The Real People
Helena Blavatsky
A woman of power with a special mission
Helena left Russia in 1848, at age 17, in a bold escape from her marriage to a 40-year-old husband. Long before meeting Henry Olcott in Vermont, she had been around the world, often on her own, and absorbed the ancient spiritual traditions of Egypt, India and Tibet.
She viewed her destiny as bringing the “secret doctrine,” a body of knowledge she also called occultism, Brahma Vidya, wisdom religion and Divine Magic, to a materialistic yet psychically fertile western world.
After serving in Garibaldi’s army, and a brief second marriage in Russia, she left her homeland for good. Eventually landing in New York in 1873, at the instruction of unseen (except to her) spiritual masters, she drew together a circle of admirers and followed the spiritualist craze until she read one of Henry’s accounts about the Chittenden mediums. This was karma, she thought. He would be her partner in the “great work.”
Henry Olcott
A grieving journalist looking for ghosts
By the 1870s, Henry Steel Olcott, a retired colonel, had shifted his focus from corruption in naval yards during the Civil War to the study of mediumistic phenomena. He launched his career as Agriculture Editor for the New York Tribune, but made his name covering John Brown’s execution.
After the war, he investigated government fraud and built a successful legal practice in customs and insurance, moonlighting as a lobbyist. He’d even been asked to uncover an alleged conspiracy surrounding Lincoln’s assassination. But none of it really interested him. Henry was disillusioned and in mourning.
He made two visits to Chittenden in 1874, the second lasting more than two months. Attending seances and witnessing manifestations in a second floor Circle Room, Olcott reported materializations of “spirit forms” of all shapes and sizes — huge Native Americans, spouses and children, businessmen in expensive suits, even the departed Julia Ann Eddy.
William Eddy
A troubled medium haunted by his past
William Eddy was born in Weston, Vermont in 1833. At age 13, he and his family moved to Chittenden, a township with less than 800 people at the western edge of the Green Mountains.
His mother Julia Ann was psychic, able to foretell the future and communicate with the dead. She hid her abilities for years, fearing her husband’s reaction. But the birth of her first son ended that deception. Although William resembled his father physically, his arrival had revived Julia’s clairvoyant abilities. And her powers were inherited by her son.
By 1874 he was one of the most gifted mediums in the country. He was also a wounded soul with secrets in his past.
George Beard
A cynical doctor determined to expose them
Dr. George Miller Beard graduated from Yale College and studied at the New York College for Physicians and Surgeons. After serving in the Civil War, he established a New York City practice, specializing in nervous diseases. He was one of the first to experiment with electricity as a stimulant, and used “central galvanization” to treat skin diseases.
In 1874, he initiated a study of “animal magnetism” and spiritualism, convinced that such phenomena were tricks or delusions. That October, he visited the Eddy farm to “observe” a seance. Using a disguise, he got into the Circle Room with his “scientific” device. The plan: to connect electrical current to a ghost.