47. Fox Sisters - Spirit Mediums

Lucy Worsley returns with her new series of Lady Swindlers, where true crime meets history, with a twist. Lucy and her team of all female detectives travel back more than a hundred years to meet women who stepped outside of their ordinary lives to do extraordinary things. Together they investigate what their lives and crimes tell us about women in the past, and ask how different is it for women today?

In this episode Lucy travels to New York to uncover the story of spirit mediums Maggie, Kate and Leah Fox. The sisters are credited with igniting the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement, which claims that the living can contact and communicate with the dead. The craze for séances crosses class divides and Spiritualism garners millions of followers across the globe, including First Lady Mary Lincoln, Arthur Conan Doyle, and even Queen Victoria.

However, throughout their forty-year career as mediums the sisters face persistent accusations of fraud. To tease apart fact from fiction Lucy is joined by Dr Thema Bryant,  past president of the American Psychological Association. A Professor in Psychology at Pepperdine University who specialises in the intersection of spirituality and psychology, Thema brings a modern lens to help understand the minds of the past.

We visit the small hamlet where the mysterious occurrences first begin; the Fox property in snowy Hydesville, Upper New York State. Here Tracy Murphy, Director of Historic Palymra, recounts the moment when the young Fox sisters first encounter the mysterious ‘raps’ they convince others are signs from the spirit world.

With Fox sisters expert and author Barbara Weisberg, Lucy and Thema examine how the sisters take the world by storm. They ask whether they are really audacious swindlers or the genuine founders of a spiritual movement?

Producer: Emily Hughes Readers: Clare Corbett, Jonathan Keeble and Alex Phelps Sound design: Chris Maclean Executive producer: Kirsty Hunter

A StoryHunter production for BBC Radio 4.