![]() Medical societies, academics and traditional church groups huffed in protest, insisting it was all a hoax. By 1854, more than 15,000 believers were petitioning Congress (unsuccessfully) to fund a scientific study of spiritualist phenomena. Weekly newspapers, such as the Spiritual Telegraph and Banner of Light, popped up like weeds in a graveyard. Just three years after the Albany demonstrations, thousands of mediums, mostly women, were channeling ghostly messages for fun and profit in heavily curtained parlors throughout the nation. Even there, the hullabaloo over spiritualism could hardly have escaped their notice. That fall, Jane married Leland and left Albany to join him in Port Washington, Wis., where he had been building his law practice. ![]() Their fees: $1 per person for the public séances, $5 for private ones. Before long, hundreds of curiosity-seekers were flocking to Hydesville in the hope of contacting their own departed loved ones via this spiritual "telegraph." From there, the Fox sisters took their show on the road, first to Rochester and then to Albany, where, in February 1850, they engaged the most luxurious suite in the elegant Delevan Hotel and rented a public hall for demonstrations and lectures. The sisters, ages 11 and 15, interpreted the sounds as coded messages from the spirit of a peddler who, they claimed, was trying to tell them he had been murdered and buried in the cellar. The frenzy took a supernatural twist one night in March 1848 when two Methodist girls, Maggie and Kate Fox, reportedly heard mysterious "rappings" in the bedroom of their Hydesville farmhouse. America was in the midst of a popular evangelical revolution known as the Second Great Awakening, and upstate New York was a hotbed of revivalist zeal. How could a cultish fad involving Ouija boards and levitating tables have entranced the Stanfords and Grants, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Victor Hugo and a host of other 19th-century notables? Spiritualism had its eerie beginning in Hydesville, N.Y., around the same time Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop became engaged in Albany, about 120 miles to the east. ![]() The spiritualist movement, Jordan mused, "seemed perhaps to give them the basis for a demonstrable belief in immortality, a faith in which they found great consolation." Stanford were for some time deeply interested in certain phases of spiritualism," particularly during the terrible months that followed their son's sudden death from typhoid. ![]() "It is true," President Jordan claimed years later in his memoirs, "that both Mr. Leland Sr.'s own brother, Thomas Welton Stanford, was a leading spiritualist proponent in Australia and a driving force in Jane's otherworldly pursuits. The quasi-religious movement, which promised to connect believers with the netherworld, had captivated America in the years leading up to the Civil War, and by the 1890s it claimed millions of followers. Stanford's ghostly genesis aside, it's clear that the founders, especially Jane, experimented with spiritualism during the waning years of the 19th century-and in this they were hardly alone. Drake was a fraud who had "no more to do with it than a child unborn." "No spiritualist influence affected the decision," they insisted in their 1891 statement. had died and the Stanfords had made provisions in their wills for the creation of the University. But that meeting did not take place until the fall of 1884-months after Leland Jr. Drake at a séance in New York City with their friends, former President Ulysses S. It was no secret that the couple had attended séances in Paris after the death of their son. Drake's claim and asked University President David Starr Jordan to place it on permanent record. Gossips had prattled about undue spiritualist influence on the family for years, but with this latest round of tabloid speculation, the Stanfords decided to set the record straight. But now, in the fall of 1891, the well-known medium Maud Lord Drake was telling the newspapers she had been "the guiding intermediary" in Jane and Leland Stanford's bold decision. Founder Leland Stanford had long maintained that the idea for the University came to him in a dream as he mourned the death of his only child, 15-year-old Leland Jr., in the spring of 1884. Was Stanford University conceived during a séance? That's what Victorian busybodies wanted to know when the new institution first opened.
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