The tambourine returned to the table and the violin performance stopped. Barthet’s reveries were interrupted by a high-pitched voice flowing out of the trumpet, which he surmised was now floating above them. The voice was speaking with Jonathan Koons, but at first Barthet could not make out what it was saying.
“King, play the accordion,” Koons commanded.
The instrument immediately began to sound, but to Barthet it was just noise. Whoever or whatever was behind it—the entity called King—obviously did not know how to play.
“Koons, this accordion is like a lot of people,” the voice in the horn complained. “It seems well on the outside, but it doesn’t have anything good on the inside.”
“King is jovial,” Koons said, perhaps addressing the spectators as much as the voice. “But he is right in this case because nothing good has come from this instrument that is, for that matter, very mediocre.”
The voice tried a different tack. “Koons, tell me to get the violin.”
“Very well, pick it up.”
Barthet heard the violin being plucked, rather than played with the bow. Soon the accordion joined in, but the result was no better than before. Barthet found the sound discordant. The invisible being was certainly no musician.
No sooner had the violin fallen silent than a high-pitched voice emanated from the harmonica. Barthet deduced that the harmonica was functioning as a megaphone, just as the trumpet had earlier. Although the voice sounded natural to him, he still could not make out the words. The music started up again shortly, this time a racket of accordion and harmonica that hurt Barthet’s ears. He felt something lightly tap his skull several times just above his right ear, almost like a caress. Whereas the tambourine had tapped his knee and hands, this time he thought the accordion was dancing around his head.
Now the voice in the trumpet requested a fiddle tune and began to sing, but Barthet remained unimpressed. He found the lyrics childish and the falsetto voice that delivered them unpleasant, nothing like the celestial music he had read so much about in glowing accounts of the Koons phenomena. Mercifully the singing lasted only about a minute. But the tapping soon began on the other side of Barthet’s head; he believed it was the trumpet. Annoyed as he was with the musical performances, the hypnotist marveled at the demonstrations on his person. He was convinced that only an entity that could see in the dark, or was reading his mind, could land these taps at precise locations—and, so far as he was concerned, clairvoyance did not exist.
A flash of light shot through the darkness near the back table and was quickly extinguished. Barthet heard the rustling of paper. Something that looked like a small lantern appeared 2 feet in front of him. He leaned closer. The lantern came within 8 inches of his face, and by its light he could see a hand holding a pencil as if poised to write. The hand itself was giving off a modicum of light, as if it had a glowworm in its grasp. It began scribbling on paper, first a couple of lines and then a long paragraph that filled the page. The paper flipped over, and a hand again appeared above it. Barthet did not know if it was the same hand. The writing continued on the reverse side of the paper until the light was gone. He heard what sounded like paper sliding across the table toward him and grabbed it.
“Koons, I have something to tell you,” came the voice through the trumpet.
“Well?”
“Bon soir,” said King, taking his leave with the thump of the tin horn on the table.
Jonathan Koons lit the candle, and the men pored over the document. Barthet found a message signed “King” that had been written out in a precise, backward-slanting hand on a piece of stationery:
To the friends and visitors of this assembly we glad to meet you here in this our humble retreat. Let the light illuminate your spiritual vision and perception we have afforded you on this occasion, and freely as we bestow so freely confer on those who seek.
On the back of the stationery, more words had been written in a different hand, with more space between the letters and fainter characters. The calligraphy even showed signs of corrections to some of the strokes. Barthet read:
Friends, disregard the medisance of those who dispute statements, for their manqué d’experience leads them to lamantable states dereglements.—A FRIEND
Running a critical eye over the page, Barthet could see four French words that were written correctly except that some accent marks had been left off. Curiously, three of those words were underlined but the fourth, dereglements, was not. Barthet also thought that the last word should have been placed in parentheses, as it was restating the two words just before it. He also noticed that the English word “lamentable” had been misspelled. Even with the errors and lack of specificity, Barthet found meaning in these few words from his native tongue. The message said: “Friends, disregard the malicious gossip of those who dispute statements, for their lack of experience leads them to lamentable states craziness.” He thought it referred to skeptical comments he had heard during his trip to Ohio. Beyond that, he was convinced that no one in the Koons household—or any of their visitors, save himself and his traveling companion—knew a word of French.
* * *
BARTHET had to cut short his stay at the Koonses’ because the food served there made both him and his companion sick, a complaint voiced more than once by city folks. But he would not be the first or last learned person to investigate the strange phenomena that had made Jonathan Koons a celebrity attraction in the spiritualist world. Upstanding citizens from all walks of life—“persons of undoubted respectability . . . whose testimony would not be refused in any court of justice in the world”—were flocking to an estimated 2,000 mediums throughout the United States. Among the converts were several writers of prominence and achievement, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper. A few nationally known judges and politicians also espoused the new religion, including Judge John Worth Edmonds of New York and Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, formerly a US senator from New York and governor of the Wisconsin Territory. And just a decade later First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln would be hosting séances in the White House. But spiritualism was not a movement for the elite alone; thanks to its optimistic emphasis on human improvement and the equality of all souls, one to two million Americans in a national population of 23 million were said to have joined its ranks by 1850.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, spiritualism must have seemed to its devotees like a moral compass that could guide a rapidly changing society. Railroads and steamships had revolutionized transportation, and key inventions like the cotton gin and interchangeable parts had the United States careening from a nation of farmers to an industrial powerhouse with centers located mainly in the North. Along with German and Irish immigrants, millions of rural Americans moved to the cities to work in factories, creating the beginnings of the middle class—and liberating a pent-up desire for progress. Optimism was the order of the day; citizens in the East believed in a divinely sanctioned manifest destiny that entitled them to virtually all the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But those years also had a dark side: overcrowding in the booming ports and cities resulted in poor living and