In March 1848, Kate and Margaret Fox were just girls, around ten or twelve years old. They had recently moved into an old farmhouse with their parents near Hydesville, New York, which had a mysterious history. The previous tenants had stayed only briefly, leaving due to strange sounds and occurrences that simply couldn’t be explained. It made them uncomfortable, they said. When the Fox family moved into the house in November 1847, they too began to experience the strange occurrences that had been reported. But the Fox girls weren’t scared so easily, and with the help of their mother, they began to consider the possibility that these noises were not just coming from the “other side,” but perhaps they could also be communicating with the mysterious entity. They soon devised a code that they used to ask questions, which the spirit would answer with a certain number of knocks. “Yes” and “no” questions were fired, and the family discovered that they certainly weren’t the only ones residing in the cabin.
The answers to the girls’ questions began and revealed that the beatings came from Charles B. Rosna, a man who had disappeared some years before. Rosna had been a peddler in the area until about five years before the Fox girls’ strange experience. By this time, however, he had simply disappeared and no one remembered seeing him anymore. It wasn’t until young Sister Fox’s bravery in attempting spirit communication that people were finally able to get some answers to her questions about Rosna’s disappearance. The ghost’s blows revealed not only his identity, but also that he had been murdered by a previous tenant and buried in the cabin’s basement. His spirit could not rest and Rosna apparently wanted his body to be discovered and properly buried.
However, what the poor murdered man got was much more. His bones weren’t dug up from the basement for another fifty years, but in the meantime, his ghostly communication with the Fox sisters started a religious movement that would continue into the 21st century. Although the founding of spiritualism is generally credited to the Fox sisters, their story cannot be told without mentioning Rosna’s pivotal role. He will always be considered one of the most notorious spirits in history.
