The Look
Meet the Mediums of Lily Dale
A hamlet in Western New York is home to a community of Spiritualists.
LILY DALE, N.Y. — It was the last Friday in June, and this tiny community of pocket-size cottages, their white picket fences festooned with climbing roses, was performing an idealized version of small-town Americana. There was a flag raising with five veterans in full uniform (after which the crowd sang “America the Beautiful”); a butterfly release and four church services.
Everything adhered to a postcard quaintness, except for a couple of details: Many of the front doors were adorned with signs that read, “May Be Haunted,” and the church services seemed more like networking events for dead people.
“May I come to you, young lady?” asked Sherry Lee Calkins, a white-haired medium with an upturned nose and a sweet smile. She was channeling a spirit before a crowd that had come for the opening of Lily Dale’s summer season. The spirit seemed intent on dispensing cooking tips (encouraging one woman to bake with honey, and another to use more salt) and career advice (consider public speaking or writing, Ms. Calkins said to a third woman in a mauve head scarf, adding that the spirit was offering adjectives from the other side to help her do so, like a spectral thesaurus).
“We welcome loved ones, and not-so-loved ones,” said Neal Rzepkowski, a mischievous 66- year-old family doctor and medium who had exchanged his customary T-shirt for a Hogwarts robe (“Hufflepuff — don’t ask — the spirit made me,” he said) to oversee a midafternoon church service.
Dr. Rzepkowski, who has been H.I.V. positive half his life and said that this community’s good vibes are a factor in his continued good health, is the president of the Lily Dale Assembly, the organizing body of this 160-acre town.
Founded in 1879 as a Spiritualist’s summer retreat, the original Lily Dale was a tented community that welcomed all manner of outsiders, including Susan B. Anthony, already a regular at nearby Chautauqua, the more intellectually minded cultural community founded a few years earlier. While Chautauqua’s engine is philosophical — arts-focused education for grown-ups — Spiritualism is a religious practice. Its central tenet is that the dead are still with us, and eager to chat.
But not everyone can hear them. There are 52 registered mediums in residence here, charging $80 to $100 for a half-hour reading, Dr. Rzepkowski said. (To be registered, they pass a number of tests overseen by the members of the Assembly that includes three readings.) Their services, and Lily Dale’s small-town charms, draw about 22,000 visitors each year during the town’s season, which ends the day before Labor Day. (That number has held steady for the last two decades.)
There are curious day-trippers, to be sure, but also the truly bereaved, like Karen Mitchell, a hairdresser from Seattle who attended the butterfly release, and said she had an appointment with a medium later that afternoon. Her mother had died six months ago, and she was hoping to connect to her grandfather too. “I miss him dearly,” Ms. Mitchell, 52, said. “I feel like maybe I’m going to connect with myself in a different way.”
Spotted in the gift shop, among the tie-dyed T-shirts printed with the words “Old Soul”: a pamphlet titled, “Do I Have To? A Treatise on Reincarnation.”
There were young seekers that day, like Gabrielle Abt, 13, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., who wore blue high-tops and cutoffs, and intends to pursue a career in forensic psychology. She is also interested in psychic phenomena and Wicca, otherwise known as contemporary witchcraft. “We’re looking forward to the séance,” said her mother, Meg Roper, 34.
Mediums from elsewhere had come to sharpen their practice (one workshop trained them in connecting with trees), and to rub shoulders with their peers at talks like Diversifying American Mediumship or International Perspectives on Spirit Communication.
Dawn Bruce, 47, and Barbara Kelleher, 46, are Canadian healers on their fifth trip here, they said. In years past, they had come to learn, but this year they were serving for the first time in the healing temple — hands-on healing on a first-come-first-served basis.
Caveat emptor, suggested John White, 72, a medium, mystic and medical intuitive, for the American Medical Association has not blessed these practices. “We have to say that we are not doctors, and that we know you’re going to use common sense,” he said.
What is a medical intuitive?
“You can see what’s going on in someone’s body,” he said. “People also come to me for help finding something they have lost and expect me to find it, which I can’t. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you know a lot. You have the same belief systems as when you’re alive. Close your eyes,” he said to this reporter. “Now open them. That’s what it’s like to be dead.”
I winced.
“What makes us different from other religions,” Gerta Lestock said, “is that we bring evidence that life continues.”
Ms. Lestock, 71, is a physical medium, which means she has a skill set that includes spoon bending and table turning. She spent part of the afternoon before Lily Dale’s opening testing the weight of a table — “If it’s 200 pounds, there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to move it,” she said — and buying extra spoons from an antiques store for a séance she was holding over the weekend. “You’re supposed to bring your own,” she said, “but nobody does.”
As it is for many of the mediums practicing here, Lily Dale is Ms. Lestock’s third or fourth life chapter. Ms. Lestock emigrated to Ohio in the late 1960s, part of a mass Jewish exodus from Poland, where she grew up, to escape anti-Semitic government policies. She has been a furrier, a marketing executive and a boxing coach.
“I was born Jewish, raised Catholic, baptized Lutheran, and now I’m a Spiritualist minister. I’m covered,” said Ms. Lestock, who moved here full time in 2006.
In the 19th century, Western and Central New York were such hotbeds of social revolution, free thought, dubious science and new religions that they were known as the Burned-Over District. There were abolitionists, suffragists and utopians. There were Shakers, if not movers. Joseph Smith was seeing angels; William Avery Rockefeller (father of the founders of Standard Oil) was hawking quack nostrums; and the Fox sisters, a trio of teenagers living in Hydesville, were receiving messages from a dead tin peddler.
The Foxes’ exploits contributed to the birth of Spiritualism, though one later admitted they had made their experiences up. Yet they are stars in Lily Dale. Their cottage was moved here in 1915, and its site (it burned to the ground at midcentury) is now the Fox Memorial Garden, still a favorite spot for Spiritualist pilgrims and tourists of the paranormal.
Spiritualism may have peaked by the turn of the 20th century, but it accrued a bit of New Age energy in the 1970s, and some reality show love a few decades later (TLC’s “The Long Island Medium,” otherwise known as Theresa Caputo, is an appealing contemporary example).
With no central text and only the vaguest core principles, said Mandi Shepp, Lily Dale’s library director, “Spiritualism has always been very personal.” Guessing the number of its practitioners is almost impossible, but the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, based in Lily Dale, counts 85 American churches among its members.
Gorgeously tattooed and a with a spray of pale blue hair, Ms. Shepp, 32, is the first professional director the library has had in decades. She was hired in 2014, after having been digital director of the Skeptiseum, an intoxicating virtual museum of fringe science and far-out religion curated by Joe Nickell, a paranormal skeptic.
Ms. Shepp has brought some order to the roughly 12,000 volumes here. There are primers on quack medicine, mediumship and slate writing. Manuals for mesmerism and magic. A book of sarcognomy, which is like phrenology except it involves the whole body. (Ambition, ostentation and domesticity, apparently, live in our biceps.)
“I personally am an atheist,” Ms. Shepp said. “A grumpy atheist. But I think the culture of Spiritualism is fascinating. This is a dream job for a former teenage Goth girl.”
Penelope Green is a reporter for Styles. She has been a reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times — an early iteration of Styles — and a story editor at the Times magazine. More about Penelope Green
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