The Koons Spirit Room

Jonathan Koons was a farmer from Pennsylvania who had settled in the hills of southeast Ohio around 1835. In 1852, the year Spiritualism was sweeping the country after the Fox sisters, he and his large family took up the new faith. According to Ohio magazine’s account, his son Nahum drew a spirit table, and the spirits then asked for more instruments: accordions, drums, a tambourine, a guitar, a banjo, harps and bells. Koons built a log room, which could hold about twenty people, to hold the séances. Historian Sharon Hatfield’s book Enchanted Ground (2018) is the fullest modern account.

Visitors, by Hatfield’s estimate hundreds and perhaps thousands, made the difficult trip to the farm outside Athens. The sources describe the effects reported: a spirit called King who spoke through a trumpet, instruments played while Koons played and flying around the dark room, and long messages written during sittings. In May 1853 a Columbus physician, Dr. J. Everett, made the two-day stagecoach journey and later wrote that he was convinced. Reviewers of Hatfield’s book note that the family charged nothing for food, lodging or séances, and that many witnesses thought them sincere.

Fraud was alleged from the start. Hatfield’s book is reviewed as recounting that at the home of a Spiritualist supporter, Linus Smith Everett, during the family’s journey to New York City, a lit match reportedly revealed a Koons daughter working alone in the dark. The reviewer concluded the evidence does not settle whether all the séances were fraudulent. After about three years the family’s work wound down, and Koons moved to Illinois in 1858, where he held private séances until his death in 1893.

In the dark séance room, a ‘spirit’ named King speaking through a trumpet, musical instruments playing and moving about, and messages written on paper.

A purpose-built log room on the Koons farm, on the outskirts of Athens in rural Athens County, 1852–c. 1855.

Hatfield’s Enchanted Ground (2018) and Ohio University coverage keep the story alive; Athens County was briefly a centre of Spiritualist activity in the 1850s.