Lily Dale (12 page)

W
hen I heard that Patricia Price, the medium who had taught us how to fake billet reading, was having a yearly reunion of her students, I wrangled an invitation. We were to meet for dinner at a restaurant on the water. On the way over a nurse who gave me a ride spoke of having talked with the Archangel Michael. She never saw him, or heard a voice outside herself, she said. It was more like a voice in her head, like her own thoughts but also like someone else speaking.

I asked her what I always asked people when they said God talked to them.

How did you know it was him?

“He said so,” she answered.

Eventually she asked the Archangel to go away because the conversations made her think she was crazy. When she first started talking to him, she told Michael, “You've got to help here. Give me something so I don't feel like I'm becoming psychotic.”

He didn't say anything for several minutes after she made her request, she told me, and then…the nurse stopped talking and put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh,” she caught her breath. “I'll probably break up telling this. I always do.

“He said, ‘I love you.' I said, ‘You love me? That's it? That's all you have to give me?'”

Here she paused again and steadied her breathing. Her voice was solemn as she said the words. “He said, ‘Usually that's enough.'”

“That was the last you heard from him?” I asked.

“Yes. It was. I think of that answer all the time.”

No one spoke. The mood in the car was somber, as if she had just said something so profound that it required a pause before other talk proceeded.

The most frequent gift Lily Dale spirits bring is love. For a long time, I resisted such messages as too easy. I thought,
Why can't the spirits say something more useful? What good is love?
I wasn't alone in that criticism. Lots of people noted that numbers for the lottery might be more appreciated.

But I've since changed my ideas. Love might be the most important thing any of us has to convey. September 11, 2001, convinced me. When the planes were being hijacked and the World Trade Center was about to collapse, people who called relatives for one last word said the same thing, “I love you.” None said, “The lotto ticket is in the bureau,” or “The will is in the top left desk drawer.” They said, “I'm safe. I'm all right. And I love you.” I don't say that means the mediums are really talking with spirits, but the content of the messages doesn't necessarily rule that out.

Listening to the Archangel Michael's nurse, I thought,
This is strange. She seems normal, as do most of the other people here who tell strange things, but if these experiences are so common, why have I never had one?
And then I remembered a memory so deeply imbedded in my interior reality that it seemed almost normal when it happened. It only seems strange when I put it into words.

After my husband and I bought our house in Wisconsin, we learned that the forty-eight-year-old woman who had lived there with her family had died of breast cancer a few months before. We
had seen her photo over the mantel when we looked at the house. Pretty and blond, she was posing at a wedding with her husband. I didn't look closely at the photo, but I remember how lovely she looked.

She'd been diagnosed in October, we later learned, and died in March. We bought the house in July. Her cosmetics were still under the sink in the master bedroom vanity. We met her husband when we closed on the house. He had that dazed look of fresh grief, like a kid who'd just awakened from a deep sleep and doesn't quite know where he is. You could hear him trying to lift the sadness off his words as he said them, but the end of every sentence fell away under the weight of it.

I'm impressionable—lacking in good boundaries is how the psychologists put it—and that may be why I didn't think much about the feelings I sometimes had as I stood at the vanity or took a shower or started to walk down the stairs. A sense of great sorrow would wash over me, and I would think of her. I would think how weak and despairing she must have been as she stood in those spots, and it was as though those same emotions swept through me. As I tell it, this sounds spooky and strange, but it wasn't. I didn't stumble or gasp or do anything dramatic. I just felt a wordless kind of knowing.

It didn't scare me. I would pause and let the feeling linger for a moment. It seemed as though, in acknowledging it, I was there with her, extending a sort of tribute to her. What I felt seemed like solidarity and common humanity. I didn't wallow in it. I paused, felt it, thought of her, and went on. It was a feeling so deeply embedded in my interior self that I never considered mentioning it to anyone.

From the first moment we walked into the house I knew it should be ours because I felt such a sense of love and peace and gladness. When those other feelings came—this is strange but
true—I felt as though the woman who had lived in the house before us was lingering there, being with me to bless and affirm our having bought it.

I'm tempted to say that I didn't take it seriously, even that I didn't quite register it consciously, but I must have. About six months after we moved into the house I was at my sister's, thumbing through a book on Feng Shui, when I came across this advice: always clear your house of lingering spirits by repainting. If you can't do that, spray orange water around the baseboards and in the corners.

I hope what I did next doesn't sound heartless. It wasn't that I wanted to chase her out of the house, but feelings of weakness and despair are not so very pleasant, and they weren't going away. Like the nurse listening to the Archangel Michael, I didn't want to trifle with a state of mind that might not be healthy. If the house's former inhabitant really was there, this would release her. If my feelings were created by some strange fixation of my overactive imagination, maybe a little ritual would steady me.

I didn't think about it that much. When I went home, I bought some orange extract, mixed it with water, and sprayed it around the baseboards.

The feelings left and never came back. I sometimes think of her when I catch a whiff of what seems to be perfume. I'm usually in the basement, my closet, or the pantry when I smell it. So the smell is probably wood, sachet, or something that I can only smell when my allergies are under control.

A few days after I remembered this story, I mentioned it to medium Greg Kehn.

“You're right. That is who it was, and it was also her when you heard the footsteps,” he said.

“I didn't hear footsteps,” I said. Then I searched my memory. Oh, yes. I had. I was in the bedroom one day when I heard footsteps so clearly that I thought my husband was walking across the
wood floor downstairs. I called to him, but he wasn't home. Like a thousand women in spooky movies, I shrugged and thought,
That's funny.

I hadn't told Greg anything about the good feelings I had toward the woman, so maybe what he said next was just another coincidence.

“She wasn't trying to scare you,” he said. “She just wanted you to know that she was glad you were in the house, and, since her illness was the only thing you knew about her, she used that as the way to identify herself.”

A
fter dinner the night I attended Patricia Price's reunion, her students gathered in her living room, which was furnished like a turn-of-the-century parlor—lace curtains, overstuffed, wine-colored furniture, old photos on the wall. In the bookcase were carved busts of Native American men.

The time-honored way to develop gifts of spirit contact is through the kind of home circle that we were about to have. Mediums often liken their gift to singing or playing the piano. Everyone can learn to play the piano, they say, but not everyone can be a concert pianist.

For more than 150 years, people who want to develop their Spiritualist abilities have gathered in someone's home, sat in a circle, and practiced on one another. For most people, becoming a medium is a long road. It takes years. Some Spiritualists criticize public circles and classes, saying they encourage people who have no gift to imagine they do. But almost no one becomes a medium without some sort of support, and they don't get it from the outside world.

Medium Beverly Burdick-Carey is an example of the close-to-home criticism many face. Although “Rev. Bev” is highly regarded in Lily Dale for her skills, her family doesn't always like what she's doing. One of her children has converted to evangelical Christian
ity. “She thinks I eat babies for breakfast,” Rev. Bev said. “Dead or alive, it doesn't matter.” I noticed that a number of the Spiritualists' adult children were conservative, rather disapproving Christians. I wondered whether the loosey-goosey ways of their parents had sent these children scurrying toward faiths that give them certainties and firm doctrine.

Patricia dimmed the lights and put a trumpet on the table. We traced a circle around it so we would know whether it moved. It didn't. We started as usual by singing to get our vibrations up. Vibrations are a big thing. Exactly what a vibration is I still don't know. I never saw anyone shake or quiver. That too seems to have gone out of style. Lily Dale's favorite put-down of an uppity medium is to quote a long-dead resident who said, “A quiver and a shake do not a medium make.”

The only songs most people seem to remember are beginning piano songs or scouting campfire ballads. By the time we belted out, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I'm just craaaaazy, all for the love of you,” segued into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and finished with rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” we were ready for any action the cosmos could provide. Patricia's circles also include a meditation backed by rhapsodic music and guided by her melodious voice. Then members are invited to give messages from spirits. On this night we sat in silence for a while.

Patricia is a tall, ample woman whose age I would guess to be somewhere in the fifties. She wore her brown hair shoulder-length that summer. She has a broad, kindly face and a low musical voice that blends beautifully with New Age music.

Despite the amount of competition in town and the occasional backbiting, I never heard anybody say a bad word about Patricia. During my second summer in the Dale, she shaved her head. Somebody said it had to do with letting hair dye grow out.
Someone else said it was a spiritual symbol. Whatever it was, people accepted it, even admired it.

“Girlfriend rocks,” Shelley said.

Sometimes Patricia would hum a little during circles or, if the energy felt low, start up a new song. Then silence would fall over the group again. Patricia told a married couple that their dog, Wolf, who had died recently, was pushing his head between them. I didn't see him.

Then there was a long silence.

“Welcome,” Patricia said, addressing the air. “We're happy you've joined us again.”

Her eyes appeared to be following something or somebody as it moved through the circle.

“A black leopard who has appeared in our circles before has entered the room,” she told us. I squinted into the dim light. I didn't see him.

Apparently he and the dog didn't see each other either because Patricia didn't mention a ruckus. In an earlier circle, students had seen a layer of foggy vapor they called ectoplasm rise in the middle of the floor and spread to the edges of the circle. It grew until it was a foot high, they said. Everyone saw it.

On this night, I saw no rising mists. That's all right, they assured me. They didn't either.

One guy dressed like a biker was told he would be getting love in his life. The spirits had apparently promised this before. It had been slow in coming, Patricia said, with a deep-throated chuckle. He needed to be patient.

Some students gave each other messages. Then Patricia looked at me and said in her sweet, lilting voice, “May I come to you?”

I nodded. Then I remembered. They like to hear your voice. “Yes, please.”

“Two spirits are standing behind your chair,” she said. “They are former Lily Dale mediums. Billy Hammond is the man, and Lillian Braun is the woman. They were highly regarded mediums on the earth plane, and they're telling me that they've come back to help you. They're going everywhere with you as you walk about Lily Dale, and they're making sure that you meet the people you need to meet for your research.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Oh,” Patricia said, as if slightly startled, but looking pleased. “They're now telling me that you are a person of impeccable honesty, and I can believe anything you write in your book.”

Such affirmation so disconcerted me that I forgot to say thank you. Impeccable honesty? Who has that? I'm not trying to sound dark or sinister, but, for pity's sake, I'm a reporter. Nobody says things like that about reporters, and they shouldn't. We're the enemy. People who let reporters into their lives are living dangerously, and some of them know it. It makes them edgy and suspicious.

I was surprised by how few people in Lily Dale tried to control what I would write. I often raised an eyebrow and grinned at what they said, clearly showing my disbelief. I expected them to whine or bluff or sic the spirit world on me. At least they might have indulged in a few dark predictions about what would happen if I crossed them, but they didn't.

Only one person flatly refused to talk with me. Gayle Porter was just graduating from a two-year Lily Dale school that taught mediumship and hands-on healing. When I asked for an interview, she said she would talk with me only if I took a two-part class called “Spiritual Insight Training.” At the end of the class, I would be giving readings myself, she said.

I didn't think so.

“I can guarantee it,” she said. “There's no way you will ever understand what's going on in Lily Dale until you take those classes.”

I thanked her, took her telephone number, and said I'd call if I ever followed her advice, which I didn't intend to do.

Generally, the mediums seemed unafraid of my questions. Several even affirmed what I was doing, as Sherry Lee had when she said the spirits picked me for the work of writing about Lily Dale. Now Patricia's spirits were vouching for me. In Lily Dale, spirit words carry weight.

Maybe Patricia was buttering me up so I would write good things. Maybe Lily Dale mediums hide their competitive feelings under smiles and phrases such as “All is in divine order,” but religion aside, they
are
in business, and businesses do well if they get publicity. Maybe that was what was going on.

Patricia didn't come to me afterward, however, and she never tried to draw me into conversation. She didn't seek me out or stop to talk when I saw her on the streets. I tried to set up interviews with her, and something always went awry. It was not as if she was avoiding me, but she made no effort. None. Not to be included. Not to explain herself. None at all.

When the circle ended, I walked to Shelley's house feeling aggrieved. Normally I would be embarrassed to repeat such a compliment, but normal doesn't apply in the Dale. I couldn't get it off my mind.

“Patricia says the spirits told her I'm impeccably honest,” I said. I could hear petulance bordering on paranoia in my voice. What was Patricia trying to pull?

Shelley waved her hand dismissively and said, “Oh, anybody could see that.”

“Impeccable?” My voice went high. “Even
I
wouldn't give me that.”

Shelley grinned and said nothing.

“So is this what Lily Dale does?” I asked. “Butter people up, present them in some outrageously positive light? Affirm them in ways nobody based in reality ever would?”

“Maybe,” Shelley said. “Is that what you think?”

“I don't know,” I said, suspicious and scared of being too easily led.

I did not believe two dead people were following me about, helping me meet everyone I needed. And the dead-people part of it was the least of my problems.

Life is not like that. Finding truth is difficult. You work until your mouth is dry, your brain is fried, and your vision starts to blur. If you've interviewed one person after another for six hours and you're so tired you wobble when you walk and you're on the way home and someone wants to talk, you do the interview. I chide myself for carelessness, warn myself against laziness, lecture myself against letting up. The next person I talk to, the next book I read, the next document I find will be the one that makes the story sing.

I'd lived by this creed for twenty-five years. Maybe I was beginning to tire, maybe I'd stayed too long in Lily Dale and it was unhinging my mind, or maybe…I don't know why, but Patricia's nonsense wormed its way into my brain. Her story of mediums walking with me gave me a new superstition to fight the old ones. This one was crazier, sure. I never saw them or heard them, dreamed about them or sensed their presence in any way, but I played around with the idea. The next time I tried to interview someone and he shook me off, I didn't fret about it. I thought, “Guess Lillian and Billy didn't think I needed that one.” With their imaginary help, I began to ease up.