Lily Dale (Plus)

by Christine Wicker

  Mary Ann’s mediumistic specialty developed one day during an ordinary psychotherapy session. She was listening to a client who was ashen-faced with grief, weeping, bent over in his chair, hardly able to talk, when beside him appeared an apparition.

  “There was his radiant daughter standing there, gesturing, saying, ‘Tell him. Tell him I’m here,’” Mary Ann said.

  His daughter had died three years earlier when a truck hit her in New York City. The driver was never found. The father could not stop blaming himself.

  Mary Ann wondered, Should I tell him? Would it be malfeasance? Would it help or hurt if I mentioned that I see his daughter? She didn’t know. So she asked him whether he believed in everlasting life. When he said he did, she told him that his daughter was standing beside him.

  “I described her down to what she was wearing and her tiny beautiful face,” Mary Ann said. “I never did know whether he believed me.”

  Since then, she said, lots of dead people have appeared next to her grieving clients. They always bring the same message: “Tell him (or her) I’m alive.” They wave their arms, shout in exasperation, jump up and down. They bring objects and animals to prove who they are. It can be most distracting, she said.

  The spirits don’t return because they worry about the sorrow their relatives feel, said Mary Ann. “They don’t think like that. They’re spirit. They see there’s a problem, and they know that the way to solve it is to let people know they aren’t dead. So they do.”

  When living people tell Mary Ann they are afraid to be buried or fearful about being burned during cremation, she feels amazed, dismayed, and somewhat alienated, as though she were on the outside looking in. They completely misunderstand, she said.

  “You’re wearing a suit of clothes and you step out of them,” she said. “You’re still you. You just leave this suit of clothes behind. You’re fully conscious, but the body doesn’t mean anything to you anymore.”

  Spiritualists often talk of spirits who keep them company over many years. At the house with a little sign that reads, RAYMOND TORREY MEDIUM, an old man often sits in the front room that serves as his office and medium’s parlor. Around his head white hair fans out in a glinting halo, lit by sun that shafts through the dusty window. Ray was once known throughout America’s Spiritualist community as the singing medium because he always sang at services. Customers come less often now that he is in his nineties. That’s all right in a way. Solitude gives him more time to talk with his baby daughter who died sixty years ago.

  Ray has a son in his twenties, but it’s still the long-gone daughter who comforts him most. He watched her grow up in the spirit world until she reached a pretty thirty-five years old, when, right in accordance with some Spiritualists’ thought, she stopped aging. There’s difference of opinion over what age spirit bodies assume after they pass over. Many Spiritualists say thirty-five is the perfect age when physical form and maturity come together most harmoniously, and so spirit entities take that age. Others say spirits become the age when they were happiest.

  When spirits appear to their loved ones, however, they often manifest at the age when they died in order to be recognized, the mediums say. There seems to be agreement on the fact that babies who die do grow up. So Ray expected to see his daughter move through childhood into her adult years, and that is what he saw, he said.

  Some days she’s the only one who seems to understand him, he told me sadly.

  Medium Greg Kehn once comforted a client by telling her that the loneliness so many people suffer from is an illusion. “If they could see what I see, they would know that they are never alone. Spirits are all around them,” he said.

  That idea causes some people to worry about privacy, a concern the mediums wave away. “The spirits aren’t watching you do embarrassing things. They’re on a different plane,” they say. That may be, but when Martie Hughes smelled cherry pipe tobacco and received the impression that a sea captain who had gone to spirit was roaming about her house, she immediately laid down some rules.

  The first was that he was not to appear before her physical eyes. “When I open my eyes, I do not want to see you standing there,” she said. And the second rule was, “The bathroom is off limits.”

  “I did not want him to see me naked,” she said.

  Some of the mediums looked at me somberly and said, “This is going to be a spiritual journey for you.” I was polite about that, but I didn’t think so. They also told me that I had psychic ability. They tell a lot of people that.

  “Haven’t you had feelings about things that were going to happen?” the mediums asked.

  “Not really,” I’d reply. That wasn’t exactly true. I do have premonitions. I think I’m going to die every time I get on a plane. If it’s not me who is going to die, it’s someone I love. Every time my relatives plan to visit, every time the phone rings after dark, I’m positive that the Old Reaper is rapping. I’ve been so sure I was going to die that I’ve left messages on my desk for my kinfolk to open once I’m gone. I used to buy all sorts of food before I went on a trip, as though produce waiting to be cooked would exert some protective force. On the way to the airport, I have reminded my husband more than once that he’s to take care of my parents if I don’t come back.

  I do not tell people about my fears because “death by irony” is another one of them. In the newspaper business, you’re always writing or reading some story about somebody who moved out of the city to be safe and got run over by a tractor or somebody who left a note on her desk about dying before she left on the trip that killed her. Those stories often say, “Ironically…,” and that’s death by irony.

  When the mediums tried to convince me that I had power, I said politely, “No. I don’t sense things.” That wasn’t a lie, because I’m never right. Thank God. If I believed all the terrors I sense, I’d never leave the house.

  I came to Lily Dale as an observer. Nothing more. But Lily Dale doesn’t like that. It’s an equal opportunity place. “Anybody can do what we do,” the mediums said repeatedly. “You can do it too.”

  10

  Pat Naulty, the English professor whose son died playing Russian roulette, was walking away from an afternoon message service at the Forest Temple when a man parking his car waved and called to her. At the service, a medium had given Pat a message that indicated Pat was confused and uncertain. It was the same message that the same medium had delivered to her the night before. Pat wasn’t confused and she wasn’t uncertain, but Lily Dale itself so entranced her that she was still fairly blissed out and open to almost anything. So she dutifully searched her consciousness to see whether perhaps the medium knew something that she ought to pay attention to. No. There was nothing.

  The night before, Pat had slept at Shelley’s house in the goddess room, a little upstairs bedroom decorated with paintings of women’s faces amid swirling colors. An alcove in one wall had been turned into an altar bedecked with gold cloth and crystals. Like much of Shelley’s decor, the altar was just overdone enough to go past reverence into playfulness. On the back of the bedroom door hung Shelley’s version of goddess attire, a T-shirt decorated with the words, “You call me a bitch like that’s a BAD thing.”

  Shelley delighted in warning guests about the goddess room. It has strong currents running through it, according to many of the sensitives who have slept there. Some women have reported that, as they fall into the darkness of dreams, powerful currents of cosmic energy toss and tumble them. Sometimes they awake in the night and hear a murmuring crowd of indistinct female voices.

  As Pat walked back to Shelley’s house her second day in Lily Dale, she eyed the pudgy little guy calling to her.

  “My God, you have the most beautiful energy,” he yelled across the street.

  Pat did feel as though she were glowing with some strange new light, but still. The little man was apparently coming on to her, and she thought, Oh, please! New Age jargon was not the way to her heart.

  “Thank you very mu
ch,” she said in that bright voice women use for the brush-off. She kept walking. But he blocked her path.

  He had a questioning look on his face. “Who’s Gertrude?” he asked.

  Pat stopped. He had her attention now.

  “That was my mother.”

  “She’s hugging you.”

  If she’s hugging me, Pat wondered, why can’t I feel her?

  Pat was not particularly a believer in such messages, but neither was she unacquainted with psychic strangeness. In her twenties she had precognitive dreams. Only one had been of any value. That one came while she and her husband were traveling to visit his parents in Indiana. It was late, and Pat, pregnant with her older son, Willie, suddenly felt so sleepy that she couldn’t keep her head up. So she laid it in her husband’s lap as he drove. In her dream she saw their car cresting a hill, gathering speed as it traveled into the night. In the black road, sat a dark car, stalled, without lights and empty. As they crashed, Pat cried out and flung her arm into the dashboard.

  She sat up and told her husband what she’d dreamed. A hill was ahead. “It looked like that hill,” she said. Her husband eased off the accelerator, and, as they coasted down the incline, he braked right behind a dark car, stalled, without lights and empty.

  Pat’s other prophetic dreams had been confusing and useless. Days before her father died of a heart attack she dreamed that she was attending a funeral. But she hadn’t known whose funeral it was. Even if she had known, what could she have done? Years later she dreamed of another graveyard. This one was at the edge of a river and had gravestones that lay flat on the earth. For two months, the dreams repeated themselves. When her sister called to say that their apparently healthy, forty-nine-year-old mother had collapsed with heart failure, Pat asked, “What hospital did they take her to?”

  And her sister answered, “Patty, she’s dead.” They buried Gertrude in a cemetery with flat gravestones at the edge of a river—just like the one in the dream.

  The dreams and forebodings ended when Pat was in her thirties. “I pretty much willed them to quit,” she said, “and when they did I was relieved.”

  She hadn’t thought about her psychic moments in a long time. They were no part of who she thought herself to be.

  “Gertrude wants you to know that she approves of what you’ve done,” the man said. “She’s proud you got your degree and that you’re teaching.” How did he know she was teaching? How did he know these words she needed so much to hear?

  Gertrude’s death had been the reason Pat returned to college. Only Gertrude could have understood how desperate she had been. As a child, Pat often begged her mother to divorce her father, but Gertrude always replied that she had no education, no skills, and no way of supporting the family. When Pat’s father died, her mother became young again, Pat said. For two years, she was vibrant and free and excited about life in a way her daughters had never seen. Then she died.

  “I was determined that what happened to my mother wouldn’t happen to me,” Pat said. So she went to college. When her marriage began to rend under the pressure that decision helped create, she left the house, found a little place to live, and kept going to college. She was determined to get a Ph.D. and become a professor. “I felt like that was what I had to do, what I was born to do,” she said.

  She thought her sons would stay with their father until she was settled, and then they would live with her. When she was ready, however, their father wouldn’t let them go, she said. Then her son John died, and Pat felt that she had killed him. She should have stayed with the boys, no matter what it cost her, she thought. But it was too late.

  The man in the parking lot was looking at her with narrowed eyes. “There’s also a teenage boy here,” he said. “He’s tall and gangly, and he’s wearing a baseball cap.” John was six-foot-two when he shot himself, so big for his age that everyone thought he was older. He had sandy hair and lopsided dimples.

  “That’s John,” she said.

  Pat doesn’t remember the man’s name, only that he was a visiting medium from Ohio. He was on his way to the Stump, where visiting mediums are allowed to give messages, but he talked so long with Pat that he missed the service.

  Pat had been in Lily Dale one full day. The next day, she would get a reading from Lauren Thibodeau, a medium with a Ph.D. in counseling. That night Pat annoyed Shelley and the other guests by talking incessantly. She dominated conversations, talked about herself, asked too many questions. She couldn’t shut up, and then she couldn’t sleep. It was all too wonderful, like a completely different life. She had evidence that John’s spirit was alive and still present. Tomorrow, maybe, she would hear words from him that she longed for but didn’t dare hope to hear.

  11

  The June day I met Murry King was early in my research, before the summer season had actually started. I’d just had my ears boxed, figuratively speaking, by a medium named Rose Clifford. I wanted to talk with Rose because she was to teach a class on spoon bending. People said it couldn’t be done anymore. But there was Rose, about to teach it. I wanted to ask this sweet-looking Englishwoman how she did it, but I never got the chance.

  Before I could ask my first question, she peppered me with queries about my intentions, my background, my character, and my right to ask anybody anything. Everything I said she called lies. When I mentioned that she wasn’t being very polite, she said, “I don’t think you’re even a journalist.” Fearing she was about to tell me I wasn’t married and probably not a woman either, I grabbed my notebook and fled.

  At the end of the street, still dazed, I stumbled into Murry King, my first complete, totally committed skeptic. Murry’s doubt about all of Lily Dale’s supernatural claims caused me to think we were kindred souls. I was wrong about that. Like Shelley, Murry still thought Lily Dale might very well be a place of great spiritual wisdom, a notion that made no sense to me. What somebody says is true or not true. What somebody does is right or wrong. But not in the Dale. People there live enmeshed in worlds glimpsed between the facts, worlds in which I’m not an easy traveler.

  Murry King was a handyman and friend to all stray cats, lost dogs, and little old ladies who needed a chore done and didn’t want to pay. A big man with enough belly to be substantial, he had a ruff of gray hair that stood over a forehead expanded by his hairline’s retreat, and he talked softly, with calm deliberation.

  Raised in a Catholic orphanage, Murry once hoped to be a monk but lost heart after a year during which he spent some time wandering in the forest trying to obey Teresa of Avila’s injunction to make every deed a prayer. “I couldn’t do it. So I gave it up,” he said. He’d knocked around most of his life, married, divorced, been a Marine, gone to graduate school, and run a restaurant. He arrived in Lily Dale to help a friend renovate a house. Before they finished, he experienced heart trouble and needed a quadruple bypass. He stayed in the Dale to recuperate and hadn’t got around to leaving.

  Murry’s tendency to sink into a funk every winter made Lily Dale, with its long gray winters, a dicey place for him to be. The previous winter he had refused to answer his door or telephone. Neighbors, convinced he’d died, called the emergency squad. People in uniforms were ready to break down the door when Murry answered, annoyed, almost comatose with depression, but completely alive. He went to a doctor, who asked whether he was hearing voices; Murry replied, “Doc, where I live, I’m the only one who doesn’t.”

  Murry was not a believer, even though he bent a spoon or two in a class taught by Anne Gehman. My attention sharpened at hearing Anne’s name because she was Hilda’s example of a born medium. During Anne’s class Murry held his spoons so the handles protruded from his fists. Spoon benders usually grasp the spoons at each end and apply a little pressure, but Murry wasn’t interested in something so easily faked. He merely held his spoons with the handles protruding from his fists and then watched as the handles twisted into curlicues. I asked to see the spoons, but he had lost them.

  This was the firs
t spoon-bending story I heard, but not the last. I was told about whole classes of people who bent spoons while standing on the shore of the lake. Each time a piece of cutlery surrendered itself, the class cheered so loudly that all of Lily Dale could hear it. Anne herself displays a big bag of bent silverware, spoons turned to curlicues, forks with tines as wild as Einstein’s hair.

  Murry’s bent spoons pushed him toward conviction, but only briefly. He tried to do it again and couldn’t. “I don’t know what bent the spoons. Hypnotism maybe,” he said. But the way Murry sees it, if you can’t do it again, it doesn’t count. That’s an idea that Murry shares with the scientific world, which has looked into the claims of Spiritualism thousands of times. Lots of researchers say they have found amazing things going on amid all the claims. Metal bending, object moving, ESP, conversations with the dead—they’ve all had their distinguished advocates, bearing evidence, but getting the phenomena to repeat themselves for other scientists has been the rub. It’s hardly ever happened.

  “I haven’t seen anything in Lily Dale to convince me they are communicating with spirit,” Murry said. “There’s a lot of exaggeration, and I guess you would say hopeful enthusiasm.”

  If the spirits wanted to convert Murry, they had their chance fifty-five years ago. He was a first-grader when his mother placed him in the orphanage. She promised to come back. Instead, she died. Every night while the other children slept, Murry padded across the floor to the window. Looking into the cold, dark sky, he prayed that his mother would send some sign she was with him, but she never did. No voice. No vision. Not even a shooting star. Nothing.

  Murry grew up, married, and moved to Georgia. One midnight he was looking toward the starry sky when a thought flashed across his mind.