The Eddy Brothers' Materialisation Séances at Spirit Vale, Chittenden

Chittenden is a hamlet in Rutland County, Vermont. In the 1870s the Eddy family farmhouse there doubled as an inn, the Green Tavern. Visitors and the press had another name for it. Spirit Vale.

The Eddy boys were said to vanish from their cradles and reappear elsewhere in the house. Their father reportedly poured boiling water on some of the children to break their trances, and later exploited them commercially. From 1864 the family gave public séances. By 1873 the farm itself was the stage. The séances were free. Visitors paid only for room and board, and thousands came.

Upstairs, on a raised platform, stood a solid wooden cabinet with one small window and a curtained door. William Eddy sat inside on a chair. Under the subdued glow of a shaded lamp, the forms stepped out. Babies in arms. Indian warriors. Gentlemen in evening dress. A Kurd with a nine-foot lance.

Honto, a Native American woman, was measured at 5 feet and 3 inches. She was fond of dancing, of singing, of smoking. She exposed her breast and asked a lady present to feel her heart. It was cold and moist, not like that of a living person. Yet it beat, feebly but rhythmically. Santum, a giant Indian, stood six foot three. A signed certificate records that he and another Indian of almost as great a stature passed and re-passed each other on the platform.

Horatio Eddy's dark circles were wilder. Wild Indian war dances. The thudding of a dozen feet. Every instrument playing at once, with yells and whoops. When a light was struck, the instruments lay littered about the floor and Horatio was in a deep slumber.

On 28 August 1874 Colonel Henry Steel Olcott arrived for the New York Sun. He returned for the Daily Graphic and spent about ten weeks at the farm. Engineers and carpenters searched the cabinet for false panels and passages. They found none. He weighed Honto four times in one evening: 88, 58, 58 and 65 pounds. In all he recorded no less than four hundred apparitions.

On 14 October 1874 Helena Blavatsky arrived, and met Olcott at the farm. Figures from her own past were said to appear, among them a man of gigantic stature in the attire of a Kurdish warrior. In November the Shaker Elder Frederick W. Evans reported over thirty spirits in one session. Olcott stayed careful. The forms, he wrote, were still as a scientific fact to be regarded as "not proven."

The neurologist George M. Beard attended a single sitting. He argued that every figure was William Eddy himself, and claimed he could produce the effects with three dollars' worth of theatrical properties. Blavatsky answered him in the Daily Graphic. In March 1875 an Eddy-trained assistant named Chaplin was caught faking manifestations and acknowledged that the whole thing was a humbug. Then, on 26 November 1875, the New York Sun reported a secret passage between the chimney and the spirit cabinet, and family members in an array of costumes. The operation ended.

Olcott published People from the Other World in 1875. Arthur Conan Doyle later called the brothers primitive folk, yet defended the phenomena, arguing that one sitting could not outweigh Olcott's weeks of testing. In 1875 Olcott and Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society. And Chittenden became known as the Spirit Capital of the Universe.