romantic to see how remote the countryside actually was. Whether visitors were stoked by religious zeal or plain curiosity, just getting there required stamina and determination. Approaching from the west, a pilgrim would take a train to Lancaster, Ohio—the nearest point by railroad—and travel more than 40 miles by stagecoach or canal packet to Chauncey, a village in Athens County’s Dover Township. Travelers from Columbus would have to take the stagecoach through Lancaster and proceed to the southeast on a journey spanning more than 70 miles. “I staged over a country that enabled me to fully realize the inspiration of that elegant song, ‘Jordan is a hard road to travel,’” wrote a visitor from New York City. “But I feel myself amply repaid for the wear and tear of my journey, and would again undertake the same, as cheerfully as did ever a pilgrim to the holy land.”
Some pilgrims coming from the east fared better by a water route: a steamboat carried them from Zanesville or Marietta to McConnelsville on the Muskingum River, where they were obliged to hire a private carriage for the last leg of the journey. Others approaching from Cincinnati could travel upstream on the Ohio River, disembarking at Pomeroy for the inland trip. When traveling by coach or carriage, however, “the miles bear no correspondence to the hours, for on every route they think they do well if they accomplish two and a half miles an hour,” an Illinois passenger wrote. Once in Chauncey, weary travelers had to walk 2 or 3 miles to the Koons home or find a local willing to take them there on horseback or by carriage. “Fare, hog and homminy,” quipped one wit, “and he needs to endure that travels in that country!”
Though visitors were still only in the foothills of the Appalachians, they faced an arduous climb to reach the Koons farm, poised more than 1,000 feet above sea level. “The way to Mr. Koons’ house leads through several miles of mountainous woods,” a visitor named J. B. wrote. “It is one of the wildest countries I ever saw. Here and there bright little streams come jumping over the rocks and down the mountainsides; echoes ring through the thick forest—it seems, indeed, the fit abode for Spirits.”
“When you finally get into Koons’s vicinity,” an Illinois man reported, “you find the essence of hills personified; there is no such thing as a level spot large enough to put a house on. Koons’s house is located on the southeast angle of a sharp ridge, some few rods below the edge of the ledge, and where, when the native trees occupied the ground, the lightning was wont to make frolic among them; and where it still likes to sport.” During his visit “the stove-pipe above the spirit room was burst off, and a number of times during the sitting of the mediums, electric sparks were seen to play over the wires of the spirit table.”
More than one writer would comment on the unusual electrical properties that seemed to infuse this locale. The chemist, professor, and author Robert Hare—one of the most prominent converts to spiritualism in the United States—believed that “there is something in the locality that favours mediumship.” A curious person once asked the presiding spirit during a séance why the manifestations were seen in the vicinity of the Koons farm rather than elsewhere. “[He] was told that it was owing to the peculiar geological formation; the material on which, and by which, spirits act, existing there, in singular abundance. He said he had never seen such a rich out-cropping of minerals, combined with richness of vegetation, and salubrity.” Another visitor called it simply “the enchanted ground.”
Although the atmosphere may have been electric, the appearance of the Koons homestead bespoke thrift and industry rather than magical largesse. Koons’s friend David Fulton wrote, “He is a plain, unvarnished farmer, having a large family of small children, [and] owns a small piece of very rough land indeed, has it well fenced in small fields, and cultivates it in the neatest manner; and in addition to his regular set orchard, he has his fence-corners generally set with the choicest of fruit trees. On this small, rough bit of ground, Mr. K. so managed it as to make a comfortable living for his large little family.” An out-of-state visitor found the Koons home place “a very romantic spot among the hills,” adding that the groves of apple and peach trees “give something of the appearance of comfort to the surrounding scenery.”
When the spiritualist publisher Charles Partridge made the trip from New York City, on a spring evening he saw “from thirty to fifty men sitting on stones, logs and fences around a dilapidated log-cabin” with their carriages parked and horses tied nearby. “The men looked respectable, and their deportment and conversation bore the impress of a religious meeting,” Partridge reported. In the same yard, not far from the Koons residence, sat the spirit room that was attracting crowds almost nightly. “I inquired [of the men] what Spirits lived there, and was told that it was the room where people go in to talk with their Spirit friends who have gone out of their earthly tabernacle,” he wrote.
Adding to the spookiness of the place were stories about the Koons family’s knowing things about their guests they shouldn’t have known, had no way of knowing. Several high-profile visitors took deliberate steps to conceal their identity as a means of testing the Koonses. The Reverend Thomas Benning of New York, riding over the hills to the Koons homestead, “was suddenly impressed to maintain a profound incognito while there.” Once inside the spirit room, Benning remained tight-lipped about his identity and place of origin, only to be astonished by the spirit King’s words to Jonathan: “Do you know who you have got here? We do. He has come a long ways. We sent him.” This statement alone did not prove that King, or Koons for that matter, knew Benning’s identity. Perhaps it would have been easy to deduce from the minister’s city dress that he had come a far distance. But when Benning entered the room a second time that same day, he found a letter “addressed to his initials and in the proper handwriting of his deceased wife,” the Spiritual Age reported.
Benning was not the only one to be so greeted. When Partridge arrived at the Koons establishment, he, too, found that Koons was expecting him, although the two had not corresponded about the visit, much less met face to face. Just as a real telegraph carried messages in a mysterious fashion, the “spiritual telegraph”—the name of Partridge’s newspaper—seemed to be operating between New York City and the wilds of Ohio. And a Pennsylvania medium, traveling with a friend by steamer down the Ohio River, made his way to the Koons place and got a hearty welcome from the family. Jonathan Koons “was aware of our coming,” the medium explained, “for he had been in communication with me two days previously, by spirit power.”
* * *
A November day in 1852 found Jonathan Koons digging for treasure. He was spading up the ground under a hickory tree in the woods near his house, just as the spirits had told him to. The adventure had begun the day before when his sons Nahum and Samuel, aged 15 and 12, were herding some cattle home from a pasture about a mile away. While passing by a scattering of stones that circled the hickory, the boys felt something plucking at their arms, grabbing their wrists, and trying to pull them off the path and toward the rocks. Spooked, they returned home and wasted no time in telling Abigail what had happened.
Their mother guessed that the spirits were trying to communicate, so she, Jonathan, and probably Nahum repaired to the spirit room to find the source of the boys’ scare. The shade of an Indian chief revealed that he and another entity had accosted Nahum and Samuel to call attention to what was actually a burial place. Within the rocky circle, Jonathan would find the ashes of the chief’s body, together with his weapons. The invisible gave his name as Jewannah Gueannah Musco and explained that his tribe had waged war on another tribe that was siding with the whites—an alliance the chief deemed traitorous. His warriors, Musco explained, had “persued them unto death, as they would the wolf and the bear.”
Despite the ferocity of Musco’s attacking force, he was fatally struck by an arrow. To honor his dying request, Musco’s warriors burned his body on a pile of wood and buried his ashes and personal effects under the hickory tree, placing the stones around it. As proof of his authenticity and as an example to unbelievers, the spirit asked Koons to take two neutral observers to the spot and dig up the relics.
The message made sense to Koons and may have come as
