On May 18, 1892, a lawyer addressed a packed Englewood auditorium. The issue was whether to form a mob to remove their new neighbor, Dr. Cyrus R. Teed, or to let the law take its course. “Let us say that there is one spot in the State of Illinois where such a devil cannot exist,” E.S. Metcalf told the crowd. “Don’t talk about tar and feathers tonight; they will come later.” Speakers told stories of how wives had abandoned their families and turned over all their assets to Teed. Admitting his past desire to shoot Teed, another ex-husband told the approving crowd that “No jury would have held me accountable for his death.”
Calling himself by the name of Koresh, Teed taught that the body could heal itself through a “scientific” reading of a hodgepodge of ancient texts. In February 1888, Teed’s reputation as a kooky doctor took a dark turn with the death of Fletcher Benedict, the husband of a devoted follower. Benedict, who had believed Teed’s ideas were “humbug,” didn’t respond to Teed’s treatment for pneumonia, which consisted solely of prayers. “What if he does die?” Teed told Benedict’s distraught landlord. “I have been dead a dozen times.” At the coroner’s inquest, Teed claimed “Koreshan science” could cure “cancer, consumption—anything.”
If Teed’s odd theology wasn’t enough, a key element of Teed’s evangelism was the goal to prove that humanity lived inside the Earth. According to Teed, the Earth was hollow, with the sun, powered by precious metals of the earth’s crust, sitting at its center. Nighttime could be explained by the fact that the rotating sun was black on one side. The moon was an “x-ray picture” of the earth’s surface projected on the atmosphere, while the stars were “focal points of light.” The appearance of ships disappearing on the horizon was only an optical illusion, gravity explained by the existence of “gravic rays.” The Koreshans dutifully ran their own experiments, including one involving telescopes mounted on rowboats floating in the Old Illinois Drainage Canal.
Read The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet by Lyn Millner (University Press of Florida, 2015) and American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation by Adam Morris (Liveright, 2019)
