That Florida Spirit: Jamie Loftus Visits Cassadaga, the Psychic Capital of the World
Art by Jamie Loftus
My mom and I arrive at the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association in central Florida on a Saturday morning to celebrate her birthday and hopefully contact the dead, in whichever order. Psychics and mediums have been a common interest of ours for years, and the appeal of an entire colony of mediums whose full-time jobs were to connect visitors with their deceased loved ones at the lower-middle class version of top dollar held more appeal than any other attraction in Orlando—even that theme park constructed around a pagan one-percenter with a facial scar.
“Oh, I can feel it,” Mom says about something or other when we get out of the car in front of the Cassadaga Hotel, which we will soon learn is the hub of the schism that stretches across the camp’s 57 acres. Make no mistake, Cassadaga isn’t how Conor Oberst describes it in his music, but neither was sex or weed. It’s a place divided in many ways, a sparring ground between the traditionally trained mediums entrenched in the traditions and history of Cassadaga, and the trendier New Age psychics that work the hotel more like your average crystal shop tarot reader. Across the street from the Hotel is the book store, a traditionalist venture that actively encourages visitors to engage with certified camp mediums over the hacks across the street. They’re all spiritualists, but some are more evangelical than others.
It’s fine, both sides assure us through the course of the day through clenched teeth. It’s fine.
Like any religion, the story behind spiritualism requires suspension of belief. Deeply rooted in the concept of the afterlife and the spirit world, the movement experienced its peak between the 1840s and early 1900s, reaching its height with the widespread popularity of the spirit-speaking Fox sisters. Kate and Maggie Fox, per legend, were two young sisters able to convince their community that they could communicate with spirits through “rappings” on the ceiling of their floor and ceiling. Their older sister Leah recognized that her younger siblings were producting these rappings with the joints of their toes on resonant wooden floors, and saw an opportunity that had rarely been afforded to American women up until that point: to be in control of their own movement. Prior to vaudeville, the Fox sisters brought massive clout to the nascent spiritualist movement and made their own livings until, some forty years later, Kate and Maggie explained the mechanism of their trick to the public. The popularity of the movement faded, but camps like Lily Dale in upstate New York and Cassadaga, founded by a trance medium named George Colby in 1894, flourished.
Before we know any of this, we go into the hotel, rebuilt after a fire in 1926 and radiating some off-brand Shining vibes. Prominently displayed between the cafe and the gift shop is a menu of mediums the size of a bookcase. They’re mostly older women, and my mom selects a gay man in a turban (not for religious purposes—it’s a carnival psychic’s turban) and I choose a lady who looks like my aunt. It’s fun here—people are brunching and day drinking in Sinatra’s Bar down the hall, which promises haunted karaoke in the evenings. It feels a little off for the spirit vortex the area claims to be, but this lines up pretty closely with the camp’s early days, where parties and community dances were just as frequent as the séances they were known for.
The hotel is careful not to mention their lack of affiliation with the camp proper, and we head across the street to get a formal tour. The groups wandering the camp are mostly female friends, but there’s families and rogue Bright Eyes fans as well. We meet a woman who has come by herself because her mother finds the whole conceit of the camp Satanic; my mother takes this chance to congratulate herself on not thinking that.
My mom is receptive to spiritualism as a byproduct of rebellion—like most Massachusetts girls in the 1960s, she was raised Roman Catholic and fucking hated it, but atheism was too academic and jaded to fill the void left by distaste for the church. She landed somewhere in the lightly New Age category, the kind of person who believes in spirits but still wants the structure of something familiar to place the belief in. The fact that one of her best friends, one of my many pseudo-uncles and aunts in the family structure she’d made outside her home, owned a New Age shop in Plymouth was all the more useful.
I was raised an appeaser—baptized Catholic for my grandma, First Communion Protestant for my aunts, a brief dabbling in Wiccanism during Mom’s midlife crisis and abandoning the topic altogether by the time I was 14 and allowed to decide whether I wanted to wake up on Sundays or not. I have a mixed experience with readings, meaning I usually only get them when I’m on the verge of a manic episode and can’t afford therapy.
The tours are provided by the Association and serves as half walkaround tour, half subtweeting the New Age-rs who didn’t have the wherewithal to go to mediumship college. Our guide Carla is a grandmother of 23 from Gainesville who’s in training to be a medium and rents a room to spend a few nights a week. She’s also dressed like a gingerbread lady, which she explains has nothing to do with the tour and just “sounded fun.” It’s her first tour and I love her. “As the sunflower turns its face to the light of the sun, so let spiritualism turn the face of…to the light of the truth,” she assures us, gesturing to the sunflower imagery that floods the camp. The Powerpoint detailing Cassadaga’s history keeps freezing; it’s not a technical difficulty to Carla, but rather the spirit of a little boy named Timmy who haunted the building.
There’s a lot that goes into becoming a practicing Cassadagan. Carla is in the middle of a six-year training course that all certified mediums have to go through before they’re able to practice. They have to take courses, participate in séances, get the approval of two separate committees, demonstrate their abilities in public, pass a written exam, spend days and weeks on the campus. The hotel mediums, by comparison, are more 9-to-5ers, she explains, and use divination tools—your cards, your crystals, your runes—which Cassadaga-certified mediums are never allowed to do.
“So when you see a medium sign inside the grounds of Cassadaga, believe me, that person can speak to spirit,” Carla assures us. “If you see a sign outside of Cassadaga, outside the Cassadaga guidelines—just because they’re in Cassadaga doesn’t mean they’re approved by the Cassadaga board.”