Eddy Brothers - Work

Work

"When their father finally died, William and Horatio returned home to live with their sister, Mary." However, this quote is not quite accurate, as in 1870, William, Horatio, Mary, and other children were all living with their widowed mother Julia in Chittenden.

There, the Eddy family opened a small inn, called the Green Tavern. In addition to lodging travelers, the Green Tavern was also the spot of regularly scheduled séances that the brothers put on for visitors from around the world.

At this point in his life, Henry Steel Olcott, a respected attorney and war veteran, who also sat on the three-man commission looking into the Abraham Lincoln assassination, was doubling as a newspaper reporter for the New York Sun and the Daily Graphic. He became intrigued with the Eddy brothers after reading about them in a spiritual newspaper, the Banner of Light. In 1874 he headed to Vermont to meet with the brothers and decide for himself whether they were charlatans or a validation of that period's Spiritualist movement. It was there, on October 14, that he met Madame Blavatsky.

Olcott spent several weeks with the Eddy brothers, during which time he observed a number of séances that William and Horatio put on for free for the public. A typical séance would have the audience gathered in the "circle" room at the tavern. One of the brothers would enter a special spirit box at the front of the room (essentially just a small room with a chair in it) and lapse into a deep trance, at which point the show would start. Instruments would start playing music on their own, various noises could be heard and strange lights would be seen. Then the spirits would start filing out of the spirit box, sometimes 20 to 30 of them in an evening. These spirits would perform, sing and talk to the audience, sometimes in foreign languages that the illiterate Eddy brothers could have never known. Essentially the brothers were capable of conjuring up a wide array of supernatural activities, including automatic writing, psychic healing, levitation, teleportation, and prophecy.

Blavatsky was later to state, that these conjurations peaked with her presence because she conjured them herself, by her own powers.

Olcott came away from his visit unimpressed by the Eddy brothers, but convinced that they were not charlatans. He hired numerous engineers, carpenters, and consultants to thoroughly examine the "circle" room and found no evidence of false panels or hidden passages. Even if the Eddy brothers were capable of pulling off such a deception, it would have taken a sizable troupe of players and considerable resources to do it, something well beyond the simple farmers from Vermont who didn't so much as charge people to attend the séances (although they did charge a minimal amount in board for anyone staying at the Green Tavern).

Olcott chronicled his stay in several newspaper articles and a book, People from the Other World, where he described everything he saw, including illustrations and interviews with witnesses and experts.