Shows, Fred Nadis makes the provocative statement that “every historical study is a veiled autobiography.” Although that maxim may not be uniformly applicable, it resonates for me. I have always been attracted to mysteries large and small. As a child and enthusiastic member of the Nancy Drew book club, I was transported to a world where fictional mysteries unfolded like clockwork in old hotels, larkspur lanes, and hidden staircases. In the real world I wondered who had made the arrowheads that farmers routinely plowed up from the fields around our home. As I began to study science, more curiosities presented themselves: the dark side of the moon, the stars, the dinosaurs, Mendel’s peas, and Schrodinger’s cat—and I wondered what future discoveries might reveal about the cosmos. I even dreamed of becoming a scientist myself.
But mysteries of the supernatural resided in a category all their own. I waited in rapt anticipation for my grandma to open the book of Grimm’s fairy tales and begin to read. I shivered as other relatives told of a headless horseman patrolling a lonesome hollow in our neighborhood. Such flights of imagination led me to speculate on what magical creatures might dwell in the misty folds of Cumberland Mountain, whose high rocky rim dominated the landscape of my youth. And in church we learned of magical feats such as walking on water or through fire, how Gideon’s fleece changed from dry to wet, and why the hand wrote on Belshazzar’s wall. The difference was that these stories, unlike “Hansel and Gretel,” were believed to be literally true.
Over fifty years later I am still as interested in mysteries as I was back then—both of a scientific and metaphysical kind. I have gained much comfort, and perhaps some insight, from reading the works of poets, philosophers, scientists, and assorted radical thinkers. As a young child I had feelings of déjà vu that I could not really articulate, but years later I instantly recognized them in Wordsworth’s verse from 160 years before:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
That sense of glory predictably faded over time, but from reading the works of Carl Jung and his disciple Joseph Campbell as an adult, I have experienced a feeling of connectedness with water, rocks, trees, and animals—both human and not. Jung demonstrated how many cultures throughout the world share the same archetypes, although they have different expressions—perhaps an indication of a great mind or consciousness that unites not only humans but other forms of life. Jonathan Koons and his fellow believers were attempting to tap into this vast reservoir—although other religions could claim other, equally valid, pathways. Koons was the product of a time and place, just as I am. And though this book was not intended as a “veiled autobiography,” I will be the first to acknowledge that by learning his story I have been able to trace some philosophical dilemmas of my own. I hope the reader will find illumination as well, and, if not, will simply be entertained by Jonathan Koons’s tale.
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FEW visible structures remain from the world that Jonathan Koons and his extended family created when they settled on a high ridge in Dover Township in the 1830s. Both Koons’s 1852 Spirit Room and another built about 20 years later have succumbed to the ravages of time. One artifact that survives is a small hilltop cemetery where his daughter and brother lie buried. As the Koons family stood around the fresh graves of their kin in the mid-nineteenth century, they grappled with the perennial questions that the death of a loved one brings. What can we know in this life about the next, if there is one? It is a search, as one Victorian letter writer put it, for evidence of “the continued life.” But the path they took to seek that truth, that is what makes this story.
1
The Frenchman’s Visit
IT WAS an age that loved its wonders—the bizarre, the spectacular, and the arcane. In the 1850s sightseers could tour Barnum’s American Museum in New York City to gawk at wax figures of Siamese twins and of a giant and giantess in Quaker dress. The visitors could pause to admire the miniature costume of mulberry-colored velvet worn by General Tom Thumb to his audience with Queen Victoria—or on a lucky day meet the diminutive Tom himself. But in the backwoods of Ohio, hundreds of miles from that center of commerce, the curious were flocking to a remote country cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions. The farmer-turned-medium Jonathan Koons had built a special house where it was said that the dead spoke to the living, where the ancient spirits of the place deigned not only to reveal the wisdom of the ages to visitors but to serenade them with celestial music.
Like hundreds before him, Joseph Barthet had heard of the mysterious goings-on at Koons’s hillside farm, only 7 miles distant but far removed from the county seat and university town of Athens. So renowned was the rustic cabin called the Spirit Room that Dr. Barthet, a mesmerist and devotee of spiritualism, had traveled more than 1,000 miles from New Orleans to see it for himself. He joined a restive crowd, some dressed in homespun and others in city attire, that had already gathered outside, awaiting admittance to the evening’s demonstrations.
Barthet was ushered into a log structure that he estimated to be 15 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 7 feet high. He found himself in a one-room building with a most peculiar contraption at one end: a wooden table the size of a coffin affixed with a bewildering profusion of wires, metal bars, tin plates, pieces of glass, and small bells. Some wires ran to two drums, about 5 feet apart, that were fixed to a frame hoisted above the table. Barthet had heard that the device had been constructed under the guidance of the spirits to energize the room and help focus their essence. On the table itself sat a tin trumpet about 18 inches long with a small mouthpiece. A hand bell, tambourine, accordion, and harmonica also adorned this unlikely altar. Writing paper, a pencil, a book, and two sheets of sandpaper coated with phosphorus completed the eerie tableau.
No stranger to a séance, Barthet scanned his surroundings with a discerning eye. A decade or so earlier the French émigré had organized mesmerists in New Orleans as the Magnetic Society, men who thought that a fluid with electrical properties permeated the universe and, with the aid of hypnosis, could be harnessed for its healing powers. From there it was just a short step to believe that entranced individuals also could be in touch with the healing spirits of the dead. As the spiritualist craze spread to New Orleans from the North in the 1850s, Barthet had become a leading voice of the new religion of spiritualism, initiating some of the first circles in the city. Although he had come to this gathering in Ohio as part true believer, Barthet would not disavow the habits of mind that had made him a dispassionate observer. He watched curiously as the 20 or so guests filed into the spirit room and his host prepared for the evening’s performance.
Jonathan Koons’s hair was the color of hickory nuts, and he wore it long and parted in the middle. With his full beard and heavy brows over deep-set dark eyes, Koons wore a mantle of grave intellect about his person. But even in middle age he carried the livelier traits of the performing artist as well, for it was said that he could hear a tune whistled just once and effortlessly reproduce it on his fiddle. Tonight, with violin in hand, Koons took his place at a second, smaller table that had been pushed up in front of the rectangular one that supported the two drums and the other musical instruments. His son Nahum, a tall, fair-haired teenager known as Nim, took a seat on the opposite side of the smaller table, which was reserved for the mediums and
