The funeral was closed casket. A picture of my uncle sat on an easel beside it. None of us were crazy about that particular photograph. He was smiling, but in a kind of sad way, as though life were a little bitter to him. We’d all studied that photo enough to know how it made us feel. We’d been looking at it, crying beside it, for two days.
Now we filed into the church. My mother was beside me. My uncle’s only daughter was down the row. As the organ played we sat facing the photo. But the smile looked different now. There seemed to be a kind of glint in his eyes, and he looked as though he were about to burst into laughter. I thought, Get a grip, girl. You are imagining things.
But his daughter, Andrea, was whispering to my mother. Then my mother was whispering to me, “Does that picture look different to you?
“Andrea thinks so, too. I didn’t like that picture, but now he looks so pleased. Like he’s really tickled. Something has happened.”
We all three saw it. I’m not saying that picture really changed. It couldn’t have. But it sure looked different to us.
And that brings me to the last part of Gretchen’s message. I finally admitted that there’d been an argument right before the funeral—not an interruption, I said, not really, but half the family did go home.
“That’s it, then,” said Gretchen in the perky way that she has when she’s settling something.
“He says to tell you that he was just real tickled about the whole thing.”
A lot of people would have signed up as a believer right then, but if you don’t have the faith, it doesn’t matter what happens. You won’t be convinced. You’ll pass it off as something strange, and you’ll let it go. Or if you’re like me, you’ll get stuck on something that doesn’t fit and you won’t be able to get past it.
For me, the problem was the name John. If Gretchen really had my uncle, why wouldn’t he give the name that I knew him by? I was sure he would have. The interruption in the funeral? Well, the funeral hadn’t really started, had it? What I couldn’t explain away was that Gretchen had used the word tickled. At the funeral his picture had looked exactly like that, like he was tickled. And he would have been. He would have thought that ruckus was about the funniest dustup he’d ever seen.
6
I returned to Lily Dale on a cold March night. It was late. When I reserved the room, I told my hostess at the Lakeview guesthouse not to expect me until the next day, but once on the road I didn’t want to stop. I pulled into the dirt-packed parking lot, fumbled through the darkness up the stairs of the veranda, and rang the bell. A tiny woman with so much dark red hair that I peered at it suspiciously, thinking it had to be a wig, answered the door.
“I had a feeling you would arrive tonight,” said Jessie Furst, whose yard displayed a neat little sign that proclaimed her a medium.
I snickered somewhat gracelessly. Was she kidding?
No.
This time I planned to stay as long as it took to find out whether Lily Dale really had power. If it did, I wanted to know where that power came from. Were the mediums’ messages guesswork? Chance? Telepathy? Fraud? Or was Lily Dale truly what so many of its residents believed it was? They call it a “thin place,” one of those rare geographic locations where the barrier between human realities and spiritual verities is so thin that people can glimpse a universe beyond ordinary sight. The universe Lily Dale posits is far kinder than the one the rest of us live in. Everything that happens has a purpose, they say, and we all have a role.
I didn’t believe any of that, but maybe I wanted to. Why else would I have come back?
A couple of signs sat in the foyer of Jessie’s house. The first one irked me. It instructed visitors to take off their shoes and “borrow” a pair of slippers from a basket next to the sign. I didn’t mind removing my shoes, and the slippers were a nice touch, but the quotes around borrow made me go all schoolmarmish. What did those quotes mean? That we weren’t to borrow them but to take them with us? Or that we were to borrow them only and not steal them? Or did they mean nothing?
I was tired and peevish, I guess, because the next sign really made me roll my eyes. It said that Jessie did readings in person and over the phone. Over the phone? Maybe people could do readings in person, and maybe not. But over the phone? No way, I thought.
This was not a good start.
I’d been back in Lily Dale less than ten minutes, and I was already quibbling over quotes that were merely an attempt to be gracious and making a big deal over something most of Lily Dale thought of as nothing. Many mediums in Lily Dale do readings over the phone. I was starting way too early with the eye rolling. I didn’t know yet about pets that come back with messages for their masters or the Andalusian stallion that invites people to a party. No one had yet talked about Vikings who march in the woods or living people whose faces are transfigured into those of famous dead people. I had a long way to go, and it wasn’t going to be easy if I fought it every step of the way.
Lily Dale didn’t look the same at the end of winter. The summer’s sunlit charm was gone. Without the flowers, it was easy to see the village’s cracks. Pastel hues that looked festive on a warm bright day washed out and blended into winter’s gray. Ice floated on Cassadaga Lake. The tourists had disappeared as completely as the robins. Most of the mediums were gone too. Many winter in Florida. Those left were predominantly working folk—carpenters, carpet layers, truck drivers eking out a living in a region where jobs are scarce.
Cars, wearing coats of chalky grime, were the only signs of life. They stuck out around the community’s parks like spiked collars, nudged next to curbs, sinking into muddy driveways. At night the blue light of television flickered from occupied houses, and the windows of Lily Dale’s many vacant houses turned blind gray stares toward cold streets. If ghosts walk in Lily Dale, they have plenty of room during the off-season.
With the frippery that drapes and softens the community in the summer gone, all that was left was exactly what I wanted to know about—Spiritualist life outside the spotlight of tourists’ expectations. One of my first stops was to see Betty Schultz, a tough old gal who didn’t worry about choosing her words carefully.
I half-expected that the mediums would revert to normal after the tourists went home. If they did, these middle-aged and older women, most of them without a man and all of them without any money worth bragging over, would be exactly what society told them to be—drab, passed by, unimportant, a little pitiful really with their pretensions and lies. If they did revert to such a life, they wouldn’t be the real thing, and I’d leave without wasting more of their time or my own.
But Lily Dale doesn’t do what society expects. When the tourists go home, when the mediums shut their doors to the outside world, they don’t quiet down. They up the amps.
Betty said she’d see me at two o’clock. “Two o’clock sharp,” she said. “Be on time.”
Betty Schultz is one of the grande dames of Lily Dale mediumship, a woman who speaks her mind and gets her way. I’d heard about her during my first trip, and she was every bit as formidable as I had imagined. She had a kind of Bette Davis toughness that made you know she might say anything. She’s retired now. Some people would pay her whatever she asked for just one more reading, but she won’t do it.
As I walked toward Betty’s house on a brisk afternoon with five minutes to spare, the trees weren’t even thinking green, which was good because Lily Dale had one more blizzard between it and spring no matter what the calendar said. I passed several houses that a more prosperous community would have torn down years ago. Even some of the better houses in Lily Dale look close to collapse, paint peeling, porches sagging. The community has been kept poor by the same rules that have kept it alive all these years.
Only Spiritualists can buy houses in the 167-acre compound, a stricture that can be enforced because the Lily Dale Assembly is a religious corporation made up of community residents. Lily Dale has a volunteer fire department, a post office, and a governing board of electe
d representatives. Its separation from the settlements around it makes Lily Dale feel like a town, but it is actually a gated membership community within the town of Pomfret.
The rule that residents must be Spiritualists keeps the client base for real estate small, but that’s a minor problem compared to the fact that Lily Dale residents don’t own the land their houses sit on. They lease the land from the Assembly. This ensures the Spiritualists will never lose control of Lily Dale, but it also keeps real estate prices depressed. Banks generally won’t lend money for houses that sit on land owned by someone else. As a result, buying in Lily Dale takes several kinds of faith, and that suits board members just fine.
Some people are repelled by Lily Dale’s rough edges. They suspect that anything not polished and slick, not varnished with money, can’t be good. Even many Lily Dale residents can’t resist contrasting the shabbiness of little Lily Dale with the Chautauqua Institution, twenty miles away and founded in 1874, only five years earlier than Lily Dale, as a Protestant summer camp. Also on a lake, the Institution is now a grand place, with magnificent meeting halls, condos that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, an elegant hotel, and 7,500 residents. It has a symphony, an opera, a conservatory theater, and a ballet.
Some residents of Lily Dale boast that their community has resisted temptations that would have led it away from its founding principles toward the riches and acclaim Chautauqua has. Others bemoan lost opportunities.
In the summer, when Lily Dale leaders try to get big-name New Agers for lectures, it’s a tough sell. Not only is the Assembly too poor to pay good money, but celebrities don’t like the accommodations. They want modern rooms with air conditioning. They want room service and fine restaurants, all of which Chautauqua has and Lily Dale does not. Some luminaries have come anyway. The author Deepak Chopra spoke in the Dale before he became so famous. Author Wayne Dyer visits every year. Mediums James Van Praagh and John Edward were there the summers I visited. Edward’s appearance, before he began hosting his television program Crossing Over, was poorly publicized, and he didn’t draw the crowd he should have. Van Praagh’s sellout appearance was the talk of the season. At the annual meeting, Lily Dale’s president bragged so much about the famous medium’s prowess that he offended some of his constituents, who felt their own powers were being somehow undermined.
Lily Dale’s tatty side gave me a certain ease. Small, cramped rooms, the moldy smell of old walls, weedy yards, and porches with broken furniture don’t put me off. I spent much of my childhood in such places, and I like them. They’re freer. People don’t have to follow as many rules. To the people of Lily Dale, that’s important and always has been.
Their beliefs once caused them to be considered freethinkers. Freethinking about religion, which included escape from Christian ideas about original sin and atonement, were important reasons for the original appeal of Spiritualism. Early Spiritualists supported the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and free love, which in the nineteenth century meant the right to divorce. Lily Dale was one of the first platforms to allow women to speak. Susan B. Anthony spoke at the community’s annual Women’s Day so often that she was known as Aunt Susan. She was not a Spiritualist, but once, when she sat for a reading, the medium said she was bringing through Susan B.’s aunt. Anthony was unimpressed.
“I didn’t like her when she was alive, and I don’t want to hear from her now,” she snapped. “Why don’t you bring someone interesting like Elizabeth Cady?”
Political crusading went out of fashion in Lily Dale long ago. The community’s two churches rarely adjure members to go out and redress the wrongs of the world. The idea seems to be to get in touch with the spirits, and they will take it from there.
Betty’s screen door rattled. The porch creaked and smelled faintly musty. When I knocked, I could hear her schnauzer barking inside. I was right on time.
Betty was wearing house slippers. She’d fallen not long before while walking her dog in the woods. She lay in the cold for quite some time, and it was close to dark before she was found. Betty reclined on the coach as we talked. I sat in a chair before her, facing an antique photo.
“That’s my grandfather on the wall. He’s the only one with money, so I put him on the wall.”
An elaborately carved teak chair sat across the room. Betty invited me to sit in it. I did.
“Do you feel anything?” she asked.
No.
“How are your feet?”
Fine.
Betty looked disappointed.
“Once a lady sat there and said, ‘I can’t feel my legs. I can’t feel my legs.’ I said, ‘You better get out. You’re sitting on my father.’ I knew he was in the chair. He had sugar. He’d had a foot amputated, and his legs were very bad.”
My feet were fine, but I got up anyway. The dog was giving me a strange look.
“Dogs are very aware of spirits,” Betty said. “Nobody has told them spirits don’t exist.”
She has four dogs in spirit and a dead friend who takes care of them. “Every once in a while he’ll bring me a dog and I’ll lose it,” she said, looking mournful. “Show me people, but don’t show me dogs. I love my dogs.”
Nobody in Lily Dale seems to doubt that pets live on after death and visit their owners. One medium specializes in pets that have passed over. The best story I heard of that ilk was about a woman worried that her late dog was angry because she adopted a new puppy. When she consulted a medium, he told her, “Your dog doesn’t mind the new dog, but he doesn’t like the pup using his food bowl.”
“What should I do?” the woman asked.
“Have a ceremony to retire the old bowl,” the medium said, “and buy a new bowl for your new dog.”
At one point in our interview Betty stared at the ceiling, cackled, and said, “Oh, you think so, do you?”
Looking my way again, she said, “Don’t mind me. I’m talking to my spirit helpers. I call them ‘the boys.’”
Betty isn’t married now, but she once was.
“My husband thought I was a nutcase,” she said.
Imagine that.
She took a drag off her cigarette and said, “I finally divorced him.”
I laughed and glanced at Betty’s face to see how that went over. It went over fine.
Betty didn’t mind that I might think she was crazy, didn’t mind at all.
Gertie Rowe, her mentor who could float seven trumpets in the air, taught Betty not to care what others thought. “They put her in a nuthouse more than once,” Betty confided, “and her sister would have to go and bail her out.”
Betty has seen it all.
When two young men disappeared and were suspected to have drowned in Cassadaga Lake right off Lily Dale’s shores, their spirits appeared at Inspiration Stump, dripping water. Betty, saddened to see that they really had drowned and surprised because she had thought the missing boys were much younger, sighed and gave them the comfort they were seeking. “All right, boys,” she said. “We’ll find you.” They did.
Once she had a lump in her breast. Her doctor asked, “What do the spooks say?”
“They say ‘not cancerous,’” she told him.
“I don’t think so either,” he said, and that was that.
Betty’s mediumship has helped people believe there is a God, she said. It has helped them believe in the afterlife, and that’s its purpose. As for questions about this life and asking favors from spirit, “You don’t ask unless you’re desperate” she said. “You don’t get piggish. You don’t get the lottery, but I’ve always been taken care of.”
Is her religion real?
“Take everything I have. Take my loved ones. Take my home. Leave my puppy dog alone, but take everything else I have. I will survive. But take my religion, and I won’t. My belief in my God, my spirit loved ones, my understanding of natural laws, it’s what’s gotten me through it all. Bungled as I have, it’s what’s gotten me through.”
One thing puzzled me. Why
would she retire? Mediumship is a good way to pick up a buck. All it takes is sitting in a chair and talking. Why retire?
“It’s hard on your body. It takes a lot of energy, and the right chemistry,” she said. “Gertie Rowe always said, ‘Have the good sense to know when to get out.’”
It isn’t that Betty has lost her powers. If she’s at the Stump listening as mediums work, she tunes in to check their accuracy. “Ninety percent accurate is real good,” she said.
I left Betty’s house in high spirits. By the time you get to her age, society has definitely cast you aside. You aren’t in the movies. You aren’t in the songs. You aren’t even in the books because, if you were, they’d be so depressing no one would buy them. Betty was an old woman, living alone with nothing but an old dog to keep her company. And she wasn’t pitiful.
She had enough powers left to check on the youngsters, and she had spirit men flitting about the house. Once, she sent them upstairs to look for a book and then excused herself after yelling into the air, “All right. If you can’t find it, I’ll help you.” Another time, apparently tired of chatter only she could hear, she snapped, “Fellows, while you’re not doing anything else see if you can get someone to come up here and take care of that tree before it falls and breaks the house. Please. Thank you.”
She always says please and thank you.
I couldn’t verify anything Betty said, not with facts and not in my own experience. Some might suspect she wasn’t latched on too tight, but maybe Lily Tomlin’s Trudy the Bag Lady was right. Reality is just a collective hunch.
I didn’t think Betty was faking it. She was not some trumped-up gypsy pretender peering into a crystal ball. As far as I could tell, she was the real thing. What I wasn’t sure of was what the real thing is.
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