Lily Dale Read Online Free PDF

the sugar in their blood is depleted and they crave sweets, she says. Nonsense, says another local authority. It’s because they get so caught up in spiritual worlds that they don’t tend to mundane matters such as exercise and controlled eating.
    I like to think that spirit connections give the mediums license to take up space. Maybe their bodies expand with their consciousness. Or maybe they need all the heft they can gather to stay grounded.
    Alcoholism is also a common affliction among mediums, a fact that Patricia cites as backup for her sugar deprivation theory. John Slater, known as the dean of American Spiritualists in the 1920s, often disappeared for multiple-day binges with his secretary, forcing Lily Dale authorities to pacify his fans with concocted stories of illness and emergency.
    â€œHis liking for liquor was common talk about the camp, though in whispers,” according to George Lawton, a psychology student who visited the Dale in the 1920s. “What is interesting is that I have never seen Mr. Slater so chastened and purified, in a spiritual sense,” as he was when he returned.
    Patricia Bell, who lives in the big pink and yellow house on Cleveland Avenue and does not drink alcohol, once found herself waking up with a strong taste of gin in her mouth. Puzzled, she mentioned the odd occurrence to another medium, who answered, “Oh, that was Billy Turner’s drink of choice. He must still be around.”
    Billy Turner, who died about twenty years ago, started as a wildly popular child medium. Billy’s mother wanted him tobecome a lawyer and to marry, but Billy was gay, and he also had the gift. So he stayed in medium work, but the work never made him happy and he drank. When Billy went on a bender, he didn’t hide out, as Slater had. He liked singing to the tourists as they sat over coffee and cake in the cafeteria. “Yes, Jesus loves you. Yes, Jesus loves you,” he would warble sweetly and then break off abruptly to tell the crowd, “That’s a lie.”
    Â 
    S keptics often say mediums get their messages by picking up nonverbal cues and unconscious hints. I don’t think so. Many mediums are so sweetly vague that I have wondered how they find their way home. Some of the Dale’s best sensitives are awkward in one-on-one conversations. Trying to talk with them can be like George Burns talking to Gracie Allen. You’re always the straight man faced with a wacky kind of wisdom you can never quite grasp. If it is your turn to speak—and it usually isn’t—the medium’s eyes start to waver and a distracted look comes over her face. Mediums treat conversational cues like gnats, ignoring them or swatting them away. If you have something to say, talk fast, because whatever the medium is paying attention to, it isn’t you. Otherworldly input is many mediums’ best hope.
    Martie is fairly tuned in to the world around her. She makes eye contact, seems to hear living voices even when they aren’t talking about her, and responds in a fairly earthbound way. Occasionally, she will get a preoccupied look and make a pronouncement that’s a little more personal or a bit more philosophical than anything we “insensitives” are saying. She reattaches pretty quickly, often with the words, “I don’t know why I said that,” which I have taken to mean that whatever she just said was of a cosmic nature.
    That evening Martie sat down, took a glass of water from Frank, and apologized to Carol.
    â€œI would have called on you,” she said, “but I really needed to talk with that woman in the hat.”
    During the daily free message services, each medium is allowed to give messages to three different people, and then another medium comes forward. The free events are Lily Dale’s way of helping humanity, but they also give student mediums practice, and established mediums can pick up new business. Martie’s