The Fox family rappings

On the evening of 31 March 1848, the Fox family reported rapping sounds in their house, and the sisters Kate and Maggie Fox said the raps answered them.

The Fox family reported rapping sounds in their home. HistoryNet describes what happened on the evening of 31 March 1848. Mrs. Fox got up with a candle and searched the rooms. At her daughters' bed, Kate, who was eleven, spoke to the source of the sound as "Mr. Split-foot" and snapped her fingers. Raps followed in the same pattern. Fourteen-year-old Maggie clapped four times and told the sound to rap back, and four knocks came. Kate then made finger-snapping gestures without sound, and raps answered those too.

Girl Museum says the two sisters had been out walking that day and told a neighbour about the noises. The neighbour asked to hear them, and they all went into the house.

Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in 1926, gave a later account. He wrote that a neighbour named Duesler was the first to call over the alphabet and get replies tapped out against letters, and that this produced the name Charles B. Rosma. Doyle wrote that the events of 31 March continued the next night, when around two hundred people gathered at the house. He dated the first connected messages four months afterwards, to Isaac Post, a Rochester Quaker.