Hydesville

And it wasn't long before these little

girls were the talk of Hydesville, New York.

And everybody came to see them perform because they developed what was called table tipping.

And they started with a simple code.

2015, I think.

But the there was a there was a situation with what is known as the Hydesville wrappings.

And this would have been in 1840.

I think I said 46.

I believe it's 1849.

I misspoke there.

And these three sisters, the Fox sisters in what's what was what what was called Hydesville, New York is now, I think, Arcadia, New York.

The name doesn't that town name doesn't appear anymore.

John was a blacksmith and Margaret was a superstitious housewife.

And I guess like John and Margaret decided to relocate from Rochester to Hydesville, New York.

And this new house had a very unique quality.

You see, there was like nightly knocking on the walls and furniture.

And now as we are wrapping up today's episode, let's quickly go back over our timeline so we can trace the thread all at once because it is a lot.

1848, a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, where two young girls claim they're hearing mysterious knocking sounds coming from somewhere inside the house, and folks around town start asking, is there anybody there, even though we can't see them? That's basically the baseline, the first question that kicks off this entire story.

Then the spiritualists decide maybe the answer is spirits.

Psychical researchers come along and ask, well, that's great, but can we test it? Is there some physical or biological mechanism behind this? Then the Cold War begins and American intelligence asks, can the Soviets use it against us? SRI asks, can we reproduce it in a laboratory? The military asks, can we use it to collect intelligence? Robert Monroe asks, can we deliberately change our state of consciousness? All of this accumulates and Wayne McDonald is tasked with putting it all together and he comes up with what would consciousness and reality itself have to look like for any of this to even be possible.

The Fox Sisters.

March 1848, Hydesville, New York.

Winter is losing its grip, but it hasn't let go yet.

The roads are half mud, half frozen ruts.

Neighbors hear the story.

Then they come to hear the knocks for themselves.

In a little place like Hydesville, that kind of news spreads in dry timber, fast, hot, and hard to put out.

People crowd into the farmhouse, wanting the same thing every ghost story promises and almost never delivers.

I believe Kate was 11 and Margaret was 14, if I have that correct.

They were from Hydesville, New York, so upstate central New York.

They claim to have psychic abilities and...

In their house, actually, and it started, it was, I believe, March of 1848.

So I'm going to leave it open to you as to where to pick it up.

Okay, well, I have a little timeline that I have in one of my books that I copied out here, and everything seems to have begun on March 31st, 1848, as you know, which was when the Fox family in Hydesville, New York, began hearing raps in their house.

John Fox had two daughters, Margaret and Kate, who lived at home, and they heard these raps coming through, and they somehow figured out that they could communicate with these raps.

They'd get three raps for a yes and two raps for an oh, or there'd be five raps, might indicate an E, and three raps, a C, and so forth.