The Rappings That Started a Movement, and the Confession That Followed

Modern Spiritualism is conventionally dated to a specific event: in 1848 the Fox sisters, Kate and Margaret, in Hydesville, New York, reported communicating with a spirit through a series of rapping sounds, a claim that spread rapidly and is credited with launching Spiritualism as an organised movement across the United States and then Britain within a few years. Margaret Fox published a signed confession in 1888 stating that the rappings had been produced by cracking her own joints, then partially recanted that confession the following year, leaving the movement's founding event permanently and, by design of the historical record itself, unresolvable as either genuine phenomenon or admitted fraud.

Despite that unresolved founding scandal, and the long subsequent history of exposed fraud among individual mediums, Spiritualism survived and institutionalised, and organised Spiritualist churches, including the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States and the Spiritualists' National Union in Britain, continue to operate today as recognised religious bodies with their own ordained mediums, doctrine and regular services, a durable religious institution built on a claim that mainstream science has never accepted and that the movement's own founding figures partially disavowed.