Greeley, Horace (1811-1872)

Famous American political writer, editor of the New York Tribune, and an important figure in early American Spiritualism. He was the first to call upon the Fox Sisters on their arrival in New York in June 1850, and he admitted publicly that he was puzzled by the phenomena he observed and that he thought the good faith of the mediums could not be questioned.

The Fox sisters were guests at Greeley's home in New York for three days. During that period he became convinced of the genuineness of their mysterious rappings, although he did not accept the spirit hypothesis. "Whatever may be the origin of the cause of the rappings," he wrote, "the ladies in whose presence they occur do not make them. We tested this thoroughly and to our entire satisfaction."

The columns written in Greeley's paper were fair and impartial during periods of the wildest controversy. In his Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), he admits that "the jugglery hypothesis utterly fails to account for occurrences which I have personally witnessed," and that "certain developments strongly indicate that they do proceed from departed spirits." He submitted, however, that nothing of value was obtained from the investigation, that the spirits "did not help to fish up the Atlantic cable or find Sir John Franklin."

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Moore, Lawrence R. In Search of White Crows. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Van Deusen, Glyndon G. Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953.