Koons’s inconclusive brush with a ghost could not compare with the stories told by his oldest brother when Jonathan was a youngster. Michael had lived at the old Fletcher place, about 6 miles south of the Koons family home near Bedford. As Jonathan later described it, “The dwelling was constructed in old-fashioned style, with a chimney in the centre, and a fire place on both sides.” The house was essentially a duplex with one party living on one side and another—often a boarder—occupying what was called an “apartment” on the other side. Over the years several folks had lived there but not for very long, thanks to what seemed to be apparitions and strange influences about the place. Despite this reputation Michael’s family moved in and apparently occupied the entire farmhouse. In good weather they noticed how the cattle, lying near the house while chewing their cud in the evening, would suddenly get spooked and run into the woods. Horses returning from a hard day in the fields would all at once take fright and become unmanageable.
In wintertime the family sealed off the far side of the house and did not use it. One snowy night they heard the outside door to the apartment open and close. “They accordingly repaired to the room to see who had entered,” Jonathan Koons wrote. “On entering the apartment a spotted dog was discovered lying upon the bed, which, by the rays of dim light, was mistook for their own, and no one thought any different.” The dog was bidden to leave the room and did so immediately. When the family returned to their quarters, they began to ponder over the experience. How could the west-facing door have gotten open when an enormous snowdrift was piled up against it? Looking outside, they found the door closed and the snow without blemish. “Their own dog was lying quietly in his kennel without a single trace in the fallen snow, of his departure or return,” Jonathan Koons recounted.
Though Koons was well acquainted with his brother’s troubles at the old Fletcher place, Jonathan as a boy found nothing in the tales to prove a hereafter. The same could be said for the times he saw a jack-o’-lantern or will-o’-the-wisp, sometimes called ignis fatuus, or swamp gas. “One of these luminous forms was frequently seen to travel a path accurately, leading from my father’s residence across a ridge to an adjoining neighbor, which was frequently mistook for the actual approach of some person with a lantern.” Travelers on the turnpike between Bedford and Bloody Run also complained of “ignescent forms” that stalked them with a bright white light or blocked their passage on the road.
Sifting through these stories as a youth in Bedford, Jonathan was not sure what to make of them. Years later in Ohio, as he reflected on his childhood and adolescence, he wrote, “My own personal experience in matters relating to tangible spirit manifestations were very limited, so much so at least that it left my mind in constant doubts and fears that all the remarkable appearances of forms, were nothing but hallucinations which give rise to many serious doubts on the subject of man’s future or spiritual existence.”
But the spirits he would encounter as a middle-aged man were not something to be feared but earnestly to be desired, for they alone could finally put his doubts to rest.
* * *
THE spiritualist fervor had entered Athens County through an improbable route—from the west rather than the epicenter in the Northeast. Joseph Herald, an Athens County resident, encountered a rapping medium while on a trip to Indiana.
“Is there a medium in my county?” Herald inquired of the spirits.
They responded, presumably through raps, that one Mary Jane Paston was a rapping medium. Upon his return home Herald called upon the Paston family, none of whom knew anything about spiritualism. Undeterred, Herald asked them to sit around a table with him to form a traditional circle that included 16-year-old Mary Jane. To their complete amazement they soon heard raps.
The Pastons were a bit perplexed by this development, as the father was an atheist and the mother a Methodist. Mr. Paston especially was skeptical about any spiritual origins of the messages, holding firm in his rejection of the afterlife. Nonetheless the family continued to hold séances and began attracting crowds. The father, however, soon tired of visitors’ frequenting his home and taking up the Pastons’ time with this newfound obsession. He was also concerned about his daughter’s participation in what many regarded as a shady enterprise. Determined to put a stop to the craziness, he forbade Mary Jane to continue rapping or sitting for circles. Henceforth anyone who stopped to inquire about the medium within was turned away at the door.
Even as weeks or months of relative peace and quiet ensued, Paston nursed a worried mind. Perhaps he had acted rashly in shutting down his daughter’s activities; perhaps there really was something to be explored. He contacted someone he knew to be of his own religious persuasion—the infidel Jonathan Koons. Around February 1852, Paston invited Koons to visit and join him in investigating the mystery, apparently relenting on his edict to Mary Jane. As Koons’s interest was already piqued by newspaper stories about spiritualism, he needed little urging to accept the invitation. “But as far as this matter concerned my own faith, I supposed it to be a fraud imposed upon the credulous part of [the] community, by a set of designing aspirants for power and gain,” he wrote. “I accordingly set out with a firm and assiduous zeal to detect their fraud and make a full exposure of their designs.”
Once Mary Jane had seated herself at a table and placed her hands on top, her father began the dialogue.
“Is there a spirit present?” Paston asked.
A rap was heard in the vicinity of the table. As Paston continued to query the spirit, it would rap once to indicate yes but would pause or remain silent to signal no.
“This however, was not very satisfactory to me,” Koons recounted, “as I chose to present my own questions, many of which were asked mentally, which were all correctly answered. And amongst the various questions given by me I enquired for mediums in my own family, naming them over in order, and behold the lot fell upon myself.” Koons must have been amazed and gratified to learn that he possessed these undeveloped talents. He further learned that at an appointed day and hour, the spirits would reveal themselves to him and begin his initiation as a medium.
Koons’s encounter with Mary Jane Paston went a long way toward erasing his skepticism. He went home and immediately began to meditate, hoping to make contact. Nothing happened for several days, until the hour the spirits had decreed finally arrived. According to the Spiritual Telegraph newspaper, Koons’s hand was “seized by some strange influence” and he began writing at terrific speed, filling three or four sheets of paper in a few minutes. The scribbles appeared to be in some kind of language, but he could not read it. The automatic writing continued to produce this alien script for two weeks, until Koons grew weary and concluded that the source was not spirits but “some unconscious mental action of his own.” Abigail, however, was not persuaded. “His wife had observed its influence on him, and did not believe the intelligence and force originated in him or in any other person present,” the Telegraph said, “and while they were discussing the matter, his hand was moved to write a communication to them in English, the character of which entirely disproved his theory.”
Once the breakthrough of using English had been made, it became the lingua franca of spiritual communication in the Koons household. Koons began experimenting with various types of mediumship over the next six months. He was encouraged to learn that his wife and children, even the 7-month-old baby, George Eaton, also had extrasensory abilities. (Koons reported that he by then had nine children, including son Cinderellus, born in 1849, as well as an adopted daughter, 5-year-old Eliza, whose origins are not clear.)
“Soon finding several medium developments in my own family, I was no longer at a loss for proper means to detect the supposed fraud, and from that time the manifestations have progressed in my family,” Koons wrote. Soon