One July, Shelley was at a Forest Temple message service when a medium she didn’t much like said, “Are you aware that you’re involved in a legal dispute?”
“I thought, Like hell, I am,” she said.
Eight months later a lawyer called to say a letter from Shelley was being entered as evidence in a harassment suit. He read the letter.
“I had never written such a letter,” Shelley said. A former client had forged her signature.
It was dated July of the previous summer, the very month the medium had given her the message.
Did any of these things convince her that spirit power exists? No.
“Because if this is real, why can’t I do it?” she asked. “Why can’t I be a medium? Because I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.
“It’s like I’m always saying about the mediums, ‘Either they’re crazy or I’m stupid.’ I’ve never figured out which.”
She thinks most Lily Dale experiences could be exaggeration, delusion, or wishful thinking. “People are making it up all the time.” And yet, she said, “it’s still the closest thing to the Temple of Eleusis that we have. There are things you can’t reject no matter how discerning you are.”
The Temple of Eleusis was where ancient Greeks explored the Mysteries and celebrated the rites of spring in honor of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, fertility, and marriage.
She and Frank teach classes for Virginia Beach’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), which grew around Edgar Cayce’s channeling. “I’ve seen people arrive at ARE exhausted after driving all night, with everything they own packed in their cars, because God told them to come there,” she said. “What they’re looking for is Lily Dale, but they don’t know it exists.”
By this time nodding in response to statements that make no sense came easy. So I nodded, then asked my next question.
How did you get this way?
Never coy, she didn’t demur as though wondering what I meant. She knew. I meant, how did she get so free.
“I found out I was right.”
About what?
“About everything.”
How did you find that out?
“Lynnie,” she said. “My Lynnie. She taught me.”
She meant Lynn of the bicycle and the prayers. I nodded.
8
The mediums are nice people, and they believe what they say, but some of them could be getting carried away with their own imaginations,” Hilda Wilkinson said.
I was surprised to hear anyone in Lily Dale admit it.
Ron Robertson, Lily Dale’s Assembly president, introduced me to Hilda, which was a smart move. Letting a reporter know that not everybody in Lily Dale accepted any claim was smart, and Hilda had great credentials. She’d never been a medium, and she didn’t entirely approve of making money off spirit communication. She was also ninety-five. If she was faking, she’d been faking for a very long time.
Hilda was an example of one of Lily Dale’s proudest boasts, which is that people don’t age as fast in their community as elsewhere. “I don’t color my hair, and I have my own teeth,” she told me. Her hair had only a grizzle of gray. Her face was sweet behind big glasses. Under five foot and about ninety pounds, she cut her own lawn in the summer and blew snow off her own driveway when hard winters came raging across Lake Erie.
Hilda converted to Spiritualism early. She was six years old, had just crawled out of bed, and was washing up while her eight-year-old sister, Julia, lingered under the covers. From behind her, Hilda heard a guttural voice. She turned to see Julia sitting bolt upright, her face wooden, her body stiff. Words were coming from Julia’s mouth, but they were not her own. Hilda ran from the room, screaming, “Julia’s talking with the voice of a man.”
Hilda laughed at that part of the story. She didn’t remember her mother being particularly upset. Their family attended a Christian church, but New York State was full of Spiritualists.
“My mother understood,” Hilda said as we sat over cups of hot tea at the dining room table of her little white frame house. “My sister was a born medium. She never took money for it. The voice told her that it wanted to speak through her, and she would be taken care of.”
Hilda asked whether I wanted to see her chalk slates. I did. Lily Dale is full of relics said to demonstrate the miracles of spirit aptitude. Lots of people have their grandmother’s trumpets—tin, megaphone-like cones that supposedly floated about rooms while spirits talked out of them. Hilda’s trophies were chalk slates filled with writing. Early Spiritualist mediums would put a piece of chalk between two blank slates and bind them together with twine. Hilda said she held one end of the slates and the medium held the other. She could hear the chalk scraping as spirits wrote the messages, she told me.
This was the very trick exposed by Hereward Carrington, once one of the country’s most famous psychic investigators.
In 1907, the most powerful and popular medium in Lily Dale was an ill-tempered man named Pierre L.O.A. Keeler. Carrington, who called Keeler the best slate-writing medium in the country, had reams of letters from highly placed professional men attesting to Keeler’s veracity and otherworldly talents. But Carrington, an investigator for the American Society for Psychical Research, was no ordinary customer. He was a keen observer and the author of a book detailing fifty-three different ways in which slate writers tricked the unwary.
The Lily Dale he visited was far more flamboyant than the community today. Mediums so disliked light that they nailed planks over the windows of their séance rooms. “One would pass such cottages at night, and hear issuing from them, anything but melodious sounds—the house itself dark, shadowy, and closely boarded up,” he wrote in his report to the society. The mediums further improved their chances by constructing so-called spirit cabinets—curtained-off portions of the rooms from which spirits emerged once all lights were extinguished. Spirits demanded such conditions, the mediums said.
Mediums induced spirits to appear as lights, produce various thumps and noises, even touch the living. Spirit photographers made spirits appear in photographs. Without touching a paint-brush, mediums who worked with spirit painters made full portraits appear. Pressure to produce such sights and sounds was intense because people believed it could be done, and they came in droves to witness such feats. Forbidding them could have dire commercial results. When the Onset, Massachusetts, camp outlawed physical mediumship, it found itself with so few Spiritualist tourists that it was forced to become merely a summer resort, according to Carrington.
In the summer of 1907, Carrington picked Lily Dale as a site for his two-week investigation, not because he suspected it of fraud, but because it was the “best and most aristocratic camp in the States—and the best known.” It was so popular that up to four thousand people would show up for a lecture. The community once had a bowling alley and a ballroom where orchestras played and elegant dances were held. The smart set of American Spiritualism came for picnics in the early years and then stayed to build summer houses. Eventually some started living there all year. If anyone could do physical manifestations, it was likely to be someone in Lily Dale. And in Lily Dale it was likely to be Keeler.
“[I] entered his house with high hopes that here, at last, I should meet with physical phenomena that were genuine, or at least such as I could not readily explain,” Carrington wrote.
Keeler, he noted, was a touchy man who had to be approached with caution and humility, “otherwise one finds oneself turned out of doors with short ceremony.” The medium had reason to be cranky. The University of Pennsylvania’s Seybert Commission on Spiritualism had already exposed him as a fraud. He had also been outed in a book titled The Spirit World Unmasked.
Carrington called himself Charles Henderson and wore a pair of smoked eyeglasses to make it seem that his eyesight was defective. Keeler worked in daylight, using a table covered with a cloth that fell six to eight inches below the edges except on the side where the medium sat. On that side, the cloth h
ung about a foot.
In the first session, Carrington could not detect even one trick. Keeler had earned his title as the best slate medium in the country. Carrington was positive that fraud had taken place, but he couldn’t prove it.
In the second session, Carrington gave Keeler four questions written on paper that crackled as it was folded into little pellets. The pellets were placed in the center of the table. The medium then gave his client five slates and asked him to clean them. As he did so, Carrington saw Keeler exchange two pellets, one after the other.
“These pellets he held in the palm of his right hand, which he then dropped carelessly into his lap,” the investigator wrote. As he busily cleaned the slates, Carrington could hear the faint crackle of his paper being unfolded and then the soft scratching of a slate pencil writing on a board in the medium’s lap.
Before he gave the medium two of the cleaned slates, Carrington pressed his thumbnail in the soft wood of the slates’ frames. The slates were then bound together with the pencil in between. First they were held by both men over the table, and then Keeler pulled the slates toward him and slipped them under the table, bidding Carrington to grasp them there. In the instant when Keeler put the slates under the table, he dropped them onto his lap and picked up the finished slates, which he had written answers on. When returned to the tabletop, neither slate had the mark made by the investigator’s thumbnail.
As the two men held the bound slates between them, Carrington heard what seemed to be the sound of a pencil writing. This was supposed to be evidence of spirits at work, but watching the medium’s wrist, Carrington saw the slight twitching of a muscle produced as Keeler’s finger scratched against the underside of the slates. “[H]is wrists are well covered with fatty-tissue, it is very difficult to detect this movement; but, by watching intently, I clearly saw it—corresponding to the [sound of ] scratches on the slate.”
When the slates were unbound, Carrington also observed that the pencil between the two slates was perfectly sharp and unused. In addition, some of the more inane and nonspecific writing that could have applied to any customer was written in red and yellow pencil. The pencil between the slates was black.
Keeler was tossed out of Lily Dale after Carrington’s report became public, but by the 1920s he was back, and Hilda gave him three dollars to reach spirit through his slates. Even then, Lily Dale answered its critics as it always has: it admits everything. There used to be a shocking amount of fraud, perpetrated by bad mediums, and there’s still some of it around, the mediums say. It blackens the names of good, honest mediums, and it ought to be stopped. In the 1940s, Lily Dale outlawed all physical mediumship except in classes and private circles.
Today Lily Dale’s finest mediums delight in telling of faked trumpet sessions they’ve exposed. They entertain their classes with stories of how the great frauds of old did their tricks—reading hotel registers, memorizing car tags so they could research records, keeping a secret book that contained names and details of known Spiritualists. One medium told me that concealed trapdoors had been found in houses. I was told that carpenters tearing walls apart had found clappers that could be used to make spirit rapping.
Alexander DeChard, the father of Lily Dale resident Ron DeChard, was one of the mediums suspected of cheating during the 1930s and 1940s when physical mediums were being pressured to leave Lily Dale. He was tested by community leaders, who strapped him to his chair wearing nothing but his underwear. Alexander passed the test, but more than fifty years later his son Ron is still bitter about the humiliation.
One evening medium Patricia Price showed a group of us how to fake billet reading. Billets are folded pieces of paper on which questions for the spirits have been written by members of an audience. The questions are placed in a basket, and the medium draws one. Without unfolding the paper, the medium holds the paper to her forehead, supposedly intuits the question, and answers it with the help of spirits.
The trick is achieved by having a plant in the audience, who has agreed to claim the first answer as his own. The medium picks a question from the basket. Without unfolding it, she gives the bogus answer. She then unfolds the paper, reads it to herself, and looks at the audience. But the question she speaks aloud is not the one on the paper. Instead, she substitutes a question that fits the bogus answer she just gave. Her confederate in the audience gasps in amazement and says the spirits must be present because that is the very question he asked and the answer he most hoped for.
Now the medium is in business. She knows one of the audience’s questions, and that’s all she needs. She picks another billet, holds it to her forehead and gives the answer to the question she read on the first piece of paper. And so it goes. Each time she simply answers the question printed on the last billet she read. The audience is astonished, and spirit help is entirely unnecessary.
Patricia had a great time showing that trick, and afterward she warned us, “Always be suspicious. Always use your common sense.” And then she added, as the mediums invariably do, “But you know, you can’t have a fake without having something real first.”
What sounded like a self-serving rationalization was an observation made by William James, who helped found the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884.
One swindler imitates a previous swindler, but the first swindler of that kind imitated someone who was honest. You can no more create an absolutely new trick than you can create a new word without any previous basis. You don’t know how to go about it. Try, reader, yourself, to invent an unprecedented kind of “physical phenomenon of spiritualism.” When I try, I find myself mentally turning over the regular medium-stock, and thinking how I might improve some item.
Well, maybe. But magicians might disagree. I bet none of them have seen a woman sawed in half, and they still do the trick. Some manifestations of spirit the early Spiritualists came up with were pretty strange. Ectoplasm, a jellylike white substance that oozed out of mediums’ chests and formed itself into shapes, for instance. Nobody in Lily Dale said they’d seen such a thing, but it did happen in the old days, many people told me, and the museum has a newspaper photo of a woman with a hazy-looking white hand reaching out of her sternum.
James also agreed with another Lily Dale idea. Just because someone cheats sometimes doesn’t mean they cheat all the time. Scientists lie too, James wrote, demonstrating with a story about the time he made a dead turtle’s heart seem to beat because a fellow scientist needed the motion for a demonstration.
People of the Dale usually explain that physical mediumship is real but rare. It can’t be produced at will. Old-time mediums, such as Keeler, were able to do the feats they claimed to do, but they weren’t able to produce them on demand. And so they resorted to trickery sometimes. Hilda firmly believes her slates are legit. She has believed that for most of her life, and she’ll die believing it.
I could barely read the scrawls on Hilda’s black slates, but I could see that each slate had different handwriting.
Are these signatures of real people you knew?
“Of course,” she said, looking puzzled, as if wondering whether I might be somewhat dim. I didn’t take offense. People in Lily Dale often tell the most fantastic stories and then look at you as if you’re the one who’s odd.
You’re left-handed,” Hilda said. “That means you’re from Atlantis.”
I nodded as though that were good news. The truth was that I didn’t know anything about Atlantis. I suspected that it had never existed, and if it did, what difference did it make that I’d lived there? I didn’t ask.
Then Hilda told me I was an old soul.
That time I knew what she meant. An old soul is someone born many times before. I wasn’t sure why Hilda thought such a thing, but I’d heard versions of it before. They hadn’t always been compliments. Once when I was four, a mean-tempered uncle said something rude. I don’t remember what I replied, but it made him furious. He glared down at me.
“You little adult,” he sn
arled.
Some years later, a neighbor told my mother that I’d been born an old lady. “Old soul” sounds much nicer than “old lady.” Maybe I was coming up in the world.
I waited patiently as Hilda told me all she wanted to tell. When she began to repeat herself, I posed the one question that really intrigued me. Why did she doubt the mediums? I had not asked earlier because I didn’t want to scare her into thinking that I was in Lily Dale for only the dirt. I wasn’t. The dirt hardly interested me at all. That was easy prey. I could catch the dirt anytime. No. I was interested in her doubts because none of Hilda’s certainties convinced me.
That’s always the case. When religious people tell me that they know, absolutely know the truth, I am never assured that they are telling the truth. They are showing me their public face. What convinces is the other face, the one that can only be glimpsed. When their eyes shift, when doubt widens their countenance into blank confusion and they fumble because words come hard, I know I’ve hit the right spot. This is what they worry about in the dead of night, when the sureties everyone believes seem far away and they are left with only their own thoughts. The questions they pose to themselves then, and how they answer them, are the heart of faith. When I see that look, I become very still and careful, as watchful as the voyeur standing outside the barn, peering between the slats.
During one interview, a medium smiled placidly as she told me about healing and love and the power of spirit. She said that she believed in what I was doing. I thought that was taking a big risk considering that nobody ever knows what a journalist is really doing. But I listened until she ran down, and then I figured, If she says she trusts me, let’s see how much.
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