t is an injured spirit, make two
raps,' which were instantly made, causing the house to tremble. I asked:
'Were you injured in this house?' The answer was given as before. 'Is the
person living that injured you?' Answer by raps in the same manner. I
ascertained by the same method that it was a man, aged thirty-one years;
that he had been murdered in this house; and his remains were buried in
the cellar; that his family consisted of a wife and five children, two
sons and three daughters, all living at the time of his death, but that
his wife had since died."

Then the supposed spirit was asked if it would continue to "rap" if the
neighbors were called in to listen. The answer was affirmative.

And so they were called in.

This caused the commencement of that great excitement which so soon spread
from neighborhood to village, from the village to the near-by city of
Rochester, and thence all over the country.

* * * * *

Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane says at the present time:

"The apple-dropping trick appeared to us small children so simple and
innocent, that we could only wonder that any one attached so great an
importance to the sounds we produced. Only think of our ages at that time,
and then ask, if you will, how we could have even the shade of a
realization of the real meaning of this deception!

"This lying book of Mrs. Underhill's, notwithstanding its abominable
object, does give some slight inkling of the truth here and there.

"It is thus that the wicked confound themselves.

"She quotes, as you see here, what she says to be my mother's words: 'The
children who slept in the other bed in the room, heard the rapping and
tried to make similar sounds by snapping their fingers.'

"Now that is really just how we first got the idea of producing with the
joints similar sounds to those we had made by dropping apples with a
string. From trying it with our fingers we then tried it with our feet,
and it did not take long for us to find out that we could easily produce
very loud raps by the action of the toe-joints when in contact with any
substance which is a good conductor of sound. My sister Katie was the
first to discover that we could make such peculiar noises with our
fingers. We used to practice first with one foot and then the other, and
finally we got so we could do it with hardly an effort.

"Of course, I was so young then that many incidents have escaped my
memory. I assert posit