I went back to the Assembly Hall. As I stood over the pedestal table, I pushed on its edges. It was solid, heavy, and sturdy, not rickety. I placed my fingers on it and ran them across the surface as I had before, lightly and gently. Nothing happened, but as I kept at it, not cheating, just letting my energy rise, I applied pressure to one edge and felt a shift. I continued moving my fingers back and forth. The table began to rock. Now I was using no force whatsoever, just letting my hands slide and slip, and the table was bucking all over the floor on its own momentum, just as it had in class. Drat.
The magic was gone. The mundane rules of the physical universe were once again in place. A top-heavy table. A pedestal base. Excited people. No spirits needed. We didn’t cheat. Not consciously. Nobody had to.
I told Anne what I’d discovered. She didn’t contradict me, just looked at me with that calm, unreadable face. She knew it all the time, I thought bitterly. She knew about that table.
“What about the times it came up from the ground?” she asked quietly. “How did it do that?” The look she gave me then was a mixture of sadness and something else. Resignation? Was that because she believed and was weary of having her proofs rejected? Or was it because I’d exposed the trick?
“I don’t know how it came up from the floor,” I said. My voice was flat with disappointment. Once fooled, twice wary. I would never believe it was spirits.
28
Much of Lily Dale makes me roll my eyes, but I am not alone. Oddly enough, Lily Dale prides itself on skepticism. Everyone in town has what sociology professor Charles Emmons calls an eye-rolling threshold. Charlie’s wife, Penelope, for instance, is a medium, but she draws the line at believing the teeth they found in their kitchen sink were from her dead grandfather.
Charles, who teaches at Gettysburg College, laughed at himself as he told the story, but he swore it was true. They were having plumbing problems. The plumber would arrive, tinker around, give them a bill, and go away. Then the leaks would start again, and the plumber would come back. This went on long enough that Charles, a patient man, was pushed beyond his good nature. One day, after the plumber came again, Charles discovered a set of false teeth in the kitchen sink.
The message in that? “Getting things fixed was like pulling teeth,” Charles said. “That was the message he was sending us.” It was a little spirit humor from Penelope’s late grandfather, a dentist.
They took the teeth to a living dentist, who told them they were probably from a fourteen-year-old girl and looked to be a set used for demonstration in a dental school.
Penelope shook her head at the whole idea. She didn’t know how the teeth got in the sink, but it wasn’t a ghost joke, she said.
“Well, what was it?” Charles asked.
“Somebody must have left them there.”
Anne Gehman’s eye-rolling threshold is reincarnation. The National Spiritualist Association of Churches, of which Anne is a minister, does not endorse reincarnation. She once researched the subject by having more than one hundred past-life readings done all over North and South America. There was so little overlap among them that she couldn’t believe any of it could be true.
Past lives are popular among Lily Dale mediums, but, in a very Lily Dale kind of way, some of the mediums who do past-life readings don’t believe in them themselves. More than one told me that past-life readings might not be literally true, but they contain psychological insights people can use.
I sat in several circles where students practiced giving past-life messages. I recall being told that I was a midwife who delivered hundreds of babies and twelve of her own. Maybe that’s why I have so little interest in motherhood. I got over it in a past life.
In one scary session, Tom, a kind-faced man sitting across the circle from me, said he saw me as an old Cherokee woman clinging to a horse. I was fearful and sorrowful, weakened by age and the loss of everything I loved. It was freezing. I was sharing the horse with children. Only old people and children were allowed to ride. Everyone else was walking.
My grip on the horse’s mane slipped, and, as I slid down the horse’s side, the children pleaded with me to hold on. Anyone who fell on the Trail of Tears was killed by the soldiers, but I was too weak, and so I fell and lay in the dirt. A soldier stood over me, his gun pointing down.
The circle leader warned everyone against giving bad messages. So what was this? Tom apologized.
“I hate to tell you this, but I’m supposed to say that it’s why you feel such sadness and grief in this life.”
Afterward he approached me looking worried. “I hope you don’t feel sadness and grief,” he said. “I felt I had to give you the message, but I hope I was wrong about it.”
He couldn’t be more wrong. I am an upbeat, cheerful person. I experience some foreboding when the phone rings, when my husband goes to work, when I drive to get a pizza or must make an unexpected trip to get milk, when my dog’s nose is hot, when anyone suggests a vacation that requires leaving my yard, or when everything in life is too perfect. I have a perfectly reasonable sense that happiness is fleeting, that death, pain, and destruction could befall me and the people I love any minute. That’s normal, I think.
Margaret Mary Hefner, who channels the Virgin Mary, triggers a lot of eye rolling. In channeling, the spirit speaks using the medium’s body. Once Margaret Mary was channeling Mother Mary while a guy on the other side of town was channeling Jesus. When Hilda heard what was going on she said, “Shouldn’t someone go over and tell Mary that her son’s in town?”
One afternoon each month Margaret Mary and her husband, Bob, stand outside, pray, and scan the skies for a vision of the Holy Mother. At first, they held their vigil outside the Lily Dale Spiritualist Church, but that caused some people to behave quite rudely. One woman told Margaret Mary to take it elsewhere or else. So now Margaret Mary and Bob hold their vigil, which they call Mother Mary Energy Day, in the field near the playground equipment.
Energy days help them get ready for the Virgin’s imminent arrival on earth by changing their DNA so they can transmit greater amounts of energy, said Margaret Mary, who is widely known in Lily Dale as Marge. She now prefers Margaret Mary because the Virgin asked her to use her full name, which has better energy. Mother Mary Energy Days leave the Hefners weak in the knees sometimes, and the couple always requires a nap afterward.
One day I joined them in the field. First we chatted a little. Margaret Mary told me that she and Bob dowse when they make a decision. When I asked how, she took off a pendant and held it by the chain so that it dangled.
“What does ‘yes’ mean?” she asked. The pendant swung left to right.
“What does ‘no’ mean?” she asked. The pendent swung back and forth. “You see?” she asked.
I did.
“We do that with everything. We dowse all the food we eat.”
“Not all of it,” Bob said.
“Yes, we do. Once we were in the grocery store, and I dowsed some cake to see if it had ingredients in it that would hurt us. A woman saw me doing it and asked me to show her how. Pretty soon other women gathered around, and the ladies behind the counter were watching. Everyone wanted to try it on their own food,” Margaret Mary said, laughing. “We did bread and cookies and all sorts of things.”
Margaret Mary had an extra rosary so I could join them in reciting Hail Marys. As we chanted, we squinted into the sun and scanned the clouds. The Virgin had appeared once when Margaret Mary, Bob, and a friend were looking for her. She was mostly a cloud shape. Their friend thought it was an angel. Margaret Mary was pretty sure it was the Holy Mother.
We were almost finished with the Hail Marys when I spotted a configuration of clouds that looked exactly like the outline of Mary’s figure. She was wearing a long gown, and her head was covered. She was facing straight on, her hands folded as they often are at about waist level. There was no halo.
I blinked. She was still there.
I looked at the Hefners. They didn’t say an
ything. I looked again. Still there.
If I spoke up, Margaret Mary and Bob would get one of the great thrills of their lives. I would go down in Lily Dale history as the reporter who saw Mother Mary in the field near the playground. I would go on record as having experienced something so farfetched that even Lily Dale rejected it.
Why didn’t they say something? I looked at their upturned faces. I had to speak. It was too cowardly.
I glanced back at the sky. She was gone. The clouds had moved.
Imagination. The mind is strange. It plays tricks. You have to watch it, corral your thoughts, be careful what you see.
Joyce LaJudice, Lily Dale’s historian, loves history, and she loves Lily Dale. It might seem that drawing the line would be especially tricky for her. Not so.
Joyce, who had heart trouble, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a bit of a wheeze the summer I spent in Lily Dale, has devoted more hours than anyone can count to gathering scrap-books and setting up displays in the little museum that was once a one-room schoolhouse. During the summer season, she stands behind the glass display cases that hold Spiritualism’s treasures for far longer than she ought to, thrilling tourists with tales of the old days and setting the record straight. It wasn’t Eleanor Roosevelt who came to Lily Dale. It was Elliott Roosevelt, Eleanor’s son. Mahatma Gandhi didn’t visit the town, despite what many people say. It was another Gandhi. William Jennings Bryan did speak on the Lily Dale platform, and so did Robert Ingersoll, who was known as the great agnostic. A hotel register with Susan B. Anthony’s signature shows that the great suffragette really did visit Lily Dale.
Joyce’s house and the back room of the museum are stuffed with files of clippings and playbills, old photos and pamphlets. She’s slowly working her way through them, compiling records of how the community developed and who has lived in it. Like most residents, she was happy to admit that mountains of fraud have been committed by mediums, but none of it shakes her faith.
Floating trumpets? Sure, that happens. Joyce and Betty Schultz sat for years trying to move one, and it never left the ground, but she has newspaper photos of mediums doing it. Joyce also has photos of ghostly figures floating around and about the figures of live humans. Spirit painting? That’s real too, Joyce said. Just go over to the Maplewood Hotel and look in the lobby.
A painting of Napoleon and a painting of a spirit guide named Azur are displayed there. So is the portrait of a young girl painted after her death. The child’s mother was thrilled with the likeness, but she died not long after taking it home. Her relatives believed it was the work of the devil and returned it to Lily Dale.
The spirit paintings are a long way from masterpieces, even to my untrained eye. If God sends spirits back to the earth to paint, why doesn’t he send the best? Michelangelo or Rembrandt would be happy for the work, and just one of their paintings would end Lily Dale’s money troubles forever.
What mystified me most was how the Spiritualists seem to view the pictures. “Did you see the paintings?” they asked, as though the mere existence of the canvases would convince me they were painted by spirits. It didn’t.
Joe Nickell, a researcher for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, has come to Lily Dale repeatedly. When he wanted to look at spirit paintings, Joyce was more than glad to help him. She tells everyone about his story on the painters who worked in Lily Dale: two sisters known as the Bangs Sisters and a gay couple in the import-export business who called themselves the Campbell Brothers. Joyce is cited at the end of the critique Nickell wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which is published by the Committee.
“Joe’s my buddy. He’s just like me,” Joyce said. “He’s skeptical of anything that can’t be proved.”
29
You only have to see one white crow to know that not all crows are black, wrote William James. All it takes is one. For him, the white crow of Spiritualism was an uneducated Boston housewife named Leonore Piper.
James was convinced that her knowledge about the small domestic matters of his family came from a source beyond normal consciousness. She told about their son’s tantrums and his nickname, “little Billy-boy”; the contents of a letter from his wife’s aunt warning against all mediums; his loss of a waistcoat and his wife’s loss of a rug; how he had killed a gray and white cat with ether and how it had spun around and around before it died; how a rocking chair creaked; how his wife heard footsteps on the stairs; and how their child’s crib creaked at night.
“A normal person, unacquainted with the family, could not possibly have said as much; one acquainted with it could hardly have avoided saying more,” he wrote.
Mrs. Piper and her family were followed by private investigators and tested in a number of ways. Unannounced clients were brought into the séance room only after she had gone into trance. Other clients came as proxy sitters, meaning that they asked questions for third parties, strangers they didn’t know.
Richard Hodgson, one of the world’s fiercest psychic debunkers, investigated her over a period of years and became so convinced that Mrs. Piper was genuine that he promised to speak through her after he died. Hodgson’s new belief in the afterlife turned him from a cynical, rather obnoxious man into a person whose love of life, serenity, and general glow of well-being were amazing to see, said James.
When Hodgson died, James and others tested Mrs. Piper to see whether their friend was able to return through her. The medium spoke in a manner that resembled the investigator’s and gave messages that amazed his friends. But James was never convinced. The spirit’s mannerisms were sometimes forced and seemed overdone, not quite genuine, he wrote. Perhaps another spirit was impersonating Hodgson, or perhaps Mrs. Piper’s subconscious mind was supplying information that allowed her to mimic Hodgson. The accurate information she received might come from telepathy or other sources not yet understood.
One intriguing speculation was that perhaps the spirit of Hodgson or fragments of his personality had come through in early sittings and given bits of information. Once some hazy image of that personality was impressed on Mrs. Piper, perhaps her own mind embellished and amplified it. She might be entirely unaware of such a creation, James hypothesized.
As I watched Lily Dale mediums, I often thought of James’s analysis. How can any of us know what our minds are actually doing? Nobody knows what consciousness is, how far it extends, whether it continues after death, or where it resides before birth. James, who called the gap between one mind and another the greatest in nature, also wrote that “our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there be potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
James thought the brain might be a “temporary and partial transmitter of cosmic consciousness into individual consciousness. The power of those transmissions might rise and fall so that we are sometimes aware of things not normally conscious and other times are insensible and dull, unable to form an eternal, cosmic consciousness.”
James used German philosopher and psychologist Gustave T. Fechner’s analogy of the brain as a kind of dam or threshold for consciousness that already exists outside the individual and can exist after death. “We need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam. Of course the causes of these odd lowerings of the brain’s threshold still remain a mystery on any terms.”
Whether our thoughts are manufactured solely by our brain or imposed upon it is impossible for us to know. So how can a medium know where imposed thoughts leave off and her own thoughts start? She can’t. Not entirely. Even if the mediums are getting spirit messages, they’re bound to insert errors from their own ideas, their own interpretations, and their own projections.
30
My own white crow was Sherry Lee Calkins. I didn’t feel a particular need for a reading. I didn’t want a message or need guidance, but I hea
rd so many stories about Sherry Lee’s pre-science that I had to try her out.
Her reading room is austere. A little couch for the client sits low enough that I found myself perching on the edge. Sherry Lee sat on a straight-backed chair behind a small table with a blank sheet of paper and artist’s crayons. She talked fast and started as soon as I was seated.
“I have a young man here. Tall. Dark hair. Nice-looking young man. He has, what’s that? Oh. He has a straw in his mouth. A piece of hay, and he’s chewing on it. He’s leaning against a tree, very relaxed. Do you know who that might be?”
No.
As she spoke, she was furiously drawing lines and dates on the paper. She said that in July 1997 I started something new. In February 1998 I finished a phase of my life.
I didn’t know what she meant.
August was a big change, monumental, she said. That was right. I’d moved to Wisconsin. In January, another big change, she said, and this one freed me up. Vague, but right again. That was the month I stopped working for the Dallas Morning News.
In March, my new life really began, she said. That was the month I returned to Lily Dale. Pretty good so far. Then she hit a snag.
By June of next year, I would have completed the book on Lily Dale.
Not possible, I thought. She doesn’t know enough about books, and she thinks that giving me a year to finish will be enough. She said a few more things about how I write and my grandfather’s character. Nothing that meant much to me.
Then she picked up the blue pencil and began drawing up the side of the paper.
“Your husband became very sick before you started dating, almost died. He also almost died in the country when he was in his twenties. His guardian angel saved him.”
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