Enchanted Ground

The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons

Sharon Hatfield

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780804040969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Enchanted Ground, Sharon Hatfield brings to life the true story of a nineteenth-century farmer-turned-medium, Jonathan Koons, one of thousands of mediums throughout the antebellum United States. In the hills outside Athens, Ohio, Koons built a house where it was said the dead spoke to the living, and where ancient spirits communicated the wisdom of the ages. Curious believers, in homespun and in city attire, traveled from as far as New Orleans to a remote Appalachian cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum's attractions.

Yet Koons's story is much more than showmanship and sleight of hand. His enterprise, not written about in full until now, embodied the excitement and optimism of citizens breaking free from societal norms. Reform-minded dreamers were drawn to Koons's seances as his progressive brand of religion displaced the gloomy Calvinism of previous generations. As heirs to the Second Great Awakening, which stretched from New York State to the far reaches of the Northwest Territory, the curious, the faithful, and Koons himself were part of a larger, uniquely American moment that still marks the cultural landscape today.

1

The Frenchman’s Visit

IT WAS an age that loved its wonders—the bizarre, the spectacular, and the arcane. In the 1850s sightseers could tour Barnum’s American Museum in New York City to gawk at wax figures of Siamese twins and of a giant and giantess in Quaker dress. The visitors could pause to admire the miniature costume of mulberry-colored velvet worn by General Tom Thumb to his audience with Queen Victoria—or on a lucky day meet the diminutive Tom himself. But in the backwoods of Ohio, hundreds of miles from that center of commerce, the curious were flocking to a remote country cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions. The farmer-turned-medium Jonathan Koons had built a special house where it was said that the dead spoke to the living, where the ancient spirits of the place deigned not only to reveal the wisdom of the ages to visitors but to serenade them with celestial music.

Like hundreds before him, Joseph Barthet had heard of the mysterious goings-on at Koons’s hillside farm, only 7 miles distant but far removed from the county seat and university town of Athens. So renowned was the rustic cabin called the Spirit Room that Dr. Barthet, a mesmerist and devotee of spiritualism, had traveled more than 1,000 miles from New Orleans to see it for himself. He joined a restive crowd, some dressed in homespun and others in city attire, that had already gathered outside, awaiting admittance to the evening’s demonstrations.

Barthet was ushered into a log structure that he estimated to be 15 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 7 feet high. He found himself in a one-room building with a most peculiar contraption at one end: a wooden table the size of a coffin affixed with a bewildering profusion of wires, metal bars, tin plates, pieces of glass, and small bells. Some wires ran to two drums, about 5 feet apart, that were fixed to a frame hoisted above the table. Barthet had heard that the device had been constructed under the guidance of the spirits to energize the room and help focus their essence. On the table itself sat a tin trumpet about 18 inches long with a small mouthpiece. A hand bell, tambourine, accordion, and harmonica also adorned this unlikely altar. Writing paper, a pencil, a book, and two sheets of sandpaper coated with phosphorus completed the eerie tableau.

No stranger to a séance, Barthet scanned his surroundings with a discerning eye. A decade or so earlier the French émigré had organized mesmerists in New Orleans as the Magnetic Society, men who thought that a fluid with electrical properties permeated the universe and, with the aid of hypnosis, could be harnessed for its healing powers. From there it was just a short step to believe that entranced individuals also could be in touch with the healing spirits of the dead. As the spiritualist craze spread to New Orleans from the North in the 1850s, Barthet had become a leading voice of the new religion of spiritualism, initiating some of the first circles in the city. Although he had come to this gathering in Ohio as part true believer, Barthet would not disavow the habits of mind that had made him a dispassionate observer. He watched curiously as the 20 or so guests filed into the spirit room and his host prepared for the evening’s performance.

Jonathan Koons’s hair was the color of hickory nuts, and he wore it long and parted in the middle. With his full beard and heavy brows over deep-set dark eyes, Koons wore a mantle of grave intellect about his person. But even in middle age he carried the livelier traits of the performing artist as well, for it was said that he could hear a tune whistled just once and effortlessly reproduce it on his fiddle. Tonight, with violin in hand, Koons took his place at a second, smaller table that had been pushed up in front of the rectangular one that supported the two drums and the other musical instruments. His son Nahum, a tall, fair-haired teenager known as Nim, took a seat on the opposite side of the smaller table, which was reserved for the mediums and special guests. Although most visitors sat in two pews facing the tables, Barthet was given a place of honor at Jonathan Koons’s right. On Barthet’s right was his traveling companion, M. L. Their host’s custom was to give special accommodations to visitors from far away, especially those learned men who could best appreciate the phenomena. Sizing up the arrangements, Barthet noticed how crowded the room had become and how difficult it would be for anyone to get up and move around. To make matters worse, a little stove straddled the space between the smaller mediums’ table and the first bench.

Koons put out the candle, plunging the room into total darkness. Something immediately struck the mediums’ table with two violent licks. Barthet guessed that it had been the mallet for the large drum. The fiddle began to play a jig at a rising tempo as the two drums kicked in behind it, sometimes drumming together and sometimes separately. Some little bells rang too, perhaps from the vibrations of the whole assemblage. Barthet found the noise unpleasantly loud, but he thought the timing of the drums and violin impeccable. He imagined some invisible conductor leading the band through a medley of tunes. When it was time to switch to another melody, the conductor would change the rhythm, delivering a few offbeat licks. The fiddle would then commence another hornpipe or quickstep, and the drum would resume keeping time. Barthet assumed that Jonathan Koons was playing the fiddle with both hands. He wondered how anyone else could have moved to the drums so quickly without detection—or even whether one person could have managed to play both drums at once.

The drums fell silent, and a tambourine flew across the room, keeping time with the violin. Barthet got the impression that two hands were working the tambourine, one shaking it and the other hitting it. He could also hear a handbell that seemed to be aloft. The New Orleans mesmerist strained to pick up any evidence of human motion but could not. With no light at all, he was depending on his ears alone to make sense of what was unfolding.

Now it was time to test the capabilities of the acrobatic tambourine. On its first pass around the room, the instrument had lightly tapped Barthet’s knee before continuing on to touch others in the audience. Now he silently placed his hands on either side of his body at knee level, one hand next to his knee and the other 8 inches from his body. Barthet wanted the tambourine to touch his hands without groping around or brushing against his knees—a feat that he thought would be difficult for a person to do in pitch darkness. As if by magic, the tambourine returned and immediately did as he had willed.

The Frenchman placed his hand on the table palm up, and soon the tambourine fluttered down onto his hand. He could feel the side and the drumhead of the instrument. Barthet dared to push his hand forward. An alien palm came in contact with his. The temperature of the hand was unremarkable, but the outsize fingers caught his attention. Barthet wanted to palpate the strange extremity, but all too soon it flew away. He assumed that the person still playing the violin was Jonathan Koons. Common sense told Barthet that the only person who could reach him in the cramped space was young Nahum Koons, who sat opposite his father. Barthet had his doubts, though. Nahum would have had to get up from his chair and lie nearly flat on the table to touch Barthet’s hand. The mesmerist did not think Nahum could have done this without making some telltale sound; besides, the young man’s fingers were much smaller than the ones Barthet had just felt. The mesmerist had made a careful observation of Nahum’s fingers before the séance began. The only way he could imagine the teenager’s fingers being that thick was if they were swathed in heavy gloves.

The tambourine returned to the table and the violin performance stopped. Barthet’s reveries were interrupted by a high-pitched voice flowing out of the trumpet, which he surmised was now floating above them. The voice was speaking with Jonathan Koons, but at first Barthet could not make out what it was saying.

“King, play the accordion,” Koons commanded.

The instrument immediately began to sound, but to Barthet it was just noise. Whoever or whatever was behind it—the entity called King—obviously did not know how to play.

“Koons, this accordion is like a lot of people,” the voice in the horn complained. “It seems well on the outside, but it doesn’t have anything good on the inside.”

“King is jovial,” Koons said, perhaps addressing the spectators as much as the voice. “But he is right in this case because nothing good has come from this instrument that is, for that matter, very mediocre.”

The voice tried a different tack. “Koons, tell me to get the violin.”

“Very well, pick it up.”

Barthet heard the violin being plucked, rather than played with the bow. Soon the accordion joined in, but the result was no better than before. Barthet found the sound discordant. The invisible being was certainly no musician.

No sooner had the violin fallen silent than a high-pitched voice emanated from the harmonica. Barthet deduced that the harmonica was functioning as a megaphone, just as the trumpet had earlier. Although the voice sounded natural to him, he still could not make out the words. The music started up again shortly, this time a racket of accordion and harmonica that hurt Barthet’s ears. He felt something lightly tap his skull several times just above his right ear, almost like a caress. Whereas the tambourine had tapped his knee and hands, this time he thought the accordion was dancing around his head.

Now the voice in the trumpet requested a fiddle tune and began to sing, but Barthet remained unimpressed. He found the lyrics childish and the falsetto voice that delivered them unpleasant, nothing like the celestial music he had read so much about in glowing accounts of the Koons phenomena. Mercifully the singing lasted only about a minute. But the tapping soon began on the other side of Barthet’s head; he believed it was the trumpet. Annoyed as he was with the musical performances, the hypnotist marveled at the demonstrations on his person. He was convinced that only an entity that could see in the dark, or was reading his mind, could land these taps at precise locations—and, so far as he was concerned, clairvoyance did not exist.

A flash of light shot through the darkness near the back table and was quickly extinguished. Barthet heard the rustling of paper. Something that looked like a small lantern appeared 2 feet in front of him. He leaned closer. The lantern came within 8 inches of his face, and by its light he could see a hand holding a pencil as if poised to write. The hand itself was giving off a modicum of light, as if it had a glowworm in its grasp. It began scribbling on paper, first a couple of lines and then a long paragraph that filled the page. The paper flipped over, and a hand again appeared above it. Barthet did not know if it was the same hand. The writing continued on the reverse side of the paper until the light was gone. He heard what sounded like paper sliding across the table toward him and grabbed it.

“Koons, I have something to tell you,” came the voice through the trumpet.

“Well?”

“Bon soir,” said King, taking his leave with the thump of the tin horn on the table.

Jonathan Koons lit the candle, and the men pored over the document. Barthet found a message signed “King” that had been written out in a precise, backward-slanting hand on a piece of stationery:

To the friends and visitors of this assembly we glad to meet you here in this our humble retreat. Let the light illuminate your spiritual vision and perception we have afforded you on this occasion, and freely as we bestow so freely confer on those who seek.

On the back of the stationery, more words had been written in a different hand, with more space between the letters and fainter characters. The calligraphy even showed signs of corrections to some of the strokes. Barthet read:

Friends, disregard the medisance of those who dispute statements, for their manqué d’experience leads them to lamantable states dereglements.—A FRIEND

Running a critical eye over the page, Barthet could see four French words that were written correctly except that some accent marks had been left off. Curiously, three of those words were underlined but the fourth, dereglements, was not. Barthet also thought that the last word should have been placed in parentheses, as it was restating the two words just before it. He also noticed that the English word “lamentable” had been misspelled. Even with the errors and lack of specificity, Barthet found meaning in these few words from his native tongue. The message said: “Friends, disregard the malicious gossip of those who dispute statements, for their lack of experience leads them to lamentable states craziness.” He thought it referred to skeptical comments he had heard during his trip to Ohio. Beyond that, he was convinced that no one in the Koons household—or any of their visitors, save himself and his traveling companion—knew a word of French.

* * *

BARTHET had to cut short his stay at the Koonses’ because the food served there made both him and his companion sick, a complaint voiced more than once by city folks. But he would not be the first or last learned person to investigate the strange phenomena that had made Jonathan Koons a celebrity attraction in the spiritualist world. Upstanding citizens from all walks of life—“persons of undoubted respectability . . . whose testimony would not be refused in any court of justice in the world”—were flocking to an estimated 2,000 mediums throughout the United States. Among the converts were several writers of prominence and achievement, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper. A few nationally known judges and politicians also espoused the new religion, including Judge John Worth Edmonds of New York and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, formerly a US senator from New York and governor of the Wisconsin Territory. And just a decade later First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln would be hosting séances in the White House. But spiritualism was not a movement for the elite alone; thanks to its optimistic emphasis on human improvement and the equality of all souls, one to two million Americans in a national population of 23 million were said to have joined its ranks by 1850.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, spiritualism must have seemed to its devotees like a moral compass that could guide a rapidly changing society. Railroads and steamships had revolutionized transportation, and key inventions like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts had the United States careening from a nation of farmers to an industrial powerhouse with centers located mainly in the North. Along with German and Irish immigrants, millions of rural Americans moved to the cities to work in factories, creating the beginnings of the middle class—and liberating a pent-up desire for progress. Optimism was the order of the day; citizens in the East believed in a divinely sanctioned manifest destiny that entitled them to virtually all the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

But those years also had a dark side: overcrowding in the booming ports and cities resulted in poor living and working conditions and outbreaks of disease; infant mortality was high and industrial accidents horrific. The federal government had removed Native Americans from the South by treaty, or at the point of a bayonet, from their homelands east of the Mississippi, clearing millions of acres for slaveholding white settlers. Wars had been fought out West to gain more land, and with each new acquisition of western territory fresh controversies would erupt about whether that territory should enter the Union as a free or slave state. From the shining new cities of the North to the colonnaded verandas of the South, the threat of violence hissed and simmered.

Religion, too, was in ferment; in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a wave of religious fervor called the Second Great Awakening had swept across the United States and on to the frontier. Along with a renewed emphasis on a personal relationship with the Savior, some Christian believers looked forward to a new millennial age, all the while working to purify society so that Christ could return to Earth.

Nowhere was this revivalism more prevalent than in western New York, where spiritualism was born in 1848. This region eventually became known as the Burned-Over District because so many religious fires had swept the population that few people were left to convert. The Second Great Awakening not only fueled Protestant denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists but spurred the rise of churches that believed in direct communication with spirits. The Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, for one, had long been known for their ecstatic rites—whirling and stamping dances and speaking in tongues, as well as their propensity to fall under the influence of spirits as they worshipped. Mediums, also called instruments, heard from entities as diverse as Napoleon, Native Americans, and even neighbors who appeared at their own funerals to console the living. And in 1823 an angel had appeared to Joseph Smith, revealing to him the location of inscribed golden tablets buried near Palmyra, New York, and providing the foundational text for the Mormon religion. Other residents of the Burned-Over District had once discarded their worldly possessions, believing the preacher William Miller’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return to Earth no later than March 21, 1844.

The desire to cleanse a wicked world in advance of the Second Coming also spilled over into the social arena. Reformers in central and western Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• A Note on Sources
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. The Frenchman’s Visit
• 2. “The Place of My Nativity”
• 3. Putting Down Roots
• 4. “A Striking Specimen of Beauty”
• 5. At the Spirits’ Command
• 6. A Buried Man’s Instructions
• 7. The Trumpet Medium
• 8. Communication from Angels
• 9. Allies and Kin
• 10. Mountain Tea
• 11. Sustaining “Brother Koons”
• 12. The Mesmeric Potion
• 13. Not One Single Copper
• 14. Koons, King, and Company
• 15. “An Artful and Designing Rogue”
• 16. Galileo in Eclipse
• 17. An Arc of Golden Roses
• 18. “Their Humbug Art”
• 19. The Psychometrist
• 20. Little Egypt
• 21. “The Venerable Johnathan Koons”
• Epilogue
• Afterword. Koons in Legend: Gold and Dross
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index