on a previous night arrangements were made to assassinate myself and eldest son, but were thwarted by the presence of a crowd of visitors,” he wrote. Such gruesome knowledge must have given the husband and father pause, for ambush might be just a rifle shot away as the family went about their chores on this lonely woodland farm. But Koons would not be dissuaded. Having found the light he had searched for all his life, he would resist all attempts by his enemies to extinguish it.
7
The Trumpet Medium
FOUR DAYS into the new year of 1853, Koons’s circle was keeping a date set exactly four months earlier. At the close of a séance on September 4, a spirit had tipped the table to reveal that it wanted to make contact: “The circle is hereby notified, that Hommo, an ancient Indian chief, desires to favor the circle with a communication, when the circle is not otherwise occupied and engaged.” The appointed hour was upon them, and the results promised to be all the more spectacular now that King no longer depended on tips or raps and was speaking through a trumpet.
The new Indian shade was much older than Jewannah Gueannah Musco, the slain chieftain who supposedly had lived during the time of white settlement in Ohio. Hommo, on the other hand, claimed to have lived 800 years previous to 1853, when the bow and arrow were replacing the spear in the Ohio Valley. But his purpose was the same as Musco’s—leaving to earthly believers the ghastly task of exhuming his remains. In this case Hommo did not give his cause of death. He did explain, however, that his body was embalmed “in a composition of ashes, clay and charcoal; and was placed upon a select spot, with his head towards the ‘rising sun,’ and his face downwards; over which, a monument of earth was erected, about 20 feet [in] diameter at the base.” To build the mound the Native Americans had carried dirt in what Hommo called luggagers, a type of stretcher consisting of an animal skin stretched between two branches of a forked stick to form a basket. Working in teams of three, the Indians would move the earth to the mound site, where for several days each member of the tribe would ceremonially cover the body with it.
Hommo told the Koons family that his body was enshrined in a mound about one and a half miles northeast of their home. He asked that they go there and find his body to “test his veracity.” Jonathan Koons, however, had little enthusiasm for the mission, thinking of the sheer amount of labor involved. He would have demurred from the spirit’s request had it not been for “two visiting investigators,—J. Hoisington and M. Handsberry,” who were keen to make the excavation. Upon digging into the mound, the trio found a skeleton enclosed in what Koons called cement, which seemed dry and waterproof. Their inspection of the mummy was short-lived, however, as most of its bones crumbled upon being exposed to air. Nonetheless Koons found the enterprise to be yet another validation of predictions gleaned from the dead. “All we were told by the spirit, relating to his position and mode of preservation, was found to be correct, to a demonstration,” he wrote.
Although Koons’s digging today would be regarded as grave desecration or destructive amateur archaeology, what he did was commonplace at the time. He took home the few bone fragments that did not disintegrate, believing them to be Hommo’s. He added them to the personal effects of the Indian chief Musco that had been recovered in the woods the previous November. Koons, like many spiritualists, believed the Indians’ messages to be worthy of investigation. Actions that now seem discourteous or disrespectful must have seemed to him an attempt to honor the wishes of the dead.
* * *
FROM time immemorial the idea of a talking object has held the human imagination. “The creation of objects that could talk had long been presumed to be inseparable from the creation of objects that could answer questions, and that might therefore be used to divine secret or future knowledge,” a twenty-first-century folklorist observes. In the tenth century one Gerbert of Aquitaine had created a metal head “by a certain inspection of the stars when the planets were about to begin their courses.” The mysterious object was reported to deliver correct answers to yes or no questions. And Cervantes, in his 1615 novel Don Quixote, has an “enchanted head” that can field questions from guests. In 1853, in rural Ohio, the Koons family was carrying out a tradition as timeless as “mirror, mirror, on the wall”—yet transforming it into something as daring as the latest technological innovation.
With Nahum now developed as a trumpet medium, the Koons circle was free from the tedious business of rapping or table-tipping their way through the alphabet or limiting themselves to yes-or-no questions. Now spirits could deliver whole sermons or the circle could hold conversations with King or other spirits. Historians believe that Jonathan Koons was the first person in the spiritualism movement to develop “direct voice” communication through the trumpet. The Koons instrument must have been more like a metal megaphone than a musical instrument with valves; perhaps the women of the house used it to summon the men from the fields for dinner. It was described as “a tin trumpet about two feet in length” that had the magical quality of levitation. Before long the Koonses would incorporate multiple horns, of both brass and tin, in their séances.
The horn was placed on the mediums’ table before the séance began. “Before using it for speech, it would be raised into the air, then a sentence would be distinctly articulated through it, when it would fall to the table,” one set of visitors to the Koons circle told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “When we asked any questions, as we did repeatedly, the horn would rise, the answer be given, and the horn again fall to the table. At our request they extended the horn to us, and allowed us to take hold of the large end of it, while at the same time conversation was directed through it to us. We observed, that after the horn had been used for a few moments, the small end was sensibly warmer than the large end.”
Jonathan and Nahum could scarcely have imagined that use of the horn would still be debated well into the next century. The magician Harry Houdini, writing 70 years after the Koons demonstrations, was openly contemptuous of the trumpet medium and spiritualist practices in general. “As one who for 35 years has been freeing himself from every sort of bond, encumbrance, and restraint that human ingenuity can devise . . . please permit me to testify that for a medium to free himself from a spiritual circle and so get hold of the trumpet is child’s play!” he declared in 1925.
In the article “How I Unmask the Spirit Fakers,” Houdini explained how tricksters posing as physical mediums can deceive the gullible. The trumpet medium usually sits at a table with the people to his left and right holding his hands, leaving him no opportunity to touch the trumpet lying on the table. But all too often the fraudulent medium is able to get a hand or foot on the trumpet and move it around the room, sometimes with the help of a confederate, sometimes by “his own cleverness.” The “spirit voice” that seems to emanate from the trumpet is actually the medium’s as he or she holds the horn and speaks through it in a disguised voice. At other times, such as in daylight, the faker may use ventriloquism to project his or her voice, even while conversing with others in the circle.
Houdini related how he, along with a reporter and a county prosecutor in Cleveland, once attended a séance at the home of a well-established trumpet medium:
The particular medium of whom I write performed most of the usual tricks with the trumpets. He also caused a guitar, placed on the table before him along with the trumpets, to be play[ed] while he sat with his hands apparent[ly] covering those of the persons who sat at his right and left. . . . And so, when the opportunity presented itself, I slipped out of the circle in which I sat and smeared lamp-black on the trumpets. I waited until the medium had completed his trumpet work; then I rose, drew an electric flashlamp from my pocket, and directed its rays across the table.
It was a startling, though somewhat comical picture that the sudden light disclosed. For there in the circle sat the medium holding the guitar above his head, and his hand and face were as black as a coal heaver’s from the lampblack I had used!
The
