“Spirit says there’s a woman standing right behind you,” warns the Reverend Louis Gates, as his eyes begin to flutter in their sockets. A heavy silver pendant hangs around his neck. He speaks softly.
“Oh yeah, she’s right there. She’s old. She just keeps smirking at me, shaking her head.”
I turn around.
Behind me is a wall. It is covered with black-and-white photographs and pencil portraits of long-dead Spiritualists. Another photo shows a younger Gates, wearing a bolo tie and the same heavy pendant. There is no old woman.
I tell him I can’t see her.
“Oh, you won’t be able to,” he replies. “You don’t have the gift.”
The Reverend is one of Cassadaga’s best-known mediums, and in Cassadaga that means a lot. It is, as its 200-odd residents have a habit of saying, the Psychic Capital of the World.
Hidden away in the mosquito-choked wetlands of Central Florida, it is the perfect place to speak to the dead. Rickety white clapboard cottages sit under canopies of live oak and Spanish moss. Signs hammered into front lawns advertise healers and spiritual counsellors. Spiritualist Street crosses Mediumship Way. At Harmony Hall, in the centre of town, mediums pin up headshots and handwritten advertisements. One simply reads: PAST LIVES $40.
Back in his sitting room, Gates continues unfazed.
“I have a lot of spirits in the house,” he says. “They’re just not allowed to break anything. If they break anything, I ask them to leave. I have rules.”
Spiritualism, at its core, rests on one central belief: continual life. Death does not end anything, its followers believe. The personality, the soul, the spirit, survives intact, merely departing to another realm. It is still itself, and, crucially, still very much reachable.
Its modern incarnation traces its origins to a farmhouse in Hydesville, rural New York. In 1848, two sisters, Maggie and Kate Fox, claimed they had made contact with a spirit through a series of mysterious knocks inside their family home. Word spread, crowds arrived, and within a few years, a local curiosity had become a national movement.
The timing could hardly have been better. Disease was rampant and child mortality was commonplace. Then came a Civil War that left hundreds of thousands of families mourning fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. While traditional religion offered comfort, spiritualism offered something more enticing: not simply faith in an afterlife, but the possibility of speaking to it.
The movement spread rapidly. Mediums toured the country giving demonstrations. One of them was George Colby, a Baptist who claimed he first communicated with a dead relative while being baptised in a frozen lake as a child. In 1875, convinced by his spirit guide to found a new settlement in the South, he led a group of Spiritualists into the heart of Florida's scrub.
Eventually, they reached Blue Springs, a stretch of high ground rising out of the wetlands and set up camp. A charter was granted in 1894 and Colby became the camp's first president. He named it after his hometown in New York: Cassadaga.
Remarkably little has changed since the town took shape over those first decades. The same cottages still line the streets. Rev. Gates, now 74, lives in one of them. His study is small and air-conditioned, with a white leather sofa, a tape recorder and enough Spiritualist memorabilia to stock a small museum. A séance horn sits in one corner.
Gates wears many hats around Cassadaga: medium, healer, teacher, former pastor of the Colby Memorial Temple and, depending on who you ask, showman. His website — a gloriously blocky masterpiece — advertises classes in mediumship and an upcoming Spiritual cruise. Right at the bottom, almost too small to read, sits a disclaimer: Mediumship services are for entertainment purposes only.
“I've been giving readings since I was five,” he says. He doesn’t want to talk about the near-death experience that triggered his first conversation with the dead, preferring instead to describe how his mother used to bring him to Cassadaga in the 1960s, leaving him with responsible babysitters such as the crippled, bed-bound medium Wilbert Hall who taught him how to harness his powers.
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