back a biblical salvo, accusing Koons of violating the Ninth Commandment (Thou shalt not bear false witness) by vouching for the acrimonious letter. Ryors identified the man who asked him to preach Filenia’s funeral as “Mr. Hughes” (probably Jonathan’s brother-in-law or nephew, through Jonathan’s sister Elizabeth Hughes) and assumed that Hughes had written the letter. But the minister cast the events in a much different light as he explained them from his perspective.
Ryors wasn’t feeling well on a hot, late-summer day when Hughes approached him around 11:00 a.m. with a request to officiate at the funeral at 1:00 p.m. Ryors was unprepared to travel the 7 miles from Athens to the Koons farm, but more important was that he did not know the family. While denying that he had asked about the Koonses’ politics, he acknowledged that he had asked several reasonable questions: Were the parents religious and, if so, of what denomination? What had caused the girl’s death, and did she die peacefully? Ultimately, however, his concern for his own health had led him to refuse Hughes’s request.
The next letter to the Messenger came from the Reverend W. F. Stewart and gave his version of events: Koons’s emissary (“a stranger”) came to the parsonage specifically seeking a Methodist clergyman to preach the funeral. The unnamed man “urged me to go, saying that Mr. K., tho’ not a member, frequently attended the Methodist Church, and would like to have a minister of that denomination.” But Stewart demurred, explaining that he was leaving town the next day and “was much pushed for time.” In his published letter Stewart delivered a stinging rebuke to Koons and “A Friend” for their “strange and indelicate” public mention of “matters thus connected with the dead.” “I am willing to make sacrifices for the consolation of the bereaved,” Stewart fumed, “but I do think it unkind that those who seek shelter in no branch of the Christian Church should not only expect the minister of the gospel to run at their call, but hold him up in the public prints when prevented by previous engagements from doing them service.”
Koons sent a somewhat conciliatory letter to the Messenger the following week in which he backtracked, suggesting that his original letter may have been misunderstood. But after brief apologies, he could not resist one final barb: “Since the law of retaliation is neither congenial to common sense or moral virtue, I heartily recommend a truce with my competitors, ere the sheep’s clothing be rent from the wolf.”
Was Jonathan Koons simply unlucky, taking a last-minute chance on finding a speaker for his daughter’s funeral when he had no pastor of his own? Or was the religious edifice of Athens stacked against him? It is clear that neither Ryors nor Stewart knew the Koons family, and therefore they did not refuse to come their aid out of disapproval or spite. More likely, neither pastor felt a necessity to go out of his way to assist someone who was not a member of his church. Not having a “church home” left the Koonses with no one to officiate at weddings and funerals, although the absence of Abigail’s father, the Reverend Samuel Gaylord Bishop, is hard to fathom.
Koons’s withering exchange with the ministers shows his combativeness and nimble tongue but also reveals his sense of exclusion from Christianity, even from established society. He had even gone so far—on the heels of his apology—as to characterize members of the clergy as “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Why he cared so much is a mystery, given his unorthodox views. Yet Robert L. Daniel, in his book Athens, Ohio: The Village Years, notes that “the churches of the village remained the most important groups in which Athenians participated. . . . Membership tended to confer an aura of respectability, given the penchant for disciplining the wayward. . . . At the same time, keen denominational rivalries precluded cooperation between the churches.”
Reflecting on the incident five years later, Koons was still bitter toward the ministers, now claiming that three clergymen had refused him. Perhaps unwilling to appreciate the social advantages of church membership, he wrote, “[When] three ‘preachers’ were solicited, of different denominations—all strangers to myself—each in turn drew the religious and temporal history of my family from my friend; and finding we were not members of their respective orders, they all denied their service, under some feigned excuse, none of which, however, justified their denials in our judgment. Had the examination of my family history been omitted by them, their excuses would have been received. But as the case stood, I could not consider them faithful stewards in the discharge of their professed duties.”
Koons had taken the ministers’ rejection deeply and personally. As he stood in the rain-cooled breeze at his daughter’s graveside, he resolved to challenge the orthodoxy of the Christian sects at every opportunity—and they in turn would brand him as worse than an infidel.
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.
