Read The Scarlet Sisters for Free Online Page A

charged for their “spirit rapping” sessions. The press and traditional clergy cried fraud, but this only added to the sisters’ fame, and the awestruck lined up to see them perform. Leah, a savvy promoter, took her sisters to New York, where P. T. Barnum cleaned up as crowds stormed Barnum’s hotel.
    Greeley—best known today for his admonition to those seeking a fortune to “Go west, young man”—championed the sisters in his New-York Daily Tribune . His wife sought their help in reaching her dead son, just as Mary Todd Lincoln would later, in darkened White House parlors, beg mediums to contact her dead son, Willy. In séances across America, spirit rapping, moans, moving tables, weird music, and wispy astral visions ensured the presence of a ghostly power. Printing presses churned out books on Spiritualism at a fast clip. Mark Twain’s editor William Dean Howells, an author in his own right, remembered as an Ohio youth that Spiritualism was “rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations by rappings, table-tipping, andoral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one met in the dances and sleigh-rides.”
    The movement, however, appealed to more than just the gullible who wanted desperately to speak to loved ones on the “other side” or to those who followed it as a popular fad. For progressive reformers, Spiritualism offered something better than the unforgiving hellfire and damnation that thundered from church pulpits. Instead of being terrorized by a wrathful god, they were graced by angels who wanted only good for them. Many humanitarians felt that the “spirits wanted to make themselves felt in earthly affairs and would, in fact, lead mankind to social regeneration.” Utopians, many of whom advocated free love, took up Spiritualism, as did many socialists, abolitionists, and suffragists.
    Above all, Spiritualism was a breakthrough for intelligent women who loathed their role as silent partners deemed by society as unfit to speak in public. Spiritualism gave such women a platform, because as mediums, it was acceptable for them to speak, as they were not expressing their own thoughts, but acting as conduits for messages from the dead. Savvy women soon took over the movement. They held forth as lecturers and moved into the homes of the rich and famous to conduct séances.
    Spiritualism became a religion, with Spiritualist churches springing up across the country as freethinkers revolted against harsh authoritarian Christian orthodoxy. When no traditional churches ordained women, and many prohibited them from speaking out loud at services, Spiritualist churches embraced women’s rights and considered them as equal members. While the movement was easily dismissed because of the charlatans and their tricks—disembodied voices, music, spirit rapping, parlor “ghosts”—serious followers believed there was a scientific basis for it. They argued that “reason” demonstrates that life, at least the soul, continues on in some fashion. In an era when the mind was a mystery—“phrenology [studying the bumps on one’s skull] and alchemy still passed for science”—the Spiritualist belief in the “science of the metaphysical” seemed rational. Religious Spiritualists believed that there could be genuine manifestations from the other world. This was, after all, just an extension of acceptedreligions, which told parishioners that the departed existed in “heaven,” that they would meet them one day in the “great by and by.”
    Belief in Spiritualism’s power was strengthened by the amazing—some would say miraculous—changes made by the “culture of invention” during the Industrial Revolution. In just twenty years, from the 1840s to the 1860s, machinery and other inventions transformed Manhattan from a nearly medieval hellhole of no sewers, open-hearth cooking, and outdoor privies into homes with running water, stoves,