The Fox Sisters
I hurry toward Lily Dale up a local highway edged in rows of corn dwarfed by drought. It’s a sweltering summer afternoon. Each upstate town I wind through shares the shuttered look of has-been industrial communities or the eerie stillness of vampire covens. A teenager in a lone burger shack sells me an ice cream cone, and I inhale it against the heat on the hood of my car.
I prepare myself for a potentially disappointing Lily Dale, the colony of a Victorian religion probably made cheesy by the moneyed New Age: collections of crystal shops, deluxe motor homes, plastic angel mobiles, something like that. I get back in the car. I pass a rodeo field, an abandoned school, a pub called the Witch Hut, and I recall that Rod Serling grew up in this region. I can suddenly see Twilight Zone everywhere, its endless streets and existential conundrums: it’s the end of the world but your glasses break; the streets in your town connect in an endless loop; you wake up in a dollhouse and your life is governed not by the hands of God but the hands of a little girl.
I turn off the highway onto a wooded road, Cassadaga Lake glittering through the trees. Finally, I’m at a toll booth: “LILY DALE ASSEMBLY—world’s largest center for the religion of Spiritualism – est 1879.” I hand my $10 to a young man, and he waves me through.
On the other side of the booth is a simple Victorian town made shabby by time and isolation. I pass a post office, a county firehouse, an old hotel, and gingerbread homes in varying states of disrepair, then I park in a gravel ditch behind a carriage house, its paint, at this moment, being chipped at by two uniformed men. A bell clangs for the two-thirty worship service.
The Old Assembly Hall provides cool, cavernous shade as I pass under its arched doors. There are large glassless windows but no electric light. Without a word of greeting, an old woman hands me a laminated hymnal, and I walk toward a congress of folding chairs. Once settled, I face a stage flanked by blown-up photographs of Lily Dale’s grounds during the late nineteenth century next to a set of principles, the first three proclaiming:
The fatherhood of God
The brotherhood of man
Continuous existence
The last of those refers to Spiritualism’s central belief: that the life of the soul, Spirit, is literally eternal, “continuous,” after the decay of the physical body, allowing those who have passed away the ability to communicate with the living. The cornerstone of the religion is the practice of mediumship—communicating with the departed, who, in turn, can lead us toward a more perfect society on Earth.
A woman with a thick Eastern European accent explains from the stage that, because of the stifling heat, we don’t need to stand during the service. Then she says, “We need to raise vibrations for our speaker today. Let’s go to page twenty-three—‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’” So we sing this old spiritual, and as I flip through the hymnal, still singing, I notice that traditional songs have been slightly revised. Words like “Christ” are replaced with the generic “love,” and “providence” with “angels.” My favorite line in “Amazing Grace” is changed to “’Twas Grace that taught my heart to sing” rather than “to fear.”
A middle-aged male minister rises to the podium. “Who here knows much about the religion of Spiritualism?” Only six people, myself included, raise their hands. As I suspected, most guests must have come for the summer events, held from the solstice until Labor Day weekend, hoping to make contact with dead parents, children, ancestors, or looking for guidance during a dark night of the soul, or they’re Catholics who told their families they were going to a spa or to the beach and instead snuck off to this metaphysical compound in the spooky rural reaches of the Finger Lakes. It’s also then I notice that nearly all seventy or so people present are women, middle-aged or older, and white—and they look a lot like my tarot clients.
A year earlier, I was scraping by in Providence, Rhode Island, making part of my income reading tarot at a New Age shop called Andromeda’s Alley. The guy who vetted me for the job was of old Boston Spiritualist stock and had spent his childhood in parlors with his medium grandmother. As a control, he had me read for a friend of his, a woman who had popped in during a lunch break. I pulled three cards: weird dreams, a feeling of inadequacy, a baby. She burst into tears and told me she was pregnant, unexpectedly, at forty-five years old.
In the weeks that followed, I noticed that my being a young woman was initially off-putting to clients (they’d see my smooth, hopeful face smiling at them from the back room), and then, a few minutes into the reading, my youth became comforting, inviting. I’d face them straight on and have them cut the deck a few times. I’d ask that they not tell me anything—not even ask a question (because it’s always the wrong question anyway). I’d put my hand on the deck, recite the Lord’s Prayer in my head—always the Lord’s Prayer, I don’t know why—and just get a couple of quick pictures in my mind, not the whole story of their life or anything, but enough to know how this person needed to be treated and a whiff of who or what was haunting them.
I read mostly for women—women who’d lost custody of their children, old women, young women, scorned women, depressed women, widowers, bankers, small-business owners, psychiatrists, beauticians, the recently fired, the recently sober. Catholics were my primary customers, and I often began readings by assuring clients that I was not telling their fortune but just seeing things—mostly the present and the past—and having a conversation about those things through the cards. This wasn’t euphemism, but I also knew my audience, these wary people who’d sneak in after work or during lunch, feeling like heretics.
The church, and the Abrahamic religions in general, is openly dismissive and even damning of anything having to do with divination, as the fear is that some kind of idolatry is taking place, or a sort of blasphemous attempt to become God-like, to see “God’s will,” or posit God-like intercession, and this is especially threatening if conducted by women—all them witches, you know.
And yet, at that time in my life, every Sunday I was going to church in the basement of a vocational high school around the corner from Providence’s historic Italian Federal Hill district. I’d sit in the middle row of a mess of folding chairs and sing these saccharine contemporary hymns and listen to the hour-long sermons, and I would cry, almost every time. It was a strange period.
But here I am at Lily Dale, back among a familiar set of people, a group that is by and large out of its element. The minister has begun his lecture, though I’ve missed the first part while taking in my surroundings.
“I’m from the Southern Baptist tradition,” he says. “I didn’t want to have much to do with church until I was an adult” excepting “funerals and weddings.” He tells the story of the out-of-body experience he had in his twenties after a car accident, when he first learned to communicate “in Spirit.” He says that, during the brief moments following the accident, he saw his “whole life, past, present, and future . . . and communicated with my relatives and ancestors.” Sitting before him now is a big leather-bound Bible that he calls “an atlas,” and then he concedes that, under different circumstances, he might be consulting any other book—this just happened to be Americans’ primary religious text in the mid-1800s when Spiritualism came about. This admission seems extremely odd to me, and it undermines some of the urgency of the moment.
Early on in the movement, there was certainly serious anxiety over assimilation. In Sir Arthur Hill’s 1919 Spiritualism: Its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine, he deliberately aligns the religion with Christianity but acknowledges sectarian dissent. He cites a contemporary Anglican bishop’s remark on the movement: “There have been more people sent to Hell through Spiritualism than by all the bullets and shrapnel in [the Great War],” to which he asks, mocking that Protestant absolutism, “Has he been there to see for himself?” Hill argues, for his early-twentieth-century religious readers who are seeking permission to believe that spiritualist phenomena doesn’t jeopardize their current beliefs,
It will be seen that there is nothing heretical about [Spiritualism]. Indeed, it is more Christian than many forms of modern Christianity, for it brings back into prominence those important facts, survival and intercommunion, which were taught by Christ, but which, as we have already noted, have in these latter days increasingly lapsed into a dim region of uncertainty if not actual disbelief.
Of course, these are not the kind of debates contemporary Spiritualism generally concerns itself with.
I drift back into observation. Not one person around me appears to be wearing the costume of mysticism, like I’d expected. They are dressed, rather, in tourist shorts or fanny packs or loose cotton T-shirts from J. Jill. As far as I can tell, I am the only attendee in my twenties, which is interesting, as is the fact that the minister is male. Because it was women, especially young women, who were the harbingers of nineteenth-century Spiritualism.
We should get this out of the way: In 1888, Maggie Fox gave a tell-all confession to a New York newspaper, admitting that the religion for which she and her two sisters had been patron saints for forty years was a hoax. When the interviewer probed for remorse, Maggie dabbed her eyes and said, “That I have been mainly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of spiritualism upon a too-confiding public many of you already know. It is the greatest sorrow of my life . . .” She praised God for the courage to go public, slugged a bit of gin from a screw-top flask in her purse, and cried into the interviewer’s lap.
Maggie and Kate Fox were twelve and fifteen years old when, shortly after the first day of spring in 1848, they ushered Spiritualism into the world. The Fox family lived in what was a notoriously haunted house in Hydesville, New York, where they often heard footsteps, doors slamming, and irregular tapping noises issuing from all corners of the building. Eventually, the two sisters took it upon themselves to attempt communication with the restless spirit through a series of responsive “rappings” on the kitchen table, after which they were able to determine the spirit’s identity as that of an itinerant man who’d been murdered in the house not long before the Foxes had moved in. Those rappings, to use the now-departed Spiritualism minister Alice Hughes’s phrase, were heard “around the world.” When the Fox sisters’ séances started to attract neighbors, and then Quakers, and then the religiously restless from across the country, to demonstrate their powers of mediumship, a movement was born. All Americans, even WASPs, could talk to the dead, and teenage girls would facilitate.
But 1848 is an auspicious date. There was a lot of reform going on. It was the “Spring Time of the Nations,” when Marx rallied the proletariat under the call that a “specter was haunting Europe”—not the ghosts of murdered men, but the specter of communism. That communism swept the continent at that moment not as an ideology but as a phantom, as something that haunts, is no accident. It implies that these uprisings abounded, not by the shock of something new, but of something revealed, a voice that had been whispering the secrets of the peasants’ discontent for centuries. That same year, France abolished slavery, calling further into existence a burgeoning Western notion of human rights, making visible, as if a light had been suddenly switched on, the blood of black bodies on America’s hands.
What’s more, the Second Great Awakening was, in 1848, at its peak: an American Protestant movement that prioritized personal testimony and mystical revelation over institutional authority. Methodists and Freewill Baptists dispatched uneducated clergy, men and women, black and white, across the countryside to spread the news that all people were subject to God’s messages. Inevitably, then, God was, it seems, revealing as many new ways to live as there were people interested in carrying out movements: Millerism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness; the Holiness movement, the revival movement, the African Episcopal movement, and a thousand brands of agnostic, pluralist, or Christian utopianism.
And just a few months after the Fox sisters’ rappings, down the road from their home in Hydesville, the first women’s rights convention took place. When Susan B. Anthony and E.C. Stanton stood at the pulpit of the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, announcing that woman’s destiny was up to “her conscience and her God,” they were, as much as the Fox sisters, riding the Awakening’s wave. The Awakening had arrived at the inevitable question, as put by scholar Ann Braude: “Why would God set men over women to guide and protect them and then choose more women than men to have wills perfectly attuned to Him?” Suddenly the disenfranchised—women, blacks, the poor—were all potential prophets, and everyone had better listen.
But things got strange for the Fox sisters rather quickly. Their elder sister Leah got involved in their Spiritualist celebrity, too, and for several years following, she leased their supernatural gifts to the management of P.T. Barnum, and, later on, a dozen other for-profit executors. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a Spiritualist himself, reported a sad scene involving the Fox sisters after a public séance ten years into their career. The three young women stood by as they were harassed by throngs of skeptics to prove their powers, and:
poor patient Kate Fox, in the midst of a captious, grumbling crowd of investigators, repeating hour after hour the letters of the alphabet, while the no less poor, patient spirits rapped out names, ages and dates to suit all comers . . . Can one wonder that the girls, with vitality sapped, the beautiful, watchful influence of the mother removed, and harassed by enemies, succumbed to a gradually increasing temptation in the direction of stimulants?
The Fox sisters remained Spiritualist mediums, advisers, and orators off and on for the rest of their natural lives, drinking and sniffing doctor-prescribed powders, slowly turning on themselves and each other, spreading rumors and plotting to have each other’s children taken away. They married men—rich men, controlling men, arctic explorers, Catholics, men who died suddenly from heart disease. They converted to other faiths, then abandoned those and returned to the Spiritualist lecture circuit when they were poor and had burned bridges. All three sisters were estranged by the end of their lives, and Maggie and Kate died in middle age, within months of each other, of alcohol abuse–related disease.
However, as important as they’d been to the religion’s origin, their tragic ends went largely unnoticed by the Spiritualist community, and Margaret’s late-life confession didn’t affect believers any more than any prior refutations. As early as 1851, the Fox sisters had undergone tests that ostensibly proved that the rappings issuing from the rooms during their psychic meetings were being produced by one or another’s double-jointed knees or toes, depending on the source. But by then the religion had spread like wildfire, with factions, newspapers, and hundreds of major and minor celebrity mediums holding court to a captivated public all over the nation. Anyone could own an Ouija board, and Spiritualism had produced a whole workforce of mediums, mostly young women, who were paid in spades for their vocations.
And anyway, a year after Maggie’s confession to that New York paper where she claimed it was all a hoax, she gave an equally tearful retraction, saying that she had wrongfully defamed Spiritualism, that the rappings were authentic, that she’d only given in to diabolical pressure from her sister, her agent, her drink—but that the spirit world was real, as real as you or me.
Toward the end of the minister’s lecture, he leads us in a long concluding prayer before introducing Mary Ockuly, the visiting medium for the day. Ockuly has short gray hair and has been sitting behind the pulpit with a slight silent smile for forty-five minutes. She says that she spent the first thirty years of her life as a nun among the Sisters of Humility of Mary in Ohio, and that her journey to Spirit has been a long one. She positions herself in front of the podium and, in a small voice, says to an older woman, “You—have you received a message today?”
The woman shakes her head.
“I have a message for you. A man is standing behind you. He says his name is Henry thank you. And his house burned down, I see flames thank you. He says he loves you, wants you to dig something, you know what it is, out of a sock drawer thank you. You’ll need it. He says it’s time that you started to think more highly of yourself . . .”
I wonder if these images, the image of this Henry, are as apparent to Mary Ockuly as a photograph, or a television screen, or if it’s more like watching the live charades of a flesh-and-bone human. She squints. She interprets. She expresses gratitude when something comes through. She speaks in fits and starts. Does she see the man with her eyes or with her mind? Does she have to imagine, to some extent, before she can see anything at all?
And have I ever seen a ghost? If I have, what was it like? I am reminded of a whole year during my childhood where my dad’s house smelled strange—musky, fishy—the source of which none of us could discern. I was eight or nine years old. One afternoon, one of my stepmother’s friends was visiting, and while they drank tea and tuned their instruments in the living room, her friend looked at the empty futon couch and cocked her head. “There’s someone sitting there,” she said. “His name is Ted.” The friend was already a known seer of things from the other side—this was just the kind of company we kept—so it was Ted’s presence that surprised us the most. From then on, we joked that the smell was from Ted. And it was all fun and games until the sun went down, and the hallways and stairwells of the Victorian house grew dark, and I found myself skittering out of unlit rooms, watching over my shoulder. I always felt like I was about to see a ghost.
At the time, my dad was studying with Jan Englesmith, the Shamanic healer connected to his Lakota hoop. He came home one night and said he’d visited Ted in a vision quest that Jan had led. In the quest, he’d walked into the house, our house, but it was much smaller, there was no living room, and it had old, weathered 1930s wallpaper. And there was this middle-aged guy with thinning hair, looking very confused, standing in the doorway. He kept asking where his wife was. My dad told him that she was gone, she was OK, though. And Ted looked at him, more bewildered than before, and then—just like that—the confusion melted from his face, replaced with a softness. And then a sort of chariot appeared, with horses, and he got in—in the living room?—and it carried him away. This was how my dad told it.
Later that week we found a nest of dead baby possums in the cellar. They had apparently died because my dad had repaired a hole in the house’s foundation, which must have sealed the mother possum outdoors. After that, the smell in the house went away.
I don’t think it’s quite that ambiguous for Mary Ockuly, but I have to imagine it’s close.
The service ends and I walk outside to a hot bench. I dig out a copy of divinity scholar Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits from my bag and flip to an 1857 daguerreotype of Cora Hatch, a world-famous Spiritualist medium at seventeen years old, gazing into distant light, a heavy pewter cross against her throat, golden ringlets falling below her shoulders. She was perhaps the second-most-famous nineteenth-century medium after the Fox sisters, her image appearing on mimeographed bills posted all over northeastern cities boasting of trance lectures wherein, with the help of spirits, she might deliver entire unrehearsed speeches about Darwin’s theories or the daily activities of angels or Andrew Jackson’s discontent with abolition or the history of Occultism.
Female youth was prized in these early Spiritualist circles, under the belief that it provided special innocence, ignorance, a lack of ulterior motive. For the first time ever, the nineteenth century “cult of true womanhood”—an assemblage of sentiments espousing that female virtue rested solely in the expression of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity—rendered young women the perfect moral compasses and gentle receptors of messages, and so mediums, trance lecturers, and message ministers were often eleven, fifteen, seventeen years old, put up onstage in places like New York’s Stuyvesant Institute or Union Hall, full of uncomfortable and expectant spectators. Because they were part of a new religious movement, Spiritualists had few public venues to display their practice, as most of the church’s mediums worked one-on-one with individuals or families, and there were no educational institutions or centrally organizing bodies to spread the word. So trance lecturers were, as Braude argues, Spiritualism’s missionaries.
Cora Hatch entered the assembly halls already in a trance state. Someone would usher her up to a podium, like a frail old woman with the face of a teenager, and she’d begin, eloquently. “The word ‘occultism’ is but a few months old, and bears no relation to Spiritualism. The occult presumes select individuals have access to knowledge that equips them with special powers; whereas God’s gift of mediumship is meant for all the world to possess.” A distinctive part of these “discourses” was their virtual impromptu form, wherein a committee or public figure would select a topic for her to speak on, after which they were published in the Spiritualist periodical Banner of Light, unedited, from the stenographer’s speedy notes.
Within a couple of years of that 1857 daguerreotype, Hatch was a superstar. She divorced her husband, who was her manager at the time, and he dragged their split into the public sphere, raging, blaming her marital discontent on the unruly ideals and ministerial autonomy that Spiritualism instilled in American women. But it was way too late for that kind of talk. Spiritualism had long been partnered with the suffragists and other women’s rights movements, and the community rounded the wagons, reporting on his abuse and exploitation of Hatch. In turn, she continued to rise in fame, on her own, gathering larger and larger crowds. When the suffragist Paulina Wright Davis spoke on a retrospective of the women’s rights movement in 1871, she credited Cora Hatch with having “spoken more frequently and to larger audiences . . . than almost any other lecturer.” For the most part, not only were trance lectures where most Americans first heard of Spiritualism, but also, Braude notes, where they first saw a woman speak in public.
From my bench, I look up from the book and watch congregants filter out of the Assembly Hall. Mary Ockuly comes last, her eyes full of light. I think about Cora Hatch with her eyes glazed over onstage. I think of Maggie Fox’s confession and retraction. What if any or all of these people did have divine inspiration? I am not here to confirm or deny that. Is it possible that both happened at once, that divine inspiration occurred right when women were pushing for reform, or that the inklings of reform could even, possibly, have prompted or allowed for a receptiveness to such a message? In order to hear any call, there must first be some imagined future that makes it audible.
Eventually I decide to walk around town. There are multiple sites around Lily Dale’s wooded perimeters where, scheduled throughout the day, four or five mediums gather to conduct Message Services. I go to one in the Forest Alter and sit on wooden benches with a hundred others in the dappled green light next to an entrance to the Fairy Trail. The mediums call mostly upon middle-aged people or older—I didn’t see one person call on a child or a teenager or someone in their twenties. Some of the messages are very general (“I see a man who misses you”) and some very specific (“I see a red toy airplane”). Spirits give warnings, exhortations, encouragement. “I see a red toy airplane thank you, and a man in a green sweater and he wants you to know you should increase your hourly rate thank you for your legal services thank you.”
I drift off and wander around the neighborhoods. Lily Dale is made up of a lot of little paint-flecked Victorians built at ground level. I pass a man repairing the porch of a particularly dilapidated one. He turns out to be the fire marshal of the town and tells me that he and his wife moved to Lily Dale from Boston in 1999, and that the permanent resident count is 375—that’s how many people stay through the winter. He wears Carhartts and a white T-shirt and has a thick New England accent. He says they’d moved to Lily Dale because his wife’s family had history, property here, because her great-great-aunt was one of the founders. “Our church is over there,” he says, pointing down the road to a smaller meeting house used during the off-season. “The Church of the Living Spirit.”
A couple of houses later, I pass by a teenage girl, her hair cut short under a trucker hat, slouching in an old Adirondack on the porch. “Aren’t you hot?” she asks me. “Why aren’t you in one of the cafés?” I ask her what it was like growing up here and she says, “Boring.” Down another street, there is a private beach on the lake, a beautiful two-bedroom house for sale for $77,000 (I pocket its glossy flier), and a Neighborhood Watch sign.
I had ended up in Providence in 2011, reading tarot to make ends meet, after having graduated into a recession, unemployed and broke. Sweeney was finishing graduate school, and so, with no other plan in sight, I followed him north and ended up in a shabby white walkup on the city’s West Side, waiting for job interviews, waiting for revelations of the future—any future—and waiting for my clamoring heart to still. I felt haunted at the time by an anxiety so overwhelming I couldn’t distinguish my fear of the future from my fear of the flickering lights in my apartment, the dry scrabbling that echoed from the empty units below my own, and the winding, unlit stairway I’d race down in the morning dark to catch my eight o’clock train to go read cards for people in North Attleboro.
There was a ghostliness to the region, to New England, and especially to Providence itself—a city from where much had disappeared: Native Americans, trees, barons, and one of the largest industrial economies in America, leaving the population to buckle under its absence. There were other things, too: a lot of garrets, towers, cupolas, the sense of being peered out at from behind glass. Hundreds of the houses on the West Side were abandoned. You could walk for miles during the summertime and barely see anyone at all—or maybe it was just that summer, maybe that was just me. A friend visited and said, “You can tell that a lot of witches were killed here,” which seemed to reinforce my feeling, though he offered no further explanation. At night, I chain-smoked and squeezed out a paragraph here and there, and then Sweeney and I would watch episodes of Six Feet Under that we’d rent, season by season, from what appeared to be the last video rental store on Earth.
One night, shortly after Sweeney had started a dose of SSRIs, he drank two glasses of wine at a school event and then disappeared into a state of psychosis from which he did not emerge for several hours. He was standing stark naked on the landing of my apartment when I got home, and when my roommate and I tried to put him to bed, he kept waking up, wandering lustily to whomever was in reach, his pupils dilated. When we tried to guide him on the short walk back to his apartment, he yelled to passersby on the street, rolled around on the sidewalk in his rumpled dress clothes, charged an oncoming car, laughing.
I left him at his apartment with a couple of friends and wandered down to the Woonasquatucket waterfront, where a biweekly Providence ritual was underway. In that two-thirds of a mile of “reclaimed” river, once a month—and sometimes more frequently in the early fall—the city of Providence hosts WaterFire at the Waterplace Park amphitheater. It’s a mysterious nonprofit community event wherein, at dusk, more than eighty bonfires are lit in elevated pyres in the river that runs through downtown. That night I sat on the grassy knoll with a thousand other onlookers as we watched fire tenders, cloaked in black, circle the river stoking the flames.
Despite how frightening it had been to see Sweeney that way, I felt free for a moment from the quivering fears of my own possible psychosis, having transferred all my concern on to him. The Providence populace and I sat on the banks and watched, wrapped in glow sticks, paper-bagging beer, listening to strange Euro-pop or New Age opera piped into the arena, while the fire tenders, looking like druids, receded into the darkness.
Afterward, I walked to an Irish pub downriver and sat with a friend until we got a call from the boys who’d been watching Sweeney. I heard the phone passed to him and then his voice on the other end, completely familiar, restored. I asked if he remembered any of the last few hours, and he said only a little bit—that he felt like he’d come out of a trance, a possession.
When I spoke to my parents on the phone during those months, I’d make oblique references to feeling anxious but insist that I was fine, everything was fine, graduating from college is crazy, you know. Right? Right. That’s all.
My grandmother called me shortly after Sweeney’s episode, and without even saying hello, she asked, “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m OK. Yes.”
“You sure?” she said. “Because we have a connection, you know.”
“I know,” I said. I know.
From Lily Dale, I drive all the way back to Wyoming for my second year of graduate school. I end up befriending a young medium who is pursuing a master’s degree in American Studies. Her thesis is about processing trauma in the afterlife, a project inspired by victims of a gruesome murder ten years earlier who’d started appearing to her. She had been living in Thermopolis, Wyoming, as a town-paper reporter, and had found herself at night, in libraries, in her bedroom, being visited by a woman and her three children, who had been shot by the woman’s fifteen-year-old stepson just outside of town. So she started doing research about domestic violence, mediumship, and healing, and took this to an academic context. Jess is incredibly happy-go-lucky, cheerful, peach-cheeked, ten years older than me but with the bright eyes and glossy brown hair of a much younger woman. She takes me dancing one night at the Buckhorn Bar ’90s night, and then she tells me about being a medium the following week when she invites me to do a clearing with her at the Cooper House.
We sit in the big seminar room of a mansion that’s been converted into the American Studies building. She’s brought another woman along, also a medium, a jolly Catholic and employee of the university. We each sit against a different wall while Jess beats a hide-drum to raise energy—and then we are quiet, our eyes closed, and Jess starts speaking to a woman and two young children. That’s who’s there, she says. The other medium, alternatively, sees the teenaged Cooper House heir who died in the 1970s, and she gives him a hard time about all the acid he did. He is annoyed, she says, and angry. I see—what? My eyes are closed, and there is the lace-like hoop of a woman’s skirt, two children darting around her. Jess tells them they’re free to go, get, go on, no need to stay. And then we continue sitting in silence for a long time.
Afterward, we turn on the lights and gather at the seminar table usually used for classes, and the older medium brings out her crystal pendulum. “I don’t think the nephew is ready to go,” she says, and the pendulum starts swinging and swinging and swinging.
At the university, I meet a woman—a professor of social sciences—who grew up in and around Lily Dale, and while her parents weren’t Spiritualists, they did casually attend Tuesday night “circles,” like everyone in the area did, and they spoke openly about making spirit contact with dead relatives. When she thinks about it, she tells me, though she knew many practicing Spiritualists, she doesn’t remember anyone explicitly stating that they were one.
She says that Lily Dale “attracts a group of people that’s quite different, in that people are coming there from all over the world by choice, so it’s a paradox in a lot of ways because you have this community of blue-collar folks—of which I’d count myself one—who are really shaped in a lot of ways by growing up in that area . . . I think there’s a basic level of respect for the practices there, because people take it really, really seriously.” She thinks about it and then compares it to the religious atmosphere of New Orleans: “You know what they say: It’s 30 percent Baptist, 70 percent Catholic, and 100 percent Voodoo.”
Maggie and Kate Fox start a movement, then abandon it, then take it back. Spiritualism makes an occasion to force the American people to shut up and listen to teenage girls talking onstage for the first time maybe ever. People continue talking to the dead, or they talk to the living, who tell them everything they need to know about what they’d want the dead to say. Spirits show up looking for resolution, so Jess writes letters to and visits a murderer in state prison who is now old and grizzled, seeing what she can do. Some women, between 1848 and now, make a lot of money, make a living, make a life, sitting in rooms or on stumps or in assembly halls, giving messages. Veracity has little to do with it.
The weird thing is that, at the end of the long, arduous year in Providence and three minutes before we packed up all of our worldly belongings and moved to Wyoming, Sweeney and I got married on the hottest day of my life. I had to run down the road barefoot from our rental house to the venue to make it in time, having just spent a spare twenty minutes scribbling a letter, sweating in my slip, on the back deck. At the inn, I found myself nearly bleeding through my dress. I needed a tampon. I did not have one. I said this very matter-of-factly, and my mom kind of looked at me, like, Really? and then began asking around.
Somewhere outside in the incredible heat was my bridegroom being made to wait in direct sunlight while I got my tampon, while our bridal party clustered at the back door, and while I cried as my brother, my stepfather, my soon-to-be-husband’s aunt and uncle, friends we hadn’t seen in months were ferried past me through a corridor. My dad took me gently by the arm and guided me into an empty hallway. “Where do you think the tears are coming from?” he asked. I looked out the window, trying to answer, and I saw two friends of Sweeney’s I’m not even that close to wander up the drive, and I burst into tears all over again. “It’s just that everyone is here—” I said, “that all these people are here together.”
We’d brought all of these people together in some very brief vision of a more perfect society, though it lasted only for a second, in my mind, and then it was gone.
What my stepmother remembers most vividly from the ceremony were the vows. She said, years later, “We were shocked by the vows.”
“The vows?” I asked, remembering mine, which had a reference to the woman in Proverbs who “laughs at the days to come” and to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
“Yes, the vows,” she said, “about the rib and all that. I mean, it was a wedding—where one asserts a new identity. So we were like, WHOA, OK then.”
And I realized that she was talking about the scripture, not the vows. To kick off the pastor’s homily, that radical feminist friend of mine, Amber, had read the part from Genesis about woman being made from man, Eve from Adam, the rib, and how it resulted in Adam writing the first poem of humankind.
The bridal party took whiskey shots under the trellis, at the altar, the shots poured into small Dixie cups that were distributed while my mother and stepmother played a flute duet.
Everyone in attendance was shocked for one reason or another. My friends and family from the West Coast thought it was the most traditional wedding they’d ever been to, but Sweeney’s family and friends thought it was the weirdest, saying politely afterward, “Oh, it was so you guys.” My friends didn’t dare ask about the religiously structured ceremony, and it was so new-fangled, art-school Protestant that Sweeney’s Irish Catholic family almost couldn’t tell it was religious at all.
I was twenty-three years old. My own family members—who would have been perfectly happy if I’d never gotten married, or if I’d gotten married to three people, barefoot in someone’s backyard—were politely tolerant. Our friends were excited for us, though they were also slightly overwhelmed by the whole thing, repeatedly saying things like “I’m happy for you, but I can’t imagine getting married” or “I wouldn’t do it.”
Then we partied all night in the renovated train depot hotel we’d booked looking out over the Hudson, and then for the next two nights beyond that, three dozen friends, cousins, and comrades crammed into a house up the road we’d rented to share with them.
I saw something a few nights later. All our friends had finally left, and Sweeny and I were alone for the first time, and we slept hard. Then in the middle of the night I awoke and there was a bright green light, sort of the size and shape of a scarab, flying around the room. I lay and stared, trying to parse dream from sleep from waking. It was like a firefly’s light, though it did not go out. Rather, it flew and flew all over the room for five minutes. Then darkness.
I figured Sweeney was asleep, but I whispered anyway: “Did you see that?”
And Sweeney said, “I did.”