Talking with the dead

There is a small town in western New York where spiritualists gather each summer to communicate with the dead. They have been doing this for well over a century. Just driving through the town, as I once did, can be a bit spooky, although that may have been my imagination.

Christine Wicker was a religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News when she first visited Lily Dale. She ended up returning summer after summer, getting to know many of the spiritualists who live there or visit there. The result was her 2003 book Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead.

Many well-known people have visited Lily Dale over the years, from Mae West (a believer) to Harry Houdini (a doubter). Wicker first went to Lily Dale as a doubter, then found herself shifting back and forth from one camp to the other. She calls it "the Lily Dale bounce." Something strange happens that makes you think spirits may actually be communicating with living people, but then something happens (or doesn't happen) that makes you think the whole thing is hooey.

Wicker bounces back and forth throughout her book. Training to become a medium herself, she discovers she has a gift for reading the pasts of other people, a gift that leaves her when she leaves Lily Dale. She sees tables dance and mediums say amazing things that have no logical explanation, while she finds that so much of what these mediums say is utter foolishness.

Even the mediums themselves doubt much of what they hear in Lily Dale. They themselves are skeptics, she finds, and they take swift action against obvious frauds.

Wicker comes to like these people. She believes that they believe. And sometimes, she admits, she does, too.

Reading Wicker's book makes me wish I had stopped on my way through Lily Dale and had a conversation or two — preferably with the living.