Giving Up the Ghost (12 page)

I suddenly feel riveted by her words. She should have no credibility with me—everything she’s told me so far is so off base. But now I’m hanging on everything she says.

“Sweetheart, you are asking all the wrong questions,” she continues. “You need to stop asking
if
this happened and start asking yourself
why
it happened. There is something that drew her to you. Something she wanted you to know—a warning—and she kept trying to tell you and couldn’t reach you.”

“Okay,” I say. “Then why did She want to hurt me?”

“What specifically did she do to try to hurt you?” Patricia replies. “What you experienced was your own fear and misinterpretation. With this Little Girl, you were basically dealing with a lost soul. We see lost souls all the time—drug addicts, people putting themselves in pain. They are just lost souls still attached to bodies. You don’t doubt they are real. Why do you doubt her?”

Patricia reaches over and takes my hands.

“From what it sounds like, honey, you were a lost soul, too.”

The leader for the 1
P.M
. Stump Service on my third day in Lily Dale is Neal Rzepkowski, a family doctor and ordained Spiritualist minister. Neal is famous outside of Lily Dale for being forced to resign in 1991 as an emergency room doctor from
the Brooks Memorial Hospital in Dunkirk, New York, because he was HIV-positive. The story made it to the front page of
The New York Times
. Neal was on
Oprah
, too.

Now he is offering a prayer and setting up a message service for dead friends and relatives to reach out to the living. The first medium called forward to share spirit was Jessie Furst, who, in addition to giving private readings, runs a guesthouse in town.

“Okay,” Jessie calls out. “I’m sensing a woman … forty to forty-five … and breast cancer. And I’m getting the name Deborah. Does anyone here have a Deborah?”

A woman sitting about ten people to my right tentatively raises her hand. As she tries to tell Jessie about her connection, she’s becoming visibly upset. It takes a couple of tries to get it out through the crying, but the woman says
her
name is Deborah and that she receives grief counseling from a forty-three-year-old woman who’d recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Sometimes spirit sends us messages that get all confused and mixed up,” Jessie says.

Then Deborah blurts out that she’s receiving the counseling over the recent death of her son. Deborah’s husband is sitting next to her, with his arms around her shoulders as she sobs. They’re about fifty years old.

“Yes,” Jessie says with sudden assurance. “The message is from your son.”

“He wants to tell you he loves you and that he misses you,” Jessie continues. “He wants you to know he is okay and there is no pain.”

Deborah starts to wail, placing her head in her hands while Jessie speaks. Deborah’s husband starts to sigh heavily, then tears pour down his cheeks.

“He knows how much you loved him and how much you sacrificed for him,” Jessie says. “He just wants to surround you with love and tell you that whenever you think of him, he is right there with you. You know those times when you are sitting alone and you think you can sense him?”

Deborah nods.

“That’s him. And he loves you so much and says he will always be with you. And I leave you with that, with light and love.”

Jessie moves on to other spirit messages—from someone’s dead aunt, someone’s dead father, and someone’s dead brother. As her time ends and she begins to walk away from the Stump, Neal stops her.

“Jessie, I think you need to stay up here another minute,” he says, waving his hand toward the treetops to his right. “There is a very persistent spirit here that wants to reach out through you.”

“Yes!” Jessie exclaims, raising her hand high above her head and walking back toward the Stump. “I can sense him, too. His name … is Peter.”

I hear a cry out from my right; it’s Deborah. She’s so upset she can’t speak. Her husband, openly crying as well, finally speaks out. Peter was the name of their dead son.

A chorus of gasps rises from the crowd assembled at the Stump; many begin crying, too.

“Boy, Peter really loves you,” Jessie says, beginning to choke up herself. “He just wants to take another moment to reach out to you. To surround you with all his love and make sure you know that no matter what happens, no matter what is going on, he loves you and will always be
right there
. So much love from this spirit for you. He wants to thank you and say God bless you.”

Jessie walks away in tears. For all the emotion I’ve seen in the audiences at message services, I’ve never seen a medium show much at all. They’re a generally stoic bunch—receiving messages is a pretty routine part of their lives. But Jessie seems sincerely moved by what has happened. Neal calls up another medium, but for all intents and purposes, the service is pretty much over. By the time it officially ends and Deborah and her husband rise to look for her, Jessie is gone.

To this day I’m still torn about what I witnessed that afternoon. On one hand, the way Jessie identified the couple and the spirit was just a shade away from the fishing you’d see from a five-dollar psychic at a state-fair booth. It felt manipulative, overly vague, and a little dirty.

However, if you spoke to Deborah and her husband, what they experienced was nothing short of a miracle. They traveled to Lily Dale for a connection and closure to this tragic event in their lives, and they got what they needed. The whole first encounter identifying Deborah and her counselor was probably a standard Lily Dale fluke. The name Peter popping up was probably just dumb luck.

So if no one was being financially scammed and poor Deborah and her husband walked away feeling like they connected to their dead son, where’s the harm? It could easily have been a complete coincidence. So what? What’s wrong with it?

This service would become the defining example of the dichotomy of Lily Dale in my eyes. I know that 90 percent of everything I saw in Lily Dale was pure bullshit; I just don’t know which 90 percent.

On my way back, I stop at the Lily Dale Museum. It’s in the old one-room schoolhouse and pretty much serves as a dumping ground for all of Lily Dale’s historical artifacts.

The main table in the center of the room is covered by photos
and albums of clippings about Lily Dale’s history and its more famous residents. There’s even a box of bent spoons, evidence of some medium’s cutlery-twisting skills.

One wall is devoted to “spirit precipitated art”—meaning that it was created and/or guided by the dead. A few famous Lily Dale mediums from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used to place a blank canvas and a bowl of paints on a table at the beginning of a séance. Then, two hours later, at the séance’s conclusion—
bang
—a painting would be there. The painting was often a portrait of a spirit that was present during the séance. Following Spiritualism’s descent into charlatanism in the early twentieth century, this and all other forms of physical mediumship, including levitation, manifestations, and dripping ectoplasm, have been strictly forbidden in Lily Dale, but that doesn’t stop them from displaying artifacts all over town. There are also a number of spirit slates (aka “automatic writings”)—small chalkboards and pieces of slate that would, during the course of a séance, become filled with drawing and writings from the great beyond.

When Spiritualism was at its peak, it was arguably too big. As it became more and more popular, there was an increasing movement toward showmanship and pressure to produce increasingly astounding acts of spiritual communication. Fraud became rampant, but the popularity of the religion remained high. People come to Spiritualism through grief, and there is never a shortage of people in pain.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a movement within Spiritualism to clean house, get a bit more organized, and weed out the sensationalists and obvious fakers. Probably as a result, Spiritualism began to wane in popularity. After World War II, it slowed to the trickle that it is today.

Today’s Spiritualists are almost obsessed with recognition and things that sound official. They are all certified in different areas of mediumship and spiritual work from organizations with vague but quasi legitimate-sounding names. Many have divinity degrees, clergy status, and even Ph.D.’s from organizations controlled by other Spiritualists. They may be nonconformists, but they want to be certified nonconformists.

My next appointment is with a veteran medium named Joe. In addition to being a registered medium in Lily Dale, Joe and his wife are also the proprietors of a Lily Dale coffee shop, which is right across the street from my hotel. Joe, like other Lily Dale mediums, has a full schedule most of the days I’m in town. Hanging out at the coffee shop during my stay got me friendly with Joe’s wife, who helped me arrange a session.

Joe takes me into a private office off the main room of the coffee shop for my consultation. It’s covered with his own spirit-guided paintings and artwork. I know this because he tells me. Joe tells me a lot of stuff. Even though we have only forty minutes together, he spends the first fifteen minutes talking about himself and his abilities. He recites his entire bio to me, recalling his recognition, even as a child, that he had the gift of visions and the ability to speak with the dead, his stint in Catholic seminary, and his mastery of Usui Reiki. I don’t get in a single word.

If you didn’t know Joe was a medium and coffee entrepreneur, you’d think he was a longshoreman or some other tough blue-collar worker. He is bald and a little on the short side, yet stocky and sturdy. He has big, thick hands that you just can’t imagine holding the delicate, small paintbrush used to make his spirit-aided art. After we say a prayer together and meditate for a bit (now almost half our time is gone), Joe says that he feels tremendous sadness around me.

“I’m sensing that this loss is fairly recent, like within the last several months,” he says.

“No,” I respond softly. “That really doesn’t have a connection to me.”

“I’m sensing some spirit guides around you. Yes. One is definitely Eskimo. Does that resonate with you at all?”

“I have nothing against Eskimos, Joe,” I say. “That’s about it.”

Joe continues with a series of fairly random observations, delivered to him by my spirit advisors. None completely off mark, but none particularly on the mark, either. With only ten minutes left in our session, I decide to cut to the chase. I tell him everything, just like I did with Patricia.

When I relate my story, Joe, who until now has been quite jovial, turns very solemn, almost angry.

“When I was a boy, I hated to touch people or be touched,” he says. “Why? Because whenever I touch people, I know what’s going to happen to them. When I was twelve years old, I was at the beach with my family. Then my mother grabbed me and started tickling me. I started fighting her off, because I knew what would happen. While she was holding me, I got a vision.”

He pauses.

“I saw her body being eaten by wild dogs,” he says. “Two years later, my mother died of cancer, weighing seventy-two pounds. Here’s the thing: When you focus on the literal meaning of messages—what you see—you often miss the point. With my mom, those dogs were her illness. I saw the whole thing coming. But you know what? As a little boy, I was worried about dogs, not cancer.”

I ask if he thinks the Little Girl in a Blue Dress is a symbol of something else.

“I’m saying that whatever needed to talk to you chose the form of a little girl. Perhaps it thought it would be less scary for you.”

“It would have been incorrect in that assumption, Joe.”

Joe continues for a few minutes about remaining open-minded, the importance of meditation to unlocking the mystery of my past, and about the importance of consulting my spirit guides. Then he looks at his watch. He pauses and takes a deep breath.

“What are you doing now?” he asks. “Are you busy?”

“No.”

“Wanna go on a walk with me?”

“Sure,” I say.

A minute later we’re walking across the park, destination unclear. Even though Joe had a tight schedule and bookings throughout the day, he’s generous with his time. He seems intensely interested in sharing whatever we are going to see, appointments be damned.

“I think I’ve seen your Little Girl before,” he says. “Several times. Right here in Lily Dale. Before I moved to Lily Dale I used to come out here for a few weeks in the summer for workshops, classes, and training. I always stayed in a guesthouse on Cottage Row,” he says. “Sometimes, you know, I’d get up early in the morning and go downstairs. Several times, I walked into the library … and I saw a little girl. She had blond hair, a blue dress, just like you say. She’d be there for a moment looking at me, then she’d be gone. Maybe, now, just maybe, it’s the same girl. Your Little Girl.”

Joe continues to share his theory: Perhaps Little Girl came to me in my dreams knowing that one day I would need some answers, and my quest would lead me to Lily Dale. Perhaps she knew that it would take twenty years before I would be ready
to hear what She had to say. Perhaps this was all part of the plan from the beginning—that coming to Lily Dale is my destiny.

Joe says that several years after seeing the girl in the library he was in the National Spiritualist Association of Churches office next door, which has a spirit painting hanging in the mailroom. The painting, almost one hundred years old, is of the same girl he’d seen in the library, blue dress and all.

I can feel a knot forming in my stomach. What if this is true? Fuck, what if
half
of it is true? What if this whole nonsense is all part of a larger puzzle? Little Girl, Laura, my dreams, all these years of wondering and unanswered questions—all leading me here. All pieces to a puzzle that is about to be solved in a church mailroom. As we walk up the steps to the church office, I feel my skepticism ebb and flow again as I wonder whether the mystery of my life is about to take a quick and definitive left turn.

Joe waves at the secretary and says we’re just stopping in to look at a painting in the back. We weave through the former home now commandeered as office space.