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Here, Mr. Splitfoot: An Informal Exploration into Modern Occultism
Here Mr Splitfoot An Informal Exploration into Modern Occultism Author:Robert Somerlott "On Friday evening, March 31, 1848, the tenants went to bed early. The familiar raps and thumps began almost at once, louder than ever, and Katie Fox, then age twelve, suddenly called out the words that were to mark the beginning of spiritualism: 'Here, Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do!'" — The Fox sisters of Rochester, New... more » York, may have turned out ultimately to be toe-cracking frauds, but it was their debut that opened the door to the golden age of the psychic on both sides of the Atlantic. In point of fact, the rapping and knocking of a Fox séance is but one tiny episode in Robert Somerlott's hugely entertaining, sometimes appallingly eerie, exploration into that region of psychic phenomena known as -- the Unexplained. It is a story that ranges back to the Elizabethans and forward to today, but the bulk of it lies in the nineteenth century, when occult stardom shone most brightly.
Robert Somerlott is the very opposite of the insistent and humorless crank dealing with the occult. He presents the people, places, and phenomena of that strange world in the context of historical happening and reported event, giving one much on which to reflect, no matter what one's disposition is on the side of belief or disbelief. He makes it impossible not to feel a certain chill breeze on the neck as one reads about Daniel Dunglas Home, a charming gentleman with powers of flight and self-elongation; about the witch-driven Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee; about the spectral revels at the Vermont house of the dour Eddy brothers, a house that was known in the 1870s to Madame Blavatsky and the many others who attended as "The Spirit Capital of the Universe" -- all guaranteed to leave one coldly up in the air.« less