Spirited Time For Mediums -- Summer Tourists Drawn To Spiritualist Church Community Of Lily Dale

LILY DALE, N.Y. - "There are no dead, and there is no death."

Residents of this western New York town have been making that claim and trying to prove it to summer tourists for 119 years.

Only members of the Spiritualist Church are allowed to live in this lovely lakeside village of one-lane roads and 19th-century houses, where the dead are referred to as "in Spirit" and dying is "leaving the Earth plane."

But every summer, more than 20,000 tourists join Lily Dale's 450 residents and learn that life here isn't quite like life anywhere else.

When children outside Lily Dale hear something go bump under the bed, they imagine monsters. But Spiritualist children think "it might just be Aunt Violet," says Elizabeth Hall, whose Spiritualist mother has been bringing her to Lily Dale for years.

Outside Lily Dale, parents encourage children with imaginary friends to curb their fancy. But Gretchen Lazarony, a fifth-generation Spiritualist, remembers, "When I would tell my mother, `There's a lady in the corner,' she would say, `What's she wearing? What's she have to say and what's she want?' "

Lily Dale started as a tent camp in the days when Spiritualism was so popular that traveling mesmerists worked the country. Restrictions on who may live here have been challenged in the courts, but upheld because the National Spiritualist Church is a registered religion, officials say.

Familiar songs, slightly changed

Church members here sing "Amazing Grace" and "Holy, Holy, Holy," just as they do in churches across America. But for Spiritualists, who don't believe that Christ died to redeem people from sin, the "wretch like me" of "Amazing Grace" becomes "soul like me."

The town's two churches have no single minister but invite various members to speak each week. Moral lessons boil down to the Golden Rule. Spiritualists believe people can atone for wrongdoing even after death.

Most spirits are friendly, but they can be difficult, said medium Beverly Burdick-Carey. "Spiritualists don't think in terms of evil spirits as much as unprogressed spirits that don't know how to behave," she said.

Every Thursday night, would-be mediums meet in the Lily Dale Assembly Hall to practice. Joanne Peters, who drives 65 miles from Allegheny, N.Y., is just beginning to cultivate her "gift."

"I'll just say it," she said when it was her turn to speak one Thursday. "I'll just say who I think the message is for, and if I'm wrong, I'll just apologize. Isn't that right? I'll just apologize." She glanced at medium Patricia Price.

"That's right," Price said.

Spiritualist services open with a prayer inviting the spirits and end with a prayer thanking them, which is a sort of signal that they are now to go away, says Lily Dale historian Joyce LaJudice. "If you didn't close the connection, all the voices would make you crazy," she said.

Only the 36 clairvoyants registered by Lily Dale are allowed to hang out the small, prettily painted sign that announces a home as the work place of a medium.

Last year, 11 people took the Lily Dale medium's test. Only one passed, says assembly president Ron Robertson.

Student mediums must give a public "reading" to a spiritualist audience, which grades them on content, appearance and presentation. Then they give three private readings for Spiritualists whose names are drawn from a hat.

LaJudice, a Spiritualist for 25 years, prides herself on her judging standards. One of her own tests involves a pet name her mother used. "Nobody knows that name," she says. "If someone tells me a spirit is calling me by that name, I know they're for real."

Spiritual healing takes priority

For a $6 entrance fee, tourists can go to "healing services" where Spiritualists will lay hands on as many people as come forward. "We believe we heal the spiritual body first and then the emotional and physical body," says the Rev. Barbara Sanson, head of the Healing Association.

The entrance fee also includes "message services" held in Lily Dale's forest.

"Sometimes you have spirits just crowding all around," says Lazarony. "It's the pushy ones who get through."

Messages the spirits deliver through mediums are usually general.

"What you hear could often apply to 95 percent of the people because many of the mediums at the message services are not that good. They're still students," says Robertson.

Valerie Pepicello from Erie, Pa., got a message about a grandmotherly figure who was always chopping vegetables. "She would peel them so fast that the peelings flew around her," the clairvoyant said.

"That was my grandmother. No doubt," said Pepicello.

When the mediums miss - which, judging by the number of shaking heads, is often - they say: "Just take it with you. Think about it."

For a more personalized and lengthy message, tourists pay $30 to $50 for a half-hour session in a medium's home.

Those fees are a bit of a problem for some Spiritualists, who believe the summer camp is important for one reason: It lets their beliefs about life after death be tested by nonbelievers.

"The goal of mediumship is to prove the continuity of life," Robertson said.

That's the only reason to consult a medium, he said. "I don't care about all that other stuff, whether I'm going to get some money or have a love affair," he says. "That's nonsense."

His only session with a medium was 18 years ago when he first visited Lily Dale, he says. His intent had been to find a fortune teller.

Scornful of `kindergarten stuff'

But Lily Dale doesn't allow trances or tarot card readings. Tarot cards are "kindergarten stuff," says Lazarony. Lily Dale's spirits appear in bright rooms to casually dressed people sitting on sofas and arm chairs, or they don't appear at all.

The assembly has also outlawed the kind of physical phenomena that once gave the camp its fame - megaphones that rise and talk with ghostly voices, tables that walk, "spirit paintings" that magically appear on blank canvasses. "In the '30s and '40s, they caught some frauds and threw them off the grounds," said LaJudice.

But fakery is not the main problem, says Wilkinson. Mediums have lost the old power because they are too focused on money, says Wilkinson, who says her sister was in communication with the dead from childhood and never charged for messages. "She said they were a gift from God."

She and Robertson believe that mediums ought to go back to giving free readings. "The mediums say that doctors charge and they ought to be able to charge, too," says Robertson, who acknowledges some fairness in that analogy.

With the help of Lily Dale's best efforts, the 150-year-old National Spiritualist Church, which has 3,500 members, is growing slowly, say church officials.

Judging from those who appear in Lily Dale, believers are generally over 40. Children don't always follow their parents' lead. One of Burdick-Carey's five children is a "born-again," she said.

"She thinks I eat babies for breakfast - dead or alive. It doesn't matter."

Hall has lived among Spiritualists all her life. With black clothes and purple-tinged hair, the 20-year-old looks more like a medium than most of the cheerful motherly mediums who live in Lily Dale.

She is at an age and of a temperament to debunk almost everything.

So are Spiritualists for real or just out for the money?

"I know these people year-round. It's an absolutely sincere religion," she says. "It's not like they become normal people after the tourists leave."