Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [22]
When the Civil War broke out, Olcott’s reputation took yet another turn. Originally commissioned as a signals officer, the still-young man displayed a talent for research, numbers, and money trails. He was placed in charge of a team of auditors and detectives to investigate fraud and forgery among military contractors, and was promoted to staff colonel to lend weight to his investigations. Exposing a racket of fake provisions sales, Olcott saved the Union army enough money for Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to write him that his efforts were “as important to the Government as the winning of a battle.” His reputation as an investigator grew. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Olcott volunteered his services. Stanton telegraphed him in New York to “come to Washington at once, and bring your force of detectives with you.” During the twelve days that John Wilkes Booth remained a fugitive, Olcott and his investigators made the first arrests and interrogations of suspected coconspirators.
Rich in government contacts following the war, Olcott studied for the bar and opened a legal practice in New York City. Settling into family life, he could have expected the secure if somewhat ordinary prospects of Sunday suppers, gentleman’s clubs, a lawyer’s paycheck, and maybe even a run for local office. But he grew restless. He took a break from law by writing cultural reviews and investigatory pieces for some of the larger New York dailies, a career he had dabbled in before the war. His interest in Spiritualism began to reemerge—especially upon reading press reports of strange happenings at a Vermont homestead.
In the fall of 1874, Olcott made several trips as a correspondent for the New York Daily Graphic to a gloomy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont. There a spirit medium named William Eddy, with the help of his brother Horatio, had been treating witnesses to a nightly parade of ghostly beings, ranging from American Indians to figures draped in costume and couture from faraway lands and eras. The ghostly forms emerged from a wooden cabinet that seated William Eddy and that credulous visitors swore had no trick doors or openings. It was here at the Vermont “ghost farm” that Olcott had a fateful encounter—one that would send tremors not only through his own life but across other continents.
On the sunny midday of October 14, Olcott stepped onto the Eddy porch to light the cigarette of a new visitor: a strange, heavyset Russian woman with whom he grew quickly enchanted. She showed him flesh wounds she said she had suffered fighting beside the revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi in his campaign to unify Italy; she told tales of travels in exotic lands; and she hinted at far deeper truths about the nature of the spirit world than were revealed to the nightly gawkers at the Eddy home. Olcott was perplexed—and utterly fascinated. The college dropout in him seemed somewhat awed by “the arrival of a Russian lady of distinguished birth and rare educational and natural endowments.” He marveled over her tales of “traveling in most of the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the base of the Pyramids, witnessing mysteries of Hindoo temples, and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior of Africa.”
His growing, and soon very intense, friendship with this mysterious lady led him on a late summer’s day in 1876 to the bustling corner of Manhattan’s West 47th Street and Eighth Avenue. His destination was a weathered five-story apartment building, a structure that stands largely unnoticed today as a budget hotel and that possessed little more prestige then. It was there that the colonel rented an eight-room apartment—effectively a salon and headquarters—for himself and his lady friend.