Spiritualist Camp Lures the Living Who Long to Reach the Dead

The living come here, to this tiny village in the woods, to commune with the dead.

Patricia Nicholson heard from her son, Brian, weeks after he was struck down by a heart attack at age 39. “It was very reassuring, knowing that he had just crossed over,” said Nicholson, an antiques dealer from Ocala, Fla. “He was at peace.”

And Nancy Whitney received messages from her long-dead grandparents and a cousin named Bill, gone for nearly two decades now. “They’re all doing fine,” said Whitney, 48, a restaurant manager from Baltimore. “I learned that my grandparents were greeters on the other side, and Bill was an organizer, moving things around.”

Spooky? Maybe.

Unbelievable? Perhaps.

But every day, bereaved relatives, paranormal pioneers and curious tourists arrive--sometimes by the busload--to consult one or more of the 50 mediums, psychics and healers who have made this central Florida town a mecca for those hungry for a word from the great beyond.

“With the approach of the Year 2000, people seem to be looking for more substantial ways of worship,” said Steve Adkins, a medium and president of the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Assn. “By bringing back lost loved ones, we hope to create an awakening to God, and remove the fear of death.”

Cassadaga is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, founded in 1894 by spiritualists from New York looking for a winter retreat. It is now the oldest active religious community in the southeastern United States.

For most of the last century, the spiritualists have lived in harmony with their Bible Belt neighbors. But on Halloween morning, conservative Christian Rev. John A. Ferro and about 10 followers from the nearby town of Lake Helen set up loudspeakers in a park and, for two hours, blasted gospel music toward the spiritualists during their Sunday worship service.

“We’re praying for that community,” Ferro said.

The spiritualists responded by calling police.

About 200 residents live beneath moss-draped oak trees in this camp--a collection of small, wooden houses, most built in the 1920s and fronted by signs proclaiming “readings,” “spiritual counseling” or “medium inside.”

As the locals say: In Cassadaga, there are a few smalls, a few extra-larges and many mediums.

“As I touch into your vibration, I see that the spirits have been playing games with you,” medium Sue Resnik told a woman named Priscilla during a recent reading. “Things have been moved around the house, right? Like your checkbook?”

Priscilla nodded.

“The lesson,” said Resnik, “is don’t take things for granted.”

Spiritualism is a religion based on the principle that the dead do not die. They merely pass over into the spirit side of life. And from there they talk to the living, sometimes as guardian angels, offering encouragement and consolation.

“People are looking for more answers today, some goodness down the road,” said Jane Webb, training coordinator for a supermarket chain who was happy to pay $50 for a 30-minute session that she hoped would put her in touch with her deceased mother. “If traditional religion provided the answers, we wouldn’t be here.”

For Webb, 59, there was no contact. Yet she and a growing number of Americans, according to surveys, believe such communications are possible. A poll conducted for CBS News last year found that 32% of respondents believed that some people could talk to spirits of the dead. And 12% of those polled said they themselves had conversed with the beyond.

Experts say that as America’s baby boom generation ages, more people than ever are longing for a more inviting eternity.

“There is a great deal of fear and confusion around death,” said Philip Lucas, who teaches religion at Stetson University in nearby Deland, Fla. “Cassadaga survives because it provides people with a therapeutic service, assuring people that life goes on.”

And life in Cassadaga does go on, much as it has since itinerant clairvoyant George Colby was led to these woods northeast of Orlando by an Indian spirit guide named Seneca.

Seekers shopping for a medium often wander behind Colby Memorial Temple and sit beside Spirit Pond to meditate and reflect.

“There is not a week goes by when someone doesn’t walk in and say how different they feel just being here,” said Diana Morn, owner of the Cassadaga Hotel.

Spiritualism is a particularly American religion that traces its roots to a hoax.

In 1848, two sisters in Rochester, N.Y.--Catharine and Margarett Fox--drew a crowd to their farmhouse when they claimed that unexplained knocking on the walls was produced by the ghost of a murder victim rumored to have been buried in the basement. Years later, after countless performances and a stint with impresario P.T. Barnum, the sisters confessed that they’d made the sounds themselves.

But by then it didn’t matter. Believers wanted to believe.

Today, there may be as few as 10,000 people in the U.S. who identify themselves as spiritualists, and only a handful of residential camps--including one in Lily Dale, N.Y., and another in San Diego County called Harmony Grove.

Over the years, Cassadaga has attracted others with similar beliefs. Several psychics, fortune tellers and New Age mystics have opened shops across the street from the 55-acre camp. Bookstores around town carry a wide assortment of literature pertaining to everything from Tarot cards, crystal balls and palmistry to Egyptian astrology and channeling.

Of course, there are skeptics. Former magician James Randi, who has made a career out of debunking the so-called paranormal, dismisses mediumship as hokum. And plenty of people leave Cassadaga dissatisfied. Burkley Beck, 37, a satellite dish installer from West Palm Beach, consulted a psychic he had hoped would offer advice on a pending business deal. “I wasn’t impressed,” he said.

Even Adkins admits that there are members of the spiritualist association who have strayed from the religion’s basic beliefs to dispense what at times sound like readings from the daily horoscope. “I’m a fundamentalist,” said Adkins, 47, an electrician. “I am not a psychic. I don’t predict the future. But for nine out of 10 people, I can bring forth a deceased relative.”

Spiritualists assert that communication with the “so-called dead” is a proven fact. That proof, said Adkins, comes when the medium provides information about the deceased that only the living seeker could have known.

That standard of proof would not satisfy science, of course. But researchers at the University of Arizona have begun to test mediums.

In an experiment conducted in February for an HBO television special, psychologist Gary Schwartz and his colleagues at the Human Energy Systems Laboratory rated the performance of five experienced mediums--none from Cassadaga--by having each do a reading with the same subject.

An analysis of more than 500 pieces of information showed the mediums had an overall 83% accuracy rate.

“My jaw dropped,” Schwartz said. “It was not fraud or magicians’ tricks. There are three possible conclusions: telepathy with the living; a retrieval of information from the vacuum of space; or they were getting it from the consciousness of a departed individual.”

The spirits of the departed--and the living they attend--are most in evidence, according to Cassadaga spiritualists, on Sunday mornings during ecumenical services in the temple. Drawing on beliefs from many religions, the services almost always include a meditation, a hymn such as “How Great Thou Art” and hands-on treatments from spiritualist healers who say they are capable of curing everything from back pain to cancer.

Visitors are handed a copy of the spiritualist “Declaration of Principles,” the religion’s philosophy, which includes belief in the Golden Rule, personal responsibility, the primacy of nature and the belief that “the existence and personal identity of the individual continue after the change called death.”

“I’m here out of curiosity,” said Sally Curry, 60, a widow from Longwood, Fla., who had a private reading after a medium passed on a message from “a gentleman spirit from your father’s side of the family” during a Sunday service.

“As I told my children, when you’re born, you don’t know there is a loving family waiting for you here in the world. It may be that way after death. I am ready to believe.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.