Adventures in Non-Fiction: Lily Dale
Feb. 27th, 2012 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerSeances! Ectoplasm! Tables lifting off the ground! Denunciations by the late, great Harry Houdini! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the still-beating heart of American Spiritualism: Lily Dale, New York.
(Except they don’t go in for the ectoplasm anymore.)
When I ran into Christine Wicker’s Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead, my first thought was surprise: there are still Spiritualists? Not just your run of the mill New Agers, but honest-to-goodness right-out-of-the-nineteenth-century Spiritualists?
Indeed there are! There’s a whole town, in fact, owned by the Spiritualist church: Lily Dale, New York, a once-great resort town from Spiritualism’s heyday which has settled into a state of genteel, New-Agey decay.
As you might expect, the travelogue/history sections of the book are fascinating. Unfortunately, they don’t get nearly the space they deserve, as Wicker saddles her book far too much reminiscence about her own time in Lily Dale, never mind that her own views on Spiritualism remain stagnant. She never buys into nor rejects it completely, which is an excellent stance for a researcher but a boring, boring story.
Especially given that the stories she could have been telling included ectoplasm, messages from the dead, and guest appearances by Harry Houdini.
(Except they don’t go in for the ectoplasm anymore.)
When I ran into Christine Wicker’s Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead, my first thought was surprise: there are still Spiritualists? Not just your run of the mill New Agers, but honest-to-goodness right-out-of-the-nineteenth-century Spiritualists?
Indeed there are! There’s a whole town, in fact, owned by the Spiritualist church: Lily Dale, New York, a once-great resort town from Spiritualism’s heyday which has settled into a state of genteel, New-Agey decay.
As you might expect, the travelogue/history sections of the book are fascinating. Unfortunately, they don’t get nearly the space they deserve, as Wicker saddles her book far too much reminiscence about her own time in Lily Dale, never mind that her own views on Spiritualism remain stagnant. She never buys into nor rejects it completely, which is an excellent stance for a researcher but a boring, boring story.
Especially given that the stories she could have been telling included ectoplasm, messages from the dead, and guest appearances by Harry Houdini.
