county, in an area prone to lightning strikes and carved in legend as a sacred spot for the Shawnee Indians. Maps made much later would depict the Mount Nebo Trail threading along the ridgetop, perhaps referring to a timeworn path trod by Native Americans. By the time Abigail and Jonathan took up farming there, the Indians had been driven out, yet here in this western land some believed their spirits still lurked among the glades they had once inhabited. Some people even told that Koons had been able to purchase the land so cheaply because others were afraid to live there.
Just a few miles southwest of Mount Nebo fanned out the broad expanse of Wolf’s Plains, where monuments to a much earlier Indian presence remained. Here along the Hocking River the ancient people had constructed a 3-square-mile complex of earthworks. Settlers had noticed not only conical burial mounds but circular enclosures that reminded them of an old fort. Later scholars, however, would interpret these open-air structures as ceremonial theaters where shamans, often under the influence of psychoactive drugs, sought entry to the spirit world. Here in these sacred circles, perhaps two millennia before Jonathan and Abigail Koons’s day, Native Americans had donned wolf skins and lit fires, performing their sacred rites under the light of the moon. In his role as ambassador and guide, the shaman would contact spirits from the other side, sometimes those of animals—and sometimes those of the dead.
The magnetic pull of the buried man’s instructions led Koons to the woods where the boys had been affrighted. Koons had convinced two local men to join him and Nahum on the quest. They had walked southward only about three-quarters of a mile when they encountered a large hickory “near a broken strata of sand rock, that projected from the bluff point of an adjacent hill.” With the two witnesses looking on, Koons scraped aside the ocher husks of the last summer’s leaves and began to dig. The black loam of the forest yielded to red clay, but at a depth of 24 inches, still not a trace of anything unusual had turned up. The neighbors might have wondered whether they had been called away from their chores on a fool’s errand. Finally, 3 feet down, came the clank of the shovel hitting something solid. Just as the Indian had foretold, Koons pulled from the grave a stone battle-ax, arrows, and a stone breastplate. These artifacts, Koons believed, would make a fine display at his home—yet another proof of the wonders, as if any more proof were required.
* * *
AS Koons’s spirit guide, King, had told him, Ohio was once deluged by a primordial sea. King’s observation did not contradict the conventional wisdom, for everybody who read the Bible knew that in the beginning the earth was “without form and void, and waters moved upon the face of the deep.” But that was just the starting point for King’s controversial views; he was not satisfied with the six-day story of Creation. The earth had roiled with change through endless eons: “Periods of duration have elapsed too great for human powers to estimate,” King advised. “Vast and successive revolutions have taken place. . . . The space of time since ADAM is but a single link, of the almost endless chain which stretches forth from the moment that matter first began to be brought together, by the Almighty Power and wisdom of God.”
Early nineteenth-century geologists studying southern Ohio likely would not have faulted King’s conclusions. The landscape told a story that did not support the time line of Genesis, either. Eons before, even before there were humans to behold them, some of the area’s waterways had flowed in the opposite direction from what Jonathan Koons would have observed in his time. Starting in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a river of Nile-like proportions had cut a gorge as much as 500 feet deep through Virginia and West Virginia before entering southern Ohio and carving its way into Indiana and Illinois. Tributaries of the northwestward-flowing Teays River had drained all of Athens County about five million years earlier.
Much later, repeated intrusions by glaciers had changed all that, damming up the waterway and forming a giant frozen lake. When the glaciers retreated, they dumped their mighty load of silt and gravel into the Teays’s drainage system, burying it and creating the Ohio River. The new channel, which flowed south, eventually brought European settlers to the newly contoured land. But the old pattern was not obliterated; the trained eyes of early geologists still could discern extinct valleys and dry riverbeds. And every so often a goose flying aloft would spy the ancient trace of the Teays and land by mistake as if on water; and in some places wild magnolias flourished along the riverbanks, far from their southern origins.
Human beings also were of much more ancient origin than commonly believed. Even though bitter debate about human evolution was still several years away, King provocatively declared that the planet “has been successively inhabited by new races of beings,” of which his pre-Adamite order was only one. And even around Dover Township in the 1850s, oddities of a much more recent character were yet to be explained. The native people whom the Europeans first encountered in Ohio had no origin stories to attach to the numerous mounds and earthworks in the area, leaving early surveyors to speculate about who might have built them. Ruminations on the role of the ancient Scythians of Asia, Toltecs, and even “Hindus” would persist for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Koons would come to believe that he himself had found the key to the Indians’ past. “I am in possession of a history of the origin of the red Men, given by a very ancient spirit . . . who claimed to be one of the ancient fathers of that race,” he wrote.
Thus part of the angels’ mission was to bring scientific truth to those who would open their minds to their true place in the universe. “Should I succeed in surmounting your sinful ignorance in this respect, then you may be visited by a host of ancient spirits, with healing in their wings,” King informed the circle. But such startling messages—so out of step with the times—were easier for a spirit to utter than for a mere mortal to profess.
* * *
ONE night, just before Christmas 1852, Jonathan Koons watched as flames licked at the smoldering remains of his barn. Gone were his crops from the past growing season, along with a new wagon, plows, and other farming tools. By the time the blaze had been discovered, about nine o’clock, nothing could be saved but a visitor’s horse.
Koons knew immediately that the fire had been no accident. Threats of mob action had been bandied about the neighborhood, forming a dark undercurrent to his shining new life as a medium. “The fat was in the fire as soon as the news was spread abroad, that the spirits of the departed friends, were corresponding with their survivors on earth at my residence,” he wrote. According to the Athens Messenger, “a gang of drunken rowdies” had been harassing the Koons family and their guests “almost nightly” for several weeks. Whiskey had finally given license to someone to light the torch.
Koons chafed at the injustice. “While my property was consuming, I asked, what have I done—what authority insulted—what law violated that I should suffer this malice and vengeance?” he wrote. “It was done because I persisted in affording opportunities to investigators: this, and nothing more.” Still, he knew that it could have been far worse. The elements were on his side that clear and cold night, withholding any wind that could have spread the flames to nearby structures. “But for the calm, house, spirit-room, family, all, would have shared the common fate,” he mused.
The Athens Messenger weighed in with a call for redress. “We sympathize with our friend [Koons] in his misfortune and hope the guilty scoundrels may be arrested and brought to justice,” the newspaper said. Koons had a good idea of who had carried out the nighttime attack but decided not to press charges—owing to an act of piety, as he later said, or perhaps to a lack of proof. The identity of the arsonists would remain an official question mark. Yet in Koons’s view, they were only a stalking horse for the religious establishment. “The clergy denounced me from their pulpits as a child of Satan, and a perverter of the Christian Church, saying that I ought to be burned out of house and home, with my family of mediums in the midst of the flames,” he later charged. “These Christian incendiaries thought thereby to compel me to discontinue my séances, for the want of provisions for the use of my family and truth-seeking guests.”
Koons
