The Eddy Homestead Séances

In the hill town of Chittenden, north-east of Rutland, the Eddy family worked a small farm and, by 1870, their widowed mother Julia ran a modest inn known as the Green Tavern. Her sons William and Horatio Eddy had a reputation as mediums – the family even claimed descent from a woman accused at Salem – and from 1873 to 1875 their farmhouse became, as one historian put it, the epicentre of paranormal activity in America. Visitors boarded for about eight dollars a week and climbed to a long upstairs room fitted with a small stage and a curtained “cabinet.”

The séances followed a set pattern. With one brother tied to a chair inside the cabinet, sitters held hands in a dim room while instruments played, objects flew, and figures stepped out from behind the curtain: dead relatives of guests, a “Witch of the Mountain,” even the poet Lord Byron, and a Native American woman called “Honto” – one of many stereotyped Native “spirit guides” in the séance rooms of the era. Some sitters said they were struck by thrown objects; spirits danced, answered questions with raps and occasionally received marriage proposals.

In 1874 the Civil War veteran and journalist Henry Steel Olcott spent weeks at the farm reporting for the New York Sun and The Daily Graphic, whose artist sketched the sessions. His letters became the book People from the Other World (1875). At the farm that autumn he met the Russian émigré Helena Blavatsky, who defended the Eddys against critics; the next year the two founded the Theosophical Society in New York, a movement still active worldwide. Few séance rooms have had such lasting consequences.

Critics were less impressed. The neurologist George M. Beard called the materializations fraudulent and said a few dollars’ worth of drapery would explain the costumes, and later magicians and psychical researchers described the Eddys’ methods – including a false hand left in a sitter’s grasp – as absurdly simple. The farmstead later became the property of a private ski club, and nothing of the séance room is open to visitors.

In the 1870s séances: materialized figures stepping from the cabinet, levitating and thrown objects, instruments playing by themselves, disembodied hands writing messages, raps answering questions, and spirits speaking in various languages. Some modern visitors and writers claim the old farm area remains haunted, but such reports are thin.

The long second-floor séance room of the Eddy farmhouse, with its stage and curtained cabinet. The site, off a back road about five miles from Route 7 in Chittenden, is now private land.

The Eddy séances are a landmark in the history of American Spiritualism, chiefly because they brought together Olcott and Blavatsky, the founders of Theosophy. Olcott’s People from the Other World remains in print, and the episode is retold in histories of Spiritualism and Vermont folklore.