Episode 84: A Family Affair

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The artist is unknown, but the painting is a perfect example of 16th-century European portraiture.

Just as in the works of artists like Hans von Essen or Antoine van Dyck, the majority of the frame is taken up by the subject of the image, in this case, an older noble gentleman, while the background is filled with all sorts of activity.

That background seems to tell a story, although I'm confident it's not a story we would want to hear.

In the distance, we can see burning structures, with flames that lick upward toward a dark yellow sky.

The subject of the painting stands in front of a crumbled wall, perhaps the last remnants of a mighty castle, or the defenses of the city behind him. But it's the man himself that draws the eye.

Perhaps it's the corrupt glint in his eyes. or the mountain of human skulls that he stands on.
Together with his gothic studded armor, he seems the very embodiment of evil.

But don't worry, the painting isn't real, and its subject, Vigo the Carpathian, is a complete work of fiction. He's the villain at the center of the 1989 film, Ghostbusters 2.

Ghostbusters, of course, is all about investigation.

It's built around the idea that we can apply science to the unexplainable, to dig for the truth, and to capture evidence that proves ideas our rational minds want to reject.

It opened up popular culture to new forms of entertainment, from the X-Files and supernatural to a whole slew of paranormal investigation shows.

But that concept, investigating paranormal events and locations, wasn't a new idea. In fact, it's a practice that goes back much further than you might expect.

Before the truth was out there, before the song asked us who we're going to call, there were enterprising individuals who made it their goal to look deep into life's mysteries and dig for answers.

The question is:

are we ready for what they found?

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

I'm not going to lie to you. The town is pretty insignificant.
It has the unfortunate honor of sitting against a small mountain range, which serves to separate it from the rest of the state.

Even today, most people in Vermont don't really know it's there, but that doesn't mean nothing significant has ever happened there.

Zephaniah and his wife Julia were actually born elsewhere in another equally small and insignificant town about 50 miles to the south.

In 1846 though, they moved north and settled in that little land of insignificance.

I'm sure they brought their hopes and dreams with them, that's just a guess though, but we do know that they brought a lot of children.

There aren't a lot of documents today that help us nail down a lot of the details, but we do know that Zephaniah and his wife had a total of 11 children.

Some had been born prior to the move in 1846, while a few more followed after they were settled. Family life life was busy and crowded and probably more than a little chaotic.
But there was more.

Julia apparently came into the marriage with a secret.

It was something she knew would drive away a man as narrow-minded as Zephaniah, who was once described as a barely educated and bigoted religionist.

Basically, he had a lot of strict beliefs, and Julia assumed her secret would shatter his neat, well-ordered, highly prejudiced world, so she hid it from him, even after they were married.

But secrets are like water. Given enough time, they always find a way to leak out and ruin things.
For Julia, that moment arrived with the birth of their first child, Miranda.

Maybe it was the stress of giving birth, or that shift in life all new parents go through. Whatever it was, Julia couldn't hold it in any longer.
And it slipped out.

What was it? Julia, it seems, was clairvoyant. She could see things that were going to happen in the future, as well as events currently taking place far away.

It was as if she had a second set of eyes that stared into the well of time and space, revealing things to her that no one should be able to know.

And to her strict and close-minded husband, that was evil.

The trouble was, her gift was spreading. Each of the children began to show signs of their own special abilities.

Their oldest was said to be a powerful medium, able to communicate with the dead in a way that fit neatly into every description of the spiritualist movement.

But the other children brought their own flavor to this unusual family affair. Some of them could levitate, while others could see things that no one else could.

sometimes unusual animals and other times strange people.

All of this unusual activity in the house had two major consequences. First, it utterly and completely frustrated their father, Zephaniah.
And maybe that's not strong enough.

The man was livid about it. Anytime he found a child in a trance, he would shake and slap them to wake them up.

Once, when his son William was just six years old, Zephaniah apparently tried pulling him from one of these trances by pouring boiling water on the boy's bare skin.

When that didn't work, he pulled a burning piece of wood out of the fire and placed it in William's open palm. But that failed as well.

Those barbaric methods left scars though, both emotional and physical, and they would stick with William the rest of his life.

The second byproduct of all this paranormal activity was that it became increasingly difficult to send the children to school. Early on, they experienced trouble in the classroom.

Books would be taken from other students by unseen hands. Loud knocking would be heard from inside desks, and small items would levitate around the room.

It was too much, so eventually the entire family stopped attending.

Sometime around 1857, Zephaniah had a bit of a revelation.

After the Fox sisters rose into the sky like shining stars, performing seances around the country to paying audiences, more and more imitation acts began to follow them.

All of a sudden, Zephaniah saw a business opportunity. If he couldn't stop the children from doing those evil things, he could at least profit from it.

So he signed a contract with a manager and said goodbye to four of them, William, Horatio, Sophia, and Mary, all of whom were in their teens.

For 15 years, the children of Zephaniah and Julia Eddy were paraded from state to state, performing their tricks in front of large crowds.

They were even rented out to a separate manager in Europe for a short time.

They were gone so long that they missed the death of their father in 1862, although considering how he treated them, it's no wonder they never went home for the funeral.

It was the death of their mother Julia in 1872 that finally brought them home and into retirement. No more national tours, no more supernatural performances in front of massive crowds.

The Eddies, those stars of the supernatural movement for over a decade, packed it all in and went home. They converted their family farm into a roadside inn and settled into a new normal.

But their story was far from over.

In fact, it had barely even begun.

On the night of April 14th, 1865, John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in the head of Abraham Lincoln. Nine hours later, the president was dead.

In the weeks that followed, a panel of men was put together to investigate the events of that night, and one of them was Henry Steele Alcott.

He'd already built a reputation for himself as a rigorous investigator. During the Civil War, he was one of the men sent to root out corruption in various military bases.

His hardline stance against fraud and trickery eventually earned him an appointment to the War Department at the age of 30. Six years later, though, he left to become a lawyer.

In 1874, on his way back to the office after having his midday meal, Alcott stopped at a newsstand where a magazine caught his eye. It was a spiritualist publication called The Banner of Light.

And even though he had no experience with that movement, something compelled him to buy a copy.

Inside, two years after their retirement, the Eddy family was still the focus of discussion and speculation, and it gave Henry Alcott an idea.

When he arrived at the Eddy's hometown of Chittenden, Vermont, a few weeks later, he did so with the backing of the New York Daily Graphic, along with one of their artists, Alfred Capes.

But the Eddy siblings weren't ready to roll out the red carpet for Alcott and his investigation. They were nervous about his intentions and his methods, and there was a good reason why.

During their 15 years on the road, William, Horatio, Sophia, and Mary were all subjected to a barrage of tests by skeptics. This wasn't a new thing.

The spiritualist movement had seen the rise in a number of celebrity mediums and just as many experts who made it their mission to debunk them all. Harry Houdini is a great example.

We remember him today as an illusionist and escape artist, but he spent a good amount of his final years using those skills to track down and expose frauds.

The traveling Eddie family had experienced their own fair share of harassment by men like Houdini, although what they suffered through was much more barbaric.

When the voices of spirits were heard from the stage, some skeptics insisted on sealing their lips with hot wax, just to be sure.

Other investigators nailed all four of them into large boxes to prove that nothing supernatural could occur without them being free to move.

During their trances, people would pinch their skin or stab them with sharp objects. They were gagged, blindfolded, restrained, and forced to hold uncomfortable positions for hours on end.

All of this abuse left scars on the siblings. Some were visible, while others weren't.
And there's no proof that these experiments ever disproved what the Eddies claimed to be able to do.

In a lot of places, that didn't matter. The mob often took justice into their own hands.
They were shot at, stabbed, and pummeled with objects while others tried to kidnap them.

Once, during a visit to Danvers, Massachusetts, home to many of the victims of the Salem witch trials two centuries before, the crowd accused them of being demons and opened fire on them.

So, yeah, when Henry Alcott showed up on their doorstep, he probably got a chilly reception. Still, after explaining himself, He was allowed to rent a room in the tavern.

Try not to think of it as a simple roadside inn tucked away in the hills of western Vermont, though. The Eddies had been busy, converting portions of the house and barn into performance space.

The large crowds might have been a thing of the past, but visitors there were always welcome to experience the Eddie magic.

Later that evening, Alcott got to do just that. As it happened, he arrived just hours before one of their famous outdoor seances, and so he was invited to come along and see the family in action.

They left the house well after sundown and followed a winding path into the nearby woods.

There, at the bottom of a deep ravine, was a large rock formation comprised of two enormous slabs of granite that leaned against each other in a way that formed a pocket inside.

William Eddy told Alcott that it was called Hanto's Cave, named after the spirit of a local Native American. This would be the stage for their performance.

Before anything began, Alcott inspected the stage. He walked all the way inside, checked for openings or back doors, but found nothing.

The only way in was through the front, and the small crowd had gathered just a few feet away. Nothing was going to slip inside unnoticed.

William and the others set to work building the framework of a small hut out of branches and then they covered the pieces with fabric.

It wasn't large, maybe the size of a phone booth, but it was enough for a single person. Once everyone was settled, William slipped into the booth, and then silence fell over the crowd.

What happened that evening was something Alcott wasn't expecting. Even though it wasn't possible, a figure stepped out of the darkness of the cave behind William's makeshift spirit cabinet.

It was a Native American man, possibly even the Honto that William had spoken about earlier. He was tall and powerful.
and more than a little intimidating to the small crowd of witnesses.

And then, someone shouted and pointed to the top of the rock formation. Alcott looked up to see another dark figure standing against the night sky.
A moment later, another appeared beside it.

More and more appeared in the minutes that followed until, according to Alcott, there were nearly a dozen figures around the cave.

Later, when it was all over, Alcott took the time to climb up and inspect the area on top of the rock formation.

It wasn't easy, but by the light of his lantern, he was able to examine all of it.

Despite the fact that the roof of the cave had been covered in leaves, dirt, and debris, there were no footprints to be found anywhere.

It seems that Alcott had a mystery on his hands. If the visitors had been real, they'd managed to slip away without a single clue they'd been there at all.

Henry Alcott found himself in a tough spot. Here he was, the skeptic's skeptic, the man known for his keen senses and logic, the impartial judge of fact and fiction.

But after that midnight seance in the woods, his confidence had been shaken. It couldn't have been real, and yet there was no evidence to prove otherwise.

Over the following weeks in the Eddy home, Alcott watched the siblings carefully.

He interviewed them to get a better sense of their past and, in doing so, uncovered their traumatic childhoods and 15 horrible years on the road.

The foray into spiritualism never made them rich, and considering how scarred it left them, both physically and emotionally, Alcott couldn't help but feel sorry for them.

Still, he was there to do a job. to get to the root of their supposed powers and hopefully reveal their secrets.

So when he learned that they held regular seances in a special room on the second floor of their house, he got to work. He asked to see the space and to be allowed to inspect it.

And as he did, his artist companion made detailed sketches and measurements.

Alcott's hope was that the examination would expose the devices of their performance.

Trapdoors, hidden rooms, wires or cables or anything else that could be pulled or pushed to create an effect that would enhance their show.

That was his assumption, after all, that the Eddies would prove to be frauds who would crumble under the weight of his logic. The trouble was, he and the artist were unable to find anything.

Unwilling to give up though, Alcott reached out to the newspaper that had sent him and requested a team of consultants who could come and lend an expert eye to the search.

A week or two later, a group of mechanical engineers and carpenters showed up at the farm and got to work inside the seance room.

At the end of the day, each of them exited the Eddie house with a bewildered expression.

Despite their combined expertise and the steady hand of Henry Alcott to guide them, there was no sign of fraud to be found. The room, as far as any of them could tell, was just a room.

So, with all of his bases covered, Alcott agreed to attend one of the seances.

When he entered, the room was dimly lit by a single lantern resting on a plain wooden barrel, barrel, adding to the atmosphere.

He took a seat on one of the long wooden benches that spanned the width of the room and waited for William to step up onto the small raised platform at one end.

In the center of that makeshift stage was a booth, what the Eddies called a spirit cabinet.

It was similar to the one built in the woods that first night, except this one was more permanent and furniture-like.

And like that first seance, when William did arrive, he opened the door and stepped inside. Almost immediately, the show began.

The first thing Alcott heard was a distant voice, soft at first but growing louder. As it did, it was joined with the sound of singing.

He also claimed to see a number of musical instruments that had been placed near the stage actually float into the air where ghostly hands materialized to play them.

There were lights and noises and sounds of knocking. Some of the people in the room even claimed to be touched by something.

This was the opening act, apparently. It set the tone and grabbed everyone's attention for the real show, which took place in the middle of the stage.

As the sounds and activity died down, the door to the spirit cabinet popped open and a figure stepped out. It wasn't William Eddy, though.
No, this was someone new.

someone who had not been inside the cabinet before William arrived. A member of the audience shouted out a name.
It was a loved one, they said, who'd passed away many years before.

The figure smiled and waved, and then vanished. Another shape stepped out of the cabinet and did the same.

Over the course of the evening, perhaps two dozen unique figures appeared before the small audience. Some, according to Alcott, were completely solid, while others were more hazy and ethereal.

Most were supposed to be the dead relatives of settlers in the area, but there were more than a few Native Americans as well.

Alcott also noticed that some of the figures were more unusual, with clothing that hinted at more exotic origins, such as Russian, African, and Chinese.

When they spoke, he claims they did so in their native tongue. And then, without warning, it was over.

For the next few weeks, Alcott attended dozens of these seances, always paying attention for the telltale signs of trickery. But he never found them.

Instead, he was presented with a nearly endless parade of unique figures, men and women that spanned every known ethnicity. By his count, he saw at least 400 such apparitions.

What he didn't see, though, was the method by which William Eddy managed to do it.

That was the part that bothered him the most. Clearly, these were impossible performances.
His rational mind screamed against everything his eyes saw, and yet he had no evidence to build his case on.

There was no secret chamber full of dozens of actors waiting for their spot in line, no bins full of elaborate costumes. There was nothing at all.
In fact, it was worse than that.

The Eddies never charged money for these daily seances.

They clearly didn't have the funds to pay a troop of actors or buy the outfits necessary to pull off the gag, and thanks to their limited education, there was no one in the house that could have ever mastered another foreign language, let alone half a dozen.

At the end of his stay there on the Eddy farm, Henry Alcott was forced to admit defeat. He had studied it all, observed everything carefully, and still couldn't explain what had happened.

As much as it pained him to admit, he walked away from the entire experience with an unsettling and controversial conclusion.

Everything the Eddies claimed they could do

was real.

I think it's safe to say that Henry Alcott walked away from his experience in the Eddy house a changed man.

He approached the notion of a supernaturally gifted family with the same rationality and due process that he brought to military inspections or insurance fraud cases.

Somehow though, all those skills and years of experience just sort of bounced off the surface of that farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont.

History is full of stories about unusual things, and that's something I'm very glad for.

But it's rare to find those moments in the past where we can watch the intersection of cold experience logic and descriptions of events that defy belief.

If we were going to wish for a witness to the Eddy family powers, we couldn't have asked for a better man than Henry Alcott.

But like I said, those 10 weeks in Vermont changed him. Most of that was due to what he saw, but part of the change came about thanks to the people he met.

Spiritualists at the time referred to the Eddy's little town as the spirit capital of the universe. That's a pretty big claim.

but it was enough to draw a lot of curious visitors, and a few of those other visitors had such an impact on Alcott that the rest of his life was altered completely.

In the years that followed, the Eddy siblings endured their fame in different ways.

Mary struggled to make a name for herself in her brother's shadows, but she was, however, one of the few Eddies to get married and move away.

She passed away in 1910 while serving as a nurse for tuberculosis patients.

Her brother Horatio moved to the house across the street sometime after Alcott's visit and spent the last 50 years of his life working as a gardener. He passed away in 1922.

But it was William, the focal point of so much attention by Alcott and others, who seems to have distanced himself the most from his younger days.

He's said to have refused to work as a medium ever again. and ended up living in that big farmhouse all alone until his death in 1932 at the age of 99.

Somehow, I can't get the image out of my head of an elderly William slowly climbing the stairs to that seance room on the second floor and just looking around, remembering.

One last detail about the Eddy family.

One of the stories the siblings told Alcott was that their sister Miranda, who had died young years before, actually visited their mother Julia as she lay dying in 1872.

Miranda's spirit sat beside their mother's bed like a caretaker, giving her drinks of water and helping helping her stay comfortable.

Julia is said to have inherited her gifts from her mother, who was reputed to be powerful in her own right.

They also claimed that on the day of her death, a ghostly carriage drawn by a pair of horses pulled up in front of the Eddy home.

A woman inside the carriage was said to have turned toward them and smiled, and then the entire vision faded away like smoke.

All of this happened right in front of the entire family, including their father, Zephaniah. He was, consistent with all the other stories about him, incredibly irritated by it.

I mention these two tales because the abilities the Eddy siblings claim to possess, the levitation and trances and communication with the dead, they were all part of a family legacy.

The Eddy's mother, Julia, was apparently descended from a woman named Mary Bradbury, who was one of the many accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Some versions of this tale say Bradbury managed to stay in jail until the panic blew over and she was released. Others claim her husband bribed the jailer and took her north to Maine.

Some just say she escaped.

Which makes you wonder, were the unusual gifts exhibited by the Eddy family nothing more than a fraud or performance designed to fool a gullible audience? Or were they real?

Proven abilities passed down through the generations and verified by a deeply skeptical observer. Depending on your beliefs, either choice makes sense.

In the end, I suppose, no matter which answer we choose, the entertaining and extraordinary abilities of the Eddies will forever be a family affair.

If the story of the Eddy family has an antagonist, it's the father, Zephaniah. But just how unusual and frustrating were the supernatural abilities of his children?

If the stories are true, they sit in that special realm just beyond belief. Stick around after the break to learn more.

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As I mentioned earlier, many of the Eddie's siblings showed signs of unusual abilities as far back as childhood. There were the trances, of course.
But that farmhouse was full of much more than that.

At all hours of the day, sounds could be heard throughout throughout their home, that sort of knocking or rapping as it was called at the height of the spiritualist movement.

All of the same troubles they encountered at school were common occurrences at home too. Objects would levitate and float around the room.

Sometimes it seemed as though they were just being thrown, while other times it was slow and controlled, as if an invisible hand were moving them.

Outside the house, things were just as weird.

It's said that their father would step out of the barn and see some of the boys playing with friends instead of doing their chores, and so he would walk over to scold them.

Before he could reach them though, the friends would fade away and vanish, leaving him so frustrated that he would beat the boys as a way of punishing them for their evil tricks.

But it was William who seemed to attract the strangest of activities. As an infant, he was reported to actually levitate out of his crib.

His parents would walk in to find him missing, only to discover him moments later in another part of the house, sound asleep.

The oddest event happened in 1839, when William was just six years old. One night as the entire family slept, he apparently levitated out of his bed and through an open window.

He woke up the next morning on top of a mountain three miles from home. While his family was searching for him on their property, Little William managed to find his way back all by himself.

He was, of course, punished by his father for it.

Skeptics will always point at the Eddy family as a classic case of spiritualist frauds. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of evidence on both sides of the argument.

It's just as difficult to believe a baby could levitate as it is to think those children would repeatedly do things that resulted in physical abuse from their father. There is no easy answer.

With all of the family gone, and a century and a half between us and the events in Chittenden, Vermont, all we can ever really do now is guess.

This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research assistance from Marsh Crockett, music by Chad Lawson, and administrative help from Carl Nellis.

A friendly reminder that lore is a lot more than just a bi-weekly storytelling podcast.

There is an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more.

And you can learn about everything in one place. Theworldoflore.com/slash now.

Lore is also on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and click that follow button.
And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

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