Enchanted Ground
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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.
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ENCHANTED GROUND
The Spirit Room of Jonathan Koons
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Now, just a few years after the Fox sisters had made their debut, Jonathan Koons was attracting an ardent following. Most visitors, like a Cincinnati businessman delving into the séances, came away convinced that the ghostly hands and unearthly music were “the work of an invisible intelligent power.” “Hundreds, and I believe thousands, (judging from a register kept there) have been there from almost all parts of the United States,” the businessman wrote, “and I have yet to hear of the first one who has gone away skeptical as to the genuineness of the performance.”
Even so, the French mesmerist Barthet was left to wonder about what he had heard and seen. The velvety blackness of the séance room seemed to produce sheer magic, but returning to the light sent questions seesawing through his mind. Barthet tumbled the evidence over and over as he left Athens County, never to return. Was Jonathan Koons a martyr for the spiritualist cause, an unlikely scientist harnessing yet unknown powers of the universe, or—as his critics charged—merely a charlatan of the highest order? Answering these questions would not be easy. But from 1852 on, the spiritualist movement would claim Jonathan Koons as one of its most charismatic figures—a backwoods seer whose legacy would rival even that of the famous Fox sisters for a place in its history.
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