Grand River times. [volume] (Grand Haven, Mich.) 1851-18??, 1853-05-04
RAPPING MANIA.


Rochester, and the attempted mercenary specu-
lation of transferring the weird sisters" to this
city to exhibit themselves to visitors at dollar
head, this paper fully and fearlessly denounc-
ed all parties who gave the foul imposture its
first impulse in New York, whether, Clerical, Ju-
dicia, Legal or Medical, as the dupes of design
ing men and women conspired to deceive. We
then took the early responsibility, not merely to
DENY ANYTHING supernatural or spiritual in the
mysterious knockings," but we boldly alleged
a systematic scheme Of vilainy upon the women
who were used, and the men who used them, to
make money by deception, fraud, and impos-
ture and insisted that for obtaining money un-
der false pretenses, all parties were open to con-
viction under our statute law, and we called on
the District Attorney, Grand Jury and Courts,
to do their duty naming the Penitentiary as
the due Of the knaves, and predicting the Luna
tic Asylum as the refuge of their dupes.
But finding our efforts fruitless, and our warn
ing unheeded, and discovering that portion of
the public press had been subsidized to silence,
and still another portion hired to echo the mys-
terry, and give currency to the pretended revela-
tions from the spirt-world, we renewed our ex-
ertions to arrest the unutterable mischiefs of
the deluson. Forseeing the certainty that null
titudes would be led away by these deceivers,
if they were not unmasked, and their knavery
exposed, we sent forth warning, not merely
against the insanity which must result upon
weak minds, but urging that the dethronement
of reason which would follow, would be suicd-
al and homicidal, and hence predicted deeds of
darkness, infamy and blood" as the legitimate
and unavoidable results, of belief in these spir
itual and ghostly revelations.
1t was but few weeks before the knavery Of
the weird sisters, Fish and Foxes was proved
and promulgated by Professors Flint and Lee,
of Buffalo, two members of our profession, who
noby threw themselves into the breach in the
vain hope of stopping the plague; and their ex-
posure of these prime movers of the rappng
mania, has since been verified by the Cincinnati
Ladies' Committee so as to annihilate every
doubt. Meanwhile insanity has gone on multi
plying, and filling up our Asyums all over the
country with its victims, and thousands more
are tottering on its verge, bewidered and con-
founded by morbid imaginings of ghostly mes
sages from the spirit-world. The deeds ofdark-
ness, infamy and blood, justly apprehended as
the fruits Of this form Of insanity, have repeat
edly been published in the suicides and bloody
murders of both men and women, leaving wild
Ows and orphans to bewail their hapless fate
And all this because summary punishment has
not been inflicted upon the guilty originators
and propagators of this abominable imposture
So far from visiting these offenders with the
penalties Of the law, there are clergymen, ply
sicians, judges, lawyers, and even editors, who
have marveled and doubted, and gravely said
there is something strange, mysterious, unac-
countable in some of these revelations, and spec
ulated on their causes thus admitting the real
ity of the so-called phenomena, and concedng
pot cho st1 in fhat
and thus betraying all around them who do their
thinking by proxy, into the belief Of all the mir
acle-mongering, which the rappers and their VIC
tins allege.
Hence, they have gone on from one impos-
ture to another, from rapping and alphabets
when these become stale, to bell-ringing, table,
moving, singing, dancing, writing, discerning
spirits healing diseases, revealing truths and de-
nouncing errors in religion, morals, science and
philosophy, and all professedly from the ghosts
of the departed And the public press has done,
and is doing, much to perpetuate the iniquity,
by recording as facts the most absurd OF these
stories. In several Of these presses, the move
ment of tables has been alleged as capable Of
being effected by circle sitting around it, and
touching it with their hands; thus giving color
to the widest of the ghostly stories, while dis
claiming these and alleging electricity as the
cause. But they forgot to tell, that, the tables
only move in the dark, and that there will be
found under each moving table stout negro,
white or black, whose muscles furnish the loco
motion. If any body alleges tho contrary, we
have small table in our office on which we
write, and we offer one hundred dollars to any
ghost or medium, from this world or the other,
who will move it an inch in daylight, by any
supernatural, spiritual, magnetic or electrical in
fuence, which shall be invisible and intangible
to our own optics; and they may sit in circle
around it for a month, and " call spirits from the
vastly deep, but will they Gomez
Surely, sense has fled to british beasts, and
men have lost their reason," who can be so ca
silly guled to sacrifice their intelligence, their
philosophy, their religion, aud even their Bibles,
to the ghostly rappings of these impostors, and
even "pay for the poker" But we have done
our duty, and will only again express our graf
ification at the fact that no regular physician
within our knowledge has been seduced from
his propriety by this stupendous folly, and that
Homeopathists, are the only medical victims of
the mania to which the honest among them have
mn intellectual proclvty, as they have ever had
to the kindred inpostures of animal magnetism.
Thus far they have only been found among the
knaves, and make money by the operation
We believe no one of them has yet become
dupe. IN. Y. Medical Gazette.
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