s signs herself, was born in the
year 1840, and Catherine Fox a year and a half later. The eldest sister
Leah was born twenty-three years before the former. The little girls, one
eight years old and the other six and a half, had rarely seen this sister
prior to the beginning of the spiritualistic movement. She knew nothing of
it until the popular excitement over the "rappings" had almost reached its
climax. Very early in life she had married a man named Fish, who had
deserted her, and she was supporting herself at this time in the city of
Rochester by teaching the rudiments of music. David S. Fox, son of John
and Margaret Fox, lived about two miles from the home of his father in
Arcadia.

Maggie and Katie Fox were as full of petty devilment as any two children
of their age ever were. They delighted to tease their excellent old
mother, who by all who knew her is described as simple, gentle and
true-hearted. In their antics, they would resort to all sorts of ingenious
devices, and bed-time witnessed almost invariably the gayest of larks. One
of their frequent amusements was to plague their niece, Elizabeth, who
slept in the same bed with them, by kicking and tickling her, and by
frightening her at almost any hour of the night out of sound sleep.

Their riotous fancy soon hit upon the plan of bobbing apples up and down
on the floor in their bedchamber, as a means of scaring Elizabeth and of
puzzling their mother without much risk of detection. They tied strings to
the stems of the apples, and thus let them hang down beside the bed. The
noise of dropping them more or less quickly upon the floor resembled
almost anything that the imagination chose to liken it to, from raps on
the front door to slippered foot-falls on the narrow stairway. Whenever a
search was made for the cause of the noises, the apples were easily
hauled up into the bed and hidden in the bedclothes, where no one would
think of looking for them, at least at that stage of the investigation.

The plan had everything in it to charm a juvenile mischief-maker. It
succeeded admirably. It was not till the wonder which was caused by these
strange "knockings" had extended beyond the humble Fox household, that the
suggestion of any other means of affording to that growing feeling its
daily food of seeming evidence came to the roguish youngsters.

The family had moved into the house at Hydesville on December 11, 1847.
The mother began to hear strange sounds almost fr