed, for the Foxes themselves politics seem to have remained a minor issue. Leah's later "criticism" of the Washington establishment bordered on the nonsensical: "But to return to Washington, it was not at that time a very satisfactory place for the prosecution of Spiritualism.... It was, indeed, a centre of political agitation, and business connected with the Government; but at that time, at least, too much whiskey was consumed there . . . Washington is a mean city. I despise nearly everything I meet here" (Underhill, Missing Link, 269, 271).
11 The fact that Spiritualism was more successful in America than in Europe was explained with the cliché of the "ignorant American." The Fox sisters' movement was rejected as just another fashionable folly that been able to attract mass support in America but was accepted only by an comparatively small uneducated minority in Europe. The reluctant psychic researcher Kiesewetter, for example, explicitly called the Foxes' Spiritualism "some craziness that is worshipped as a new gospel by hundreds of thousands of insipid Yankees and some thousands of misguided Germans who lack reason and knowledge." Quoted in Carl Kiesewetter, Geschichte des Neueren Occultismus, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1891-5; reprint, New York, 1976), 1:448.
12 I will publish a more detailed account of this sect in Johannes Dillinger ed., Kriminalität im frühmodernen Württemberg, in 2002.
13 In European folklore as well as in later American Spiritualism the idea that ghosts sing is very widespread. Leah Fox even claimed that the rappings spelled musical notes to her. See, e.g., Underhill, Missing Link, 415-20; and Carl Mengis, "Geistermusik," in Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, eds., Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1927-42; reprint, 1987), vol. 13. See also the Spiritualist hymnals by Esther C. Henk, Spirit Voices: Odes dictated by the Spirits of the Second Sphere (Philadelphia, 1853); and J. B. Packard, Spirit Minstrel (Boston, 1853). A analytical comparison of the known texts of such spirit songs might further promote our understanding of the respective sets of beliefs.
14 For the following, see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols., 2d ed. (Copenhagen, 1955-8), esp. E 230, E 340, E 341, E 415. See also the national motif indices in Ingeborg Müller and Lutz Röhrich, "Der Tod und die Toten," Deutsches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 13 (1967): 346-97; and Louis C. Jones, Things that Go Bump in the Night, 3d ed. (New York, 1959), 9-45.
15 Carl Mengis, "Geist," in Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, eds., Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1927-42; reprint, 1987), 3:488-9.
16 Davenport, Death-Blow, 92-117.
17 Underhill, Missing Link, 6, 41, 74-84, 101, 403-4, 424-6. See also Davenport, Death-Blow, 119.
18 Thompson, Motif-Index, E 341; Jones, Things that Go Bump, 36; Müller and Röhrich, "Der Tod und die Toten," G 14-23.
19 Underhill, Missing Link, 7-39.
20 Thompson, Motif-Index, E 402. See Douglas Grant, The Cock Lane Ghost (New York, 1965).
21 Braude, Radical Spirits, 23-5.
22 Bernhard Kummer, "Jungfrau," in Hoffmann-Krayer and Bächtold-Stäubli, eds., Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 4:841-54.
23 Braude, Radical Spirits, 25-31.
24 Underhill, Missing Link, 68.
25 Isaacs, "Fox Sisters," 83. Eliah W. Capron, Modern Spiritualism, Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions (Boston, 1855; reprint, New York, 1976), 64-5.
26 Underhill, Missing Link, 55-6.
27 Dellon Dewey, History of the Strange Sounds or Rappings (Rochester, N.Y., 1850), 62.
28 Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 338.
29 Underhill, Missing Link, 299-300.
30 Ibid., 3.
31 See Claude Lecouteux, Geschichte der Gespenster und Wiedergänger im Mittelalter (Cologne, 1987).
32 See Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 345.
33 Underhill, Missing Link, 403.
34 Bret Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 178-9; R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York, 1977), 65-9.
35 Underhill, Missing Link, 51.
36 Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 22, 44, 163-4, 182-3.
37 Richard Haug, Reich Gottes im Schwabenland: Linien im württembergischen Pietismus (Metzingen, 1981), 160-2. Oetinger himself was influenced by Swedenborg; see Ernest F. Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century, Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 24 (Leiden, 1973), 117-18. It is possible that the much older legends of the Nobiskrug or the Kalte Herberge as shelters of the dead played some role in Oetinger's concepts.
38 Brown, Heyday of Spiritualism, 78-87; Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 62-7.
39 Underhill, Missing Link, 3.
40 Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vols., 3d ed. (London, 1978), 2:239-50; and Bronislaw Malinowski, "Magic, Science, and Religion," in Joseph Needham, ed., Science, Religion, and Reality (London, 1925), 19-84, reprinted in Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays, 2d ed. (Bristol, 1982), 17-92. See the critical survey by Stephen Sharot, "Magic, Religion, Science, and Secularization," in Jacob Neusner, Ernest Frerichs, and Paul McCracken Flesher, eds., Religion, Science, and Magic in Concert and Conflict (New York, 1989), 261-83.
41 Johannes Dillinger, "Böse Leute": Hexenverfolgungen in Schwäbisch-Österreich und Kurtrier im Vergleich, Trierer Hexenprozesse, Quellen und Darstellungen, vol. 5, (Trier, 1999), 120-34.
42 Thompson, Motif-Index, E 337, E 416. See also Jones, Things that Go Bump, 21-30; and Müller and Röhrich, "Der Tod und die Toten," H 24, H 25, H 27, H 50.
43 Thompson, Motif-Index, E 320, E 366. See also Jones, Things that Go Bump, 37, 45; and Müller and Röhrich, "Der Tod und die Toten," F 1, 9-14.
44 Thompson, Motif-Index, F 403.2.3.7, E 501.3, E 510. See also Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf (Charlottesville, Va., 1998).
45 Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 346.
46 Timothy McCarthy, "A Culture of Dissent: Abolitionist Print Culture and the Origins of Biracial Democracy," a paper presented at the GHI workshop titled "The Claim to Social Resources: A Contested Issue in Trans-Atlantic Perspective," Sept. 2000.
47 Isaacs, "Fox Sisters," 104-5.
48 Moore, In Search of White Crows, 44.
49 Davenport, Death-Blow, 37.