Word: fox
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Guppy, Leah Fish, the Fox sisters, Malcolm Bird-the cast seems to have tumbled from Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. But the people were real, and their adventures are far more peculiar than any mere fable of talking animals and irate farmers...
...merely replaced religious faith with another dogma: the authority of Science. New believers turned to evidence of the world beyond the senses, "proof given by mediums who could communicate with the dead, make ectoplasm appear in darkened chambers and order inanimate objects to move at will. Katherine and Margaretta Fox of Arcadia, N.Y., were the superstars of the new movement, adolescents who could engender a rapping sound that issued, they said, from the beyond...
...Atlantic. In London, an obese Mrs. Guppy became celebrated for making specters tangible, including one Abdullah, who, the malicious said, was a small man hidden from the audience in her voluminous petticoats. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, became a drum beater for spiritualism. He too pronounced the Fox sisters genuine; when shown photographs of young girls playing with tiny winged creatures, he concluded that the pictures were incontrovertible evidence that fairies did indeed exist...
...shall not be content with trying to grasp it, but. in the interest of science, I will shoot it." Exposes began to play the vaudeville circuit: Magician Harry Houdini showed audiences that the mysteries of spontaneously moving objects were no more than sleight of hand and, sometimes, foot. The Fox sisters, one of them by now a hopeless alcoholic, finally confessed that the strange rapping had been done by manipulating their big toes...
...Fox subsequently wrote a statement to the Mt. Holyoke security services, and said she is prepared to make her complaint official should security fail to do anything. Though charging an officer with harassment would impose the burden of proof on Fox, she added. "I have the support of a lot of people, a lot of witnesses...