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
