On the night of March 31, 1848 in an isolated farmhouse in upstate New York, the Fox sisters and their horrified parents seemed to communicate with the dead. These events in this small community grew to become far more than a simple ghost story. It became the starting point for a new movement that influenced tens of thousands of people for the remainder of the nineteenth century, known as spiritualism. It soon became one of the largest popular movements of the time, and continues to attract believers to this day.