In a Town of Unearthly Peace, the Spirits--Visitors Hope--Are Willing

I am sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a little hotel in a town called Lily Dale in upstate New York. The lake out front is tinged pink with the sunset. A swan glides by. Frogs croak. I curl into the rocker. This is peace, I think.

This memory, from a visit 10 years ago to Lily Dale Assembly, a summer retreat for Spiritualists who believe that the dead communicate with the living through mediums, is a travel touchstone for me. It reminds me that one of the things I like best about travel is learning how other people live and, for a little while, trying out their lifestyles and beliefs. That motivation has taken me to Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains and Chongqing, China.

In Lily Dale, about 60 miles southwest of Buffalo, you have only to scratch the surface to find stunningly different ways of being.

The Lily Dale community, with its winding lanes, Victorian cottages, stalwart old shade trees and rose gardens, was founded in 1879, when interest in seances, mediums and psychic phenomena swept the country, capturing the hopes of people disaffected with traditional religion and attracting such notables as philosopher and psychologist William James, Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

The Spiritualist religion, based on the belief that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living, grew out of that spike in parapsychological interest. Today the National Spiritualist Assn. of Churches has only about 4,000 U.S. congregations. (By comparison, the United Methodist Church has about 35,000 U.S. congregations.) Some features of the religion, such as its fascination with the afterlife, have been subsumed by the more inclusive New Age movement.

Lily Dale is frumpier than New Age power spots like the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. At the New York community, a sort of “old New Age” persists in a faded Victorian postage stamp of a summer retreat, where people come to commune with the dead. This season, from June 28 to Sept. 1, about 40 mediums registered by the Lily Dale board of directors will hang signs on sweet little gingerbread cottages advertising their services. (A 30-minute reading costs $35 to $100.) Between private sessions, the mediums lecture and lead daily “message services” during which they receive communications from the beyond for audience members.

“People in parapsychological research are skeptical of Lily Dale,” says Loyd Auerbach, a San Francisco-based paranormal investigator. He thinks the mediums there are sincere but notes that even sincere people can persuade themselves that they have psychic abilities they don’t really have.

Last year 22,000 people visited the leafy, slow-lane community, which has its own post office, cafeteria, library, auditorium, museum, hotel and 101-year-old volunteer fire department.

Most attend daily message services, then get a private reading. Others, like me, are gentle skeptics who go out of curiosity and for the history. I stayed in the Maplewood Hotel by the lake, built in 1880, where the rates remain positively Victorian ($59 for a double with private bath). Its old wood floors creak, and some say it’s haunted (which is not a scary thing to a Spiritualist). On a wall downstairs is a portrait of a man in a toga titled “Azur the Helper,” reputedly painted by spirits during a seance in 1898.

Lily Dale mediums were highly theatrical a century ago. Some invoked the dead to create paintings like the one in the hotel, or they channeled spirits to speak through the bell of a trumpet. But mediums who practice there now are far more buttoned-up, simply sitting with clients and reporting what their dear departed say about health, relationships and careers.

Artifacts in the Lily Dale museum recall 19th century psychic showmanship, including a metal trunk from the basement of a cottage in Hydesville, N.Y., where a series of tenants heard inexplicable rapping in the night. In 1848, sisters Margaret and Kate Fox, who lived in the cottage at the time, reportedly solved the riddle of the rapping. They said they had managed to communicate with the spirit responsible for the noise, a peddler who had been killed and buried in the basement, leaving his trunk behind. The sisters went on to demonstrate their psychic gifts to enthusiastic audiences across the country. The cottage where their reputed ability to communicate with the dead first blossomed was moved to Lily Dale, where it burned in 1955.

The museum also has a photo of suffragette Susan B. Anthony, commemorating an 1891 speech she gave in the auditorium. Like the Chautauqua Institution 20 miles southwest, founded as a summer camp for Methodist Sunday school teachers in 1874, Lily Dale welcomed progressive thinkers and enlightened debate. But when a Lily Dale medium told Anthony at a seance that her late aunt was trying to reach her, the women’s rights advocate reportedly said to the spirit, “I didn’t like you when you lived, and I don’t care to talk to you now.”

During my visit, I had to call my mother every night to reassure her that I was still Episcopalian. She was horrified to learn that I had had a reading with a medium. But at Lily Dale, how could I not?

Time has shown that the medium’s predictions for me were wrong on all counts. But the reading did start me thinking about deep things, which is what people at Lily Dale do all summer. I like that about them--and the brief peace a skeptic can find in one of their rockers.

Lily Dale Assembly, 5 Melrose Park, Lily Dale, NY 14752; (716) 595-8721, fax (716) 595-2442, www.lilydale.org. The main office provides information on events and on accommodations at the Maplewood Hotel. Entrance to the grounds costs $7 per person per day, which includes admission to daily activities such as message, meditation and healing services.