Lily Dale (Plus)

by Christine Wicker

  Some husbands and boyfriends sent flowers and made lunch for the classes. Others protested. They hid the women’s books. One rammed the family car into a tree. Several threatened to shoot themselves and their wives. One called out to his girlfriend, looped a rope from a beam, and was in the process of strangling himself when his girlfriend finally put down her books and came out to see what was wrong.

  But the women didn’t quit because of such resistance. Instead, they won scholarships, awards, and acclaim from their professors.

  “People didn’t like it when we started to think we could do more than rub our husbands’ feet and take care of their kids,” said Joyce Parker, one of Shelley’s students, a single mother and former meatpacker who now has a degree in philosophy. “Well, that was too bad.”

  20

  One weekend in July, a handful of New Choices women burst into Shelley’s house bearing grocery bags filled with every salty, sweet, fried, or frozen junk food America allows. When they first came to Lily Dale ten years before, the women were on welfare. If food stamps wouldn’t buy it, they didn’t eat it. They had jobs now and could afford restaurants, but bringing groceries was a tradition of their annual Lily Dale weekend.

  A little blonde with long wavy hair and deep cleavage came through the door first. “Mom,” Dawn Ganss called out as she moved toward Shelley with her arms outstretched.

  Next came Doris Goodman, with curly hair the color of butternut and a don’t-mess-with-me set to her mouth that wasn’t a lie. It was a look that warned those who wanted to abuse her—and there’d been more than a few—that they would have a fight on their hands. She had just left her job working at the Kmart snack bar when she heard about Shelley’s class. Doris went on to be named most outstanding senior in her undergraduate class and most outstanding student in her graduate program.

  Next, Darcy Kiehl bustled in with a grocery bag on her hip. Darcy could make your dinner and build your house. Darcy can do about anything, which is amazing considering how much bad luck had done to her.

  She had been involved in forty-eight car accidents and two motorcycle accidents. A car hit her two weeks before she delivered her only daughter. Cars hit her from behind as she waited for lights to change. Cars coming against the light hit her as she went through intersections. Once a car ran up into her driveway to collide with her parked car.

  Darcy had good reason to respect the kind of visions and dreams that rule Lily Dale. Her younger sister, Corinna, once dreamed that she would die in a red car and refused to buy red autos. When she couldn’t avoid buying a red car, she had it painted white, but she was killed in a car accident nevertheless. A red car hit her. Darcy was not involved in that accident.

  After Darcy’s arm was caught in a machine in the glass factory where she worked, she was injured, sued the company, and lost her house to attorney’s fees. Her husband left her. Her two granddaughters have cystic fibrosis. For years, she has been plagued with a long list of ailments. Sometimes it seems as if the only lucky thing about Darcy is that she doesn’t know how to quit.

  Joyce Parker came last, moving in a lanky, languid way, looking a little sleepy, missing absolutely nothing. In her pre-Shelley days, Joyce often stood at her kitchen window, smoking as she watched Monday’s laundry flap from her neighbors’ clotheslines. Monday was laundry day. Tuesday was trash-burning day. Wednesday was fill-the-car-up-with-gas day. On Saturday nights, she and her truck driver boyfriend drank beer with their friends. The women swapped recipes. The men told racist jokes and bragged about road warrior exploits. Everyone did everything the same way every week, and Joyce thought that she would go mad if she didn’t break a rule real soon. Shelley helped her with that.

  The New Choices women were first invited to Lily Dale because Shelley had a house there, and she thought they might like a weekend away from their children and husbands. Doris refused the invitation initially. She had never spent a night away from her husband and children. At first, the town scared the women. Joyce, who hid her tender heart under a gruff exterior, was afraid the mediums could read her mind. Dawn, the little blonde who wore her heart on her sleeve, was afraid she’d cry. And Doris? Doris was afraid she wouldn’t fit in. You never looked at Doris that you didn’t see those brown eyes looking back, figuring you out. They all did that. Especially on their first Lily Dale visit, under the laughter that came too quickly, behind the smiles, through the cigarette smoke that wreathed around them, they were watching.

  Many of the women in Shelley’s New Choices classes were well acquainted with families in which fathers had sex with their children, with marriages in which men beat their wives with fists and finished them off with words, with lives in which things were always happening and none of them were good. They’d been cheated on and lied to, humiliated, and told they were worthless from their earliest days. They’d had sex before they were ready and children before they were grown. Such experiences made them into excellent watchers. They watched for signs of what was expected and instantly molded themselves into whatever shape seemed least likely to draw attack. They couldn’t remember a time or a place when survival hadn’t required camouflage.

  But Lily Dale was not like any place Doris, Darcy, Joyce, or Dawn had ever been. No one cared who they were or where they came from. No one objected to how they looked or talked or what they said. No one asked what they did for a living or how much education they had. No one was offended if they didn’t believe Lily Dale’s religion, if they didn’t see ghosts or hear spirits. Without any effort from the New Choices women at all, people of the Dale liked them, told them how wonderful they were, and assured them they could do anything, be anybody they wanted.

  At first, they felt it but didn’t believe it. They watched faces, studied voices, contrasted what was said against what was done, and the answer kept coming up the same. Nobody wanted them to be anybody but who they were. That was a first. It made them feel dizzy, a little sick to their stomachs, like the floor had fallen out from underneath their feet.

  “I was scared to death,” said Doris. “I didn’t know how to act. In Lily Dale I could be myself. But who was that? I didn’t know.”

  None of them did. Lily Dale was going to teach them.

  Dawn was pointed in the right direction her first trip to the Stump.

  The medium was a little round guy with dishwater-blond hair. He picked Dawn out of the crowd and said he had a message from a male energy, someone whose name started with an I.

  Dawn knew only one person whose name started with an I. Ian. The last time she saw him was at a ninth-grade dinner dance. Dawn was fifteen then, and pregnant. It was the last school dance she would ever attend, the last night of teenage romance and endless possibility she would ever know. The man she would soon marry was too old to attend a high school dance. Dawn danced with Ian all night. They were in band together and had long been pals. They flirted and told each other their dreams. Dawn loved Ian but never told him so. He was Jewish, she was not. He was free to go on living the happy life of an American teenager, she was not. And then the night was over. Dawn never saw Ian again.

  She was a military wife and mother by the time Ian died in a car wreck. She cried and cried, and her husband, annoyed, said, “Why do you care so much?”

  Dawn left her husband after twenty years of marriage. Nobody thought that was a good idea. Her mother called her foolish. Her sons shouted angry words into the phone. Dawn left them all, took a little apartment, and told no one where she was. She had a nervous breakdown, recovered on her own, and came to Lily Dale hoping only that she would not cry.

  The medium said, “He wants you to know that he loved you.” Dawn put her face in her hands and wept, deep heaving sobs from the center of her soul, tears for Ian and tears for herself, for the girl she had been and the woman she was, who could hardly remember the last time she had danced like that.

  21

  Lily Dale has always been a place where women find freedom, as psychic researcher Hereward Carrington himsel
f found out in 1907. Being mindful that the best results are often obtained in the humblest of quarters—through the least-known mediums—Carrington wandered up one of the small side streets, off the general track of business, and saw on one of the houses, the sign MISS M.V. GRAY, AUTOMATIC MESSAGE BEARER.

  He knocked, asked for a sitting, and thus began the part of his Lily Dale investigation that most excited and confounded him. Miss Gray had been the sport of spirits since her childhood. More or less an invalid, the child was controlled by spirits mentally and physically to such a degree that her parents had moved West to escape their influence. At the same time, they instituted a bedtime ritual of washing her thoroughly and putting her between clean sheets as a means of keeping the spirits away. If her parents failed in these precautions for two or three nights, the raps would begin again.

  Such problems persisted into Miss Gray’s adulthood but finally subsided, and she became a nurse. When her powers returned in adulthood, she dabbled in giving readings. Her method was to close her eyes and become passive.

  In all this, Miss Gray was a perfect example of mediums during that era. She was female, her experiences began during a sickly childhood, and she was merely a channel for the spirit. None of the wisdom, strength, or knowledge were Miss Gray’s. Spirits used her body and brain solely because she was weak and passive.

  Although some men were mediums, many people thought strong-minded people couldn’t be good spirit channels. Women and children, being weak-minded, easily led, and unlikely to have authority or much knowledge of their own, were much more amenable than men. It was even better if such women and children were further weakened by illness. In fact, almost all the well-known female mediums suffered with chronic illnesses before taking up their gifts. Even today, many mediums have suffered some sort of trauma in childhood that causes them to disassociate.

  The idea that the words mediums spoke were not their own had some decided advantages for women, who had few rights, little education, and extremely limited options in the society of the time. Weakness and passivity anchored their femininity, while the spirit working through them pushed them into realms where they would have never dared venture under their own power.

  In the mid-1800s, when women who tried to speak in public might well be booed off the stage and even attacked by rough crowds, female trance mediums were able to support careers with speaking engagements across the country. A key difference between them and other women was the idea that men were speaking through them. It was easy for everyone to agree that a woman couldn’t know so much or speak so well, and therefore spirits must be involved.

  The spirits were almost always males—as they often still are. Under spirit control, the mediums might swagger and make rough jokes, pontificate, and lecture. They were most free with their opinions and their advice. All of which was often unchallenged and thought to be highly amusing because hardly any woman would behave in such fashion on her own. Mediums protected the license allowed their spirits by carefully emphasizing their own lack of control and responsibility.

  The unearthly power of female mediums and Lily Dale’s ardent support of suffrage made the community a good place for an unmarried woman such as Miss Gray, her mother, and her younger sister to live and to make a small income off their gifts. Carrington was obviously quite taken with her. When their session started, Miss Gray sat across from Carrington and closed her eyes. She began to speak in a peculiar, high tone of voice characteristic of mediums. Her words were quaint and simple; she used thee and thine instead of you and yours, and, most oddly of all, the lines rhymed.

  The cords in her forehead stood out, her neck enlarged, and her whole head appeared to be congested with blood, causing her skin to flush. Carrington seemed unalarmed, perhaps because such strange symptoms meshed with the odd behavior of other mediums during those times. Mediums sometimes went rigid and could be lifted and carried around the room like boards. Others became so insensible that their skin and tongue could be stuck with needles and they would not flinch. Emma Hardinge Britten, one of the most famous speechifying trance mediums, was cool and unruffled during her public appearances. In her autobiography she bragged that while under spirit power she could outthink hostile men and transform threatening crowds into awed believers, but during one less public session she was said to have rolled around on the ground and hissed like a snake.

  Miss Gray correctly described Carrington’s health, advised more exercise, and said he would be doing a lot of public speaking. She described his office and home in detail. After their session, she told him that she, her mother, and her sister produced many phenomena in private sittings. The spirit moved trumpets, produced lights, spoke from all parts of the room, rapped, played the piano, and even touched people in the room, she said. He immediately asked to be invited to such a sitting.

  When Carrington arrived on the appointed evening, he was told that “Mike,” the control spirit, didn’t want him in the room; after some finagling, the investigator was allowed to take a seat with the three females in a darkened room, and, sure enough, the spirit of whom so much was promised did appear, and he did produce. He spoke from all about the room, lofted trumpets to the ceiling, gave messages, accepted fifty cents from Carrington, and even kissed the investigator’s hand. The kiss was wet and warm, Carrington noted, quite human. The most stunning moment of the evening occurred when the spirit began playing the piano, singing, and making thumps on the floor at least six feet from the piano. Then the spirit blew into one trumpet and talked through another one at the same time. As the spirit talked, Carrington noted that the two older women were also talking and so could not have been part of the show.

  The researcher left that night amazed, excited, and almost convinced. Miss Gray and her mother were entirely honest, he was sure.

  “Of the little girl, I was not so sure…I will merely state here that the child is shy, quiet, reserved and rarely speaks to strangers; she is anemic, and might suffer from chlorosis; in fact, she is a typical poltergeist girl,” he wrote in his report.

  At the next session, Carrington calmed himself and watched even more closely. All his attention was on that pale, quiet child. He decided that she might easily have plinked random notes on the piano while reaching her foot across the room to make a thumping noise. He suspected and later confirmed in his own experiments that it is possible to hold two trumpets on either side of one’s face and blow into one trumpet with one side of the mouth and begin easing air into a trumpet on the other side at the same time. These machinations were enough to produce the effect he heard when the voice seemed to be speaking and playing at the same time. He surmised that the little girl might stand on a chair, hit the ceiling with a trumpet, and then quickly lower it so that it would thump on the floor and thus make sounds that seemed to be coming from different directions. By creeping about in the dark and putting his ear near where the voice was coming from, he also convinced himself that the girl was speaking.

  “I distinctly heard her speaking into the trumpet at the moment the voice came (apparently) from the air over my head, near the ceiling, in the center of the room.”

  Before both sessions he noted that sulfur matches were sitting on the piano near the little girl. When wetted and rubbed, such matches would glow and produce dots of lights like the ones the “spirit” was manifesting. This time he distinctly heard a hand groping for the matches. And, once the lights began, he peered through the darkness to see the girl’s face shining faintly behind them.

  Two days later, Carrington met the girl walking in Lily Dale and confronted her. Although she did not confess, Carrington said she laughed with him about the phenomena and did not contradict his idea that she had produced the strange happenings.

  So much for his great finding. Once again, all he’d found was fraud.

  My reaction to his report was slightly different. What a kid! A little girl, encouraged to be meek and self-effacing, probably poorly educated and definitely sickly, turned out to be resourceful
almost beyond belief. Somebody sign that kid up. She’s a wiz. It’s almost easier to believe in spirits than to believe that a kid with such ingenuity and skill didn’t grow up to be somebody.

  Whenever the New Choices women come to Lily Dale, they go to the Stump at midnight. They never carry flashlights because they want to trust that they won’t run into the trees. So far they haven’t. Once Doris lay on the Stump and felt her body begin to vibrate. Another time, in a sweat lodge run by Dr. Neal, she saw the figure of a Native American woman in the smoke. It was her great-grandmother, she believes. Neal told her to breathe in the smoke and the spirit of her grandmother would reside within her.

  In Doris’s first reading from a medium, a woman with a big bun and round tummy appeared to lay pink roses on her lap and thank her for taking such good care of John, Doris’s husband. The spirit was Doris’s mother-in-law, she told me.

  Later, Patricia Price told Doris that her late mother was present and enjoyed walking with her in the flowers of Lily Dale. Patricia didn’t give any identifying details about her mother, but Doris knew she was present.

  “I just knew it. I felt it, and that’s all I needed,” Doris said. “I’m learning that I don’t have to understand what’s happening at Lily Dale. I just have to experience it. That’s enough.”