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her body. The Weekman family packed up and moved out—and a family named Fox moved in. In March 1848, the two Fox children, Kate, twelve, and Margaret, fifteen, not only heard the mysterious rappings and rattlings of the ghost, but they communicated with it.* They developed a simple code for yes and no and for all the letters of the alphabet and carried out conversations with the unseen entity. The story slowly leaked out, and the Fox sisters became famous. What’s more, the ghost apparently followed them about, and they were able to hold seances in other towns with the entity communicating with them by rapping on walls or tables. This single sequence (or was it a communications breakthrough?) was the beginning of modern spiritualism. So here is another freakish coinci- dence to ponder: Both Mormonism and spiritualism were born in the same county in places only a few miles from each other! Spiritualism became a rage in the 1850s and 1860s. Mediums blos- somed all over the world. Many of them proved to be fraudulent and were merely cashing in on the fad. But others—many others—performed inexplicable feats. Because ghosts and spiritual manifestations seemed to offer proof of religious beliefs, many educated men took an active interest in investigating such phenomena. Leading clergymen, educators, and scientists took up the investigation of these matters as a hobby. Scientific journals of psychic research were founded and published the extensive reports of these above-average ‘‘ghost hunters.”” We have been left a wealth of heavily documented case histories covering most of the nine- banmth ann teenth century. Thomas Edison’s parents were active spiritualists, and Edison himself privately expressed his belief in the survival of the human spirit after death. He was born in 1847. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, spent the last half of his life pursuing and investigating occult Matters, as did Sir William Crookes, a physicist who made a number of outstanding contributions to science (he was among the first to study radioactivity, and he invented the Crookes tube, predecessor to X-rays and radio tubes). I cannot even begin to review all of the occult evidence here, but there are dozens of excellent books available covering the whole spectrum of spiritual events. If you take the time and trouble to examine some of the The Cosmic Jokers / 209 The date of this breakthrough was March 31, 1848.