The following is an article from Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader.
Have you ever participated in a séance or tried to contact the "spirits" using a Ouija board? You probably don't realize it, but the modern conception of communicating with the dead only dates back to the late 1840s. Here's the story of the hoax that started spirit-mania.BUMP IN THE NIGHT
In 1848 a devout Methodist farmer named John Fox and his family began to hear strange noises in their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. The noises continued for weeks on end, until finally on one particularly noisy evening, Mrs. Fox ordered the two children, 13-year-old Margaret and 12-year-old Kate, to stay perfectly quiet in bed while Mr. Fox searched the house from top to bottom. His search shed no light on the mystery, but afterward, Margaret sat up in bed and snapped her fingers, exclaiming, "Here, Mr. Split-foot, do as I do!"
"The reply was immediate," Earl Fornell writes in The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox
. "The invisible rapper responded by imitating the number of the girl's staccato responses."
Mrs. Fox began to make sense of what she was hearing. "Count ten," she told the spirit. It responded with ten raps. So she asked several questions; each time the spirit answered correctly. Next, Mrs. Fox asked the spirit if it would rap if a neighbor was present; the spirit said yes. So Mr. Fox ran and got a neighbor, the first of more than 500 neighbors and townspeople who visited over the next few weeks to watch Margaret and Kate interact with the spirit. As long as either Margaret or Kate was present, the spirit was willing to communicate.MURDER MYSTERY
Using an alphabetic code that Margaret and Kate devised, "Mr. Split-foot" explained that in his Earthly life he'd been a peddler, murdered by the person who lived in the farmhouse. The spirit identified the killer as "C. R." Some citizens tracked down a man named Charles Rosana, who'd lived in the house years earlier, but with no body and no evidence other than the testimony of a ghost, he was never charged.