The other scary thing about the part of America I got to see when I was young actually happened before I got to see America. About a hundred years before I was born, but less than a hundred miles from where I grew up, the ghost industry was invented.

I knew nothing about this until recently, that a little village in western New York state, only 20 miles from Rochester, where I spent a few summer holidays, was the birthplace of spiritualism. Lots of people know about it — “Hydesville, New York” is all over the Internet because of what happened there, but good luck finding it on a map. It’s a ghost town now, fittingly enough.

People have been haunted ever since their were people, of course, guilt-wracked Cain being the first. Hydesville is where people figured out how to communicate with the dearly departed. It’s where spiritualism began.

In 1847, making that exact same trek across the border from Canada as I did, came John Fox and his family (his wife was from Bath, Ontario, near Kingston). They moved to a farmhouse in Hydesville, perhaps getting a good deal because the previous tenants had been hearing strange noises. That’s what the Foxes heard too, so maybe it wasn’t such a good deal.

Daughters Margaret (that’s her here) and Kate (below) were already making a habit of sleeping in their parents’ bed when Kate, then seven, got brave on March 31, 1848 [Possible hint: April Fool’s Eve], and started snapping her fingers in answer to the mysterious rapping sounds. The, ahem, rapper snapped his fingers back. Margaret, age 10, clapped her hands rhythmically. The ghost rapped in response.

All this fun drew a crowd, and a neighbour came up with a system involving the alphabet that enabled the, ahem, spirit to explain that until five years previously he’d been Charles B Rosma, a travelling salesman who was murdered in the house for his money and then buried in the cellar.

Congressman Robert Dale Owen, co-founder of the Smithsonian Institute, got involved. Eventually they dug up some human teeth and a hunk of skull with hair attached to it, and then, in 1904 — long, long after the Foxes had moved on and been verbally bludgeoned at every turn for believing in ghosts — a false wall in the cellar collapsed and there was an entire human skeleton inside.

Kids had been goofing around in the “Spook House”, by then long abandoned but for many years a place of pilgrimage for believers. Why hasn’t anyone made a movie about this? The Google Earth satellite image above, by the way, shows a structure on the site: That’s covering the original foundation while the National Spiritualist Association of Churches gets on with building a memorial park.

The Hydesville spirit hammered out a lot of messages, to various mediums, but there was no guarantee they would make any sense. Through Kate and Margaret, though, the messages — banged out quite loudly, sometimes in arpeggios and cadenzas seeming to emanate from different places (no way the noises were the girls cracking their knuckles) — were pertinent enough to be, uh, scary.

When the Foxes turned tail and ran, Kate was sent to live with her brother in Auburn and Margaret to her sister Leah’s place in Rochester (that’s Leah in the picture), and the tapping followed them both. Soon enough one of them coaxed out this message: “Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must not try to conceal it any longer. When you do your duty God will protect you and good spirits will watch over you.”

Cue the spiritualists!

In November 1849 the newly organised spiritualists held their first public meeting in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall and three separate committees determined that the rapping sounds weren’t a ventriloquist’s trick or mechanically generated. The public was flabbergasted to the point of imperilling the sisters’ lives with a tub of tar and other quaint threats of the day, but that didn’t stop the girls from hitting the road with PT Barnum.

Over the years there were all manner of sounds, spirit writing, lights, tables levitating, flowers appearing and visitations from deceased loved ones. The works.

The Fox sisters were never exposed as tricksters despite the best efforts of many sceptics. As well as posing strange questions, investigators tried tying the girls up and had a peek in their underwear to make sure nothing was hidden, but the source of the sounds was never detected.

There were plenty of accusations thrown around — Leah was often accused of trying to squeeze pertinent information from people coming for a seance to feed her sisters — and it stretched belief when Benjamin Franklin was summoned and got his English grammar mixed up.

But business boomed, especially when Manhattan toasted “the Rochester Rappers”. William Cullen Bryant and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley became fans, and the sisters came up with such a vivid description of the horseback-riding accident that killed James Fenimore Cooper’s sister 50 years earlier that he forgot who the last Mohican was. On Broadway, the actress Mary Taylor was crooning “The Rochester Rappers at Barnum’s Hotel”.

The Great Beyond bandwagon quickly overloaded as people across America discovered that the ringing in their ears was probably their late Auntie Em and they too became mediums. For every Ralph Waldo Emerson decrying “the gospel that comes by taps in the wall and humps in the table drawer” there were two senators petitioning for a scientific commission. Washington briefly entertained the idea of having the US Post see if a “spiritual telegraph” was possible, but got spooked.

In 1871 New York banker Charles Livermore was so grateful for the encouraging words that Kate’s ghost gave him about his very ex-wife that he paid for her trip to England, where she married a barrister. There too, Nobel-winner-to-be Sir William Crookes — the bloke who invented my spinthariscope — gave Kate a good looking over and was surprised that she didn’t need to “sit for a formal seance.

“It seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree — on a sheet of glass — on a stretched iron wire — on a stretched membrane — a tambourine — on the roof of a cab — and on the floor of a theatre.”

Crookes also watched Kate get some handwriting from beyond: “A luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room, and after hovering near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into darkness.”

Pretty heavy testimonial. So it came as a shock in 1888 when Margaret up and announced that it was her making the noises all the time. She was indeed cracking her knuckles, she said, and spiritualism was a sham.

There at the grand New York Academy of Music, in front of 2,000 people, she took off her shoes and stood on a six-inch-high pine platform and let loose with a series of toe-joint cracks that could be heard throughout the theatre. Other times, Margaret said, she and Kate bounced an apple on a string on the floor, hidden behind the furniture.

Pretty heavy confession. So it came as a shock a year later when Margaret announced that she’d been forced to declare her and her sister frauds by people with large money who wanted spiritualism silenced. The money sounded tasty because both sisters were drunkards by then. And out for revenge.

The third Fox sister, Leah, the oldest and their manager, had been threatening to take Kate’s children away from her and her bottle. The authorities had already taken Margaret’s kids away from her. Margaret and Kate figured they’d pull the plug on the family’s money factory. (Even after Margaret called it all a trick, though, Kate stayed in the dead-man-talking trade.)

The spiritualists went into told-you-so mode, insisting they’d never bought the “confession” in the first place. Among those unmoved by Margaret’s Big Put-Down announcement was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who not only maintained that the Cottingley Fairies were real based on absolutely absurd photographs but insisted that his buddy Harry Houdini was a psychic when Houdini repeatedly showed that there was no such thing (maybe).

But after Margaret died, the woman who’d taken care of her in her final months, when she was physically unable to move hand or foot, swore that Maggie could still ask the spirits questions and be answered by a 1960s-style drum solo of raps and bangs coming from all over the room.

Kate drank herself to death in 1892, age 56, having delivered a replacement medium in the form of her son, Ferdinand, who was giving off the proverbial “unearthly glow” from his eyes by the time he was three. But all kids do that. Margaret died the following year at 59, having lost her fortune and thus being in no position to prove that you can’t take it with you.

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The spiritualist movement has waxed and waned many times since Kate Fox “made history” with a snap of her fingers, as one website puts it, but there’s a place not far from Hydesville that has always believed.

The original Fox home was actually picked up and moved — not by telepathy but but truck — to Lily Dale, New York, a lakeside community of psychics still cheerfully in the tarot-astrology-feel-yer-bumps business today. Unfortunately the Fox house burned to the ground in 1956, still rapping right up to the end. But the chief artefacts within, the bones of Rosma the travelling salesman, were saved and remain on display in the Lily Dale Museum.

It’s not clear if the Lily Dale psychics go into hibernation or into space each winter or what, but every “summer season” they’re swamped with visitors attending workshops and seminars, and getting readings of course. Lily Dale has been doing this since the summer of 1879, when members of the spiritualist church of Laona, New York, purchased 18 acres and incorporated the Cassadaga Lakes Free Association. The name was changed to the City of Light Assembly in 1903 and to the Lily Dale Assembly in 1906.

Among the living who have purportedly come to talk about and to dead people twixt the comfy cottages and Victorian homes are Mahatma Gandhi, Conan Doyle of course, theosophy maven Helena Blavatsky, Mae West, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Leo Tolstoy’s daughter Countess Alexandra, Stephen King and Susan B Anthony. Anthony and the Suffragists celebrated “Woman’s Days” here in the in late 1880s.

Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs wrote a song called “Lilydale” that goes a little something like this: “Here soon to rise up / Amelia tender and sweet / Her last words spoke / All is well / All is peace.”

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The spiritualists who didn’t head west with Horace Greeley to Lily Dale headed east to Massachusetts. The First Spiritual Temple, “the world’s oldest Christian spiritualist church”, has been hearing voices since 1883 and as yet shows no sign of deafness.

Boston was a hotbed (if that’s the right word) of believers in those days, the top mediums in the country producing manifestations at “camp meetings” on the shore of Onset Bay and hundreds of lesser lights aboded around the city tending their own plaintive flocks.

The founder of the First Temple, Marcellus Ayer, made a killing in wholesale grocery and then started channelling a spirit called Chrysi, as well as his own dead sister. Another popular spirit guide at the church was a 3,400-year-old sage named Chine, “after whom China is said to have been named”. Huh. Confucius used to drop by too, as did Abe Lincoln and Thomas Paine. Everyone had something to say.

The church was founded in 1883 as the Working Union of Progressive Spiritualists and quicly racked up a thousand members before getting self-conscious about its name (the spiritualists are a feisty, territorial bunch) and switching to the Spiritual Fraternity. It kept growing until around 1910, when the scourge of “prejudice and resentment” turned the temple into a theatre, and the Exeter Street Theatre did great business too. Ayer took the services down to the basement.

The Exeter closed in 1974 or 1984 (depending on the source), and Waterstone’s bookstore moved in and did great business. But it closed in 1999 and a division of Pasadena-based Idealab moved in and, as near as I can tell, it still doing great business. For now.

Meanwhile, in 1975, First Spiritual Temple — meaning the congregation — moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, and they’re still rapping away there. The original building was declared an historical site. It’s still got some of the classic features, like stained-glass windows with depictions of Mark Twain, Joyce, Poe, Jane Austen, our good buddy Jack Kerouac and, right at the top, that Shakespeare guy.

The spiritualists came back in 1985 to celebrate the building’s 100th birthday and see what was inside the time capsule in the century-old cornerstone. There were a sheaf of papers and a vial of the oil used to consecrate the church in 1885, supposedly a taste from a lamp found in the tomb of Rameses III.

The church maintains a sort of hall of fame of favourite characters in its history, and there’s a “memorial star” to ER Dyar, a trance and physical medium for the temple in the 19th century. The photo shows her in a trance with the spirit known as Christal, who evidently is still in touch. The memorial star, I was intrigued to see, gives the medium’s name as “ER Dyar Clough”. Where have I heard the name Clough before?

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Read up on this stuff yourself if you don’t believe me: The Lily Dale website is here, but there’s lots more info about it at the National Spiritual Association of Churches website.

The Fox sisters are everywhere, but two fine retellings of the tale online are at GhostsMonstrous.com and, with complete cynicism, at History.net.