Quotes:Eddy Brothers

Boris de Zirkoff

Eddy Brothers. Horatio and William Eddy were primitive folk farming a small holding at the hamlet of Chittenden, near Rutland, Vermont. An observer described them as “sensitive, distant and curt with strangers, looking more like hard-working rough farmers than prophets or priests of a new dispensation, with dark complexions, black hair and eyes, stiff joints and a clumsy carriage.” They seem to have been at feud with some of their neighbours and were not liked by them. The curious phenomena of materialization which took place at the homestead became widely known and aroused great curiosity. Guests who came to observe and investigate, found accommodations and were boarded in a large room with food as simple as their surroundings. For this board, the Eddys charged a low rate, but they do not seem to have made any profit from their psychic demonstrations. The ancestry of the Eddy Brothers was rather interesting. Not only was there an unbroken record of psychic powers extending over several generations, but their grandmother four times removed had been burned as a witch as a result of the Salem trials of 1692. When young, the Eddy Brothers were persecuted and even tortured by their fanatical father, in order to stop the phenomena which were taking place; their mother, herself a strong psychic, was unable to stop this brutality. Later on, the father tried to make some money out of the powers of his two sons by hiring them out as mediums. This only added to their unfortunate plight.

The best account of the mediumship of the Eddy Brothers is the one by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. The Daily Graphic of New York sent him to Chittenden to report his findings for that paper; this was in October, 1874. The result of his ten-week's stay in Vermont was a series of fifteen remarkable articles which appeared in October and November, 1874, in the New York Daily Graphic. It is on the basis of these articles that Col. Olcott prepared his work entitled People from the Other World which was published, profusely illustrated by Alfred Kappes and T. W. Williams, by the American Publishing Company, Hartford, Conn., in 1875.

The Eddy Brothers seem to have covered just about the whole range of physical mediumship; however, it was William Eddy’s mediumship which took the form of materializations, while Horatio gave seances of quite a different character. Some visitors, among them a Dr. Beard of New York, tried to show up the alleged “tricks” of the Eddy Brothers, but to no avail; they were genuine mediums for physical manifestations as evidenced by several of the most careful observers, notably Col. Olcott himself.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 1, pp. 461-462