Lynn Mahaffey rides up and down the hills of Lily Dale on a rusty black Schwinn with a wire basket strapped to the back wheel by a plastic rope. She often wears light blue. It matches her eyes, faded to a soft sapphire now that she’s close to eighty, but beautiful still. She rides her bike slowly, past tourists in shorts and sandals, past gingerbread cottages that advertise the services of mediums, past the mediums themselves as they hustle with skirts flying toward Forest Temple.
She bikes five miles every day, for her heart and for the world. She prays as she rides. She holds the earth in her mind, the whole globe, lapis and emerald spinning through space. She prays for everything on it, rich and poor, good and evil, human and otherwise. Upon it all she calls down blessing.
Lynn was in her early twenties in the 1940s when she first visited Lily Dale. Responding to an urge she couldn’t explain, she took off her shoes before getting out of the car. “I knew I was on holy ground,” she said.
Every day she pedals around the cafeteria with its big screened porch and stained cement floor. She skirts muddy puddles in the community’s pitted roads. She passes Leolyn Woods, an old-growth forest bisected by a gravel path. The woods’ path goes by the pet cemetery and leads to Lily Dale’s holiest spot, Inspiration Stump, where the mediums gather to call up departed loved ones. Turn over any rock in Leolyn Woods and you’re likely to find some Spiritualist’s ashes moldering. The people of Lily Dale so often ask to be scattered in the woods that there’s a name for the practice. “Walking them out” it’s called.
Lynn’s tires would bog down in the path’s gravel, so she turns on the road and passes the wide field where Margaret Mary and Bob Hefner stand every month, counting Hail Marys on their rosaries and scanning the sky for the Virgin Mother, who has repeatedly assured Margaret Mary that she will appear. Lynn passes the Lily Dale Spiritualist Church, the little white church where people gather summer mornings hoping to be healed, and Assembly Hall, a two-story meetinghouse where students practice bending spoons and making tables rise. She coasts around men who carry passports to Orion in their wallets and women who give lessons in how to tell an angel from a human being. She wheels around widows hoping to talk with their late husbands, skirts love-struck girls anxious to find out if their boyfriends are cheating, steers clear of divorcees yearning to know whether passion will ever visit them again.
If you came to Lily Dale a thousand times and passed Lynn on the street every day, you might never notice her. She’s short and wears big glasses that sometimes slip down so that she has to take one hand off the handlebar and push them up by stabbing her forefinger into the nosepiece. A grandmother with fluffy gray hair, she is shy, humble, slightly hard of hearing, and soft-spoken. She has no standing in the world, no title, no lofty degrees, no certification.
In the years I visited this 123-year-old village to study the quick and the dead, I came to think of Lynn as a living version of the spirits said to be flitting about, whispering secrets in the mediums’ ears, appearing in dreams, rising up in hazy wavering visions, applauding, encouraging, running things in a way that helps human happiness. If you don’t have eyes to see, you’d never spot her. If you don’t have ears to hear, you’d never listen. It takes some faith to heed an old woman who arrives each summer high in the passenger seat of a big RV, her husband, John, gripping the wheel, her bicycle strapped to the back of the car they’re pulling. Just as it takes some faith to believe in spirits even if you see and hear them yourself.
It was Lynn who finally showed me that Lily Dale can be completely silly, banal, and simpleminded, but that nevertheless the people there are engaged in something vital and true. That understanding didn’t come, however, until more than a year after I met her. Eventually her words would free me; in between, just about every piece of spiritual wisdom she gave shocked and dismayed me.
The woman who helped her change me was her friend and protégé, Shelley Takei. Shelley, who spends summers in a big lavender house on the hill near the entrance to Lily Dale, draws women like the Pied Piper draws children. And, like the Piper, she leads them right over the cliffs, out of what she likes to call consensus reality into free fall, a blissful new reality where all things feminine are all right. Shelley told me everything I needed to know about Lily Dale the first day I met her. She laid it out, but the more she talked the more she confused me. Like a Zen riddle, she is simple to describe but hard to understand.
Most people who visit Lily Dale probably go away unchanged. They find what they expect. Many are already dancing on the cosmic fringe, and Lily Dale affirms them. Skeptics, who like to call the place Silly Dale or Spooksville, also generally find Lily Dale to be the nonsense they expect it to be. But the majority of Lily Dale visitors are neither converts nor scoffers. They believe a little and doubt a little and don’t make a religion of it. They come to play in Lily Dale, to flirt with mysteries, to entertain intriguing notions that can be pulled out at will and put away without regret. For them, Lily Dale is fun, pure and simple.
None of these visitors interested me much. I wanted to meet people with focused hopes, seekers who needed what the Dale offers and were changed by what they received. I wanted to talk to people who needed Lily Dale’s promises so desperately that anyone who encountered them would ache at hearing of their pain and want to strike out at Lily Dale if it deceived them.
I found what I was looking for in a bereaved mother named Pat Naulty and a widow named Carol Lucas. Carol was in fresh grief, still dazed, as though her husband’s death had been a cudgel blow to her head. She was apt to weep at anything. More than anything in life, Carol wanted her husband back.
Pat Naulty came to Lily Dale expecting nothing. The worst of her grief was long over. Her guilt was another matter. She had endured that and expected that she always would. Guilt had so numbed parts of her psyche that she didn’t even long for succor.
I almost missed my third story. The day I first met her, Marian Boswell was a too-skinny little brunette talking compulsively about her troubles. I backed away as fast as I could, but I wasn’t fast enough. Before I got free of her, she told me a story of Lily Dale power that I couldn’t forget. So I contacted her again and listened some more. Hers was a tale of unearthly doings, of prophesized disaster, and of the indomitable human ability to find meaning and hope in the oddest ways.