The Heyday of Spiritualism

                                This rest of my blogs are going to be concerned with a selection of chapters  from some books I have found on spiritualism. The first of which is The Heyday of Spiritualism by Slater Brown. 

Visitors to the Koonses' Spirit Room would have a trek similar to this

                          The first chapter that I chose to read was Chapter 12 The Koonses' Spirit Room. I couldn't find any good pictures of the Koonses' or their infamous spirit room but I would still like to share their story. The Koonses' spirit room for a brief time in the 1850's served as a spiritualist Mecca and was visited by hundreds of spiritualists from across sections of the United States. The trip to visit the Koonses' spirit room was not an easy one. The room was located in a remote and hilly region near the West Virgina lines. To reach it patrons had to travel by stagecoach from Columbus, Ohio over hilly roads for seventy two miles. This might not seem like a long trek but  one pilgrim estimated the trip to take two and a half jolting miles an hour. That wasn't the end of the trek though. Patrons then had to walk two more miles on foot along a muddy cow path. 

Jonathan Koons

            Jonathan Koons along with his wife Abigail and his eighteen year old son Nahum were all endowed with the medium gift. Jonathan was introduced to his own gifts while on his many travels to a seance in which the spirits there told Jonathan he was a powerful medium. Jonathan and his family held a number of seances and then they were ordered by a band of communicating spirits to build a Spirit Room.


            The spirits gave exact specifications to the Koonses' on how the Spirit Room should be built, its furnishings and equipment. What came out of the spirits instructions was a "log cabin twelve by fourteen feet, with three shuttered windows, a single door, and a ceiling of seven feet high" (pg. 178). Along with a detailed layout the spirits also requested a number of musical instruments to be placed in the Spirit Room. Some of the instruments included a tenor drum, a bass drum, two fiddles, a guitar, a banjo accordion, a French horn, a tin horn, a tea bell, a triangle and a tambourine.

"Ghost's" playing music [not real]

                                              After all was said and done the Koonses' began to conduct seances in the Spirit Room. Before long people from all over the country were coming to view the wondrous things going on inside the desolate log cabin out in the middle of nowhere. The exhibition was often boisterous, and the spirits performance on the musical instruments was at times ear-splitting. All reports agree that in the total darkness of the crowded room it would have been impossible for the Koonses to have provided the uproarious entertainment. According to another witness, "all the floating instruments playing in unison created an unearthly din making the whole house roar so as to almost deafen us." (pg. 180). Charles Partridge reported "the instruments started together as if at a signal and would stop just as abruptly." (pg. 180). The spirits would also sing songs and all the witness agreed that the words were never distinguishable as English.

               The spirits were lead by King Number One, the spirit master of ceremonies who spoke through a tin horn. King Number One explained that he was the chief of the band of spirits, which numbered 165 in all. He declared that they were members of the most ancient and primal order of men predating Adam and Eve by many years. King Number One had two adjutants, King Number Two and King Number Three also called himself Servant and Scholar of God. King Number One delivered addresses, exchanged witticisms with spectators, and at times would give medical advice. 

Unidentified Seance

                The musical program was usually followed by the appearance of hands, either luminous themselves or illuminated by phoshporized sheets of paper prepared by the Koons. Visible to a little above the wrist, the hands were sometimes warm, sometimes cold. 

                The seance in the Spirit Room ended with the spectacle of the luminous hand writing messages (automatic writing of which I have written about before) in pencil on a sheet of paper.All those who described their visit to the Spirit Room saw it write communications, and all agreed that it wrote with incredible rapidity. One spectator put their face so close "that the hand playfully poked his nose with the butt end of the pencil." (pg. 181). 

                   Even if all the reports of what went of in the Spirit Room were made by avowed spiritualists, the general agreement of all of the various accounts as to the flying instruments and the hands offers a good deal of evidence that the Koonses were not putting on a fraudulent performance. The Koonses' did not make any money off of their seances and Jonathan Koons still worked the family farm during this time, sometimes even falling asleep at seances because of his hard labors. The Koonses' Spirit Room continued to operate until the end of 1858. After a half a dozen years of public demonstrations the Koonses moved west to Illinois.