The Reading - August 2006I sat patiently in the room; across from me sat the medium. There was no sound at all. It is hard to explain how I felt; it was a mixture of excitement and dread at what I would hear. I had heard the typical stories and seen the typical programs that said mediums were a fraud. That they played on your emotions grabbing onto anything they could from your reactions at what they said and what they observed of your person. Even the questions they asked were designed to find out what you were all about. I was not sure what was going to happen next. The medium sat in front of me quietly, motionless, breathing meditatively as if recharging their battery after the last reading. Eventually, the medium leaned over and grabbed a stone of some sort. I was not sure what it did. In my research I had come across ideas that certain stones or crystals produced certain effects on the holder. They could heighten awareness, hone concentration, or produce a link between individuals. For all I knew it was just another way to validate the experience. |
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My Lily Dale ExperienceI had made the appointment weeks previous and had waited with anticipation for the day to arrive. It was funny that I had never been there before since I was so heavily into the stranger aspects of life. Lily Dale, merely ten miles outside of Jamestown was a place that I had only heard stories of but had never been to before. I really did not know what to expect from a place that touted so called psychic phenomenon twenty-four hours a day. A community of mediums of all kinds living in a quaint nook of Chautauqua County seemed preposterous. Of course before I had gotten into the study of psychic phenomenon and the paranormal that was all I had heard from everyone. They could not have been more wrong. |
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The Emergence of SpiritualismThrough the ages Spiritualism has been looked down upon as mere pseudoscience, scoffed at by critics, and altogether dismissed as fakery. All the rage in Europe it did not come into vogue until 1848, not through the intervention of some great illusionist like Houdini but in a small house in Hydesville, New York. The perpetrators of the great scheme called spiritualism were the Fox Sisters, Maggie (15) and Katie (12) who began simply enough by talking to the dead. On March 31, 1848 father John, mother Margaret and the two girls, after many nights of thumping and rapping on the walls discovered that they could communicate with the dead. We can assume that it was mere fancy that caused the girls to discover if they themselves clapped that the rapping answered back. And soon enough they had discovered that by simply rapping for yes and no and by calling out the letters of the alphabet they began to talk with the dead. It was soon discovered that the spirit causing all the raucous at night was a peddler who was murdered and supposedly buried under the floor of the Fox home. Soon, upon inspection, some teeth and bones for found in the cellar and the daughter’s were soon on the road to being famous. |
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