While Kane was reconnoitering the top of the world, his future wife was trafficking with ghosts. Maggie Fox came from a humble background in rural upstate New York. At home one night in 1848, she and her sister Katy noticed that they had extraordinarily flexible toes, which they could snap smartly against one another inside their shoes. Their superstitious mother concluded that a spirit was making these “rappings,” which contained messages her girls could decipher. Maggie and Katy played along, and soon they were the talk of the neighborhood.

An older sister smelled money; under her tutelage, Maggie and Katy created the séance, a quasi-religious service in which anyone who paid a fee could get in touch with departed loved ones. Elsewhere, opportunists discovered that they, too, could carry messages between the living and the dead, as well as produce more elaborate effects, such as apparitions and musical instruments that played themselves. Spiritualism became an international craze. (For more on Maggie Fox, spiritualism, and Penn’s connection with both, see “Feet and Faith” in the Mar|Apr 2006 Gazette.)

Katy was the prettier of the rapping sisters, Maggie the livelier. When they played Philadelphia in 1852 and a local hero came calling, it was Maggie he fell for. But if Maggie’s visibility as a medium had first brought her to Kane’s notice, he soon set her straight: not only did he not believe in spiritualism, he considered it vulgar. (In this he was hardly alone: Almost from the start, skeptics had noted a disparity between ends and means. If spirits had wisdom to impart about the great mystery of what happens after death, why stoop to such frivolous mechanisms as “rappings” and self-tooting horns?) Kane’s family expected him to marry within his own upper-middle class. He declared himself ready to defy them and wed Maggie, but only if she gave up spiritualism.

Maggie was both thrilled and peeved. Kane could be charming and generous, and it was flattering to be wooed by such a gent. But she didn’t like being condescended to, especially by someone about to abandon her for another Franklin search, this time as commander. Besides, she had family pressures of her own to deal with: Thanks to séance money, the Foxes had embraced a high standard of living.

By now Kane had become a performer himself, spreading his fame and raising money for his voyages by lecturing. He must have been a spellbinder: after hearing him give a talk, the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray turned to a companion and said, “Do you think the doctor would permit me to kneel down and lick his boots?”