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.
6
A Buried Man’s Instructions
CITY DWELLERS making the pilgrimage through hilly southeastern Ohio to the door of Jonathan Koons in 1852 encountered what seemed to them a strange and exotic landscape, one sometimes called the Huckleberry Knobs. Farmers and merchants had access to faraway markets through the Hocking Canal, built in the 1840s, but a railroad would not reach Athens County for another four years. “This country is about 50 years behind the age,” wrote a clergyman visiting the Koons homestead from afar. “The inhabitants are a plain, simple-hearted people, dressed in their plain, homespun clothes, males and females; living in log cabins, such as the early settlers occupied about a century ago. A kinder-hearted people I never saw.”
The
