Jonathan Koons' Spirit Room, Mount Nebo, Athens County, Ohio

Jonathan Koons was born in Pennsylvania in 1811 and moved to Ohio in 1835. Farmer. Former carpenter. Fiddler. In 1852 he began communing with spirits. Soon after, he built them a room on his farm at Mount Nebo, said to be the highest point in Athens County.

It was a log cabin, sixteen feet by twelve. Inside were bass and tenor accordions, drums, a tambourine, a guitar, a banjo, harps, bells, a fiddle and a trumpet. A "spiritual table" held pencils and paper. Its design was drawn by his son Nahum Koons, the main medium.

The sittings were held in complete darkness, about twenty people at a time. Koons took up his fiddle. The other instruments answered.

Dr. J. Everett visited in May 1853. He said the music was "loud, and performed with a skill and excellence that far surpassed any specimen that can be performed by any musician of earth." Charles Partridge, publisher of the Spiritual Telegraph, wrote that "tremendous blows on these drums are really frightful to many persons." He heard "human voices singing, apparently in the distance," growing until it seemed a full choir was singing.

A trumpet "sailed about in the air." Voices spoke through it. They lectured, sang and called guests by name.

One spirit, King, said he was an angel. In the light of phosphorized paper, cold hands were seen carrying objects. Spirit faces appeared. At the table, spirit hands wrote messages, and some visitors brought their own pencils and paper to be sure. One message was said to come from Koons' dead daughter.

Visitors came from across the country. Sharon Hatfield counts "hundreds if not thousands." The Koons family charged nothing for séances, food or lodging. In 1853 Dr. J. Everett gathered affidavits and spirit writings into A Book for Skeptics. Not every neighbour approved. The family faced mob violence.

1856. The family held séances at the Cleveland home of Linus Everett, a Spiritualist editor. The first two nights went well. On the third, during the glowing hands, a match was accidentally struck. In its light, teenage Quintilla Koons was seen moving around the room. Everett's exposé called Koons a humbug and described the moment: "there stood the medium, the daughter of Mr. Koons, revealed as the active and only performer in this solemn farce."

Sceptics point to total darkness, a large family of possible performers, phosphorus-coated paper and a trumpet that throws the voice. Yet the family took no money. James McClenon, reviewing the case for the Society for Psychical Research, found them "extremely sincere." He suggests "a poltergeist-like force was active," while noting that mediums such as Eusapia Palladino cheated "whenever given the chance." Some effects, he argues, could be real and others faked.

Koons moved to Illinois in 1858 and died there in 1893. Historians of religion credit him with inventing the séance trumpet. Hatfield's book Enchanted Ground (2018) stays neutral on whether contact was real. She calls mediums "the counterculture of their time," a comfort to the grieving. "People were looking for a more optimistic philosophy…"