Lily Dale Read Online Free

days waiting for her to finish.
    On the day John and two friends gathered in Vincennes, Indiana, with a gun, one bullet, and the idea that a game of Russian roulette might be fun, Pat was sleeping two thousand miles away. John’s friends each took a turn, and twice the gun hammer clicked on empty. As John lifted the handgun to his temple his mother began to dream. She was at a party, and she had lost something important. An ache grew within her as she searched more and more frantically. What was it? Where was it?
    She awoke. Her mouth was dry. Her tongue was thick and rasped against her palette. Her lips were pulled back over her teeth and so parched that they stuck there. For a moment she lay limp, not yet free of the dream’s longing and sorrow. Then she pushedherself out of bed and went to the bathroom to splash water on her face and into her mouth. As she looked into the mirror, she tried to remember. What had she lost?
    When the phone rang, Pat knew the voice. Years of love had taught her to hear so much in her ex-husband’s hello that she could jump across that single word into all that might be coming. Years of anger and fear had sharpened that ability. He identified himself anyway.
    And Pat said, “John’s dead, isn’t he?”
    She heard what her voice said. Her mind didn’t yet know it. Only her body understood. It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer, aimed it at her breastbone, and let fly. Air gushed from her nose and mouth as her chest crushed into her body. Five years would pass before she could touch the bones near her heart without wincing at the pain.
    As Pat passed the awnings of Lazaroni’s restaurant and rounded the curve of Dale Drive as it skirts the edge of Cassadaga Lake, she forgot her need of a toilet. A powerful feeling of homecoming, so intense it was almost delirious, swept over her. This was something she had never felt.
    â€œIt was as though I was returning to a place I’d left a long time ago. I felt such delight. I laughed aloud,” she said.
    Scientists would say that Pat’s feeling was a glitch in memory caused by the way the brain stores experience. At some time in her life she had been to a similar place, and now her brain was confused. It had lost the specifics of that particular memory and stored only the general feeling and look of the place. She mistook this faulty connection for homecoming and happiness. If Pat had only known more science, she would have reasoned that delight away. She never would have felt all woozy with wonder as she passed through the gates that separate Lily Dale from the world.

3
    S inclair Lewis was shocked by the poor deluded and bereaved souls he met in Lily Dale when he visited in 1917.
    â€œNo one could be flippant over the great tears, the broken voices, with which the old people greet the ‘message,’” he wrote, characterizing the Dale’s visitors as people who lived in the past. “No few of them are absolutely alone—parents, husband or wife, brothers, sisters, uncles, even children gone.”
    In one séance, as squeaky spirit voices spoke from within a curtained-off area known as the spirit cabinet, a woman sobbed and called to her dead husband, “Oh, my dear, my dear, it’s so wonderful. Oh, my dear, I am so lonely for you. Is Charley with you? Oh, my dear!” Another woman moaned hysterically and finally fainted.
    Lewis left the room with relief, writing that the cheerful music of the Saturday evening dance was decidedly “preferable to the spirit fog we had been swathed in.”
    Most of the spirit fog has now been banished from Lily Dale. Today’s mediums practice in well-lighted parlors and do not use crystal balls, spirit cabinets, or Ouija boards. Trances are out of favor. Mediums speak in their own normal voices and rarely even shut their eyes. Spirits don’t generally appear to the physical eye ormake noises that the physical ear can hear.