Lily Dale

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For ten weeks every summer, a gate on the east shore of Upper Cassadaga Lake in western New York opens beneath a sign reading “World’s Largest Center for the Religion of Spiritualism,” and cars slow to five miles an hour among close-set Victorian cottages where the dead are expected. The day keeps liturgical time. At one o’clock and again at half past five, visitors walk into Leolyn Wood — ten acres of old-growth hemlock and white pine, centuries old — to Inspiration Stump, a massive fenced stump facing rows of benches, where mediums — who once stood upon it — give the dead’s messages to the living. At four o’clock the service moves to the Forest Temple, a white open-air chapel against the trees; the Healing Temple lays on hands twice daily; and in the cottages, mediums registered by the Lily Dale Assembly take private sittings. The hamlet entire — some 160 leaseholds, two hotels, a museum in an 1890 schoolhouse — belongs to the Assembly, and to own a house here one must first be a Spiritualist in good standing.

Freethinkers prepared the ground. The Religious Society of Freethinkers, gathered at nearby Laona around 1850 under Jeremiah Carter, made open inquiry into mesmerism and mediumship its business; in 1873 a member, Willard Alden, set aside part of his Pomfret farm for the work, and camp meetings followed. In 1877 the instruction came to Carter — received as Spiritualists receive such things — that a camp meeting should be prepared on the land; after Alden died in 1878 they bought some twenty acres of adjoining lakeshore, and on June 15, 1879, incorporated as the Cassadaga Lake Free Association: the Methodist camp-meeting form — summer gathering, auditorium, preaching platform — taken over whole for the demonstration of the spirit world.

The camp built fast. The Maplewood Hotel began in 1880 as a horse barn and was raised story by story, new floors built beneath the old roof. The Children’s Lyceum, Spiritualism’s school after Andrew Jackson Davis’s design, opened in a tent in 1881; the Auditorium of 1883 seats some fifteen hundred and is in use still. Marion H. Skidmore founded a library in a tent in 1886; from 1924 it has had a building of its own, holding what the Assembly counts the largest collection of Spiritualist books in the world. By 1893 there were 215 cottages on the grounds. Electrified, the camp renamed itself the City of Light in 1903; in 1906 it took its lasting name, Lily Dale Assembly, from the water lilies on the lake.

By then it was the movement’s working capital. When the National Spiritualist Association (today the National Spiritualist Association of Churches) was founded at Chicago in September 1893, six of New York’s fourteen delegates came from Lily Dale, and the association’s first president, Harrison D. Barrett, was a resident; the NSAC’s headquarters stand on Cottage Row to this day, and the Assembly formally affiliated in 1933. Skidmore put it plainly in 1894: “Spiritualism is enthroned in this camp.”

The Auditorium platform carried more than messages. Susan B. Anthony spoke from it three times — in 1891 alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in 1892, and in 1905 — before congregations full of women for whom mediumship and the trance lecture opened a religious authority no ordination could withhold. The platform ranged wide: the camp weekly The Sunflower (1898–1911) ran psychic science beside palmistry and astrology; the Jain teacher Virchand R. Gandhi lectured in 1894 and the Theosophist Annie Besant in 1897; and a visitor writing in The Catholic World for January 1899 could find “no fundamental doctrine in Spiritualism” at the camp — an observation the Dale could afford, its doctrine being a demonstration.

The early fame was physical. Cabinets yielded materializations, trumpets rose and spoke, and in the precipitated spirit paintings of the Bangs Sisters and the Campbell Brothers, portraits of the dead arrived on blank canvas in the sitters’ presence, no brush touching it; “Azur the Helper,” precipitated through the Campbell Brothers on June 15, 1898, hangs in the Maplewood Hotel still. Organized psychical research came in the same decades. In 1907 Hereward Carrington, of the American Society for Psychical Research and a year from the Naples sittings with Eusapia Palladino, spent two weeks there and judged all seventeen mediums he tested fraudulent — findings the New York Times carried on March 8, 1908, under the headline “Ingenious Frauds at Lily Dale Seances.” By mid-century the Assembly had retired physical phenomena from its platforms; since about 1950 the public work has been mental mediumship only — the message, not the cabinet.

In 1915 Benjamin Franklin Bartlett of Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, bought the little framed cottage at Hydesville in which the rappings of 1848 first answered, and gave the movement’s birthplace to its capital: taken down in sections, carried by canal barge to Buffalo and overland to the Dale, it was re-erected facing the Forest Temple and dedicated in 1916, with the rapping medium Flo Cottrell installed as keeper. For thirty-nine years pilgrims could stand in the founding room itself. Around 3:30 on the morning of September 21, 1955, a passing motorist saw flames; the fire companies could not save it, and the cottage was lost entire, its cause never established. A stone marker and a memorial garden keep the site; the pack shown as the peddler’s and the Fox family Bible survive in the Lily Dale Museum. The Healing Temple rose the same year, on ground where the Mohawk healer Oskenonton had once pitched his tipi.

The camp renews itself each generation. In the 1980s the Assembly turned deliberately toward the New Age, adding auras, energy work, and channeling to its season brochures by 1983; Elaine Thomas founded the Fellowships of the Spirit school on the grounds in 1988; and the guest platform has since carried Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and James Van Praagh. Some 22,000 visitors pass the gate each season by the Assembly’s count. On January 28, 2022, the Lily Dale Assembly Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places (reference SG100007380).

Field studies and a film crew

Lily Dale’s observers arrive while the rite is in progress. The first substantial sociological field study, Michael P. Richard and Albert Adato’s “The Medium and Her Message” (Review of Religious Research, 1980), examined the practice and social organization of mediumship at the camp’s centennial and remains the baseline for everything after. Darryl Caterine’s “Between Two Worlds”, in Brill’s Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling (2015), reconstructed the camp’s whole arc — Freethought origins, NSAC consolidation, the deliberate New Age turn — largely from the Assembly’s own annual brochures. The current monograph, Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale by Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik (Three Hills/Cornell University Press, 2024), proceeds site by site — the Stump, the Fox cottage, the Auditorium, the “Indian Village” — and reads the Dale into the suffrage and temperance history it helped carry. The widest audience came by television: Steven Cantor’s No One Dies in Lily Dale (HBO Documentary Films, premiered July 5, 2010) followed bereaved visitors through one season — the camp’s pastoral work, performed before a camera.

There were camps before it — Lake Pleasant in Massachusetts from 1874, Onset from 1877 — but Lily Dale is the one that lasted: the oldest and largest Spiritualist camp community in continuous operation, worked without interruption since 1879, a year-round village of about 275 that swells each summer into the religion’s capital. Mediums are still tested by established mediums for about two years before the Assembly registers them, and every registered medium is a resident. Each June the gate reopens and the benches fill in Leolyn Wood, where at one o’clock the dead again take their turn at the Stump — an appointment kept every summer since 1879.

→ Related: Hydesville · Spiritualism · Hereward Carrington · Mesmerism · Victorian Psychical Research Spr