Lily Dale (Plus)

by Christine Wicker

  I saw it happen with the Taiwanese who came to Garland, Texas, believing God was going to appear there before ending the world. Right before the Almighty’s scheduled appearance, the prophet changed his story to say that God in His infinite wisdom would not appear in person but via television. A horde of reporters gathered to see the Almighty take over the airwaves. When he didn’t, we expected great wailing and gnashing of teeth, at least a shamefaced apology.

  But no…at almost the exact moment that God became a no-show, a sudden breeze caused the clouds to go skittering across the moon. That was all the Taiwanese needed. God had appeared, they told us. He had come as a great wind and had entered into our hearts. He now dwelt among us as He had promised. And He was going to delay ending the world because everything would be different now.

  The sociologists and psychologists, the scientists and the journalists, all have explanations for such credulity—just as they do for Spiritualism. Good, solid, logical reasons. I believe them all and feel securely superior when reciting them.

  Most of the time. But sometimes the bright face of a true believer shakes my certainty. Sometimes as I look into the clear, guileless eyes of faith, I wonder if the rest of us are missing something. Have they taken the dross of ordinary, drab, death-and-taxes life and turned it into some kind of gold? If there is no “more,” why are so many people finding such richness in living as though there were?

  Unlike the scientists’ explanations, these questions don’t cause me to feel secure and superior. They make me think I’m missing something. Worse than that, they make me think that I’ll have to be a little gullible, maybe even a little crazy, in order to figure out what that something is. I hear a lot I would like to believe. White light, for instance.

  One of the most widely discussed and debated gifts of spiritual thinking is the white light that people report seeing while in comatose, near-death states. White light also figures prominently in Spiritualist thinking. “Go to the light” is often what mediums tell poltergeists, whom they believe are merely confused spirits that don’t know they’re dead yet.

  Anne, a firm believer in the white light, also gave us some hints about what would happen once we entered the glow. Jesus didn’t figure in her stories, but a sense of purpose did. She told our class that we would all have tasks in the afterlife. We would use our skills to help others. At the break, as we stood outside the building, the former policeman asked me what I thought of Anne’s ideas about heaven.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’m not interested,” he said flatly. “Sounds boring. When I go to heaven, I want to be a Viking.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of rape and pillage, if that’s what you want.”

  “I can do without that,” he said. “But to do battle. To risk everything you have, even your life, in the cause of something you believe in, to help other people, to save them, that’s the greatest thrill in life. That’s what I’d like more of in the afterlife.”

  When I repeated that story to Jackie Lunger, a diminutive medium who once wore a T-shirt that read, “Small medium at large,” she replied coolly that Anne’s ideas were right and heaven was probably pretty boring. “That’s why everyone wants to come back here,” she said. “This is where the action is.”

  24

  I believed I killed my son,” Pat Naulty said. “I was convinced of it.” She knew that John needed her in those weeks before he shot himself playing Russian roulette. She knew that she should have gone to Indiana immediately and taken him back to California with her, but she didn’t. Her guilt was so intense that she would have killed herself to escape it, but her other son, Willie, held her to the earth. She’d killed his brother. She couldn’t kill his mother.

  For a year, Pat could not say the words “John is dead.” Her tongue could not form the words. The breath to speak them stuck in her throat. On the first anniversary of his shooting, she went alone to a cabin in the woods. There she wrote a song for John and a eulogy.

  The next day, she set out to walk up a nearby hill. She brought flowers saved from his funeral and photos his grandmother had taken of him in his casket. She hated those photos of his body and had never looked at them because she didn’t want to remember him that way. She also carried her guitar, a pen, and a pad in case she needed to write something. She followed a clear path to the top of a hill. Looking over the land, she sang the song and read the words. She buried the photos.

  John had once asked her what she thought about life after death. She replied that she believed in it, but she didn’t know what she believed about it. He said that he believed the universe is filled with amazing energy and that after death souls float up to the energy and join it. Pat couldn’t forget the sweet dreaminess of his voice when he said those words.

  In the years since John’s death, as she struggled to stay sane, a new fear came to her. It wasn’t anything rational, nothing other people understood. She worried that her grief might be holding him back, keeping him from moving into the energy of the universe.

  She finished her lonely ceremony and sat sobbing on the hill. When she could stand, she said, “Good-bye, John,” and turned to walk down.

  The path that had been so clear on her ascent had disappeared. She struggled through the brush, weeping as she went, her guitar clanking hollow against her legs, until she came to a fallen log. As she sat on it, she began to cry again. She curled into her body, keening. Her ragged cries, rough as a crow’s dark caw, tore through the clear air of the silent, empty woods. When she could cry no more, she sat there a while, wet, limp, exhausted. Then she pulled out the pad and pen and began to write a letter of apology to her son, the letter she had not finished, the one that had sat on her desk because she was too busy, and then because John was dead and it was too late. She begged his forgiveness for not being present when he needed her.

  She finished the letter and began to weep again. A breeze started from behind her, high in the top of the trees. She heard the shiver of their leaves, a trembling that started far away and moved toward her, over her head and past her.

  “I knew that was John. I’d been able to release him.” She stopped crying and raised her face. Slowly the trees came into focus. She saw the path that led down, right before her.

  She had released her son, given his soul permission to leave her, but did he go? Or did her grief snap him back? She didn’t know.

  Pat’s reading with medium Lauren Thibodeau didn’t start well, at least not on the surface. The medium said she had a name, but it wasn’t John. It was a name Pat didn’t know and forgot almost immediately. Lauren asked whether Pat’s son had died. She said that he had. She told Lauren his name and how he died. Giving that kind of information may not be a good idea when consulting mediums. It might help them too much.

  But Pat wasn’t skeptical. She wanted to help Lauren because even before the medium spoke Pat was certain that her son was present. As she entered the reading room, she began to hear a refrain.

  Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John.

  Went to bed with his stockings on.

  One shoe off, one shoe on.

  Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John.

  It was the nursery rhyme Pat had sung to John when he was a little boy. Each son had his own. Willie’s rhyme had been “Wee Willie Winkie.” She couldn’t remember the last time she had thought of those verses, and now John’s rhyme was tripping through her head like a children’s chorus chanting. John was in the room.

  “I knew it. I felt it,” said Pat.

  “He says to tell you drugs were involved,” Lauren said.

  “I didn’t know that,” Pat said. “I suspected it.”

  “He’s in a wonderful place,” the medium said. “It’s just beautiful. I see him lying on a table of some kind, and people are standing all around him. They’re laying their hands on him, and he’s being healed. Everything is wonderful.”

  But was he free to move on? Now while she had the
medium’s attention, Pat asked her question. “Ask if I’m keeping him back, if I’m keeping him from going on,” she said.

  Lauren smiled, shook her head. “No. No, he’s telling me that the ceremony you had released him. The song and eulogy. They released him.”

  No one knew about that ceremony. No one could have known.

  Did he forgive her? Pat wanted to ask, but she couldn’t. What right did she have to ask for that? And what if Lauren said something that made it seem that he didn’t forgive her? She couldn’t bear it. As it turned out, Pat didn’t need to ask.

  “He’s telling me to say that the love you two have for each other is always with you,” Lauren said.

  Pat thought, She used the present tense. The love we have. Not the love we had.

  “Anytime you want to feel it you can just call it up,” Lauren said. “Think of him, and he’ll be right there with you. Always.”

  25

  Our class’s star pupil was Sean, one of those thin, serious kids who looks so intense he’d quiver if you touched him. He held objects and got visions. He tuned into spirits and brought messages that amazed everyone. He came with a buddy who giggled a lot, but Sean was solemn. On the third day of class, he was not looking so good. His eyes were round and scared.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about them all day,” he told the class. “I couldn’t make the images go away.”

  The day before, when we practiced giving messages, Sean had seen a dark-haired, slightly built young man hanging dead from a backyard swing set. The boy’s mother was standing inside the house, looking through the window at her son’s body.

  “She couldn’t make herself go out,” Sean said, his voice a miserable croak.

  Sean didn’t know this family, but Anne did. “That happened to one of my clients,” she said. “You’re right about it all. He killed himself. The mother saw him, but she couldn’t go out.”

  Her voice was soothing but matter-of-fact.

  “Just let the images go. As soon as you have them, release them,” she said.

  But they didn’t go away. The next day, it seemed as if Sean had been taken over by this evil scene. When it came time to raise our vibrations by singing, Sean was silent. Afterward, he announced that he couldn’t sing. He was still captured by the vision of death. It wouldn’t go away. We all looked at him warily. Was he being haunted? Anne didn’t give the idea a second to grow.

  “You can control it,” she told him firmly. “Just let the thoughts go as soon as they come to you.” Then she went on with the class as though there was no reason to discuss it further. Later, the Canadian journalist and I quizzed her. Again she minimized the incident.

  “Sometimes…,” she said, and then paused, searching for words, “…sometimes artistic people dramatize too much. A good teacher downplays any attention they might get so that they won’t hang on to things they ought to let go. That’s part of learning to be a medium.”

  Oddly, Lily Dale mediums often seemed determined to downplay every sexy aspect of their profession. They refused to say that their gift was anything that everybody doesn’t have. Messages they brought from the spirits were so bland as to be boring unless you were the person they were for—and sometimes even then. William James complained, “What real spirit, at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, [wouldn’t] find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph?” One researcher during James’s day likened their fuzzy, strange performances to that of a drunken messenger. Others noted that the spirits seemed not in full possession of their faculties.

  When it came to evil spirits, possession, and hauntings, the community really fell down. People rarely mentioned evil spirits without prompting, and if they did, they passed over them without much fanfare. Betty Schultz did say her father wouldn’t allow her to dabble in otherworldly communication when she was a child.

  “I would never allow a child to do it either. They’re too open,” she said. “Murderers and rapists are looking for a way in. They’re on that level.

  “As my teacher Gertie Rowe always said, ‘Just like you wouldn’t let a stranger into your house, don’t let a stranger into your mind.’”

  Once when Joyce LaJudice was opening up the Maplewood Hotel for the summer, she called Betty and said, “Get over here and get the damned ghosts out.” A woman in a long gown had been seen walking the stairs. Joyce and Betty blamed a few guests who had brought Ouija boards to their rooms the summer before.

  “Anything like that attracts the lower vibrations,” said Betty.

  I asked a bit breathlessly, “What did you do?”

  “Just what anybody would do,” she said. “If an ordinary person was bothering you, you’d say go away. It’s the same with spirits.” Even the worst are easily banished. “A ‘God bless you’ will stop them cold,” Betty said.

  “They’re not evil, just confused,” was a description I heard many times. Mediums often talked about misdirected, unprogressed, or lower spirits.

  Even the late Arthur Ford, grand old mediumistic showman that he was, dismissed the idea that bad vapors might take over the unwary. He told audiences, “When evil, obscene spirits come to you, look in your own heart—that’s why they come. You reap what you sow. A good, normal type of person does not become obsessed.”

  Again and again, mediums tossed away stories that might have been fiendishly well told. Lily Dale healer Tom Cratsley once counseled a man who felt his dead lover was inhabiting his body. “I don’t know if he was really inside his body,” Tom said. “But inter-dimensional codependency is as real as codependency between people on earth. People don’t change their tendencies because they go to another dimension.” The dead lover had dominated Tom’s client before his death and was continuing the pattern.

  “I supported him as he claimed his own power,” Tom said of the living client. When the spirit moved on, everyone in the room knew that a moment of grace had occurred. A great burst of energy come up from the floor and tears came to their eyes, he said.

  Spirits don’t victimize people, but people do project their own problems and hang-ups onto spirits, Tom said.

  “The whole fear thing is overblown, enormously and immensely. The danger, if there is one, is mainly in self-delusion,” he said.

  Tom has been called upon to exorcise ghosts from houses, a process Spiritualists call spirit rescues. They never use the word “ghost.” “Earthbound spirits” or “lost souls” or “spirits who haven’t gone toward the light” are preferable descriptions, according to Lily Dale thought. Tom calls them stuck souls.

  “I usually take a group with me and build up the love energy and then invite the poor stuck soul into it. Most of the time they just want to be understood. If someone living comes in and says, ‘I understand that you’re pissed,’ that begins the [telepathic] conversation. Once you do that, you can discuss with them their problem.”

  He was once called to a house where one resident believed an ancient Mesopotamian demon lived in the basement. Tom found nothing so alarming. The spirit of a woman who had lived in the house earlier was still waiting for her ship captain husband to return from the sea. Tom told her the quickest way to find her husband was to go to the light.

  One resident wouldn’t accept that. Perhaps he believed Tom was covering for the Mesopotamian demon. Tom laughed. “His imagination got the best of him.”

  I did find a few stories of spirits that didn’t have goodwill toward humans. On his Lily Dale visit during the 1920s, the psychology student George Lawton wrote of a service held in an eastern camp during which a popular medium began making filthy and obscene remarks. He had been possessed by an impersonating spirit, Lawton was told, “one of the vilest specimens of depravity that ever could be imagined.” Several men overpowered him and carried him off the platform.

  It’s standard practice for Lily Dale mediums to begin their sessions with a prayer requesting only the highest and the best. “You have to set your intentions,” the mediums t
ell students. “It’s your intentions that control what happens. If your intentions are good, nothing bad will be attracted to you.”

  The idea that spirits might roam looking for unwary bodies to inhabit has been around for a long time. Some mediums flatly reject the notion. Others say mental illness might sometimes be caused by such spirits, but nobody seems to feel menaced.

  One of the scariest stories I heard came from Marian Boswell, who told me that several nights when she was sleeping alone she awoke feeling certain that someone was in the bed with her, that the someone was male, and that his intentions were sexual. Once she felt a hand stroking her hair. Another time she saw the blanket move. She asked Greg Kehn what he thought was happening.

  With the kind of insouciance that’s typical of Lily Dale mediums when discussing such matters, he said, “Oh, yeah.” Those were spirits roaming around looking for someone alive to be with. They were attracted by her warmth, he said.

  “Just tell them that you aren’t going with them, and they’ll go away,” he said.

  Lily Dale’s spirits don’t give bad news, and if they do, the mediums don’t deliver it. If there’s something in the future that people need to be warned about, they soft-pedal it. If it looks like lung cancer, they say, “I’m seeing something in the chest area. Maybe you ought to have it checked out.”

  That seems irresponsible to me, but as several pointed out, “What if we’re wrong?” The future, especially knowing when something might happen, is particularly tricky, they said.

  “You always have free will. If you change what you’re doing, the future will change,” is the standard explanation.

  The spirits Lily Dale brings back are almost saccharine in their goodwill. They praise people and tell them that things are going to be great. Parents who disapproved of their children while alive are especially likely to come back saying that they didn’t understand and now they do. They ask for forgiveness, show remorse. I couldn’t find one story of anyone who came back saying that upon reflection and with the benefit of their new expanded view, they had been right in treating their kids badly and they wished they’d been meaner.