Читать книгу Enchanted Ground - Sharon Hatfield - Страница 15

5

At the Spirits’ Command

WORD OF mysterious rappings heard in Rochester, New York, in late 1849 reached Jonathan Koons by way of the New York Tribune, in which he read a report attributing the noises to the work of spirits. Koons developed a keen interest in traveling to Rochester to see for himself but soon realized he could not afford it. He would have to bide his time until spiritualism reached him.

By early 1852, according to Koons, “there arose quite an excitement” in Athens County “on the subject of Spirit-manifestations.” The zeitgeist sweeping from the Northeast all the way to the backwoods of Ohio was “causing so much fear and alarm through my own neighborhood,” he recalled. Koons claimed that initially he was as skeptical of the new religion as he had been of the old. “Some were bold enough to declare that it must be the devil, some that it was electricity, some said that it was biology in a new form, and others that it was a deception.” Like his father traipsing to the witch’s doorstep, Jonathan Koons set out to investigate. He assumed it was all a fraud but was “hoping at the same time that it might prove to be what it purported to be, the acts of the Spirits of men.”

* * *

DESPITE the strange occurrences surrounding the deaths of his mother and brother George, Koons had never actually seen a ghost. As a young apprentice back in Bedford County, he had once spent the night at a home where a man had recently committed suicide. Koons and a companion, the schoolteacher William Alexander, were abed in an upstairs chamber when footsteps sounded in the hall. The bedroom door opened and closed. They could hear more footfalls in their room. Alexander buried his head beneath the covers, but Koons strained his eyes in the dark to see what was there. “I gave myself little or no alarm,” he later wrote, “as I could not conceive the possibility of a ‘Ghost’ producing tangible footsteps.” Seeing nothing, he quickly fell asleep.

Koons’s inconclusive brush with a ghost could not compare with the stories told by his oldest brother when Jonathan was a youngster. Michael had lived at the old Fletcher place, about 6 miles south of the Koons family home near Bedford. As Jonathan later described it, “The dwelling was constructed in old-fashioned style, with a chimney in the centre, and a fire place on both sides.” The house was essentially a duplex with one party living on one side and another—often a boarder—occupying what was called an “apartment” on the other side. Over the years several folks had lived there but not for very long, thanks to what seemed to be apparitions and strange influences about the place. Despite this reputation Michael’s family moved in and apparently occupied the entire farmhouse. In good weather they noticed how the cattle, lying near the house while chewing their cud in the evening, would suddenly get spooked and run into the woods. Horses returning from a hard day in the fields would all at once take fright and become unmanageable.

In wintertime the family sealed off the far side of the house and did not use it. One snowy night they heard the outside door to the apartment open and close. “They accordingly repaired to the room to see who had entered,” Jonathan Koons wrote. “On entering the apartment a spotted dog was discovered lying upon the bed, which, by the rays of dim light, was mistook for their own, and no one thought any different.” The dog was bidden to leave the room and did so immediately. When the family returned to their quarters, they began to ponder over the experience. How could the west-facing door have gotten open when an enormous snowdrift was piled up against it? Looking outside, they found the door closed and the snow without blemish. “Their own dog was lying quietly in his kennel without a single trace in the fallen snow, of his departure or return,” Jonathan Koons recounted.

Though Koons was well acquainted with his brother’s troubles at the old Fletcher place, Jonathan as a boy found nothing in the tales to prove a hereafter. The same could be said for the times he saw a jack-o’-lantern or will-o’-the-wisp, sometimes called ignis fatuus, or swamp gas. “One of these luminous forms was frequently seen to travel a path accurately, leading from my father’s residence across a ridge to an adjoining neighbor, which was frequently mistook for the actual approach of some person with a lantern.” Travelers on the turnpike between Bedford and Bloody Run also complained of “ignescent forms” that stalked them with a bright white light or blocked their passage on the road.

Sifting through these stories as a youth in Bedford, Jonathan was not sure what to make of them. Years later in Ohio, as he reflected on his childhood and adolescence, he wrote, “My own personal experience in matters relating to tangible spirit manifestations were very limited, so much so at least that it left my mind in constant doubts and fears that all the remarkable appearances of forms, were nothing but hallucinations which give rise to many serious doubts on the subject of man’s future or spiritual existence.”

But the spirits he would encounter as a middle-aged man were not something to be feared but earnestly to be desired, for they alone could finally put his doubts to rest.

* * *

THE spiritualist fervor had entered Athens County through an improbable route—from the west rather than the epicenter in the Northeast. Joseph Herald, an Athens County resident, encountered a rapping medium while on a trip to Indiana.

“Is there a medium in my county?” Herald inquired of the spirits.

They responded, presumably through raps, that one Mary Jane Paston was a rapping medium. Upon his return home Herald called upon the Paston family, none of whom knew anything about spiritualism. Undeterred, Herald asked them to sit around a table with him to form a traditional circle that included 16-year-old Mary Jane. To their complete amazement they soon heard raps.

The Pastons were a bit perplexed by this development, as the father was an atheist and the mother a Methodist. Mr. Paston especially was skeptical about any spiritual origins of the messages, holding firm in his rejection of the afterlife. Nonetheless the family continued to hold séances and began attracting crowds. The father, however, soon tired of visitors’ frequenting his home and taking up the Pastons’ time with this newfound obsession. He was also concerned about his daughter’s participation in what many regarded as a shady enterprise. Determined to put a stop to the craziness, he forbade Mary Jane to continue rapping or sitting for circles. Henceforth anyone who stopped to inquire about the medium within was turned away at the door.

Even as weeks or months of relative peace and quiet ensued, Paston nursed a worried mind. Perhaps he had acted rashly in shutting down his daughter’s activities; perhaps there really was something to be explored. He contacted someone he knew to be of his own religious persuasion—the infidel Jonathan Koons. Around February 1852, Paston invited Koons to visit and join him in investigating the mystery, apparently relenting on his edict to Mary Jane. As Koons’s interest was already piqued by newspaper stories about spiritualism, he needed little urging to accept the invitation. “But as far as this matter concerned my own faith, I supposed it to be a fraud imposed upon the credulous part of [the] community, by a set of designing aspirants for power and gain,” he wrote. “I accordingly set out with a firm and assiduous zeal to detect their fraud and make a full exposure of their designs.”

Once Mary Jane had seated herself at a table and placed her hands on top, her father began the dialogue.

“Is there a spirit present?” Paston asked.

A rap was heard in the vicinity of the table. As Paston continued to query the spirit, it would rap once to indicate yes but would pause or remain silent to signal no.

“This however, was not very satisfactory to me,” Koons recounted, “as I chose to present my own questions, many of which were asked mentally, which were all correctly answered. And amongst the various questions given by me I enquired for mediums in my own family, naming them over in order, and behold the lot fell upon myself.” Koons must have been amazed and gratified to learn that he possessed these undeveloped talents. He further learned that at an appointed day and hour, the spirits would reveal themselves to him and begin his initiation as a medium.

Koons’s encounter with Mary Jane Paston went a long way toward erasing his skepticism. He went home and immediately began to meditate, hoping to make contact. Nothing happened for several days, until the hour the spirits had decreed finally arrived. According to the Spiritual Telegraph newspaper, Koons’s hand was “seized by some strange influence” and he began writing at terrific speed, filling three or four sheets of paper in a few minutes. The scribbles appeared to be in some kind of language, but he could not read it. The automatic writing continued to produce this alien script for two weeks, until Koons grew weary and concluded that the source was not spirits but “some unconscious mental action of his own.” Abigail, however, was not persuaded. “His wife had observed its influence on him, and did not believe the intelligence and force originated in him or in any other person present,” the Telegraph said, “and while they were discussing the matter, his hand was moved to write a communication to them in English, the character of which entirely disproved his theory.”

Once the breakthrough of using English had been made, it became the lingua franca of spiritual communication in the Koons household. Koons began experimenting with various types of mediumship over the next six months. He was encouraged to learn that his wife and children, even the 7-month-old baby, George Eaton, also had extrasensory abilities. (Koons reported that he by then had nine children, including son Cinderellus, born in 1849, as well as an adopted daughter, 5-year-old Eliza, whose origins are not clear.)

“Soon finding several medium developments in my own family, I was no longer at a loss for proper means to detect the supposed fraud, and from that time the manifestations have progressed in my family,” Koons wrote. Soon not only he but others in the Koons household were writing out messages. In what must surely have been one of the strangest home schools in the country, Jonathan taught the children to develop their own psychic specialties, which he called “these strange spiritual gifts”: “One for rapping, another for [table] tipping, another for writing, another for speaking, another for seeing, and so on.”

In a letter to a friend Koons explained how his group of mediums got better with practice:

During the latter part of the summer 1852, our circle had assumed a considerable degree of order and precision. Alternate groups of different classes of spirits, would preside, as it were,—over the deliberations of our circle—to wit,—the spirits of late deceased friends, Christian martyrs, Jewish rulers, American Indian chiefs, and antediluvian, and pre Adamite spirits. Also, a class of spirits, who called themselves primitive Americans. At this time, we were confined to the tedious method of holding correspondence with the departed, by the tiping of tables, and stands, to the successive letters of the alphabet, that were required to form the syllables, words, and sentences, of which the communication thus received, was composed. If a spirit desired to indict a communication, it would enter a notice of the same, and would appoint a time, for the special purpose.

Koons grew increasingly perplexed as he tried to decipher the meaning behind the messages. Just as ordinary mortals hold contradictory views, so did the invisibles. Did their silly babbling contain any spiritual lessons at all? As his impatience grew, Koons felt that the cacophony of advice—though given in English—was almost as useless as the original spirit writing that he could not read. “After communicating with Spirits of every grade, and those of every sect and party of men that ever inhabited the earth, each claiming to hold, with sometimes slight variations, the same views that they entertained while living in the body, he got provoked that he could find no oracle upon whom he could rely,” the Spiritual Telegraph recounted.

On August 15, 1852—after six months of recording the bizarre messages—Koons began to feed his manuscripts into the flames of a stove or open hearth in his house. The dwelling began to shake and the furniture was thrown about. Strange noises resembling logs rolling across the roof or trees falling on the cabin scared him, and as the shaking continued, he feared the house would fall down around him. Koons stopped his headstrong act to ask the spirits what they wanted. He was told to hold on a little longer and all would be well. Koons demanded to know whom these reassurances were coming from. Through calling out the alphabet and listening for raps at the appropriate letter, the Koons mediums were able to spell out the identity of the forceful intruder as “King and Master of Paints, Servant and Scholar of God.” His fear perhaps consumed by curiosity, Koons demanded to know King’s history. The spirit agreed to give it two days hence, at 3:00 p.m. on August 17. He asked Koons not to burn any more manuscripts in the meantime and not to abandon his quest. Should Koons decide to accept the offer, he, King, would corral the entities at future circles. King would banish the base spirits that muddled Koons’s mind. All the Koons family had to do was accept King as their spiritual guide.

* * *

ON August 16, 1852—the day after the spirit King made himself known to the family—Nahum Koons took up a pencil and began to draw. Supposedly acting at the direction of King, Benjamin Franklin, and other entities, the 14-year-old sketched a diagram of what the spirits called “an electrical table” that would enable them not only to speak but to create vocal and instrumental music. Jonathan Koons set to work. He hired a man to help him build the table although he could ill afford the expense. Even with the diagram, Koons apparently had to do some experimenting to get it right, and the task soon proved frustrating. “Sometimes Mr. Koons fancied they [the spirits] altered their original drawing, or else he had not fully understood it,” the Spiritual Telegraph reported.

Just as he had done when learning automatic writing, Koons eventually became discouraged enough to consider jettisoning his quixotic scheme. After a week or two of fruitless effort, he sought in vain for a sign that the spirits would fulfill their promises. “Being in a state of gloom and great despondency, with his relatives and friends chiding him for the foolish expenditure, and reporting that he was crazy, etc., it was more than he could bear,” the Telegraph explained, “and he resolved again to abandon the whole thing and burn up the several parts of the table which he had made.”

Magically, as Koons was about to consign the electrical table to the flames, the now-familiar aural sensation of trees or logs rolling on the cabin roof and falling to the ground started up again. As before, Abigail begged him not to do anything rash and to keep working. The furniture lurched around the cabin as husband and wife debated the issue. Nahum walked into the room in the midst of the turmoil. Koons told his son to “go to the table and find out what those devils want.” With Nahum acting as the medium, the spirits tipped out a stern rebuke: Jonathan must stop his impulsive behavior and finish the project. But Jonathan, by now in a combative mood, refused to work any further unless the spirits renewed their commitment. Finally the invisibles gave specific instructions on how to assemble the table, telling Jonathan they would soon communicate in the manner they had promised.

He dropped his plans to scuttle the machine, and by the next evening the pieces of the apparatus had been put in place according to the spirits’ directions. Jonathan refused to join the circle that surrounded the prototype that night and threatened to burn it up if nothing happened. Presumably Nahum, his mother, and other family members conducted the strange vigil. “A few moments after the circle was formed, the wires of the machine began to pulsate as it were, and increased in strength until the whole machine shook like an aspen leaf, and even the whole house trembled,” the Spiritual Telegraph recounted. After half an hour of disturbance, something rapped out FAREWELL FRIENDS, thus encouraging Jonathan to complete the table.

The final product was a contraption made of metal and wood whose purpose was “collecting and focalizing the magnetic aura used in the manifestations.” Sometimes described as a “novel battery,” “retainer of electricity,” or “spirit machine,” it was really an apparatus that was placed on top of a six-legged wooden table about 6 feet long and 30 inches wide.

A wooden post 4 feet high rose up perpendicular to the tabletop. Fastened to each side of the post was a carved piece of wood. The upright post had two or three iron bars passing through it parallel to the table. Hanging from the iron bars were what one observer called “a wire woven into a kind of net work with copper and tin plates, and small bells.” Others thought that the metal plates were made of copper and zinc; almost everyone agreed that they were fashioned in the shape of doves. Jonathan had stocked the drawers underneath the tabletop with paint, brushes, and paper that the spirits might need. Down near the floor, a horizontal wooden bar with eight sides was suspended by copper wires.

During the next few days the spirits began to assert themselves through the machine. According to the Spiritual Telegraph, “The spirits wrote on the table with chalk, time was beat to music, Spirit-bands were organized, etc.” From this cacophony a clear demand emerged: the spirits gave Jonathan a list of instruments required for their music making. He had no idea where to find items such as a drum, accordion, harmonica, banjo, cornet, tambourine, and bells, but he was told to travel to McConnelsville or Malta, two towns that faced each other across the Muskingum River some 30 miles from his home.

Jonathan and Nahum quickly embarked on the quest. Arriving in Malta on horseback, the two could find no store that sold the instruments. “He [Koons] felt that he had been humbugged,” the Spiritual Telegraph reported, “but, after putting up the horse, they went out with a piece of paper and pencil, and seeing a buggy wagon standing under a shed put the paper and pencil in it, and stepped [to] one side a rod or two; after remaining some minutes they went to the wagon and found written upon the paper, ‘Cross over the river to McConnelsville and inquire of the first man you meet if he knows who has musical instruments.’”

Once in McConnelsville Nahum and Jonathan encountered a stranger who directed them to the private residence of a man who owned a drum. They struck a deal and left the man’s home with not only the drum but directions to the owners of other instruments. The pair went house to house and almost miraculously were able to procure all the items on the spirits’ wish list.

Upon returning home the Koonses arranged the musical instruments as the spirits wanted. The electrical table was fitted with two drums, a bass and a tenor. They were placed opposite each other, attached to two curved pieces of wood sticking up at the back of the table. The Koonses laid the other instruments on the tabletop. With the angel band configured, the Koonses had done all they could. Now they could only wait until dark—the time the spirits liked best—for the invisibles to bring the instruments to life. Before long, it would not be Jonathan Koons playing his fiddle solo at the Koons farm; a whole heavenly host would join him in song.

* * *

AS their fascination with spiritualism continued to ramp up, word of the Koonses’ nighttime activities had begun to spread. Curious neighbors, as well as folks from outside the area, started to gather at the Koons farm. The house consisted of two cabins, each 18 by 22 feet, connected dogtrot style by “a rough shed” that served as an entryway. Wooden shakes held down by heavy poles covered the exterior. Their friend David Fulton from Amesville was a frequent visitor to the circles along with other members of his family. Fulton was by necessity an overnight guest, as he lived too far away to return home safely after the séances. He described the scene:

One end of the dwelling, or one of the cabins, was occupied (one or two years) for the “Spirit Manifestations.” This caused the other to be very much thronged, especially in cold weather, it being the kitchen, parlor, sitting-room and bed-room altogether. Here I have seen, again and again, one or two tables filled with persons not of their own family. Then comes bed-time; the floor has to be cleaned, and beds have to be divided and divested of part of their covering and arranged upon the floor to make accommodations for those who remain. Morning comes: some, not too distant, leave for home; others remain till after breakfast, and if any would summon up resolution to inquire what he charged his universal reply was, “Not anything, that he made no charge;” and thus, taking advantage of his generosity, would leave.

Despite the constant uproar in their home, Jonathan and Abigail impressed Fulton with their hospitality: “I must truly say that I never in the first instance have seen a frown on his countenance, or that of his amiable lady, who is certainly one of the finest women in the world.”

* * *

EVEN with the construction of the electrical table and the gathering of the musical instruments and art supplies, the spirits’ demands were not yet sated. They instructed Koons to erect a separate building exclusively for their use, a structure that soon was called the spirit room. As Koons’s friend David Fulton recalled it, half of the Koons residence—one of the two connected log cabins—was used for séances for “one or two years,” presumably before the spirit room was built. But Koons told it differently, and in his accounts the spirit room was up and running by December 1852, about 10 months after his conversion. Later some of Koons’s more imaginative followers would liken it to the psychomanteums of ancient Greece, where pilgrims seeking initiation into the mystery religions went down into underground caverns and, with the aid of priests and psychoactive drugs, were believed to communicate with spirits of the dead.

Just 6 feet from his own house, Koons built a one-room, mud-chinked log cabin with a peaked roof. Visitors variously estimated its size as 18 feet long by 15 feet wide by 9 feet high or 16 feet by 12 feet by 7 feet. The door and shuttered windows fit so tightly that the light was blocked out when they were closed.

Inside, the rectangular table supporting the spirit machine was placed at one end of the room with enough space for someone to pass behind it. The wall behind the electrical table had rustic shelves. At the other end of the cabin Koons placed benches in a tiered arrangement that resembled theater seating. In the middle, between the electrical table and the audience, as many as eight mediums and guests would sit around a second table that abutted the long one. This second table has variously been described as a “common cherry breakfast table” and “a common fall-leaf table, about 3 -1/2 feet square.” The mediums sat in a semicircle that connected with both ends of the electrical table. Between the mediums’ backs and the front row of audience seating was a coal-burning stove; the clearance on either side was only a foot, which made it difficult to walk around. The stovepipe passed through a planked ceiling and low garret before piercing the peaked roof. Over time the garret would be filled with “old shoes and other old trumpery.” Koons’s list of props for the spirit room had now expanded to include two accordions, bass and tenor drums, tambourine, guitar, banjo, harps and bells, toys to give to the audience, and several pistols.

* * *

ONCE the Koonses had accepted his guidance, the spirit calling himself King dominated the séances. He provided his history to the family as promised on August 17, 1852, when he claimed to be the head of a band of 165 spirits. King daringly declared himself, as well as the earth, to be “of more ancient date than Adam.” He claimed to have lived 14,000 years earlier and that “he belonged to a people whose organization would in these days be called giants, and in consequence of this superior physical endowment, they were called a nation of kings. Hence his cognomen is King,” a Buffalo newspaper explained. A great congress of entities from the various “spirit-spheres” had recently adopted a plan to communicate with humans through raps, and King—because of his evolved spiritual nature—was among those deputized to proceed. The cosmic outreach was proving wildly successful.

Though King sometimes did communicate by rapping, the entity also was said to provide written messages, which he signed “King, Servant and Scholar of God.” Sometimes the names of multiple male authors would appear at the end of a document, such as “Moses, King, Adam, David” or even “King 1. King 2. Adam. Moses.” Some believed that “King 1” and King 2” had been a father and son while on Earth. The revered Swedenborg also was counted among the heavenly messengers. At other times King would step aside and give voice to an angel named Oress or to culturally exotic spirits such as Native Americans or Chinese. On one occasion, a spirit revealed that “he had lived in Africa, before the human family had progressed to language”—which would certainly have made him more ancient than King, the 14,000-year-old. King’s most playful moniker, “Master of Paints,” referred to the watercolor paintings supposedly produced by his band—one such creation being a bejeweled chariot called a spirit car.

Visitors to the Koons Spirit Room were often invited to read the sermons that the spirits had composed, though Koons’s critics would say that the writing style suspiciously resembled his own. One visitor recounted that he “spent the afternoon in examining papers, purporting to have been written by the spirits, some of them written while the room was under lock and key, some written in the presence of many persons, without the aid of a medium . . . and some written through mediums. These papers were almost entirely upon theological subjects, and contained some of the most able arguments.”

Interpreting these messages from the beyond, Jonathan Koons saw the spirits’ philosophy as a positive, inclusive one. “I will now give you some of the leading features of the doctrines taught by our spiritual correspondents,” he wrote to a spiritualist newspaper. “Viz: They teach that God is purely love. Also, that God has placed man under a law of progression, that all can become participants of his glory and divine blessings, by the consent of their own wills.”

The purpose behind the manifestations was to free humanity from the perennial fear of death, to assure everyone that human personalities would survive physical decay. Jonathan and Abigail must have been overjoyed to receive the following poem with the dedication “To My Mother”:

Rejoice in fullness of love,

In the smiles of your angel dove.

Who was plucked from your kind embrace,

From the branch of tender days,

Whose soul to you returns,

Whose love now purely burns,

For friends who yet do dwell,

In their weak mortal cell,

To teach God’s love and will,

For their joys to fill.

Though their little daughter’s earthly raiment lay nearby in the family cemetery, Filenia Koons had cast off the old coat and put on the new. She was reaching out to comfort those still in the body.