Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (28 page)

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her clairvoyance. She adds that she can pick up people’s thoughts from

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their body language. I suddenly become paranoid that she’s reading

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mine.

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Tours begin in a small room off the bookstore. It also serves as a

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place to shop for mediums and is not unlike a real estate office with

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home listings posted on the walls. Rows of business cards embossed

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with fireflies, fairies, daisies, licenses, and degrees line the Spiritual-

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ist sales wall. Spiritualists suggest that one should select a medium by

waving a hand over the cards and choosing the one it feels drawn to.

Mediums also advertise their daily availability on a whiteboard.

A medium at the bottom of the list only gives her first name, Nellie.

Maybe it’s the simplicity or that Nellie is a common name for a horse,

but I’m drawn to this medium. Using the phone in the room that’s

specifically for making appointments, I reach Nellie and discuss the

terms—time and cost. She has a youthful voice that’s at once calm-

ing and authoritative. A half-hour reading requires a $60 donation, she

says; an hour will cost $120. She only accepts cash, but you can pay with

a credit card at the bookstore, which charges another $5 for processing.

I hold on to my cash and book a half-hour reading for the next day.

In Search of Fairies

A burly man in jeans and a loose-fitting camp-logoed golf shirt marches

in and announces he’s our tour guide. With a gruff voice, shaggy salt-

and-pepper hair past his shoulders, and a thick handlebar mustache,

Dan could easily pass for a rough-and-tumble biker.

He quickly lets his two customers know that he is a medium, but

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because he hasn’t been formally trained and licensed by the camp, he

can’t give readings there. He’s a “natural” medium, he says, noting that

he’s had the gift since the age of three, when his family moved more

than 1,000 miles so his mother could study under noted Cassadaga

Spiritualists. He says he still lives with his mom, along with a yellow-

naped parrot and a macaw that calls him “Psycho.”

“Have you looked at the orb book yet?” he asks. He grabs a photo

album from the coffee table and flips to an image that’s almost pitch

black except for a wispy white vapor, which he calls ectoplasm. Without

any explanation of what that is, he turns to a picture of trees at night.

This photo has three translucent dots—“orbs,” he calls them—floating

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in the sea of darkness.

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“You see the woman’s face?” he asks, pointing at the larger orb.

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There’s a slight pattern within the cloudy ball that in a stretch could

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be considered a distorted face.

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“Kinda,” I say hesitantly.

“That’s my mother,” Dan says. “She passed on years ago.”

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He studies us for a reaction.

James and I withhold comment. How does one respond to a strang-

er’s revelation that his departed mother’s face floats around in a ball of

light?

Dan moves on to another nighttime photo with pastel-colored orbs.

“Orbs come in different colors, not to be confused with a horse of a dif-

ferent color,” he says in a way indicating he’s said it hundreds of times

before.

“Do you believe in fairies?” he asks.

“No, not really,” I answer.

“What if I showed you a picture of one, then would you believe in

fairies?”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe.”

He grins and splays photos across the table. They are a series of en-

largements of the same image: a wooded area at night illuminated by a

camera flash. A cluster of tiny lights rests on a tree limb. They are the

size and color of fireflies, but this is no insect. No fairy, either, that I

can tell.

“You see, there are his wings.” His fingers trace the outlines of light.

At this point it’s not even like finding Jesus’s face on piece of burnt

toast after someone points it out to you. If there are wings, they seem

to be in an entirely different place from where he’s pointing.

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“One of his legs is hanging down there. I see him like this on the

limb.” He demonstrates by going into a crouched position that no

grown man should ever take in public.

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I struggle for something quick to say: “So are fairies male, female, or

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are they asexual?”

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Poor choice of a question for Dan’s comeback is not only puzzling

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but makes me want to hide under the sofa: “She’s talking sex over

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here,” he yells across the room to a Middle Eastern camp resident who’s

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explaining Spiritualism to a German tourist couple.

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They pause, bewildered, and look over.

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Dan simply moves on.

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“Why does it matter?” he asks me gruffly.

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“It really doesn’t, but I thought since you were referring to it as a he,

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maybe there is a significance to that. What is fairies’ purpose? I mean,

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what do they do?”

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“Why do they have to have a purpose?”

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The Middle Eastern man comes over and borrows the fairy photos

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to show the German tourists.

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“Hey, what are you doing?” Dan asks him. “You can’t take those.

You’re not even American.”

The Middle Eastern resident, apparently used to Dan’s unfiltered

comments, ignores him. The German tourists look horrified.

Thus begins our two-hour tour with Dan.

A Trek in Time

We spend about half the tour inside the stuffy meeting hall at the back

of the bookstore. The narrow room with worn heart-of-pine floors and

faux wood paneling reflects the camp’s evolution, which seems to have

stopped somewhere in the mid-1970s. Eight-by-ten photos, many of

which are cloudy enlargements of old lithograph postcards, hang on

the walls. Dan stops at each image, reciting a narration loaded with

dates—birthdays, groundbreakings, ownership changes, fires, expan-

sions, deaths—and names of residents and Spiritual bigwigs long since

passed. Questions fluster him. “You’re getting me off my narrative,” he

says.

The crux of the history is that a guy named George Colby, a seer and

lecturer, was led there in 1874 by Seneca, his Native American Spirit

guide. Seneca instructed Colby to form the Spiritualist camp there in

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the then-unclaimed wilderness. At the time, Spiritualism was in vogue

and Colby was riding the trend. He had made the Spiritualist circuit

throughout northern states in the late 1860s and early 1870s, giving

readings and lecturing about communicating with the dead.

The American Spiritualism movement began in 1948 when two

Hydesville, New York, teens showed neighbors that they could commu-

nicate with a ghost by asking questions and getting mysterious knocks

in return. Within a couple of years, Kate and Leah Fox were demon-

strating their medium skills before large audiences around the United

States and Europe. They gave Spiritual advice to First Lady Mary Todd

Lincoln, famed newspaper editor Horace Greeley, and New York Su-

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preme Court Judge John W. Edmonds.

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Then, in 1888, one sister admitted it had all been a hoax; they had

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created the noises by snapping their knuckles and cracking their toes.

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Although she later recanted, her admission dealt a hefty blow to the

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Spiritualism craze. But it didn’t dissuade hard-core believers like Colby

or modern camp residents such as Dan.

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“She did that because they needed the money,” Dan says when asked

about the Fox sisters’ admission. “When someone comes to you in the

late 1800s and says, ‘We’ll give you a thousand dollars to say this,’ they

say it, especially when they are making five dollars for each reading or

two dollars per reading to support themselves and to travel.”

By the time the sisters confessed their fraud, the Cassadaga Spiri-

tualist Camp was already established with graceful homes, a general

store, a forty-room hotel, water lines, and a railroad station. Wealthy

Spiritualists could board a train in New York, Iowa, or even Maine and

ride it all the way to the front door of the Cassadaga Hotel without ever

having to change seats.

In those days, more than a half century before interstates and pas-

senger planes, the railroad was the king of transit and played a crucial

role in the development of Florida, including Cassadaga. Across rural

America if your town had a railroad station, it prospered, and if a Flor-

ida town had one, it had tourism potential. Colby wasn’t blind to that.

When it came time to certify the camp as a Spiritualist church, he had

little problem getting approval from the National Spiritualism Associa-

tion. A renowned Spiritualist came down from the North and identified

Cassadaga and two other locations—ones near Bradenton and DeLeon

Springs—as Spiritual vortexes. She certified Cassadaga because it was

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easiest to reach.

National certification had greater advantages than just giving cred-

ibility to highfalutin Spiritualists. It’s one thing to claim you’re a re-

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ligion and quite another to prove it to Uncle Sam, as Scientologists

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found out decades later. To that end, Dan says certification and calling

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their auditorium a “temple” helped the Spiritualist camp get tax-ex-

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emption as a recognized religion.

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Still in the meeting hall, Dan explains the faith as we sit in what’s

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come to feel like a sauna. “Spiritualism is the science, philosophy, and

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religion of continuous life,” he says. The science involves those such as

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professional ghost hunters who measure energy and shoot photos of

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orbs, wood nymphs, and fairies. “It’s the proof of continuous life on the

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other side,” he says. “They actually see these things, and they know that

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science is getting close to proving this stuff.”

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The philosophy follows the traditional do-unto-others-as-you-

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would-have-them-do-unto-you directive. “It’s natural law,” Dan ex-

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plains. “We have to live by it.”

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“The religion is that we do have ceremonies and rituals to go along

with it,” Dan says. “We go through the rituals and prove this by com-

munication with the so-called dead.”

The Spiritualist camp also has a paranormal school, offering classes

and certification for mediums, psychics, and healers. “When you get

your papers here, they are accepted anywhere in the world without

question,” Dan says. “The National Spiritualist Association and a few

others all question some medium schools because they don’t all work

with Spirit, but work with tools, runes, throwing of bones, the reading

of knobs on your head.”

The tour finally continues outside where a ticket booth once stood

and visitors paid from one dollar to three dollars to come in and look

around. “They could wander the camp from sunrise to sunset,” Dan

says. “You’d be able to go to the library or bookstore, but come sunset

they ushered you out, sorta like a zoo.”

Dan motions to the historic Mission-style hotel and tosses out tales

of hauntings. Sometimes guests smell the cigar smoke of a long-dead

Irish tenor who used to vacation there. The spirit of a little old lady

walks the halls at night and turns on bathroom lights. The ghost of a

little boy who died at five sits on guests’ beds. “If you talk to him or

read to him he will actually stay for a while.”

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Ambling down the quiet unmarked lane, Dan points out some of

the unique architectural details of homes. One incorporates numerol-

ogy. Several have second-story outer doors with no stoop or stairs. He

explains that the doors are only for “spirit guides.” I’d like to ask why

spirits would need a door and not stairs, but don’t want to get him off

his narrative again. Plus, the tour is headed toward overtime.

The Eloise Page Meditation Garden is a small, shady lot filled with

statuary, benches, and memorials to noted Spiritualists who have

passed over to the other side. Dan shares that Mrs. Page was the rea-

son his family moved to Cassadaga from Detroit. Sentimentality isn’t

tourist fodder, so Dan quickly shifts to another medium memorialized

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in the garden, June Mahoney. She gave readings to professional race-

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car drivers. “Richard Petty was one of her favorites,” Dan says. “Maybe

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that’s why Richard won so many races and stuff.”

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Sightseers on Harleys rumble past. For the most part, Dan says,

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the camp stays quiet. It closes to the public at 10:00 p.m., although

there are no gates or barricades to prevent entry. Crime is rare, and

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to make sure it stays that way, Dan acts as an unofficial neighborhood