It’s pretty obvious right away that I’m in the right place. As I pull in to the hotel parking lot, three women are circling my car while chanting and holding out dowsing rods to lead their way. Once I walk into the hotel lobby, I’m greeted by a sign that reads: NO READINGS, HEALINGS, CIRCLES, OR SÉANCES IN THIS AREA, PLEASE.
Lily Dale, New York, is pretty tiny—two hundred homes—and about an hour south of Buffalo. However, Lily Dale is quite different from the dozens of other towns that dot northwestern New York. The hamlet is entirely owned and run by followers of the Spiritualist religion. Spiritualists believe that they, as mediums, have the ability to communicate with the dead, using the dead spirits as life guides, predictors of the future, companions, and emissaries to God. Starting out as a Spiritualist church summer camp in 1879, Lily Dale grew into a town. Its guesthouses, hotels, museum, and library—not to mention its restaurants, post office, and fire department—are all run by people who believe they can see and talk to the dead.
During the summer, tens of thousands of people descend on Lily Dale for private consultations with its registered mediums, to attend lectures, church services, and workshops, and to receive healings.
The hotel where I’m staying, the Maplewood, is old, as in falling-apart old. It’s been hosting summer guests since the 1880s and looks it. There are no televisions, telephones, or air-conditioning. Everything creaks and is lumpy, slanted, or sunken. There are signs everywhere warning guests not to smoke, slam doors, light incense, flush sanitary napkins, burn candles, or shower without the curtain completely closed—all because these activities will push the building over some kind of functional abyss.
And of course, the place is supposedly teeming with ghosts.
In fact, ghost sightings are so common in Lily Dale that some claim they can’t tell who is alive and who is dead. Pass a person on the street, and it could be someone staying in the hotel room next to you or it could be someone who stayed there in 1928. Some visitors and residents of Lily Dale have taken to referring to themselves in the plural—as in “We are going shopping today” or “We might stop over later for a visit.” They’re referring to themselves and their spirit posse.
I have no time to investigate the Maplewood’s otherworldly residents, as I am on the verge of being late to the five-thirty Stump Service.
Inspiration Stump is a tree stump in the middle of the Leolyn Woods, a towering old-growth forest on the outskirts of Lily Dale. There are no bells or announcements when it’s time for one of Lily Dale’s four daily public services. At five-fifteen, almost every person in town simply exits home, hotel, or guesthouse and quietly walks to the far end of town and the trail into the woods.
The Stump itself is huge, probably three feet in diameter. It’s thought by Lily Daleans to be an “energy vortex”; standing near it will amplify a medium’s abilities. For some reason that no one has been able to explain, in 1898 the residents of Lily Dale decided to encase the Stump in cement, later adding a short fence around it. Lily Dale mediums are no longer allowed to stand on top of the Stump when giving readings and messages. Some say it’s because it is too powerful (according to a long-repeated rumor, a medium had a heart attack while channeling atop the Stump). Others suggest it is too unsafe, as the cement covering has caused the actual wooden Stump to rot away completely, leaving an empty shell.
From the 1880s to the 1920s, Spiritualism was the fastest-growing religion in America. Spiritualism was founded, albeit loosely, in 1848, when Kate and Margaret Fox started to receive spirit messages from a murdered peddler who was buried in the basement of their family home. The Fox sisters began demonstrating their medium abilities to others and quickly grew into a national sensation. Other mediums began to emerge, and Spiritualism slowly grew from a curiosity into a movement, then a religion. By the late nineteenth century there were more than eight million followers. And all this despite there being no centralized anything in Spiritualism—no religious texts, no core sets of beliefs, organization, or dogma—except the belief that adherents speak to the dead.
During Spiritualism’s peak, thousands of people would fill this clearing in the woods to hear the Stump-fueled mediums shout out messages from long-lost relatives and friends to those assembled. Today there are about a dozen wooden benches, capable of holding about 150 people, arranged in a fan shape in front of Inspiration Stump.
For my first service, it’s a packed house. As we’re sitting around waiting for the service to begin, I notice that at least ten of the people attending are already crying. Outside of a few bored children, most of those assembled are middle-aged and older; all rather pasty, plump, and plain-looking—the type of people you expect to see at a Kiwanis pancake supper or in the cheap seats at a Wayne Newton concert, rather than at a gathering to invoke the dead.
At precisely 5:30 P.M., a man walks up and stands in front of the Stump. “Good afternoon. My name is George Kincaid, and I’d like to welcome you all to the five-thirty Stump Service.”
George looks like a standard-issue retiree—unextraordinary in every sense. He stands in the small clearing separating the Stump from the first row of pews.
“How many of you are here for the first time?” he asks.
A few dozen hands shoot up, including mine.
“Good, good,” George continues. “First, I’m gonna tell you how this works. Several of Lily Dale’s registered and visiting mediums will take turns coming up here and tuning to the spirit world. They bring your loved ones from the other side to prove the continuity of life between the physical world and the spiritual world. If the medium receives a message for you, they will ask to come to you. You need to acknowledge this—out loud. They need to hear your voice vibrations—it helps them make a connection. Different mediums work in different ways, but make sure to respond to everything they ask, verbally. Now, because we treat this as a religious service, let’s all stand for the opening prayer.”
“Oh Lord, Father-Mother God, as we come once again to the Stump, to prove the continuity of life, we ask that the loved ones from the other side manifest to show their love and guidance. Amen.”
“Okay, our first person to serve spirit tonight is Brenda Hawkins, a registered medium here in Lily Dale. Brenda?”
Brenda thanks George for letting her serve spirit that evening, says a brief silent prayer, and surveys the assembled crowd.
Then she points right at me. It feels like winning the lottery the first time I buy a ticket.
“Sir, may I approach you, please?”
“Sure,” I say.
“A little louder, please?”
“Sure, yes,” I call out. “Absolutely.”
“I’m sensing a spirit … a maternal spirit, please … perhaps a mother or grandmother. Is your grandmother on your mother’s side in spirit, please?”
Assuming that “in spirit” is a euphemism for “dead,” I guess she is referring to Bobalu. I reply, “Yes.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Brenda says. “Tell me, please, was she a little round in the bottom?”
Now, how am I supposed to answer that? Bobalu wasn’t really overweight, but she wasn’t rail thin, either. Imagine how pissed off Bobalu would be if she traveled back from Grandma Heaven to deliver a message to her oldest grandchild, just to arrive as he says, “Oh yeah, she had a huge ass!”
I just shrug and say nothing.
“That’s okay,” Brenda says. “I feel the spirit that is reaching out to you is definitely Grandma.”
Brenda pauses.
“She wants to surround you with light and love right now and let you know that she watches over you and is proud of you,” she resumes. “She knows that you have a job that is difficult and demanding, and she is proud that you do this work. That … that is mostly it … she just wants you to know that she misses you and knows how much you loved her. She wants to leave you with blessings … oh. There is one more thing, please.”
I nod, then catch George’s glance and remember to say “Yes” out loud.
“Grandma wasn’t much of a car person, was she, please?” Brenda asks.
“No,” I reply. Outside of smoking in them and driving them to the grocery store, my grandmother had no particular connection with cars.
“Well,” Brenda says with a slight chuckle. “Your grandmother wants you to check your tire pressure over the coming weeks, please.”
“My tire pressure?”
“Yes, she says that it is nothing dangerous; just make sure you are watching it carefully to be safe. That’s it. And I leave you with God’s light and love.”
Brenda then receives a message from some woman’s uncle and is off in another direction.
Tire pressure?
I drove seven and a half hours to have Bobalu tell me to watch my tire pressure? People come to Lily Dale to connect one more time with the recently departed, find out what will happen to themselves and their loved ones, understand the afterlife and how to prepare for it, and finally figure out where Aunt Myra hid her jewelry. All I got is some car advice from a woman who couldn’t tell a tire gauge from a meat thermometer.
Over the rest of the hour-long service, about five other mediums get up to deliver messages, each connecting with three or four spirits. Unlike Brenda, many mediums start off by focusing on the spirit that’s reaching out, then identify who in the audience the message is meant for. Regardless of tactic, things often start off vague and general and end up slightly less vague and general.
A normal message will start off like this:
The medium says she has someone in spirit with a J name, probably a generation or two back, who would have died of something in the chest area.
Now, think about how many people have a deceased relative who has a first, middle, or last name that starts with J. Add that they died of something “in the chest area,” and see how likely it is that no one in a crowd of 150 has a connection. Of the two dozen or so mediums I saw deliver messages at public services in Lily Dale, more than half of them started off trying to identify a spirit as being overweight or having died of something in the chest area.
After a large number of people raise their hands at the chest-area description, the medium adds something slightly more specific, like that the J relative is wearing a uniform in spirit, meaning that in life that relative was in the military, a delivery person, a policeman, worked in a medical field, et cetera. A few hands go down. Then another level of mild specificity: something like that the spirit loved music, knitted, or clipped items from the newspaper to send to relatives and friends. Sooner or later, the medium has it down to a specific person.
One particularly bold student medium at the service gets up and says he has a spirit with him named Eunice and wants to know if anyone in the audience has an aunt or sister in spirit named Eunice. Nothing.
Then he asks if anyone in the audience is named Eunice or has a living aunt or sister named Eunice.
Crickets.
He looks over at George, shrugs, then attempts to connect with another spirit. He asks if anyone has a deceased relative, a woman, who was short, round in the bottom, and dyed her hair. Lots of hands go up.
When a medium delivers a message to the living, it is almost always loving, supportive good news. The spirits have come to let the living know that everything is going to be okay, that they love them and are always with them. The spirits want the living to know that while other living people don’t understand them fully, or don’t appreciate all the work they do, or judge them, the spirit is there to let them know that everything will be fine, and if they believe in themselves everything will work out. That son who hasn’t come home in years—the spirit knows he will soon. The uncertainties and difficulties in a career—rest assured that the spirit will help guide them and they will be successful. Every man is acknowledged for his hard work; every woman is counseled to slow down and take care of herself for a change.
Even after all I’ve been through, at this point in my life I am not, by any standard, a pessimist. Yet even I can acknowledge that sometimes bad things can happen and things don’t work out very well. Not according to the spirits of Lily Dale. They have traveled back from the great beyond to let us know everything is going to be all right. All we need to do is chill out and follow our heart/head/spirit.
After the service ends and George says another quick prayer and sends everyone on their way, the first thing I notice is more crying.
In my reading about Lily Dale before visiting, there was one curious tidbit that I couldn’t get my head around: Most of the summer visitors aren’t Spiritualists. If people don’t practice this religion or identify with all this dead-people stuff, why do they flock here? After that first service, I figured out why.
People come to Lily Dale because they are grieving.
They’ve lost loved ones and are desperate for a sense of closure or completion. They need answers and are hard up enough to schlep out to the middle of nowhere to listen to people who claim they can talk with the dead. Many of those crying before the service were anticipating a message. Many of those crying afterward are upset that they didn’t get one.
I feel like a bit of an asshole. I came to Lily Dale expecting to encounter a bunch of weirdness—which, frankly, I found. However, I expected the people who came here to be guileless kooks. In truth, their motivations for coming here aren’t that different from my own. I want answers and closure; so do they. Instead of being an outsider, I’m one of them.
The next morning I begin my hunt for a Lily Dale medium to consult with one on one. In order to conduct readings or deliver spirit messages in Lily Dale, especially if you plan to charge—I mean, accept “love offerings”—for doing so, you need to be registered and approved by the church. Lily Dale mediums go through an exhaustive vetting and testing process to demonstrate their gifts before being allowed to practice in town. Visiting or student mediums are allowed to give messages at Inspiration Stump (or at Lily Dale’s other outdoor venue, the Forest Temple), but they’re forbidden to do private readings or accept money—I mean, love offerings.
At the time, there were roughly forty registered mediums hanging shingles in Lily Dale. How do you choose one? Well, if you see a medium you like at a Stump service, you can look her up in town and set up a consultation. Other visitors go by the recommendations of friends or mediums they’ve visited in the past.
For me, it’s all about style. I simply walk the streets of Lily Dale, making harsh choices about the spiritual abilities of Lily Dale’s mediums based solely on their home décor. A few tattered angel flags on the front of the house? No. A full-sized Buddha statue on the front porch? Awesome, but not someone I want guiding my life choices. Poorly hung Christmas lights in the front window? Maybe next time. New Age music playing on a boom box on the front porch? No way.
After perusing the options, my first choice is a medium named Lynne Forget. To be honest, while her house is a little rough around the edges, I just decide the last name Forget is kinda fantastic for a medium. However, when I go to Ms. Forget’s porch to sign up for a session, every slot is filled.
Okay, no problem. I’ll just go with the next passable choice I come across: James Barnum (whose home has a tasteful and well-kept red-and-white exterior with some meticulous and lovely landscaping). A sign is hanging on his porch, ALL FULL TODAY. I move on to choices three, four, and five—all full, no appointments available. On a Monday in late August, Lily Dale is hopping.
I run into two women sitting outside a medium’s home (one that I originally passed by due to purple wind catchers and a rain-forest tape playing on the porch). I ask if they have already booked their appointment.
“Oh, yes, we booked our appointment six weeks ago,” one says.
“The good ones fill up quickly. I don’t think there’s much room for walk-ups,” says the other.
In other words: I am screwed.
I spend most of the morning going door-to-door looking for any available medium. Knowing there are forty mediums around town, I scour every driveway and sleepy side street. I even revisit all the tacky houses I passed over earlier. Eventually, I find one with a name crossed out for four o’clock that afternoon: a cancellation. The medium’s name is Patricia.
I write my name above the scratched-out cancellation. I’m in.
At four, Patricia meets me on her porch and invites me into a back room near her kitchen. After stepping into the kitchen to yell at her grandchildren, she comes out and rubs some essential oils on her hands, holds her newly scented palms to her nose, and takes a deep breath. She never asks me what I’m doing there or what I want; she just dives in.
“I’m sensing someone in spirit who had trouble breathing. A grandfather? Or some other male figure?”
“I’m sorry,” I reply. “That really doesn’t seem like a connection to me.”
“What did your grandfather die of? I assume one or both of them are dead.”
I tell Patricia that I didn’t know either of my grandfathers well, and I’m not sure what they died of, but trouble breathing isn’t ringing a bell.
“I’m still getting a male—and trouble in the chest. Could there be a younger man who passed?”
Sure, there are plenty, I tell her. But she seems to get really hung up on identifying the spirit, for at least another five minutes.
“This male energy says that you are very creative and there are other things you want to do with your life, but that you took a career for stability and money.”
This is so vague, kind of applicable and kind of not, that I really don’t give much of a response. I just nod.
“Something with your hands,” she continues. “Do you do creative things with wood?”
After another few minutes of these misfires, I decide to tell her why I’m here. I lay it all out. Dreams. Little Girl. Laura. Death.
“Of course there was a little girl in the attic!” she exclaims. “She came to you in your dreams to try to communicate with you and couldn’t, so she became increasingly frantic and desperate. You need to start thinking about what she would have wanted to tell you. Why it was so important.”
I suddenly feel riveted by her words. She should have no credibility with me—everything she’s told me so far is so off base. But now I’m hanging on everything she says.
“Sweetheart, you are asking all the wrong questions,” she continues. “You need to stop asking if this happened and start asking yourself why it happened. There is something that drew her to you. Something she wanted you to know—a warning—and she kept trying to tell you and couldn’t reach you.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then why did She want to hurt me?”
“What specifically did she do to try to hurt you?” Patricia replies. “What you experienced was your own fear and misinterpretation. With this Little Girl, you were basically dealing with a lost soul. We see lost souls all the time—drug addicts, people putting themselves in pain. They are just lost souls still attached to bodies. You don’t doubt they are real. Why do you doubt her?”
Patricia reaches over and takes my hands.
“From what it sounds like, honey, you were a lost soul, too.”
The leader for the 1 P.M. Stump Service on my third day in Lily Dale is Neal Rzepkowski, a family doctor and ordained Spiritualist minister. Neal is famous outside of Lily Dale for being forced to resign in 1991 as an emergency room doctor from the Brooks Memorial Hospital in Dunkirk, New York, because he was HIV-positive. The story made it to the front page of The New York Times. Neal was on Oprah, too.
Now he is offering a prayer and setting up a message service for dead friends and relatives to reach out to the living. The first medium called forward to share spirit was Jessie Furst, who, in addition to giving private readings, runs a guesthouse in town.
“Okay,” Jessie calls out. “I’m sensing a woman … forty to forty-five … and breast cancer. And I’m getting the name Deborah. Does anyone here have a Deborah?”
A woman sitting about ten people to my right tentatively raises her hand. As she tries to tell Jessie about her connection, she’s becoming visibly upset. It takes a couple of tries to get it out through the crying, but the woman says her name is Deborah and that she receives grief counseling from a forty-three-year-old woman who’d recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Sometimes spirit sends us messages that get all confused and mixed up,” Jessie says.
Then Deborah blurts out that she’s receiving the counseling over the recent death of her son. Deborah’s husband is sitting next to her, with his arms around her shoulders as she sobs. They’re about fifty years old.
“Yes,” Jessie says with sudden assurance. “The message is from your son.”
“He wants to tell you he loves you and that he misses you,” Jessie continues. “He wants you to know he is okay and there is no pain.”
Deborah starts to wail, placing her head in her hands while Jessie speaks. Deborah’s husband starts to sigh heavily, then tears pour down his cheeks.
“He knows how much you loved him and how much you sacrificed for him,” Jessie says. “He just wants to surround you with love and tell you that whenever you think of him, he is right there with you. You know those times when you are sitting alone and you think you can sense him?”
Deborah nods.
“That’s him. And he loves you so much and says he will always be with you. And I leave you with that, with light and love.”
Jessie moves on to other spirit messages—from someone’s dead aunt, someone’s dead father, and someone’s dead brother. As her time ends and she begins to walk away from the Stump, Neal stops her.
“Jessie, I think you need to stay up here another minute,” he says, waving his hand toward the treetops to his right. “There is a very persistent spirit here that wants to reach out through you.”
“Yes!” Jessie exclaims, raising her hand high above her head and walking back toward the Stump. “I can sense him, too. His name … is Peter.”
I hear a cry out from my right; it’s Deborah. She’s so upset she can’t speak. Her husband, openly crying as well, finally speaks out. Peter was the name of their dead son.
A chorus of gasps rises from the crowd assembled at the Stump; many begin crying, too.
“Boy, Peter really loves you,” Jessie says, beginning to choke up herself. “He just wants to take another moment to reach out to you. To surround you with all his love and make sure you know that no matter what happens, no matter what is going on, he loves you and will always be right there. So much love from this spirit for you. He wants to thank you and say God bless you.”
Jessie walks away in tears. For all the emotion I’ve seen in the audiences at message services, I’ve never seen a medium show much at all. They’re a generally stoic bunch—receiving messages is a pretty routine part of their lives. But Jessie seems sincerely moved by what has happened. Neal calls up another medium, but for all intents and purposes, the service is pretty much over. By the time it officially ends and Deborah and her husband rise to look for her, Jessie is gone.
To this day I’m still torn about what I witnessed that afternoon. On one hand, the way Jessie identified the couple and the spirit was just a shade away from the fishing you’d see from a five-dollar psychic at a state-fair booth. It felt manipulative, overly vague, and a little dirty.
However, if you spoke to Deborah and her husband, what they experienced was nothing short of a miracle. They traveled to Lily Dale for a connection and closure to this tragic event in their lives, and they got what they needed. The whole first encounter identifying Deborah and her counselor was probably a standard Lily Dale fluke. The name Peter popping up was probably just dumb luck.
So if no one was being financially scammed and poor Deborah and her husband walked away feeling like they connected to their dead son, where’s the harm? It could easily have been a complete coincidence. So what? What’s wrong with it?
This service would become the defining example of the dichotomy of Lily Dale in my eyes. I know that 90 percent of everything I saw in Lily Dale was pure bullshit; I just don’t know which 90 percent.
On my way back, I stop at the Lily Dale Museum. It’s in the old one-room schoolhouse and pretty much serves as a dumping ground for all of Lily Dale’s historical artifacts.
The main table in the center of the room is covered by photos and albums of clippings about Lily Dale’s history and its more famous residents. There’s even a box of bent spoons, evidence of some medium’s cutlery-twisting skills.
One wall is devoted to “spirit precipitated art”—meaning that it was created and/or guided by the dead. A few famous Lily Dale mediums from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to place a blank canvas and a bowl of paints on a table at the beginning of a séance. Then, two hours later, at the séance’s conclusion—bang—a painting would be there. The painting was often a portrait of a spirit that was present during the séance. Following Spiritualism’s descent into charlatanism in the early twentieth century, this and all other forms of physical mediumship, including levitation, manifestations, and dripping ectoplasm, have been strictly forbidden in Lily Dale, but that doesn’t stop them from displaying artifacts all over town. There are also a number of spirit slates (aka “automatic writings”)—small chalkboards and pieces of slate that would, during the course of a séance, become filled with drawing and writings from the great beyond.
When Spiritualism was at its peak, it was arguably too big. As it became more and more popular, there was an increasing movement toward showmanship and pressure to produce increasingly astounding acts of spiritual communication. Fraud became rampant, but the popularity of the religion remained high. People come to Spiritualism through grief, and there is never a shortage of people in pain.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a movement within Spiritualism to clean house, get a bit more organized, and weed out the sensationalists and obvious fakers. Probably as a result, Spiritualism began to wane in popularity. After World War II, it slowed to the trickle that it is today.
Today’s Spiritualists are almost obsessed with recognition and things that sound official. They are all certified in different areas of mediumship and spiritual work from organizations with vague but quasi legitimate-sounding names. Many have divinity degrees, clergy status, and even Ph.D.’s from organizations controlled by other Spiritualists. They may be nonconformists, but they want to be certified nonconformists.
My next appointment is with a veteran medium named Joe. In addition to being a registered medium in Lily Dale, Joe and his wife are also the proprietors of a Lily Dale coffee shop, which is right across the street from my hotel. Joe, like other Lily Dale mediums, has a full schedule most of the days I’m in town. Hanging out at the coffee shop during my stay got me friendly with Joe’s wife, who helped me arrange a session.
Joe takes me into a private office off the main room of the coffee shop for my consultation. It’s covered with his own spirit-guided paintings and artwork. I know this because he tells me. Joe tells me a lot of stuff. Even though we have only forty minutes together, he spends the first fifteen minutes talking about himself and his abilities. He recites his entire bio to me, recalling his recognition, even as a child, that he had the gift of visions and the ability to speak with the dead, his stint in Catholic seminary, and his mastery of Usui Reiki. I don’t get in a single word.
If you didn’t know Joe was a medium and coffee entrepreneur, you’d think he was a longshoreman or some other tough blue-collar worker. He is bald and a little on the short side, yet stocky and sturdy. He has big, thick hands that you just can’t imagine holding the delicate, small paintbrush used to make his spirit-aided art. After we say a prayer together and meditate for a bit (now almost half our time is gone), Joe says that he feels tremendous sadness around me.
“I’m sensing that this loss is fairly recent, like within the last several months,” he says.
“No,” I respond softly. “That really doesn’t have a connection to me.”
“I’m sensing some spirit guides around you. Yes. One is definitely Eskimo. Does that resonate with you at all?”
“I have nothing against Eskimos, Joe,” I say. “That’s about it.”
Joe continues with a series of fairly random observations, delivered to him by my spirit advisors. None completely off mark, but none particularly on the mark, either. With only ten minutes left in our session, I decide to cut to the chase. I tell him everything, just like I did with Patricia.
When I relate my story, Joe, who until now has been quite jovial, turns very solemn, almost angry.
“When I was a boy, I hated to touch people or be touched,” he says. “Why? Because whenever I touch people, I know what’s going to happen to them. When I was twelve years old, I was at the beach with my family. Then my mother grabbed me and started tickling me. I started fighting her off, because I knew what would happen. While she was holding me, I got a vision.”
He pauses.
“I saw her body being eaten by wild dogs,” he says. “Two years later, my mother died of cancer, weighing seventy-two pounds. Here’s the thing: When you focus on the literal meaning of messages—what you see—you often miss the point. With my mom, those dogs were her illness. I saw the whole thing coming. But you know what? As a little boy, I was worried about dogs, not cancer.”
I ask if he thinks the Little Girl in a Blue Dress is a symbol of something else.
“I’m saying that whatever needed to talk to you chose the form of a little girl. Perhaps it thought it would be less scary for you.”
“It would have been incorrect in that assumption, Joe.”
Joe continues for a few minutes about remaining open-minded, the importance of meditation to unlocking the mystery of my past, and about the importance of consulting my spirit guides. Then he looks at his watch. He pauses and takes a deep breath.
“What are you doing now?” he asks. “Are you busy?”
“No.”
“Wanna go on a walk with me?”
“Sure,” I say.
A minute later we’re walking across the park, destination unclear. Even though Joe had a tight schedule and bookings throughout the day, he’s generous with his time. He seems intensely interested in sharing whatever we are going to see, appointments be damned.
“I think I’ve seen your Little Girl before,” he says. “Several times. Right here in Lily Dale. Before I moved to Lily Dale I used to come out here for a few weeks in the summer for workshops, classes, and training. I always stayed in a guesthouse on Cottage Row,” he says. “Sometimes, you know, I’d get up early in the morning and go downstairs. Several times, I walked into the library … and I saw a little girl. She had blond hair, a blue dress, just like you say. She’d be there for a moment looking at me, then she’d be gone. Maybe, now, just maybe, it’s the same girl. Your Little Girl.”
Joe continues to share his theory: Perhaps Little Girl came to me in my dreams knowing that one day I would need some answers, and my quest would lead me to Lily Dale. Perhaps she knew that it would take twenty years before I would be ready to hear what She had to say. Perhaps this was all part of the plan from the beginning—that coming to Lily Dale is my destiny.
Joe says that several years after seeing the girl in the library he was in the National Spiritualist Association of Churches office next door, which has a spirit painting hanging in the mailroom. The painting, almost one hundred years old, is of the same girl he’d seen in the library, blue dress and all.
I can feel a knot forming in my stomach. What if this is true? Fuck, what if half of it is true? What if this whole nonsense is all part of a larger puzzle? Little Girl, Laura, my dreams, all these years of wondering and unanswered questions—all leading me here. All pieces to a puzzle that is about to be solved in a church mailroom. As we walk up the steps to the church office, I feel my skepticism ebb and flow again as I wonder whether the mystery of my life is about to take a quick and definitive left turn.
Joe waves at the secretary and says we’re just stopping in to look at a painting in the back. We weave through the former home now commandeered as office space.
As we walk into the mailroom, Joe points up to a painting.
“There she is,” he says with an empathetic smile on his face.
It is a young girl. Blond hair. Blue dress.
I take a deep, long look at the picture.
“It isn’t Her,” I say.
“What? Are you sure?” Joe says.
“Yes,” I reply. “The hair is wrong; her face is too round. It isn’t Her.”
We stand there for a moment.
“Now think about this for a minute,” he says slowly. “Are you sure?”
I don’t question Joe’s sincerity or intentions, but there is no doubt he is enabling. All it would take is one small leap over some minor inconvenient truths to make my good story into, literally, a fantastic story—one with an unthinkable conclusion and new direction. I’m sure Joe is just trying to help me find an answer.
“No,” I say. “I am absolutely positive. This is not the Little Girl I saw in my dreams.”
Joe sticks out his lip and shrugs.
“Just keep that image in your mind,” he says. “Don’t close yourself off to possibilities. You never know, you may wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘That’s her!’ Or maybe you’ll have another dream and notice more of a similarity.”
I can’t help but wonder how many times similar things have happened. People come to Lily Dale looking for answers, and if they don’t find one, they kind of hammer one into place.
“Now, I’d suggest you just be patient,” he says. “I get the feeling that all the pieces of the puzzle are in front of you; you just need to put them together. Try different arrangements, different orders. Just keep an open mind.”
The Wednesday-night Lily Dale Ghost Walk is a big deal for tourists. People flock into town to take part in the popular tour, and by the time it starts at nine o’clock, the firehouse is packed. A stretch limousine arrives with about twenty middle-aged women here to take the tour as part of a fiftieth birthday party or something. T-shirts are sold. Everyone gets a commemorative Lily Dale Ghost Walk flashlight.
The tour is hosted by Neal and Joe. After welcoming everyone, Neal shares a PowerPoint presentation covering some complex and confusing explanations of ghosts and spirits.
“There are several different types of ghosts,” explains Neal. “They all have different traits and are here for different reasons. Some are ‘Halloween ghosts’—those are simply an evaporation of the ethers—or the spirit from when the body had life. Seeing them is like watching a film loop. They can’t interact with you—they are simply an image. There are also spirits that are astral beings; those are the kind that try to communicate with someone who is mediumistic, like the people of Lily Dale.”
Neal goes on to explain that many Spiritualists believe that there are different planes of existence and, frankly, offers a bit more detail than the tour attendees seem interested in. They want visceral freaky ghost stuff. They want Lily Dale to be like walking through a haunted house.
“You know, you can actually see your spirit form—we call it the ‘prana aura,’ ” Neal says. “If you look at your hand and defocus a little, you can see it. It’s an energy field that is about a sixteenth to an eighth of an inch around your finger. A healthy prana aura looks like fur sticking out—like static electricity. If the ‘fur’ looks wet or flattened, there is a lack of energy.”
All of the tour attendees start looking at their hands, hoping for fuzzy, and comparing notes with their friends or fellow birthday celebrants.
Then Neal shares a bunch of photos taken on previous Ghost Walks—spirit orbs floating overhead, ethereal fog in the distance. The attendees are getting a bit restless, so Neal breaks us up into three groups. I end up in Joe’s group.
“I bet you went back to the office to look at that painting again, didn’t you?” Joe asks me as the tour heads out into the night.
I did, I admit. Even though I am dead certain that it isn’t Her, the whole notion is simply too weird to let go without at least taking a second peek. Under the guise of taking a better photograph, I asked the office secretary if I could go back and look again. With a wave of her hand, I was again standing in front of a spirit-guided painting of a little girl in a blue dress. Just not the Little Girl in a Blue Dress.
Joe just smiles, nodding, and winks.
The Ghost Walk itself is a pretty cut-and-dry walking tour, except it takes place in the middle of the night. We walk by the historic places of Lily Dale and learn lots of trivial things about them. We see the homes of famous Lily Dale mediums and hear stories about their wild séances and works of spirit mastery. We learn about what it’s like to live in a place like Lily Dale (turns out the church owns all the land underneath the businesses and homes and leases it to property holders, thus making it impossible to get a mortgage for a home in Lily Dale—homes have to be bought with cash). One of the last stops on the tour is the Maplewood Hotel, where I’m staying. During this stop, I learn that all the bad art in the hallways that I’d been cringing at all week is, in fact, spirit art. After explaining the concept of spirit art to the other tour attendees, Joe stops in front of a large red tapestry. He says the Spiritualist woman who created it was a quadriplegic, blind, and mute and that she stitched the tapestry with her mouth.
“Her mouth?” I ask.
“Yes,” Joe replies. “She was in a trance state for the nine years she spent working on it, and she embroidered it with her mouth.”
I stand there for a moment letting that sink in.
“Her mouth,” I repeat.
“Yes,” Joe repeats.
“How is that possible?” I ask.
“With the help of Spirit …,” he says, trailing off to what he assumes is an obvious conclusion.
“I’m not even sure I can grasp the physics of how that would work,” I say.
Joe just smiles.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Talking to dead people … I’m willing to accept that. Hearing voices that others can’t hear—I’ll go there with you. Astral projection—I’m skeptical but willing to listen. But creating a queen-sized tapestry only with your mouth—that’s too much. That falls outside what I’m willing to accept.”
“Well, being skeptical is good,” Joe offers. “Questioning things is good. When it all comes down to it, it is simply a matter of whether or not you choose to believe. And I choose to believe.
“But then again,” he continues, “I also believe I can talk to dead people.”
True, Joe. Very true.
I notice a small framed paper to the left of the tapestry. It’s the official Lily Dale version of the tapestry’s history, which, as it turns out, is even weirder than Joe’s.
While the official version makes no mention of her creating the embroidery with her mouth, it does say that Mollie Francher, the stitcher, “suffered a severe accident which resulted in a development of inflammation of the lungs, paralysis, blindness, periods of deafness, occasional loss of speech, then spasms, followed by a trance condition.”
Mollie stayed this way for nine years, supposedly refusing all food and drink, saying, “I receive nourishment from a source of which you are all ignorant.” And not only did Mollie manage to embroider the tapestry during that time, but she also wrote more than sixty-five hundred letters of encouragement and support to other Spiritualists. Instead of making a tapestry, Mollie should have written a book on time management.
As we head out of the hotel to the next tour stop, I walk up to Joe again.
“You do realize that when you say, ‘I also believe I can talk to dead people,’ you are providing someone with the ultimate trump card against any argument you make,” I say.
“What do you mean?” he replies.
“Well, let’s say we’re having an argument over who was the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I could say it was Sidney Pollack. You would say, ‘No, it was Milos Forman.’ Then I would say, ‘Yeah, but you also think you can talk to dead people.’ Then I automatically win the argument.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because there would be a third dude with us,” I say. “And when he heard all this, he would say, ‘Wow, I’m gonna believe the guy who doesn’t think he can talk to dead people.’ And side with me, two to one.”
“But who directed the movie?” Joe asks.
“Milos Forman.”
“Then I’d be right after all,” Joe says.
I decide it’s better to let it go.
After visiting a few more Lily Dale sites, we head out to Inspiration Stump. The capper on the Lily Dale Ghost Walk is a special midnight service at the Stump, completely and totally in the dark. As we work our way through the forest, we almost don’t need flashlights. This is due to the paparazzi-like explosion of camera flashes. Earlier, Joe had said that many people capture orbs in photos taken in the woods—or their cameras stop working entirely—and everyone is taking pictures into the darkness, hoping to capture a spook.
I settle in on the front bench at the Stump, surrounded by some women whom I don’t recognize and assume are with the birthday party group.
Neal leads us in some silent meditation to align ourselves with the spirits and open ourselves up to communication. As we sit there, the woman on my left starts crying. I’m clueless about what to do. Should I comfort her? I mean, I don’t even know her. Should I just leave her alone and ignore it?
“Now that we’ve become in tune with the Stump and the spirit energy, does anyone have anything to share?”
“I was just touched on the arm by my grandmother!” the woman at my left yells. Even though it’s pitch-dark, I look at the people around me, I guess to make sure they understand that it was Grandma touching her, not me.
“I’d know her touch anywhere!” she cries out. “I can feel my grandfather, too. It’s like they are standing right here with me.”
Then the woman sitting on my right starts to sob. Again unsure as to what I should do, I lean in toward her in a gesture meant to ask “Are you okay?”
“Can’t you see him?” she whispers through her tears.
“Um, who?” I say.
“He’s sitting right there on the Stump,” she replies.
Even at night, I can clearly see the entire Stump in the moonlight, just eight feet in front of us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t see anything on the Stump.”
“The boy,” she insists. “He is sitting right there in front of you.”
I just sit up straight again. Probably best to leave the two of them alone.
Neal and Joe both offer a few messages, then everyone gets up to walk out of the woods and head back to town. On the way, my fellow tour takers are aflutter over what happened and what they experienced. Several of them are pretty freaked out. However, I’m not at all, which surprises me.
It’s something I came to understand about myself in Lily Dale, but I’d felt it on Clinton Road as well. While these places are scary at first, the more time I spend around them, the less frightened I am. Even though there is no less of a reason for being afraid, I kind of get used to them. For the first time, I catch myself wondering if perhaps it isn’t the ghosts I’m scared of.
Nine days after my return from Lily Dale, a few friends and I are going to a movie. I’m driving and my friend Joe (of Clinton Road fame) is giving me directions. Bad directions. After turning the wrong way, I attempt a three-point turn to head back the other way. In the middle of my second turn, I bump up against a curb and hear a loud pop.
A flat tire.
We get it fixed and still make it in time for the movie, but it’s close.
The mechanic later told me the tire blew because it was only half full.
I should have checked my tire pressure, he says.