The Poughkeepsie Seer

Andrew Jackson Davis, The Poughkeepsie Seer

Poughkeepsie, NY—There are countless famous and infamous people that have called the Hudson Valley home; Gavin Degraw, Ed Wood, Michael Williams, Ric Ocasek, Kendall Francios and Albert Fentress just to name a few. But only one person has had such a close connection to the occult world and the Hudson Valley to be called the Poughkeepsie Seer. Andrew Jackson Davis became world renowned for his work in the Spiritualism movement and unchallenged skill in reaching the beyond.

While Davis’ birth was unremarkable in the mid 1800s for an upstate New York family, his childhood, on the other hand, was a bit more extraordinary. He was born in 1826 to an alcoholic father and a sickly mother. Samuel Davis was an experienced cobbler but could never quite hold a job. Mrs. Davis was deeply religious and had extraordinary visionary powers.

Mrs. Davis often foresaw elements of her and her children’s lives. She had visions of Andrew almost drowning in a stream and being hit by an ox cart, both situations which later proved to be true. Her clairvoyant traits must have run in the family as Andrew soon started having his own visions and receiving messages from voices.

The family moved from Blooming Grove, NY to other small communities in the Hudson Valley. They were living in Hyde Park when Andrew Jackson Davis had a vision of Poughkeepsie. Why he received this direction, he didn’t know but he felt compelled to move into the city to start a new life.

As the sixth child, a boy was a blessing, another bread winner for the family, but Andrew Jackson Davis proved to be sickly and clumsy, making it difficult to hold a job. Partly due to all the moving, Davis only had five months of formal education, but he started an apprenticeship with a Poughkeepsie shoemaker at the age of 15. He wasn’t cut out for the cobbler profession and soon moved on to a job in a general store. He failed at this job as well.

His life would change forever only two years later. In 1843, Davis attended a performance by J. Stanely Grimes. Watching the man work with magnetism, mesmerism and phrenology, Davis was fascinated. By December of that year he was mesermized by William Levingston, a local tailor, and began to hone his skills. Together Davis and Levingston focused on their mesmeriser/ mesmerized relationship to diagnose illnesses. Davis said he could see bodies as transparent and the specific auras of each organ, with colors being less vivid if there was a problem present. It was during this phase of his career that he was named the Poughkeepsie Seer.

In 1844 Davis had a new experience with this clairvoyant skills. This visionary trance, or as he called it “psychic flight through space”, allowed him to meet the ancient Greek physician Galen as well as the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772) in the mountains of Ulster County. These men became his advisors in both healing and the occult. Davis proved his connection to the dead by speaking in depth about weighty topics an uneducated person would know little about, but thanks to the help of Galen and Swedenborg he could lecture at length.

Davis’ work was only just beginning. With the help of a new mesmerist, S. Silas Lyon, an herbalist from Connecticut, he wrote over 30 books detailing the visions he had while in trance. His topics were of wide variety and included subjects as philosophy, cosmology, health and healing as well as the afterlife. In a span of time just over two years he gave no less than 157 lectures. He became a well known personality in New York City and the entire country.

1848 saw the official start of the Spiritualism movement when The Fox Sisters brought the paranormal activity in their upstate New York home to the masses. Seances and other modes of contacting the dead became extremely popular and skeptics deemed clairvoyants “table rappers.” Andrew Jackson Davis has been credited as the founder of the movement and was certainly a leader among men. By 1853 there were about 40,000 spiritualists in New York State alone, guided by Andrew Jackson Davis, The Poughkeepsie Seer.