Lily Dale (17 page)

That was not, however, the last of Houdini's dealings with Lily Dale's finest. Houdini made compacts with about a dozen people to communicate with him after they died. He agreed on secret handshakes and code words that would prove who they were.

“They have never come back to me! Does that prove anything? I have attended a number of séances since their death, the
mediums have called for them, and when their spirit forms were supposed to appear not one of them could give me the proper signal. Would I have received it? I'll wager I would have,” he wrote.

Before he died, Houdini left instructions with his wife, Bess, to continue his mediumistic inquiries by trying to contact him. She would know it was him if he delivered a secret message they had agreed on.

Three years after Houdini's death, Lily Dale medium Arthur Ford appeared at Bess's house to deliver what he claimed was the correct message. Bess wrote a statement confirming that Ford's message, delivered in the couple's secret code, was from Houdini, and two newspaper reporters covered the event. But one of the reporters later accused Ford of fraud, saying he told her the code the night before, enabling her to write her story before the event. Many who were skeptical of the reporter's veracity questioned why she ran a story she knew to be false.

But that was not the end of the criticism. Others noted that the code had already been published in a book. Ford supporters replied that his message was much more than merely the code. Then Bess herself was accused of having conspired with Ford. One Lily Dale medium told me she knew for a fact that Ford and the widow were having an affair and that she had given him the secret message. Eventually, Bess retracted her statement and to the end of her life denied that her husband ever communicated from the grave.

Séances to contact him are still held on the anniversary of Houdini's death. Organizers say the magician has never shown up. Spiritualists say he has no need to since he already proved his point in 1929 when he communicated with Ford.

A
nne Gehman was obviously a woman who wanted to lead us into the deeper meaning of her faith, and she spent hours trying. I was pretty much bored, as I had been by the Spiritualist church services. Lily Dale churches may have no appointed ministers, but they have lots of reverends because many mediums and healers are licensed as ministers. Healing is part of the service, and so is giving messages. Different church members speak from the platform each week. Some Spiritualists expect speakers to arrive without any preparation so the spirits can take over. Judging from the times I attended, the spirits don't have much umph.

Lectures tended toward “Let's love each other” and “We ought to try to be nice.” That may be good enough, but guilt and shame and a God ready to throw sinners into everlasting, roasting hell do make for a livelier meeting. The Weak Willie way of Spiritualist lectures made it hard for me to take them seriously as religion. I approved of what was being said, but my mind kept wandering.

Before Lily Dale, I had a pretty good idea of what Spiritualists would be like—old, bloodless, soft-voiced, hopelessly hopeful little folk who had watched the world pass them by and didn't quite know it yet. I was right about the hopelessly hopeful part. Spiritualists don't believe in hell, and they don't talk about sin. They think
humans are basically good. They think that everything we do comes back on us. “Kick a dog and you'll answer for it,” said medium Betty Schultz.

No savior can rescue humans, according to Spiritualists, but there's also no cutoff for changing your ways. You can do it now, or you can do it after you die. Spirits and angels are always gathered around us, watching and guiding and trying to beam messages through.

I couldn't believe that. What kind of loafing-around spirits would be wasting celestial time on me? And what kind of dopey egotist would I be if I thought they were?

In class, Anne talked about the principles of Spiritualism while we waited for her to give us what we came for, which was the tricks. That eagerness to see her perform made me feel a little like those rude men who yell, “Show us your tits,” at earnest young women trying to get a serious message across. Maybe other people felt the same way, because no one tried to steer Anne toward the good stuff during class. But none of us discussed her religious ideas afterward. We were all too entranced over her stories of spirit doings.

She said her mentor used to brag, “Anne isn't happy until the men cry and the women wet their pants.” Both events were part of her history, she said. A client who gave her a false name had once wet her pants in fear and consternation when Anne revealed that she knew the name was phony. And a skeptic who once tried to humiliate her during a lecture was brought to tears by the message she gave.

She told us of the evening her long-dead sister appeared before her and several friends. She gave details of the afternoon she was sitting in her living room feeling terribly depressed when she looked up to see a perfect rose floating across the room toward her. She recognized it as having come from her garden. Later she went to the garden and saw the stem where the rose had been. It was carefully clipped.

Anne was never stagy or particularly dramatic as she told these stories. She seemed almost bemused by them herself. She never raised her voice or varied the tempo of her speech. Her voice was soft, and she had a disarming way of interrupting herself with a bubbling little laugh that made me think she might be fun if you ever got past that ladylike surface, but I didn't think I ever would. Her eyes were arresting, almond-shaped and not easy to read. “She's got witch's eyes,” a classmate hissed one day. When I looked at her in surprise she said defensively, “Nice witch.”

Our class of about thirty included a lawyer, a former policeman, an artist, a couple of students, therapists, health-care workers, hypnotherapists, and experts in massage. This was the second week of a two-part class. I hadn't been in the first class, and neither had the Canadian journalist and his wife, who were in town researching the possibility of a book on Spiritualism. According to one student, the energy had been better the week before. They saw all sorts of psychic phenomena and gave each other astonishing readings, she said, but having journalists around messed with the vibrations, and this week wasn't nearly as good.

I resented that, but I could see how it might be true. I often felt like a black hole as I sat there brooding about what I heard. A television crew also showed up that week, and Anne's decision to let them film the class upset some students who didn't want outsiders to know they were involved in such lessons. Anne often looked toward the Canadian and sometimes called on him for comments during her talk. I could see why. He was tall and dignified. He had best-selling books, and he looked alert. Unlike me, yawning and as red-eyed as a drunk just in from an all-night bender.

Anne so rarely looked at me during the class that I began to have an odd sensation of being invisible. Sometimes her eyes ran down the row of people, and when they got to me I could have sworn they blanked out. When I raised my hand, she didn't seem to
see me. She agreed to an interview, but when I got to her house, no one answered the door. Later she said she hadn't heard me knocking. How could that be? Her house is not that big.

The idea that someone might feel invisible came up during my first conversation with Shelley, when she was talking about stages of what she called the heroine's journey. Shelley asked me whether I'd ever had the feeling. I had, so often that I never think people are going to remember me when I meet them a second time. I generally like feeling invisible. It leaves me free to watch. But in Anne's class I had too much of a good thing. According to heroine's journey theories, the feeling of being invisible comes most often when people are beginning a spiritual journey. They feel as though others don't see them because they are changing and are not the solid selves they usually feel themselves to be, Shelley said.

Then one day in class a strange thing happened. A woman named Anna sat toward the middle of the room, and I sat on the left side. She had attracted my attention early in the week when she mentioned that she felt so in touch with her dead son that he was as much support and help to her as her living children. This day Anna was sharing some point with the class when she leaned over, looked directly at me, and said, “There are great advantages to being invisible.”

I should have caught her after class to ask what she meant, but I didn't. I had never mentioned my feelings of invisibility to the other students, and Anna's comment made me feel like a stranger had shoved me. She didn't have to tell me the advantages of being invisible. If I was being needy and childish about the lack of attention, I didn't want her giving me lessons.

 

H
ilda was right about Anne being a born medium. She wowed our class with many fabulous stories from the days of her childhood as the youngest of eight children in an Amish-
Mennonite family. Cutlery and dishes would move at her end of the dinner table. Her father would lay his big hands on her head and pray that this strange affliction be taken from her. She remembers once being sent to bed as punishment. As she lay there, the table beside the bed began to rise. She heard her father's heavy footsteps coming toward the room, and the table crashed to the floor. Once she returned home to find her mother lying on the floor so sick she couldn't move. Anne placed her hands on her mother's body and began to draw the poisons out. As they left her mother's body, Anne's hands and arms turned dark, and she had to wash them repeatedly before they returned to their normal color.

In the community where she grew up, children weren't expected to go past eighth grade. So Anne left home at fourteen, determined to finish high school and go to college. By then the family was living in Florida, and she moved to a small town not too far from their farm. She worked in a nursing home and took care of an old lady in return for lodging. She was so lonely and lost that one day she bought as many over-the-counter sleeping pills as she could, took them all, and lay down on the bed. She awoke vomiting and too weak to rise from the bed. As she lay there, a female apparition appeared at the foot of her bed and said, “If you will follow me, I will lead you into a new way of life.”

When she was strong enough to get up, Anne felt compelled to get in her car and drive to a nearby Spiritualist camp called Cassadaga, named after Lily Dale's lake. Her car kept stopping at a certain house. She got out and knocked on the door. It was opened by a man named Wilbur Hull. “You're a natural medium, and I want to help you develop your gifts,” he said. That morning the same spirit that had appeared to Anne appeared to Wilbur and told him that she was sending him the greatest natural medium she had ever known. Over the next few years, Wilbur taught Anne what he knew about the spirit world and helped her develop her gifts.

She lived for many years in Florida. Several people told me she made a bundle when spirit told her to buy some land, which she eventually sold to Disney World. The story wasn't quite accurate. She didn't sell directly to Disney World, but she did make a lot of money, she said. “But it's gone now. I made other bad business deals,” she said.

Other mediums encouraged her to become a physical medium because of her skill with objects, she told us, but that didn't interest her. She wanted to help people grow and heal.

People in the Dale were always talking about how the manifestations of spirit ought to help people on their path to spiritual growth, but I didn't get it. Mediums differentiate themselves from psychics in emphasizing that their primary goal is to prove the continuity of life by contacting the dead. But most people who come to the Dale are more interested in what is going to happen in their own lives than they are in talking with the dead. So the Dale's mediums give people what they want. I couldn't see how foretelling the future had anything in common with spiritual growth. People come because they want money or love or power. They aren't looking to become better people. And most of the time, they aren't looking for dead people.

Lily Dale's visitors today are mostly people of modest means, mainly working people. The women are secretaries, clerks, factory workers, beauticians, school cafeteria cooks, and women whose main task in life is cleaning houses and keeping children, sometimes their own and sometimes the children of others. The men are carpet layers, carpenters, mechanics, firefighters, and policemen. Those who aren't in unions probably vote Republican. In recent years, Lily Dale has drawn increasing numbers of schoolteachers, physicians, nurses, professors—people with education and a good bit of social status.

Those who come are often middle-aged or older and, like the rest of America, overweight. Sunshades are clamped to their heads
and cameras swing from their necks. Those not wearing sandals are most often shod in the enormous, blazingly white athletic shoes that identify American tourists everywhere in the world. They wear shorts, although many are long past the age and weight when they ought to have given up such revealing wear, and they often sport tans with the peculiar beetle-shell look that comes from tanning beds.

They are cheerful, easygoing people and not at all fools. Unlike people whose intelligence or education has puffed them up, many Lily Dale visitors take in what the town has to offer with easy shrugs that accept and dismiss in equal measure.

Once I interviewed people in the Monday evening line outside the auditorium on five-dollar reading night. On these nights, six people sit in a circle with one medium, who will go from one to the other, giving short messages that last maybe five minutes. One medium complained that the people who attend Monday night messages are often greedy for more than their money buys them a right to. They press the mediums, argue with them, and sometimes treat them like sideshow performers, which the mediums don't appreciate. Incidentally, mediums make no money from this event; all proceeds go to the Lily Dale Assembly.

Hours before the event started, a French girl, dressed in black, smoking a cigarette, was in line. She was visiting the area, heard about Lily Dale, and came to see what she might find out about her future. Yes, she did believe in all this. She'd gotten a good reading from a medium in Belgium, who told her about what would happen with her job and her love life. Asked for specifics, she blew a column of smoke and said she didn't exactly remember. A group of sixty-ish friends was there from nearby Jamestown. They didn't want to give their names. They came every year. “For five dollars, it's worth it,” said one.

Oh, yes, they'd gotten good advice and heard true things. One woman was told that she would have problems with her lungs. She
wasn't smoking, but her face had the lined look and her voice the husky growl of a longtime heavy smoker.

Did you stop smoking?

“No,” she said.

Did the prediction scare you?

“Sure.”

I asked people in the line whether any of them had changed anything in their lives because of the mediums' predictions. That got a laugh.

“No.”

“Of course not.”

“I'd never do that.”

They shook their heads and grimaced, amused at the idea.

But you say the mediums are often correct?

“Sure.” “That's right.” Lily Dale patrons don't have to be consistent. This isn't science. It's life.

Nobody mentioned contacting dead relatives or friends, which might be just as well.

“It's getting harder and harder for spirits to prove that they're who they say they are,” medium Lauren Thibodeau told me.

“People don't remember anybody from past generations,” she said. “When you add the number of adoptions and divorces that split families apart, you've got a real problem. I might very well be bringing in Grandpa, and no one knows enough about him to believe that he's really there.”