Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

I

THE UNHOMELY

CHAPTER FOUR

THE RATHOLE REVELATION

Georgetown, NY, and Bull Valley, IL

Sarah Winchester may not have designed her house with guidance from the spirit world, but if there is a house that was indisputably built by someone influenced by the dead, it is Timothy Brown’s in Georgetown, New York, about thirty-five miles southeast of Syracuse. Brown had not yet begun building his house when, he later explained, his dead sister, Mary, presented him with a vision one morning. She offered up several types of house and invited him to pick the one that suited him. From that point on, the spirits guided him in its construction. As the Spiritualist journal Banner of Light later related, Brown “found that if he put his chisel in the wrong place his arm had no power to use the mallet or strike a blow, but when his chisel was rightly placed the blows were freely dealt.”

The house that Brown and his spirits built still stands, a remarkably odd and beautiful structure from the 1860s. It might have been an unremarkable square house but for the fringe of scalloped wood that hangs from its eaves, an ornamental design of wooden lace that drips down as though the roof is melting. The wooden lace adds a richness of detail and a depth of character to the house that begs for closer inspection. Rather than constructing an A-frame roof to keep snow from building up, as was customary, Brown built his roof with a unique funnel that leads to a central drainpipe. (This might have led to the leak that severely damaged the interiors when the house was left vacant in the mid-2000s.)

Ghosts are the quintessential unwanted guests: like pests or dry rot, they do not belong. When homeowners discover ghosts on their property, they will do anything in their power to excise or exorcise them. Usually, that is. For there is a long history of Americans doing exactly the opposite: people who’ve tried to populate their houses with the paranormal, to welcome spirits in and make them feel at home. Timothy Brown saw himself as part of a larger movement—Spiritualism—and his house stands as a monument to the great American passion for communing with the dead that held fast in this country (and elsewhere) for the better part of a century.

America’s popular fascination with ghosts began in 1848, in a small house in upstate New York, where two sisters, fifteen-year-old Margaret and twelve-year-old Kate Fox, revealed that they had been communicating with the spirit of a dead man in their basement. The house had been thought haunted before the Foxes moved in, and almost immediately after they arrived, they were tormented by loud, unexplained sounds, doors closing by themselves, and objects that inexplicably moved. Beset by this unexplained activity, the sisters found that they could talk to the resident spirit by rapping on the wall and floor; it would answer questions with knocks, indicating that he knew the girls’ ages as well as other pertinent information.

One neighbor recorded his experience with the Fox sisters’ ghost:

I then asked if Mr. ——— [Naming a person who had formerly lived in the house] had injured it [the spirit], and if so, manifest it by rapping, and it made three knocks louder than common, and at the same time the bedstead jarred more than it had done before. I then inquired if it was murdered for money, and the knocking was heard. I then requested it to rap when I mentioned the sum of money for which it was murdered. I then asked if it was one hundred, two, three, or four, and when I came to five hundred the rapping was heard. All in the room said they heard it distinctly. I then asked the question if it was five hundred dollars, and the rapping was heard… . I then asked it to rap my age—the number of years of my age. It rapped thirty times. This is my age, and I do not think anyone about here knew my age except myself and my family.

Soon the Fox sisters were touring the region, displaying their abilities to communicate with the dead while others rushed to get in on the act. Within a year there were more than a hundred spiritual mediums in New York City alone, and in Philadelphia there were another fifty-some “private circles.” Popular contacts included not just lost loved ones but historical figures: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, as well as Francis Bacon, Enlightenment-era mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Daniel Webster, and Shakespeare. The dead communicated through table rappings, by moving objects about the room, and by automatic writing, in which mediums scribbled on paper until words began to emerge. There was no shortage of means of reaching the dead, and the growth of Spiritualism was exponential: by some estimates, there were as many as eleven million Spiritualists in the United States by the end of the 1850s.

At least some of Spiritualism’s appeal lay in its social aspect: it was a means of bringing together a community over a shared grief or curiosity, in an intimate and emotionally intense setting. In Georgetown Timothy Brown and his wife held annual gatherings for Spiritualists in the house that became known as Brown’s Temple, and, as Banner of Light concluded, “his wonderful persistence has well-nigh conquered the prejudices of his doubting neighbors, and the structure stands a striking edifice of the power of will concentrated on one object, and of the guiding inspiration, as he firmly believes, of spiritual beings in the life beyond.” It is without a doubt a testament to the power of a self-trained carpenter, a genuinely artistic achievement. And it is also, based on contemporary reports, a testament to one way in which Spiritualists could ingratiate themselves with a community, which may further explain Spiritualism’s widespread appeal.

Which is not to say that the new religion wasn’t controversial; the word “Spiritualism” first appeared in print in 1853 in a book by skeptic John Ross Dix, in which he referred to Spiritualism as one more “paroxysm of humbug” afflicting America. In spite of its many detractors, the movement only grew in ensuing decades. When Margaret Fox publicly confessed in 1888 that she and her sister had faked the original rapping incident, many Spiritualists denounced her, and she was forced to recant her confession a year later.

Spiritualism’s explosion and massive popularity was never the result of a single event; rather, a confluence of obsessions and cultural needs all came together in the 1850s. Preceding the movement was another homegrown philosophy: Transcendentalism, which caught fire in the American imagination in 1836 with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature.” In it Emerson emphasized a personal revelation free from organized religion, in which one could seek direct access to the divine through solitary contemplation of nature. His teachings would inspire some of the seminal works of American literature, including Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

The Transcendentalists often viewed Spiritualism with a skepticism bordering on outright hatred. Emerson called it the “rathole revelation” and claimed that the adepts of Spiritualism “have mistaken flatulence for inspiration.” His disdain was shared by, among others, Herman Melville, who parodied Spiritualism and its “table-rapping” sessions in a short story, “The Apple-Tree Table,” in which a family believes a table to be possessed by spirits, only to discover that it’s infested with bugs. “I hate this shallow Americanism,” Emerson proclaimed in an 1859 lecture, “which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study.”

Like it or not, Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists had laid the groundwork for the kind of personal revelation Spiritualism promised. Emerson himself, after all, wrote in his essay “Nominalist and Realist,” “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again,” as if agreeing with all those mediums reaching out across the grave into the spirit world. The basic tenet of Transcendentalism was that one need only open up an extrasensory perception to access the divine all around us. If Emerson could find God in the forest, why couldn’t a medium find departed loved ones in a darkened room?

Spiritualism took fast hold of the American consciousness at the same moment our attitudes toward death were changing. The early half of the century had seen a war between religion and science over how to handle the dead body and when dissection was permissible. Burial reformers pushed the importance of sanitary corpse disposal, and so families, many of whom were used to keeping vigil with a loved one’s body for several days after death, saw these bodies removed from their care at a rapid rate. Suddenly bereft of this final communion due to medical and sanitation laws, families turned to Spiritualism as a means of continuing that conversation, seeking in séances a closure that had been denied them.

For Spiritualists, there was no hell, and there were no evil spirits; rather, the spirit world existed on a continuum with the world of the living: in the afterlife, the dead were at peace in a place known as Summerland. Spiritualism offered hope and comfort, not just because it put the living in touch with the longed-for dead but because it did so without the intermediaries of organized religion. In the world of Spiritualism there was no vengeful God who damned infants who died before baptism, there was no predestination condemning you to Hell no matter your actions. The harsh Calvinism of the Puritans had given way to an afterlife without pain or judgment, and one that anyone could access. Spiritualists, despite nominally maintaining their Christian faith, began to downplay the role of Jesus himself, since without a judgmental God or Hell, there was no longer a theological need for a savior to die for their sins. Death instead was simply part of a natural process, overseen by a benevolent deity.

This new DIY religion brought with it an additional attraction: since the spirit world was accessible to all, Spiritualists saw little need for the men who traditionally controlled organized religion. In short order Spiritualism became dominated by women: for one thing, they were generally acknowledged to be superior mediums, and many saw in Spiritualism an antidote to the patriarchal misogyny of traditional religion. In volume 3 of History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, Spiritualism was singled out as “the only religious sect in the world … that has recognized the equality of woman.”

Among the many reasons Transcendentalists like Emerson might have viewed Spiritualism with skepticism may lie in how it took a philosophy authored by men and transformed it into a women’s movement. Spiritualism tended to valorize traits that were elsewhere labeled as women’s psychiatric diseases, including convulsions, incoherent babbling, open displays of sexuality, and other violations of Victorian decorum. Behavior that would have then been diagnosed as nervous sensitivity and hysteria were exactly the kinds of traits that made for good mediums. In an age when male-dominated religious and medical institutions were working overtime to contain, train, diagnose, and treat all women who didn’t fit an established mold, the Spiritualists, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage noted, “have always assumed that woman may be a medium of communication from heaven to earth, [and] that the spirits of the universe may breathe through her lips.” Spiritualism offered a radical inversion, according empowerment and respect precisely to those who refused or were unable to toe the line.

Early suffrage meetings were heavily populated with mediums and trance speakers; in some places it was difficult to find suffragists who weren’t also Spiritualists. Spiritualism had given many of these women practice and confidence in speaking to groups with authority; by allowing others (the dead) to speak through them, American women began to speak for themselves in greater numbers. Spiritualism was only one of many factors and social movements that drove women’s suffrage, but it was a vital and important one.

As Spiritualism became associated more and more with a rejection of patriarchal religion and traditional marriage, women’s rights, and other subversive agendas, the backlash became increasingly vehement. The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has been subsequently consigned to the dustbin of that century’s excesses and ridiculous fads, alongside phrenology, animal magnetism, and the temperance movement, but Spiritualism-influenced political agitation led to lasting reform: the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1920. Since women gained the vote, however, Spiritualism’s importance as a women’s movement has more or less been forgotten or downplayed. Its influence waned as the nineteenth century drew to a close, and after a brief resurgence in the wake of World War I, Spiritualism was absorbed by the broader, more diffuse field of parapsychology. As a movement with clear leaders and well-articulated beliefs, it had mostly died out by the end of the 1920s.

The movement itself may be gone, but Spiritualism’s penchant for using the latest technological advances to communicate with the dead has found a resurgence with modern paranormal enthusiasts and ghost hunters. Ghosts have become a business of gadgets. Amazon.com is filled with gadgets for the paranormal investigator: KII meters, which measure electromagnetic field variations; portable motion sensors; “ghost boxes,” which sample FM frequencies randomly in search of voices from the beyond; and all manner of digital recorders rebranded as EVP recorders, claiming to offer superior paranormal recordings (“Get Ready to Converse with Spirits!” boasts one such device, which retails for $119.85).

Ghost hunting is a thriving, growing business, thanks to a glut of reality TV shows that have emerged over the past decade: starting with Syfy’s Ghost Hunters in 2004, in which a crew of investigators travel to reputedly haunted locations to trot out gadgetry in search of definitive proof of the hereafter. Add to this the popularity of ghost tours in historic downtowns throughout the country and museums like Merchant’s House, which have increasingly added ghost tours as part of their public outreach. You could say that Spiritualism, now practiced at Halloween and on reality TV shows, is back from the dead.

During his speech on the mysteries and virtues of Sarah Winchester’s house, Harry Houdini mentioned a curious room without corners, built by a man he claimed to know from “the East”: “This fellow had been taught by spiritualists. He built himself a perfectly round, tower-like room, so that when the devil came for his soul he wouldn’t be able to find a corner in which to catch it.” Houdini went on to claim that Winchester’s supposed séance room was similarly built: “There is a séance room without corners, so that the spirits won’t hurt themselves coming in and out. Mrs. Winchester has a vast wardrobe of variously colored robes, and she uses a different robe for each spirit.”

Houdini was wrong: there are no round rooms in the house, and the one currently claimed to be her séance room is certainly rectangular. But he did not originate the idea that Spiritualists built rooms and houses without corners, and lately this fascination has become attached to one house in particular: the George Stickney House of Bull Valley, Illinois.

Far outside Chicago, a distant suburb barely deserving of the name, Bull Valley was untrampled wilderness when George Stickney went there in 1835. He helped found the nearby town of Nunda, Illinois, building its first school and serving as the town’s school director as well as its road commissioner. In 1839 he met and married Sylvia Beckley, ten years his junior, and brought her with him to the hardscrabble wilds of Illinois, where they settled down to raise a family.

They began construction on their home not far from Nunda in 1849, on land that would eventually be incorporated as part of Bull Valley, finally finishing it in 1865. The house’s rounded corners—which punctuate its otherwise unremarkable Italianate style—are often held as evidence of the Stickneys’ Spiritualist beliefs, though there does not appear to have ever been any kind of codified building regulations, rounded corners or otherwise, for spirits. Certainly Brown’s Temple did not feature circular rooms or rounded corners.

The notion of round buildings being built to prevent the devil from catching you in a corner has a longer lineage, one that predates both Spiritualism and George Stickney, and it was used sometimes to account for the curious design of barns built by Quakers and Shakers. While it’s not clear where this superstition might have originated, the rounded barn has much more prosaic origins. Scotsman J. C. Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, first published in 1833, notes that cows and horses are approximately half a foot narrower at their heads than they are at their hindquarters, which means that the most economical shape for a stall is a wedge. A circular barn with wedge-shaped stalls can house the same number of animals as a rectangular barn in three-quarters the amount of space, with the added benefit of making it easier for the farmer to feed all the animals from the center.

There is a Chinese folk belief that evil spirits—kuei—can travel only in straight lines, a belief that supposedly accounts for the curved eaves on Chinese roofs, and which might have at some point filtered into the American consciousness, leading to the supernatural association with round barns and houses. And so a practical, if unusual, design becomes associated with a foreign folk legend about the devil, which then gets repurposed as part of the narrative of the new, burgeoning Spiritualist movement, and this in turn gets attached to an ordinary house in rural Illinois. The legend stuck, the stories began to accumulate, and over the years the house’s reputation made it the target of vandals and bored teenagers. And so the building’s current owner, the village of Bull Valley, has been trying its best to downplay the myths associated with the Stickney House. In 1995 the village clerk, Phyllis Keinz, who worked in the building, told the Chicago Tribune that the closest thing to ghosts in the house are the birds that sometimes get into the attic. Local politician Virginia Peschke, of the Stickney House Restoration Committee, told the paper, “There’s never been anything to those stories, which we believe were just made up by local kids. And we feel the stories have contributed to a lot of the terrible vandalism the house has suffered.” Peschke said she’d interviewed several previous residents of the house, and none had ever complained of ghosts. “The house is out in the middle of nowhere,” she added, “and they were always bothered a lot more by vandals than any ghosts.” One former resident, Devona Edinger, who was born in the Stickney House and lived there for a few years, confirmed this: “It’s just something creepy that kids like to say about the place.”

More than a century later, the house remains, having been passed down through various owners until it was eventually deeded to the village of Bull Valley. Now it sits by itself, a squat two-story building that houses the Bull Valley Police Department and the village clerk. The Stickney House, like Sarah Winchester’s mansion, may have little or nothing to do with Spiritualism, but the fact that we impute a Spiritualist motive to anomalous houses like these attests to the strange grip the movement has on our imaginations. The more unusual the house, the more likely it’ll cause unease among its neighbors and the more we seem to require some kind of story to explain its construction. That several of our eeriest, most inexplicable houses are misattributed to Spiritualism suggests how little we know about the movement, aside from Hollywood depictions of wild-eyed mediums and table sessions.

The Stickney House’s reputation for ghosts nowhere matches the House of the Seven Gables or the Winchester Mystery House, but among locals it has long been considered haunted. Presumably a house built to welcome good spirits at some point brought in a few bad ones, and since the 1970s stories have circulated about its strange energy. In a 2011 post to the Web site trueghosttales.com, a woman named Carri Williams wrote about an experience with the Stickney House. Her brother had been killed on the highway near the mansion in 1984, and she had thought little of it until a few years later when, driving to school one cold January day, she saw a tall, hooded man dressed in a black robe “walking toward a group of pine trees in the snow. There were no houses around… . I did not understand why someone would be walking in the bitter cold like that. I did not think nothing of it until I realized the man dressed in the black robe was headed for Bull Valley and he was walking in the direction toward where my brother had died in a car accident and near the Stickney Mansion.” Later, Williams claims, she realized that this was not a man but some kind of spirit, and “an evil one” at that.

Whatever one makes of this story, it’s hard to connect it to the house’s actual history: no terrible murders were committed within its walls, nor is there any record of a single horrible event that might give rise to an evil spirit. Perhaps this malevolent spirit might account for the fact that only three of the ten Stickney children lived past infancy, but then, child mortality rates in the nineteenth century were high everywhere. It’s just another of many stories that imply, more or less, that by dabbling in Spiritualism, the Stickneys invited ghosts to this corner of Illinois—ghosts that haven’t ever left.

Meanwhile, Brown’s Temple has vanishingly few stories of ghosts attached to it. In 2009 it went up for sale, and money manager turned spiritual healer Madis Senner attempted to buy the house, with hopes of restoring it to its former glory. In a YouTube video, he discussed the floating orbs (mysterious balls of light that sometimes appear floating in videos and photos) that many people find on photographs of the house but went on to say that it “is a divine place that has been a sacred site for thousands of years.” Rather than view it as a haunted place that inspires fear, Senner suggested instead that one should “put fear aside, and you may well encounter the divine there.”

The walls of Brown’s Temple retain the imprint of Spiritualism in its very architecture. And if it is truly haunted, then it is haunted not by ghosts or evil spirits so much as by an idea that has vanished; a building left behind, without the animating spirit that inspired its construction.

Spiritualism, like Transcendentalism, is woven inextricably into the fabric of American consciousness: much of what we now accept as our canonical culture was influenced by Spiritualism—in ways we’d perhaps like to forget. Not only were some of America’s great literary masters (including Walt Whitman and Mark Twain) believers in ghosts, but inquiries into the afterlife drove the philosophy and teachings of William James, the founder of American psychology. But Spiritualism ultimately was not an institutional religion by and for “great men” like Whitman and James; it was a messy, homespun set of beliefs that were embraced and spread mainly by women, and so American history has downplayed it as aberrant and foolish rather than accept its place in our national psyche. As a political and social movement, Spiritualism has become a ghost itself, a legacy of feminist liberation and belief without dogma that still haunts the land.

Spiritualism might have lost its influence by the end of the 1920s, but it may be more accurate to say it simply went mainstream. The percentage of Americans who identify as spiritual but not religious has been creeping ever slowly up in recent years as people turn away from organized churches and seek their own spiritual paths. Meanwhile, our belief in ghosts remains high; according to one study, 73 percent of Americans believe in life after death, and 20 percent believe in communication with the dead. While these people may not call themselves Spiritualists or spend their Friday nights clasping hands around a table, it’s clear that they have adopted a similar belief system: a focus on personal revelation unmediated by dogma or doctrine, and a belief in the perseverance of the soul beyond death, a spirit that is still somehow apprehensible by the living. Belief in a spiritual realm may now be depoliticized, divorced from the radical social agenda that once went hand in hand with Spiritualism, but it remains vitally alive nonetheless. One can dismiss Spiritualism as unscientific, as wishful thinking, as hucksterism, or as any number of other things, but it was—and continues to be—anything but fringe.