Lily Dale Read Online Free Page A

These days few people expect them to. People usually come to Lily Dale to talk about manifestations that only the mediums perceive.
    What hasn’t changed is Lily Dale’s attraction for the bereaved. Sometimes their grief is so fresh it oozes. Sometimes it’s ancient, calcified about them, a carapace that has grown between them and other living things. Some want a door that will let them into the past. Others want release. They all want a sign, a vision, a word that will give them surcease from the terrible gone of death. They seek forgiveness for wrongs they don’t dare name. They have one last message that they must deliver.
    And always the question is, are the Spiritualists good people helping or cold-hearted deceivers gulling the weak? It is here that Spiritualism’s critics catch fire, sickened by what they see. Perhaps the saddest of the bereaved are parents who’ve recently lost a child. They huddle into one another, their heads tucked like wet sparrows, or they sit planted on the seats, separate, hardly looking at each other, their eyes wide, their feet flat on the ground, their faces as stiff as statues in a wax museum.
    One blond woman came to Lily Dale hoping desperately for contact with her dead son. At an outdoor message service, where crowds gather hoping for a few free words from spirit, the medium picked her right away. “Do you have a son in spirit?” she asked.
    The mother nodded.
    â€œHe’s here,” said the medium. “He wants you to know that. Are you into computers?”
    The mother shook her head slowly.
    â€œYou’re not. Well, you will be. I see you working with computers and being very successful.”
    The mother’s face was wooden. She shook her head again.
    â€œYes. That’s what the spirits are telling me,” the medium said. “That’s what they say.”
    The woman went to medium Lauren Thibodeau after the outdoor service and was near tears as she told Lauren what happened.
    â€œShe was right about my son,” she said. “So she did know that, but if he was there, why didn’t she give me a message? Why did she keep talking about computers? I hate computers. I don’t work with them. I’m not going to work with them. All I wanted was a message from my son.”
    â€œSometimes mediums get mixed up,” Lauren said. “Sometimes they have an off day.
    â€œYour son is here now, and he does have things to tell you,” she said. The boy’s spirit had come in with his mother, Lauren told me later. “Parents who have children in spirit almost always bring them,” she said.
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    C arol Lucas was a widow of three months. Unlike those pitiable souls who so upset Lewis, she was not alone. A childhood friend had come with her for her visit to Lily Dale, and they stayed at the house of Carol’s former philosophy professor, Frank Takei, Shelley’s husband. Carol was not poor, she was not old, and no one would ever have said she could be easily deluded. She was a hardheaded, practical woman. Too perfectionist, she admitted, but responsible, dependable. Students in her high school English classes nicknamed her Mother Lucas after she wagged her finger at one of them during class and said, “You can’t fool Mother Lucas.”
    At fifty-nine, she wore well-pressed, carefully chosen clothes. When she stood, her posture was invariably erect, and she did not shy away from using the fine vocabulary and precise expression that are an English teacher’s natural way. Carol was the kind of person who white-knuckles every plane flight, certain that if she were at the controls, everyone would be safer. Never mindthat she knew nothing about flying. She knew nothing about leukemia either.
    When her husband, Noel, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, she cried. Then she started looking for a cure. She spent hours on the Internet, whole days at the computer, working late into the