Tapping the Spirit of the Ancestors
Spirits, Faerie Trails and Orbs, oh my!
Just down the road a piece from Chautauqua in Upstate New York is Lily Dale, a small community that has its roots firmly planted in the nineteenth century when Spiritualism swept the nation.
Known as the Lily Dale Assembly, home of the “Church of the Living Spirit,” this village of old Victorian cottages and gingerbread buildings lining neatly laid out streets, has fae feel. Fairy gardens gracing front yards, evokes notions of Ouija boards and ghost conjuring, of seances and spontaneous healings. Pseudo-religion.
While my own Jewish faith is important to me, I have made it a practice to traffic in the world of facts. As a science writer, I have been trained to follow the research, question, test, verify and revise.
Never in my wildest imagination would I ever override my rational-thinking mind to seek out such a place to prove anything.
Until I did.
Lily Dale is a throwback to the Spiritualist religion. The town was founded in 1871 as a home for mediums, people who claim contact with the spirit world, for the express purpose of helping people reach across the mortal divide for hope and healing. Lily Dale, with its 250 homes, a hotel, and an assembly hall for public mediumship became the largest Spiritualist community in America.
Members of the Spiritualist Church hold principally to the following tenets:
We believe in God.
We believe that God is all there is.
We Affirm the divine right of each individual to seek the truth with in their own heart.
Life is eternal.
Spiritual progression is eternal and infinite.
We believe that communication between all planes of existence is a reality.
The ultimate expression of loving God is to "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
We believe in personal responsibility and that each individual creates their own reality according to Natural Law.
Not much different from most mainstream religions, right? Until the kicker:
We affirm that the innate gifts of mediumship and healing are expressions of God's love.
The “innate gifts of mediumship.” What in the world. . .?
According to one renowned medium, James van Praagh, “a medium is a psychic who has fine-tuned his or her extrasensory perception and can interface with the spirits in other dimensions.”
In other words, they commune with the dead. Or, more accurately, channel messages from departed loved ones who are no longer embodied. Out of this world.
The appeal of channeling such messages can be appealing to people who are grieving, regretful, nervous about what lies beyond, or just-plain curious.
In our science-minded world, such practices have typically been denigrated. They might be relegated to the world of the “woo-woo.” The rational among us might suspect we are being mislead, if not tricked altogether. Like some charlatan “soothing” a bereaved and grieving parent claiming to channel a message from a child who had “passed over” too young.
Of course, it is true that, as with any religious or spiritual practice, there are charlatans and fakes willing to tell you whatever you want to hear for a buck or a hundred.
That’s why, to my mind, consulting a medium in a place like Lily Dale comes with at least a modicum of insurance. All the mediums who practice there must be registered—meaning, according to FAQs on the website of the Lily Dale Assembly—they’ve been tested and proved to demonstrate their ability to connect to the spirit world, giving consistent evidence to support that connection.
Showing, in other words, they’re not just making stuff up.
To the skeptic in me, this is like saying that they can get enough information out of me to feed it back in a way that might confirm something personal about my actual loved one.
To the mystic in me, well, the skeptic abides. But if it’s all about finding love, healing and connection, how can that be a bad thing?
Grandmother Energy
Finding love, healing and connection.
Visitors flock to this place from around the world to obtain readings. And I—in search of evidence for my grandmother’s story, a story that has been haunting me for some time—I am one of them.
I have reason to believe I may find answers here.
Did I mention I am returning to Lily Dale for the third time? On my first visit in 2017, waiting outside her house to meet with a medium, I was overcome by a strong smell of mothballs. It is a scent I associate with visiting my grandmother’s house as a child.
Inside for my reading, she opened with a nondenominational prayer invoking guidance from my loved ones for healing and guidance. Right away, my medium mentioned that my mother’s mother was waiting for her daughter to come over. She noted emphatically that this was not a prediction because, well, free will (in fact, Mom wouldn’t pass for another three years after this reading).
I told the medium that my mother, very much alive and kicking at 98, had recently told me she still had things she wanted to do in this life. My grandmother, through the medium, replied, “Like stirring up trouble!”
Yep, that sounded like Mom.
Messages flew in from Grandma, my dad, and even one of our dogs who had crossed over the year before (yes, she confirmed, pets also may want to connect). She told me things with enough specificity to make me sit up and take notice.
After the reading, I walked to the Inspiration Stump, the centerpiece for the outdoor sanctuary where public readings are held. Walking around, taking in the energy of the place. I captured a photo that was astonishing to me.
Many orbs, all in a row.
It had to be a fluke. I took repeated photos and got similar results. I asked my friend Sally, who was on her own mission to get answers from the Great Beyond, to use her phone to see what showed up. Her photo was orb-free. She repeated the experiment using my phone: again, no orbs.
Then I used her phone. Wouldn’t you know, the smudgy circles showed up again.
We showed my photos to some other women visiting from Buffalo, whom we had never met before, to ask what they made of it. One woman, Angela, who claimed she was a psychic herself, pronounced it “Grandmother energy.”
Recording Herstory
In August of this year, I decided to visit again.
I arrived early, eager to explore—including some places I hadn’t explored on my previous trips.
The Pet Cemetery in the old growth Leolyn Woods that dates back to 1900, when the town buried a cherished work horse who, in the pre-automobile age, helped keep the place running. Topsy fell through the ice one winter in surrounding Cassadaga Lake during “Ice Hauling” a practice to keep the community cool in warmer days. His body was retrieved from the lake and interred on newly consecrated ground.
Since that time, many Lily Dale pets were once laid to rest in this place. To preserve the pristine nature of the old growth forest, now only their headstones, markers and statues remain, memorial to the many beloved horses, dogs, cats, and other creatures more-or-less domesticated, whose people wanted to keep alive their memory.
There is the Faery Trail Village set along a path that goes down into the woods. It is “peopled” with spirits—many charming, some a little creepy—or perhaps, depending on your state of mind, charmed.
New to me on this visit, a discovery about the women who founded this community: they were suffragists, championing “Votes for Women.” In addition, these leaders as advocated for everything from women’s equality to social reform, to non-discrimination, to family planning, and an end to war. There’s was considered progressive movement, perhaps even by today’s standards. Susan B. Anthony addressed the Assembly more than once.
Hearing Her Voice
As fascinating as it is to dive into Lily Dale’s past, that is not the reason I’ve come.
For the past year, I have been stalking proof for a story I downloaded (or channeled) from my grandmother about a tragic incident that occurred to her as a young woman. She came to America in 1893 crossing from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian empire via Hamburg before setting off to meet her intended (my grandfather), in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Understand, I don’t consider myself a medium—at least not in the spirit of the registered Lily Dale mediums, but I have received messages from some of my loved ones. My father occasionally showers coins along my regular walking route (dimes and quarters, although there was that shiny American penny that appeared in front of me on the sidewalk when I was in Paris) when he wants me to pay attention. In a hazy state between wake and sleep traveling late at night en route to a Costa Rica retreat with my daughter, I once channeled both my grandmothers, who shared their happiness at being able to meet this great-granddaughter they never knew in the flesh.
Last year, in a poetry class assignment to write in the voice of an ancestor or family member, I heard Sophie’s voice for the first time. She shared a traumatic story she had never shared with anyone in life. She wanted me to tell it in her voice.
Dreams, intuition, uncanny coincidences—I’d experienced flashes of insight before. But a channel open, just for the asking? This was shocking at the time, and still niggles at my skeptic’s mind.
I heard what I heard; now I would need proof. But how?
Sophie’s children—my mother’s generation—have all long-since passed away. My mother’s stories about her little Mama-le were generally light on fact, but always painted a rosy picture of my mother’s growing up in the early twentieth century. Genealogical records show dates and places, but offer little insight about what was important to Sophie in life, beyond her family.
What were her Grandma’s hopes and fears, her loves and losses?
As I had experienced, there are these other ways of knowing. Skepticism aside, I was here for a medium reading. Would Grandma show up to elaborate on her story?
The reading did not disappoint. The medium I met reported emotional and physical symptoms to confirm what I most feared about Grandma’s traumatic journey.
I am still working away on this ancestor memoir; I will not give away details here. Suffice it to say that other loved ones showed up as well: my mother; my great-Aunt Marguerite, who was one of the sweetest people I ever knew; and even my dad’s father, who died before I was born—and who could not possibly have known about me.
The overarching message from the ancestors: Robin, we see you. You are doing amazing work. We are here to support; you are not alone.
I came away inspired. The word itself is derived from the Latin, spiritus: "a breathing (of respiration, also of the wind), breath;" also "breath of a god," hence "inspiration; breath of life;" hence, life itself, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Maybe those who are no longer embodied remain present in our lives in unseen ways. I take heart from this wisdom.
After my reading and before leaving Lily Dale, I ventured into The Crystal Cove, a shop where you can find gifts of the mystical and metaphysical, from books to tarot cards to jewelry. And, true to its name, crystals of every shape, size and color. I came to browse, not buy, but once inside, a pink agate, quarter-moon, quarried in Brazil caught my breath. Polished but imperfect, raw geode showing through the cracks.
It caught my breath.
In myth, the moon represents the mother. The moon rules the tides, controls our menses and syncs our flow with other females of child-bearing age. Once we have passed through menopause, we are the leaders, the wise crones. The teachings of Grandmother Moon Her teachings involve the intuitive and introspective realms.
The crystal quarter-moon was another symbol of grandmother energy, hewed from pink amethyst, a stone said to heal the heart. And the first-quarter moon of August would occur in the wee hours of that very night.
Her energy was calling me to. A purchase I didn’t come to make, Grandmother Moon now graces my bedroom window, nighttime healer, guide and inspiration.
Hearing Other Voices
I’d love to hear what you think—of mediumship, channeling voices, healing heartache by hearing from lost loved ones.
If you’ve received some kind of message from a loved one who has passed—perhaps through dreams, coincidence or intuition—how did you come to recognize it?
Have you ever consulted a medium, psychic, or other spirit worker to contact someone no longer present in the physical world?
What did you take away from your experience?
Please share your experience in the comments.
What a fascinating place. And I’m intrigued to learn more about your grandmother. My family explored a number psychics and mediums (and even leaving my dad’s Gen 1 Macintosh open hoping he’d communicate with us from beyond) but I never felt like I could surrender my skeptic, though I so longed for his ghost to haunt me!
What a wonderful description of that magical place. So close to Chautauqua geographically, and yet in a totally different realm. The downloads I have received have come through plant medicine, i.e. psychedelics, and have not yet been ancestral in nature.