Lily Dale Read Online Free PDF Page A

predictions. It’s as if they can’t keep up with all that’s coming through. Student mediums sit in the audience watching and sometimes get up to give their own messages. It’s easy to see who knows the drill and who doesn’t by how well they use the jargon.
    â€œLet me say I want to bring you a female vibration,” mediums are apt to say. When tourists shake their heads or deny that the messages make any sense, the mediums say, “Take it with you. It will mean something later.”
    Some mediums hear spirit voices, and some see visions or get feelings that they translate into messages. They sometimes spot spirits hovering over the crowd or standing behind their relatives. Some mediums describe spirit figures as looking like a piece of film projected onto a wall, slightly out of focus and wavery. Others say the figures look perfectly solid. Some see them as translucent images. Some say they appear to be behind wax paper. They may appear as shadowy figures flitting about at the outer edges of vision. They may signal their arrival with sparks of light glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.
    At public services, “people with pushy relatives get the most messages,” says medium Gretchen Clark Lazarony.
    My dead relatives must be a genteel lot because I didn’t get many messages. A medium at the Stump did once bring through a spirit in my family who hated wearing her false teeth. Lots of old people may hate wearing their dentures, but I never heard another medium give that message. The fact was I did have an elderly relative whose teeth hurt her mouth so much that she wore them onlywhen she had to. She would put them on for company or a meal and then pull them out and forget where she left them. Every time we went somewhere the shout went up, “Find the teeth.” We’d shake out pillows and flip bedcovers, check cups left on the counters, run our hands behind the sofa cushions. Finding those teeth was an event in our family. If that was a guess, it was a good one.
    Sometimes the mediums laugh at private jokes when listening to spirit or say something into the air such as, “All right. All right. I’ll tell them.” When they describe someone’s death, they often touch their chest or stomach, whichever part of themselves would be affected by the fatal illness that took the spirit, and grimace as though they are feeling pain. Maybe it is real, maybe it isn’t, but it is good theater.
    The crowd loves mediums who are loud and funny and fast. If they aren’t, the tourists yawn and blink and look up at the trees. The medium Patricia Price calls these performances “doing standup” and says mediums have to be “comediums” to win the crowd. It doesn’t matter a bit that poor old dead Mom has dropped in with her first words in fifty years. If she doesn’t have anything snappy to say, she might as well float on off because nobody is interested in hearing her dither around.
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    T he evening Carol Lucas attended her first service, Martie Hughes was one of the mediums. Martie, formerly in advertising, lives in Buffalo. She has creamy skin, dark blue eyes, and silvery hair that she wears short with soft bangs falling over her forehead. Her voice is gentle enough to lull a baby to sleep.
    Like many mediums, Martie is middle-aged, unmarried, and of somewhat larger size than other people—physically and in personality. The tendency to bulk up often goes with mediumistic talent, I was told. That propensity is so evident in Lily Dale that one visitor threatened to sneak about town some night, go to everyhouse with a sign that reads M EDIUM , and change it to L ARGE . One sensitive told me she gained fifty pounds when she gave in to her gifts.
    Some explain the weight gain by saying mediums need extra padding to protect their overly sensitive psyches. Medium Patricia Bell pooh-poohs that idea. Since they use their spleen to transmit messages,