Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (30 page)

dog. The door opens, and Nellie, with her long, wavy gray locks and

youthful, steel-blue eyes, welcomes me inside. She looks sufficiently

old and has a warm, confident aura. Her front parlor looks like a for-

tune-teller’s set in a movie—dark and filled with antiques. A small

table draped by a scarf sits between two high-back chairs. All of this

seems to promise an authentic reading.

Nellie has lived at the camp for more than a dozen years. She trained

and received her license here. She does not use tools—tarot cards,

runes, Ouija boards, tea leaves—but does not condemn them.

Everyone does a reading differently. Nellie likes to read a person’s

energy first then consult about their particular concerns and follow up

with a communication with a spirit if there is someone they wish to

connect with. I pass on the latter. I prefer not to drag the dead into my

little dramas.

She instructs me to put my hands on the table, close my eyes, and

take three deep breaths. Her bony hands grip mine and she asks my

full name. Then she softly says a simple prayer: “Divine Spirit, we ask

for your presence with us. Walk with us, guide us, and comfort us. Pro-

tect us from all evil. Send to us some information that this our beloved

child seeks. For how it is and best.”

proof

She sits back in her chair and crosses her legs underneath a long,

flowing black skirt. “I see energy as a form of color,” Nellie says. “I’m

not talking about aura. It is an electromagnetic field that changes.

What I see is the way God created you, who you are inside. We always

are created to attract people, places, and events that are going to give

the lessons that we are here to learn.”

She first sees an iridescent shade of royal blue, which she associates

with “committed people,” those who are bound to their word and for

whom keeping their word can be more important than to what they are

committed.

My next colors are red and orange, the first of which she says signi-

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fies that I’m goal-oriented with lots of physical energy. My dusty ellipti-

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cal machine comes to mind, and I have my doubts.

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“Orange is intelligence that you want to use your mind and energy to

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power the part of life that relates to loved ones, family friends, cowork-

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ers. The first is your world involvement. This part is more about how

you drive your life. Some people kinda let life happen. That’s not the

851

way you are. You want to drive your life. You want to create your life.

You want to be able to have a plan for life. It can be difficult to achieve

but you still have it.”

Mmm. Could this relate to the healer’s message from the morning

church service?

My last color is a pale, clear yellow. “What that tells me is you have

the capacity to make judgments based on fact. That you can look at

everybody’s input on a situation including your own and say this is the

best thing to do here.”

Yes, I am principled, fair, and caring! I’m starting to appreciate Nel-

lie’s powers.

Then comes the downer.

“The whole problem here is that you don’t always do the best thing,”

she relates. “You have these other parts of you that are drawing you to

do things that you don’t want to do. The way we always should make

a decision is to make it for ourselves. When you are making these de-

cisions, the universe puts in your opposites. You are going to attract

people who are users and people who are needy.” Past boyfriends come

to mind. “You are also going to attract procrastinators, big time.”

She goes on to tell me ways to overcome my issues, suggestions I

know instinctively and have read in way too many self-help books. Rec-

ognize what you are doing, stop and say to yourself, I’m not going to let

proof

xyz
interfere. Not exactly the magic pill I was hoping for.

The reading evolves into a question-and-answer session about

Spiritualism. Nellie provides logical explanations for phenomena that

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many consider completely illogical. “It has to do with energy,” she says.

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“Some people have an extrasensory perception (ESP) that allows them

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to pick up on others’ energy. It’s not so out there when you consider

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that animals have senses that people don’t have, such as dogs being

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able to hear frequencies of sound undetectable by humans,” she says.

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Mediums have this naturally, but also must learn how to develop it.

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Contrary to depictions in fairs and Halloween tales, mediums aren’t

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fortune-tellers, she says. “We don’t predict the future. What we do is

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tell you about the path you are on. Because you create your future with

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every decision you make every single day.”

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Like several other Spiritualists in the camp, Nellie also applies her

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abilities to animals. She helps people find lost pets and says she used

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to communicate psychically with her previous dog. “She taught herself.

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Not only certain words but how to use them. She was very good at it.”

95

“Dogs do think. It is something beyond intelligence. The one capacity

1

that they all seem to develop first is ESP. And they learn when you are

hearing them. Now this dog that we had learned right away that I heard

her.”

It begged the question, “Did she actually talk?”

“It’s not a voice. Everything we do is a vibration. In order for me to

hear it, she is mentally sending me the vibration. You can see the films

about how thoughts progress in the brain, and they light up and run

across. That is an energy impulse, electromagnetic, and it does not stop

at the skull. It emanates out. But animals learn to direct it, and people

who learn to exchange information by ESP learn to do the same thing.”

I kick myself later for not asking what the dog had to say. Bacon?

Sausage? Walk me?

“Isn’t Country Life Grand!”

After the session, it’s time to check into the hotel. Aside from a couple

of stylish men on the verandah smoking organic cigarettes and down-

ing Coronas, the hotel feels quite dead. The Lost in Time Café is closed.

The only sign of life is in the gift shop. A young woman behind the

counter doubles as a front-desk clerk. The spirits have been quiet lately,

she says, handing us a room key. She doesn’t rule out the possibility we

proof

will see ghosts.

The long, narrow hallway is eerily silent. The small guest room,

though not luxurious, is clean and has character with high ceiling and

a simple antique bed and a wardrobe. But there is no TV, telephone, or

radio. We’re not even able to get a cell phone signal. The
Twilight
Zone

reference on the bookstore T-shirts begins to make more sense.

The room opens outside to the long veranda. A child’s gnome-like

rubber toy lies at the threshold. Is it a plant by the hotel or a welcom-

ing gift from a young ghost? I’m positioning the toy cross-legged on a

porch bench when Dan passes.

He’s not doing the orb tour tonight, commenting that we were the

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only ones interested and didn’t sign up. It’s unlikely we would see many

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orbs anyway, he adds. Nothing, anyway, like the large group last night

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that included a boy. Orbs respond to human energy and children are

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naturally brimming with it, he says. “He was snapping orbs all over the

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place,” Dan says.

We tell him we might try it anyway. This launches a whole discussion

061

and lesson in the art of orb interaction. “You have to take deep breaths

and call them to you,” he says. You also have to be careful, he adds, be-

cause the spirits can drain you of energy if you allow them. “You have

to conserve.”

“Maybe I’ll down some energy drinks to speed me up,” I joke.

He evidently misunderstands me. “Speed. That’s a term I haven’t

heard since the ’70s. Remember Black Beauties?”

The Seekers

Since there’s nowhere to buy a soda in Cassadaga, much less speed,

we’re forced to travel to Deland for dinner and libations. We hurry back

to try our luck at finding orbs before 10:00 p.m., when the camp offi-

cially closes and Dan starts his patrol.

The two men are still drinking on the veranda. There’s no one else

in sight in all the camp. Only four cars are parked in the hotel lot. The

handful of hotel workers have locked up and gone home. Residents

have retreated inside their Victorian homes and apartments. It could

be a backwoods Kentucky community in the 1920s. No drone of car en-

gines or throbs of rap bass rattling windows. The chirp of crickets gives

the camp a pulse.

proof

We follow the croaks of bullfrogs toward Spirit Pond. Our muffled

giggles pierce the darkness. Energy we have, but not the optimistic

sort of the faithful orb hunters. More like the daring excitement of

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schoolkids who sneak out to toilet paper a yard.

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James photographs shadows of trees. Even after lowering the cam-

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era flash, no fairies or wood nymphs show up on the digital screen.

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No orbs either, save for a distant yard globe that radiates through the

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trees. Maybe we are too old and drained of energy to be of much inter-

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est to such apparitions.

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Back at the hotel, a couple of plump women devouring Italian take-

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out have joined the men on the veranda. The table is cluttered with

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packs of cigarettes, overflowing ashtrays, plastic cups, and bottles of

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booze.

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“Isn’t country life grand!” pronounces the older man wearing a

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white, flowing button-down and broken-in Bermuda shorts.

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“Oh, right,” the younger one huffs. “When we got here yesterday he

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was ‘there’s no TV! No bar!” They quickly alleviated his agitation with

16

a visit to a liquor store in Deland.

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Carlos and Randall (not their real names) drove up from south Flor-

ida but could have stepped right out of the film
The
Bird
Cage
. Carlos, in a fitted knit shirt and designer jeans, is a dark-haired, svelte twenty-seven-year-old Latino who, Randall trumpets, “could be a model.” Car-

los got his green card only a few days before. He quickly relays that he’s

a trust-fund child who doesn’t have to work. He’s flirting with college

and in love with an older man who is in a committed relationship with

someone else.

Randall is nearly twenty years older and also flamboyantly gay. They

are not a couple and have separate hotel rooms. Randall came along to

humor Carlos, who needed to get away.

The men met the women at the hotel the night before. Given their

bawdy jokes, you might assume they had been best buddies for years.

Of course, a six-pack of beer, three bottles of wine, and a liter of vodka

go a long way toward establishing friendships.

Diane, a nurse, from the east coast of Florida, had been to Cassadaga

before and talked her lovelorn friend Betsy into coming along for girls’

weekend getaway. (Again, these names are pseudonyms.)

As spontaneous as the vacationers’ trips are, their adventures are

obviously not without motive. None are hard-core Spiritualists, but

all have varying degrees of belief in the paranormal, although calling

proof

Randall a Doubting Thomas is an understatement. Carlos says Randall

mocked the psychic during his reading to the extent that he was asked

to leave. Randall later had a blow-up with fairy-and-wood-nymph afi-

cionado Dan on the orb tour.

Betsy has the most paranormal experience of the lot. She took pho-

tos of orbs on a previous Cassadaga visit and is convinced that a ghost

visited her and Diane’s hotel room. “I was dreaming that Diane was

at the foot of the bed. I woke up and felt something down there and

thought, what is she doing?” She rolled over and saw Diane across from

her, then looked down and saw the form of an old woman rise up. By

the time Betsy woke up Diane, the apparition was gone. “I hope she

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leaves us alone tonight. I want a good sleep,” Diane flatly adds as she

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lights a cigarette.

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Everyone is past the point of eloquence, and the conversation jumps

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and skips from subject to subject. One minute they laugh about Ran-

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dall’s temper tantrums, the next they hint of the darkness that led

them to Cassadaga.

261

Diane says a medium told her what she already knew. “I have to leave

my husband of thirty-five years,” she says. “My youngest son (of four)

just graduated from college. I couldn’t leave before because I have al-

ways been the buffer,” she says, leaving the details between the lines.

Carlos says an off-camp psychic told him that his current affair is ill-