Commerce with spirits was so alluring, Lurie wrote, that her two friends withdrew from real life as it became “drab, faded, even unreal” in comparison. Eventually spirits began to assure Merrill and Jackson that they were more highly evolved spiritual beings than ordinary mortals. Ephraim encouraged the couple to take other lovers whenever they liked. They did, and Merrill died of complications from HIV infection.
Lily Dale doesn’t have many celebrities these days. Anne Gehman, the medium said to have congressional clients, is fairly well known, and some of the others have wide followings, but the only medium who ever made big news was Neal Rzepkowski, a local physician who made national headlines during the 1990s when he was dismissed from the staff of a nearby hospital because he was HIV positive.
When Neal first came to Lily Dale, he was a Catholic teenager working at a nearby YMCA summer camp. A medium brought his dead uncle through and predicted that Neal was going to be a physician. Neal was so impressed with the medium’s message that he decided he too would summon the spirits.
“I thought, He’s a human. So if he can do it, I can do it. If there’s a trick to it, I’ll learn it,” Neal said. He began taking psychic development classes and sitting in circles. For more than a year he didn’t get a thing.
“I thought, What they’re doing is weeding us out before they give us the real trick,” he said.
Then one night during a service, Neal was called upon to give a message. His attention was drawn to a woman he did not know. In his mind’s eye, he saw hovering over the woman’s head an image of the U.S. Capitol and a young man in an army uniform.
“You must have a son who’s stationed in Washington who is on your mind,” he told her. And she said, “That’s exactly right.”
Neal thought, Oh, my God. How did I do that? He was so flustered that he lost the rest of the message. But that experience so encouraged him that he continued studying spirit communication, and a month after he got his medical degree he became a Spiritualist minister.
Often named as one of Lily Dale’s best mediums, Neal doesn’t believe intuitive gifts are as rare as others think they are. It isn’t uncommon for seasoned physicians to walk into a room and know what ails a patient, he said. “They don’t call it intuition,” he said. “They call it experience.” But in his opinion, the energy he taps into and the knowledge other doctors pick up come from the same source.
I asked Neal why spirit guides didn’t warn him before he became infected with the HIV virus. He gave an answer that Spiritualists often give when explaining their misfortunes and failures. They are on earth to learn their own lessons, they say. Spirits aren’t going to get in the way of that.
He now doctors others with the virus.
“HIV has been a gift for me and most of my patients,” said Neal. “You live life totally differently. You enjoy it much more.” I tried to understand that perspective. I questioned it until Neal began to look at me impatiently as if he suspected that English might not be a language I understood. But I never did get it. If he really feels that way—and why would he lie?—he has attained a level of spirituality I can’t fathom, one that’s almost as transcendent as the mediums’ other claims.
13
The morning after newly widowed Carol Lucas saw Martie Hughes and received a celestial lesson in golf, she had her appointment with medium Sherry Lee Calkins, who lives in a big green house called the Divine Wisdom Retreat. Sherry Lee, sister to Gretchen, who gave me my first Lily Dale message, and also sister to the late Chapman, who returned from the Yonder Land twirling a buttercup, spends many nights astral traveling. She once managed a former husband’s construction business in Latin America by whisking her astral body into his Colombian office each night and examining the books, she told me. She also said she used her astral abilities to tour sites for buildings the construction company bid on, allowing her husband to amaze his competitors by how much he knew.
She once battled an Amazonian witch doctor who opposed their building plans. She met him on the astral plane, she said. When she realized he was ready to turn the cosmic highway into a battlefield, she called in her long-dead father and grandfather and settled herself under a hair dryer, turned on high to disrupt the witch doctor’s electrical impulses. Then she sent her noncorporeal self out to meet him. She won the battle, of course. She’s one of the Dale’s finest sensitives.
Angelic entities are a special interest of Sherry Lee’s, and she looks a little like an angel herself. Blond curls frame her face. She has wide blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses and beautiful pale skin that doesn’t show anything of her sixty-four years. She speaks briskly in a sweet-toned voice and is likely to address people as “dear heart.” Angels are all around, said Sherry Lee, who teaches workshops on them. People often encounter them and think they’re human. A good way to know the difference is to look at their feet. An angel’s feet never touch the earth, she said.
When I began writing this book, Sherry Lee generously used her powers of clairvoyance to reassure me. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “They’ve been working on this book a long time. They want this story out.”
Clearly she wasn’t talking about corporeal beings.
“They’ve got it all worked out,” she said. “The book is written. You’ve been chosen as the way for it to get here.”
Seeing something wary in my expression, she reassured me, “They’ve done the work, but you’ll get the money and the credit.”
Great, I thought. Now if they’ll just deliver, I can go home and wait for the bucks.
She advised me to listen carefully to the tape I made of our interview because spirit voices are sometimes audible on such recordings. I followed her advice but couldn’t hear them. She does not allow tape recording of her readings. Many mediums don’t. They’re afraid of having false predictions used against them, I was told by mediums who do allow recordings.
Instead, Sherry Lee draws symbolic pictures as she gives messages. Spirits guide her hand, she said. Her pictures always include a four-year timeline, two years back and two years forward. Clients keep the drawings, and she encourages people to bring them back at the next reading.
When Carol arrived in Sherry Lee’s parlor hoping to hear more about Noel, the medium wasted no time. She started drawing furiously and talking fast in a singsong patter. She rarely hesitated. Her observations were asserted as flat facts. Even her questions often sounded like statements.
“Your husband has passed over, is that correct?
“I sense bad blood, not necessarily an operation where there was a lot of blood, but I’m thinking bad blood or tainted blood.”
“Yes.” This was good, really good. Carol felt hope rising.
Sherry could not have known those details. Frank and Shelley Takei, who were hosting Carol that weekend, had made the appointment with Sherry Lee, but they had said nothing to the medium about Carol, they assured her, and Carol trusted them completely. Could Sherry Lee have known from other sources that Frank and Shelley were expecting a recently widowed guest? Possibly, but not likely. Sherry Lee runs with Lily Dale’s old guard and lives at the other end of the community. The Takeis fraternize with a less establishment group that rarely communicates with Sherry Lee. A widow in Lily Dale isn’t rare enough to make good gossip.
Of course, if the mediums operate an organized, efficient conspiracy to check up on clients, Sherry could have gotten that information and a lot more. But even in my most paranoid moments I found that hard to believe. A community that can’t fix the holes in its streets or install a septic system that won’t overflow at the height of summer is hardly likely to run an underground information system that functions reliably. The mediums would be better off guessing.
“I want you to know that your husband is sitting on the arm of the sofa there.” Sherry Lee nodded toward where Carol sat. “Did he make it a point to sit on the arm of the sofa rather than the seat?”
Carol shook her head. Not that she remembered.
> “Your father has passed but not your mother, right?”
“Yes.” After Martie’s messages, Carol was being especially careful to reveal nothing. Her absolute belief that Martie had been in touch with Noel made Carol more cautious. She had what she came for, and now she was going to be even more picky about what she accepted. Her guard up, she kept her head lowered, writing down everything Sherry Lee said.
“Your father was right there to help your husband over.”
Carol’s dad had died in 1990. He and Noel adored each other. When Noel became ill, Carol often talked to her dad’s spirit, asking him to help in any way he could.
“Your husband passed away several months ago, right?”
Carol’s head snapped up.
“No. In April.” First Martie made that mistake, and now Sherry Lee. Where was this idea coming from?
“That’s not what I’m getting,” said Sherry Lee. “Something was going on in November.”
Carol shook her head. Both mediums challenged her as though she didn’t know when her husband died. What made them so stubborn?
Sherry Lee frowned for a few seconds as though gathering her thoughts.
“Your husband’s father also passed over, didn’t he? Some time ago?”
“Oh, yes, in the seventies.”
“I feel that his father came forward and gave him some strength, a tremendous amount of strength so that he lived longer.”
All this was very well, but none of it amounted to much. Except for the first sentences, it could have been good guesses, and the rest didn’t seem to apply.
“Your husband has a message for you. The gathering you held for him was everything he could have wanted. I’m reading that to mean the funeral,” Sherry Lee said.
“No, I didn’t have a funeral. I had a memorial in June before I came up here.”
Noel didn’t want people filing by to look at his body in a casket, and he didn’t want a preacher saying words over him. Hearing that the memorial service pleased Noel meant so much to Carol that she felt tears well up.
“Oh,” Sherry Lee said, “so you had him cremated.” Not a question. A statement. Carol answered nevertheless.
“That’s right.”
“I was getting something about a hat and wearing his favorite hat. I thought if he had been buried, maybe it was in that hat. Now I think that he wants some of his ashes to be put with the hat. You haven’t distributed the ashes yet, right?”
“Right. I haven’t yet.” But a hat? He wanted his ashes in a favorite hat? She didn’t even know what his favorite hat was.
“Someone in your life is very dominant, whose name begins with G.”
Carol shook her head, searching her mind. She couldn’t think of anyone, and then she remembered. Her mother is called G. G. by the grandchildren. Of course.
“My mother,” she said. Sherry Lee barely nodded.
“Your guardian angel is here,” said Sherry Lee. “Yours happens to be wearing…I thought it was a sash, but it’s a tire.”
Carol laughed.
“Only my guardian angel would be tacky enough to wear a tire.”
“You’ve had a near-fatal occasion that involved a tire.”
Again Carol drew a blank. “No.”
“Did you pull off the road to change a tire?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s what I’m getting,” Sherry Lee said. She never retracts a thing.
“Were you a therapist?”
“No, a teacher.”
“I see you working with children who were very troubled, on an individual basis.”
That was true. Troubled kids had always come to Carol with their problems.
Now Sherry Lee moved to the future.
“I see you not necessarily with kids. I see you with a role, and I want to say therapist, but it might not be a therapist as we think of it. But I see you with a partnership. By August of next year I see you in a partnership, and I’m going to leave the door open to work as some kind of therapist.” She marked the date on the timeline she was drawing.
Sherry Lee paused. “Here’s something you are not going to want to hear.”
Carol looked up. “If it’s bad news, I don’t want to hear it.” She was too shaky.
“I would not give you bad news,” Sherry Lee said, a little miffed. “I see this partnership starting as a business but evolving into marriage.”
“That is not something I want to hear,” Carol snapped. “I don’t see myself ever becoming involved with someone else in a marriage.”
The medium laughed. “I said it wasn’t something you would want to hear.”
The session satisfied Carol, but it had some misses. At least, that’s how it seemed as she gave Sherry Lee her forty-five dollars and left.
At a quarter to six the next morning, Carol bolted upright in bed. “It couldn’t have been more dramatic if the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had assembled in my bedroom. I knew what the tire meant.”
When she and her younger daughter were driving back from Johns Hopkins with Noel’s ashes, their car developed a shimmy. They made it to Greenville, South Carolina, where Carol’s older daughter lives. She asked David, her son-in-law, to take the car around the block and see whether he could tell her what the problem was. When he returned, he said, “Carol, you have a bad tire. You have a bad bulge in that tire. I’ll take it in to be fixed.”
At the service station the mechanic said, “Man, I hope nobody was driving on this tire because it is an accident waiting to happen.”
When Carol returned home, she told her younger daughter about the reading.
“Don’t you remember Dad coming to sit on the edge of the sofa?” her daughter asked. “He did that all the time. I have pictures of him sitting that way.”
The idea of Noel’s favorite hat was still a mystery to Carol, but that didn’t bother her. The only true mistake Sherry Lee made was that strange mention of Noel having died several months ago. The same mistake Martie made.
Was it coincidence or did they both know something even Carol had forgotten? Martie’s message had amazed Carol, but if that had been all there was, she might have eventually explained it away. She might have been able to believe that Martie had pulled that image from her subconscious memories. That would be an amazing feat, but it wouldn’t mean that Noel’s spirit was still alive.
If, however, two mediums independently came up with a fact that even Carol didn’t know, she would be convinced they weren’t getting their information from her and they weren’t guessing. They were getting messages from somewhere else, from Noel, who still existed and now understood all that had gone on.
Sherry Lee said Noel had almost died in November. Carol had medical records of everything, of every day, every setback, every rally. So she pulled those heavy stacks of paper out and began a sad search through them. As she read, all the memories came back, harder now to relive because she knew the outcome. November.
There it was, just as Sherry Lee said it would be.
Noel’s white count had risen astronomically high in November, high enough that he could have died. No one knew why. Then it dipped again. Drastically. He was out of danger. Still, no one knew why.
Had Noel stayed alive longer than he was supposed to? Martie and Sherry Lee thought so. Sherry Lee had the date right. Maybe?
All right, certainly. Carol believed it. “To have two of them in a twelve-hour period and to have some of the things they said reflect one another, it was overwhelming,” she said, “and yet gratifying and edifying.”
She was convinced. “What I’d hoped for was true.” The realization soothed her like a warm hand. Noel was all right. Everything was going to be fine. The glimmer of hope she came to Lily Dale with was now a dancing flame. Carol would look toward that glow many times in the coming months.
14
When I heard that Patricia Price, the medium who had taught us how to fake billet reading, was having a yearly reunion of her students, I wrangled an invitation.
We were to meet for dinner at a restaurant on the water. On the way over a nurse who gave me a ride spoke of having talked with the Archangel Michael. She never saw him, or heard a voice outside herself, she said. It was more like a voice in her head, like her own thoughts but also like someone else speaking.
I asked her what I always asked people when they said God talked to them.
How did you know it was him?
“He said so,” she answered.
Eventually she asked the Archangel to go away because the conversations made her think she was crazy. When she first started talking to him, she told Michael, “You’ve got to help here. Give me something so I don’t feel like I’m becoming psychotic.”
He didn’t say anything for several minutes after she made her request, she told me, and then…the nurse stopped talking and put her hand to her mouth.
“Oh,” she caught her breath. “I’ll probably break up telling this. I always do.
“He said, ‘I love you.’ I said, ‘You love me? That’s it? That’s all you have to give me?’”
Here she paused again and steadied her breathing. Her voice was solemn as she said the words. “He said, ‘Usually that’s enough.’”
“That was the last you heard from him?” I asked.
“Yes. It was. I think of that answer all the time.”
No one spoke. The mood in the car was somber, as if she had just said something so profound that it required a pause before other talk proceeded.
The most frequent gift Lily Dale spirits bring is love. For a long time, I resisted such messages as too easy. I thought, Why can’t the spirits say something more useful? What good is love? I wasn’t alone in that criticism. Lots of people noted that numbers for the lottery might be more appreciated.
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