the city.
Throughout the article Houdini tried to strike an evenhanded pose of scientific openness despite the scorn he felt toward mediums. “In regard to spiritualism I am not a skeptic,” he wrote. “Although I have found no genuine physical phenomena medium, by which I mean one who does not produce his effect by purely natural means that any trained magician can duplicate, I still have an open mind. I am willing to be convinced—even to believe, if a medium can demonstrate to me that he actually possesses true psychic power.”
Houdini also rebutted the idea put forward by some spiritualists, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that Houdini himself was a medium, that the spirits aided him in making his miraculous escapes from “handcuffs, ropes, chains, straight-jackets, locks, bolts, prison cells, trunks, safes and packing cases.” As Houdini once told Conan Doyle, “If you were to build a packing case large enough to contain me and all the American spiritualists and the scientists that uphold them, weight it with pig iron, tie us up in it and throw it into the sea, I’d be the only one that would come up. But it would be trickery that would release me.”
Houdini’s contemporary E. J. Dingwall, a magician and expert in psychic research in the 1920s, took a more nuanced view of the trumpet séance. He maintained that a person might choose to visit a trumpet medium for a couple of different reasons, although they are not mutually exclusive. One person might go out of scientific interest, to try to peer behind the smoke and mirrors and see how the phenomenon works. Others, perhaps the majority, go to receive messages from the dead. These believers, Dingwall wrote, “are usually indifferent to the methods of producing voices to which they are listening. In other words, it does not really concern such sitters if the medium is really producing the voices by whispering down the trumpet if the information given is such that it contains matter which could not have been acquired by the medium normally.” If the information supplied through the trumpet proved credible, then the medium must have been using the instrument as “an added attraction” on which her message did not depend.
But Dingwall cautioned amateur investigators to be suspicious of any mediumship conducted in the dark: “The first thing the spiritualist does is to pull down the blinds. He does not tell you that D. D. Home, the most famous medium who ever lived, derided dark séances. . . . Neither will he tell you that the greatest of all trumpet mediums (Mrs. Blake) sat in broad daylight, near the window. . . . If therefore an enquiry into trumpet mediumship is proposed, the beginner had better concentrate upon the voices and the information they give. Do not be led astray by elaborate apparatus.”
When it came to voices from the beyond, opinions would continue to clash for decades.
* * *
THE burning of his barn had made Koons dig in his heels, vow to continue his spiritual investigations. As the stream of out-of-town pilgrims grew ever larger, news of the strange nocturnal rites of the Koons family must have brought mixed reactions from other residents of Athens County. The thunderous drumming that opened each spirit concert was loud enough to annoy the Koonses’ neighbors, but they would have been few in that remote locale. Merchants in the nearby village of Chauncey, which had a large hotel to accommodate businessmen dealing in salt and coal, no doubt saw an uptick in sales to stagecoach passengers bound for the Koons Spirit Room. Other township residents simply must have been excited about the newest form of entertainment to reach their locale.
Most accounts in the press, however, tended to focus on the community’s religious outrage. An enthusiastic visitor to the Koons Spirit Room described it with a touch of sarcasm: “I left the house fully convinced of two facts:—First, that the manifestations were produced by an intelligent power. Second, that that power was not human. These two facts are admitted by the whole neighborhood, with this addition, viz: that the power is ‘The Devil.’ And so firmly are they convinced of this, that some have thought to do God service by burning up the crop and barns of Mr. J. Koons . . . and doing sundry other acts of loving kindness, by which, they expect to cast the devil out.”
Although this attitude may have been prevalent, at least a significant minority of local people embraced the message of love, harmony, and immortality that at times must have been overshadowed by the dramatic nighttime antics of the spirits. These seekers most assuredly became converts to the new religion.
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