Modern Spiritualism has an unusually precise birth date. In 1848, in a farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, the young sisters Kate and Margaret Fox reported communicating with the spirit of a dead man through mysterious rapping sounds, answering questions by a code of knocks. The claim spread with astonishing speed through a religiously ferment ing "Burned-over District" and across the United States and Britain, and within a few years mediumship, the seance, spirit rapping, table-turning, trance speaking, spirit writing and later spirit photography, had become a mass phenomenon.
The movement's core conviction is that the personality survives bodily death and that the living can communicate with the dead through gifted mediums. It should be dated honestly to 1848: Spiritualism is a modern religious movement, not an ancient one. Decades later, in 1888, Margaret Fox publicly confessed that the original rappings had been produced by cracking her toe joints, a confession she afterwards partly retracted, and which by then had little effect on a movement grown far beyond its origins.