Where do you go to get your vision corrected, your crystal ball polished? I figured August offered one last chance to check the instruments before the campaign homestretch. And in an election year haunted by all kinds of ghosts, I thought I’d check in with the people who talk to the dead all the time–just to get a different feel for the spirits that move us.
A hundred years ago, the New York Times described the Lily Dale Assembly, a gated compound in far western New York State, as “the most famous and aristocratic spiritualistic camp in America.” Freethinking, forward-leaning, this was a place for prophets of all kinds. Susan B. Anthony visited half a dozen times; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt came, and Harry Houdini and Mae West, and seekers from around the world looking to explore the continuity between life and what locals refer to as “so-called death.”
A company town of old oaks and Victorian gingerbread, Lily Dale specializes in building bridges to the Beyond. You can’t buy a house here unless you are a practicing spiritualist. But anyone can stay in the Maplewood Hotel, which might be the perfect place for political junkies to detox. There are no TVs, no phones in the rooms. A sign is posted in the lobby: NO READINGS, HEALINGS, CIRCLES OR SÉANCES IN THIS AREA, PLEASE. This is the place to come if you’re sick of the mainstream mediums.
“There are no strangers here,” residents will tell you, just friendly souls who missed you the first time around. Days are filled with classes and lectures exploring the far corners of the otherworldly: Spoon Bending, Mask Making (in the past seven elections, the candidate with the best-selling Halloween mask has won), Past-Life Regression, Alien Abduction Case Histories. I missed the Astrology Roundtable, which explored how the transit of Pluto into Capricorn–occurring once every 248 years–affects me, the nation and the world.
If anyone wishes to conduct an empirical investigation into paranormal phenomena, Lily Dale is the place to go.