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Fox Sister Calling all the Demons
Franklin Pierce became the 14th President of the United States in 1853 when our long haunting nightmare is said to have started. Benny Pierce’s death occurred in a terrible train crash just a few weeks after Pierce won the election. The tragedy shook the Pierce family, particularly Pierce’s wife Jane, a “melancholy” woman whose preacher father had brought her up as a devout Calvinist. Jane wrote letters to Benny in response to this loss. Also, she hired the Fox sisters, who, according to Demon in the White House, were pioneering spiritualists skilled in seances. Soon, those in the White House began to assert that Jane was heard speaking to her son, who had passed away.
Did Jane contact her dead son? Who knows! Nonetheless, Demon in the White House refuses to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn, heaping on dramatic recreations of Jane and the Fox sisters sitting around a table asking Benny to respond to them by knocking once for yes, and two for no.
In those and innumerable other sequences, a tall, dark, red-eyed demon invariably materializes in the corner of the room or directly behind an unsuspecting person.
