Moment in Oddity - Lung Tree (Chelsea Flowers)
In April of 2009, a 28 year old man named Artyom Sidorkin had been experiencing chest pain and was coughing up blood. He subsequently went to a hospital in Izhevsk, Russia. The hospital performed x-rays of the man and determined that there was a tumor in his chest area. A biopsy was ordered and while being performed, it is said that the surgeon discovered not a tumor, but a small fir tree sapling. It was believed that the plant's needles had been pricking the man's lungs, causing the blood and pain. According to a newspaper article, the doctor stated that the branch was too large to have been inhaled or swallowed, but must have grown from an inhaled seed. A plant ecology researcher from Toronto shared his thoughts on the discovery stating, "It looks like a hoax to me, it's dark inside a lung, and most seeds need light to stimulate germination and to grow. I don't see how it could get anywhere near that size without photosynthesis". Also noted in the x-ray was a shoulder growth plate that was not yet fused which indicates a pediatric case and not a 28 year old man. We have been told as children not to swallow watermelon seeds because then a watermelon plant would grow inside our tummies, but the thought of having a tree sapling growing in a person's lungs, certainly is odd.
Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp
There are two main Spiritualist Camps in America dating back to the Victorian Era: Lilydale in New York and Cassadaga in Florida. We've visited Cassadaga several times, which is known as the Psychic Capital of the World. Almost as often as St. Augustine, and like St. Augustine, Cassadaga oozes spiritual energy. While some people might think that Spiritualism was just a craze during the Victorian Era, it is a real religion that still exists today and is recognized by the military as a standard religion. There are around 13 million practicing Spiritualists in the world today. Many of them still live in Cassadaga and there seems to be many spirits in this small town, not only of the Spiritualists who have already transitioned, but perhaps of the many spirits called to the town. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp.
The practice and beliefs around modern spiritualism have their beginnings in the Victorian era in the 1840s, but even before that there were The Shakers. The Shakers were a communal Protestant sect that was founded in England in the mid-1700s. This was a breakaway group from the Quakers and a woman named Ann Lee joined the Shakers with her parents in 1758. Very early on, the Shakers recognized Ann as a prophetic voice who shared visions. She married and had four children, all of whom died in infancy. Her marriage faltered and she decided to emigrate to America, which she did in 1774 and she brought her Shaker religion with her. Ann settled in New York and built her commune there with everyone referring to her as Mother Ann Lee. The Shakers invented things like the clothespin, the broom, Shaker furniture and the circular saw, which we shared in a Moment in Oddity. Communicating with spirits started creeping into the practice in the early 1800s and they would entertain trance speakers. The Shaker community eventually lost members and today there are just a handful of communities. Many of the Shakers moved over to this new religion that embraced spirit communication and that was Spiritualism.
Andrew Jackson Davis was born on August 11, 1826 in Blooming Grove, New York. Davis claimed that he grew up fairly poor with an alcoholic father and a very religious mother. And she apparently was clairvoyant. The family relocated to the Poughkeepsie area. Shortly after turning fourteen, Davis realized he had a gift where he could diagnose illnesses and he started to teach himself hypnotism. He took on the nickname "The Poughkeepsie Seer" and he wrote "I have a body, a tangible body – I reside in the form – but is it my natural or spiritual body? Is it adapted to the outer world, or to the post-mortem life? Where am I? Oh, I am so lonely! Alas, if this be death!"
Davis decided to use his gifts through a medical clinic and he opened one with a partner named William Levingston. This magnetic healing, as he called it, progressed to giving lectures and spreading the principles of Spiritualism. He felt that this wasn't just a religious movement, but that it was scientific and that it would make man "happier, and wiser, and better." Davis would enter a trance and write down what he learned in books. His writings became the foundation for American Spiritualism. One of the spirits he claimed to in contact with was the spirit of Swedenborg and there was a Greek physician named Galen. One of the lectures Davis gave was on mesmerism and Edgar Allen Poe was in the audience. It inspired him to write the short story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." Davis really helped the growth of the Spiritualist movement, despite criticism that referred to him as a crazy "coot" and pointed out that his books were filled with scientific errors. But Spiritualism was going to get a real boost from another area of New York. Three years after Davis had his first trance experience, the Hydesville Rappings occurred. This phenomenon is named for the city where it happened, Hydesville, New York. The Fox family had moved into a two-room cottage in the city in March of 1848. The family had two daughters, Margaretta and Catherine who were known as Maggie and Kate, and shortly after they moved into the cottage the two girls claimed to hear knocking on the walls. The two sisters quickly figured out that a spirit was trying to communicate with them. Neighbors and other family members witnessed the rappings, both hearing and feeling them. They investigated to see if they could figure out what was causing the noise, but nothing was found. The girls decided to name the entity Mr. Splitfoot.
At first, Mr. Splitfoot communicated in very simple ways, like one rap for yes, two raps for no. The Fox sisters' older brother David, developed an alphabet to make the communication more in depth. You can imagine how long this took going A, B, C, D, knock, okay. The sisters also incorporated table tipping. So, they're communicating with whatever had been knocking on this wall and this entity tells them that he was a peddler, that he had come here to sell his wares and the people who lived in this house had murdered him and buried him under the house. As news traveled about the Fox Sisters, they became hugely popular and they began touring the country.
Those tours inspired people into hosting seances in their parlors. The sisters admitted sometime later that they were frauds and the that the knocking noises people heard were actually created by them. Apparently, they would crack the knuckles of their toes. We don't know how they were doing that and making it loud enough to sound like knocking on a wall. They eventually reneged on that confessions and claimed they really were talking to spirits. So who know, but when they excavated under that cottage later, they did find the bones of a male. Maybe a peddler had been murdered and really buried there. Another key figure in the movement was Emma Hardinge Britten. She was born in London in 1823. She got involved in the theater and traveled with a company to New York in 1856. When there, she met a medium named Ada Hoyt who converted her to Spiritualism. Britten mastered automatic writing, psychometry (which is reading objects by feeling them), prophecy and healing. Robert Dale Owen was an American statesman who communicated with Britten after he died and he gave her the first four of the seven original principles of Spiritualism. British spiritualists still adhere to these principles, while the American Association has drafted its own set of principles. Britten was one of the most zealous spiritualists in history and she took her message around the world. Another pioneer to Spiritualism in America was a very unlikely person, a Chief Justice of the New York State Supreme Court. Judge John W. Edmonds wrote the book "Spiritualism" in 1853 detailing his investigations of mediums. He had witnessed hundreds of manifestations. His book outraged the churches and politicians and they, along with the press, forced the Judge to resign the bench and return to private practice. Despite the negative response of much of the public, many high profile people were embracing this new spiritual science. The Lincolns used mediums and participated in seances, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer as were Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Carlyle, Emily Dickinson, Sir William Crookes, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Russell Wallace, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Queen Victoria, and W. B. Yeats.
Another adherent was George Prescott Colby who was born in New York in 1848. He became a teacher as an adult. His relationship with Spiritualism started early with him demonstrating mediumship abilities starting at the age of twelve. Through the years, he seemed to gather spirit guides around him. There was a Native American spirit named Seneca, then a German guide named The Philosopher, a healing guide named Wandah and another named Professor Hoffman. He became ill with tuberculosis. Legends connected to Colby claim that during a seance he was told to establish a Spiritualist Camp down south and a group traveled to Jacksonville, Florida and Seneca told them to travel to Blue Springs to establish a town. This is an interesting legend, but almost certainly an embellishment. The truth was that a doctor told Colby that Florida would be good for his tuberculosis.
Colby homesteaded in 1875 and named the town Cassadaga after the city in New York. There was a lake here that he named Lake Colby, for himself, and he built a large house on the west side of the lake. The house burned down in 1911, but he rebuilt. Colby started a chicken and dairy farm, planted an orange grove and opened a lumber business. And what started as 35 acres, grew to 57 acres. He granted access to parts of his property and sold plats and a group of 13 Spiritualists from De Leon Spring Camp started the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in 1894. Campers came from the north in the winter and lived in tents. Eventually, they built cottages and a post office, grocery store and pavilion were added. And a three-story hotel named Cassadaga Hotel was also built. The main thoroughfare in town is Stevens Street and the neighborhood along it started with a woman named Anna Stevens. She platted the subdivision after buying one large plat. Anna built a beautiful Victorian home that still stands. She left before paying out the balance of her mortgage and the new camp assumed that. In 1926, a fire ripped through and burned down everything. Buildings were rebuilt and today there is the rebuilt Hotel Cassadaga and a temple/auditorium that is known as The Colby Memorial Temple, a large educational building built named Andrew Jackson Davis Educational Building, Harmony Hall and Brigham Hall.
We had never done the Encountering Spirits Night Tour, so we decided to give it a whirl. Diane had done the historical tour before and it explained more about Spiritualism and how their main goal had been to prove the afterlife with science and that they don't believe in death, rather that we transition. Spiritualists adopted the sunflower as their symbol because the sunflower turns to the sun as spiritualism turns to the truth. There is a certification to work as a medium in Cassadaga and there are dozens available for readings. Back in the day, you could visit the camp from October to March it was 10 cents a day to enter. If you stayed for the whole season it was two dollars and 50 cents.
The tour met in the Andrew Jackson Davis Building, which is also the bookstore there. There is a lot of activity going on in this building. The building was completed in 1904 and initially served as the new Pavilion with a dance floor. The dances hosted here attracted people from other towns, particularly during World War II. The floorboards had pretty big gaps between them and when people were dancing, the change that was in their pockets would fly out and down through the cracks and the children in town would crawl under the building to collect the change. The Pavilion was renovated in 1974 and the roof was lowered and the walls were paneled. The Andrew Jackson Davis name was given to it two years later in 1976. Another renovation in 1985 transformed the front part of the building into the bookstore. We checked in and gathered in the back room for a Power Point presentation on Spiritualism and orbs. Here is a video of that back room. The focus of the tour was going to be catching orbs in pictures. We had only been sitting for about five minutes when a flashlight across the room turned itself on. (Flashlight On 1) At the end there you hear us mention that our K2 has gone off and gone up to red. This happened multiple times. The second time, a couple behind us shared something that verified the activity. (Pedulum) So very interesting that their pendulum started swinging crazy and then our K2 went crazy. Here are a couple of videos featuring the K2. The flashlights turned on and off several times. There were cat balls in a couple spots also and there were two at the front that were about 6 inches apart from each other and they both went off at the same time. Our two guide shared this story that happened to her to illustrate how spirits might help us. (Drive Story 1)
Some of the activity described happening here include people hearing change dropping on the floor. They'll hear band music playing and there are no instruments in this room at all and they will hear children that are running around laughing and specifically there is a little boy and a little girl that haunt this place and they like to get into a lot of mischief so they do a lot of poltergeist type activity. People also feel cold spots. On one area of the wall there used to be a door that people would come in that was the main door. This former door has been paneled over and the reason why they paneled it over was because spirits used that door like a portal. They felt this was the only way to stop all the spirits from coming in.
We headed out onto Stevens Street and worked our way down to the Colby Temple. There are two buildings across from each other that are called Harmony Hall and Brigham Hall and both have paranormal activity. Harmony Hall is a long, two-story building that was constructed in 1895 and served as a boarding house to accommodate winter guests. There were suites of three rooms that could be rented separately or together and there was a shared kitchen in the center. In just one season, they had 33,000 people come through Harmony Hall. Since it only had 16 rooms, that's a lot of turnover of people coming in and out. Our guide shared that a picture was taken on a tour that featured three faces in a window. She showed it to an 89-year-old medium in town one day and she said, "Oh, that's my husband, my mother and my daughter." Then she asked if the guide would print the photo off so that she could hang it in her home as a family photo.
Brigham Hall was an apartment building constructed in 1898 by Dr. Hubbard and Sarah Brigham and Fred and Kate Brigham. There were 18 single rental rooms and they even accommodated extra people with quilts in the attic. Ownership changed in 1912 and then the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association bought it in 1913 and they remodeled kit in 1928 into four private 3-room apartments with private bathrooms and that is how it is today. They conducted community seances on the third floor and so they have quite a bit of hauntings that are going on up there. A lot of the time they'll hear up on the third floor, tables dragging across the floor, chairs dragging across the floor and the floors will creak like there's people walking around. Our tour guide told us that a woman in period clothing is seen often in the downstairs hallway and has been captured in pictures taken from outside the door, shooting down the hallway. This woman is also seen going in and out of the front door every so often.
The Norman House is next to Harmony Hall. Between the two is a camphor tree that has been cut back several times into a stump and it always grows back. A picture has been carved into the trunk and there is a story that goes with this. First, let's talk about the house. It was built in 1906 and this is one of those houses you could order out of the Sears Roebuck catalog when they sold kit houses. This particular house was an Aladdin home and that means that it had a big wraparound porch on it so it's really cool. Inside, there's a portrait of the family who had lived there at one time and they had an eight-year-old daughter named Evelyn Phelps, but they called her Neesh and she was very ill and she ended up dying in the house in 1927. She loved pennies and she would collect pennies and she would stack them and roll them. She was always playing with pennies. Well, now all of the owners that have been in that house ever since then find pennies all the time. Piles of pennies. They'll lift up the couch cushions and have a whole pile of pennies under there. You lose some coins out of your pockets with couches, but not that many. That carving on the tree features this little girl and there is an angel flying down from heaven, bringing her pennies.
The Bond House was owned by father and son Frank and Eber Bond. They owned a sawmill and they built the house out of heart of pine and heart of pine gives off this sap that makes the wood indestructible so when you're trying to build with it, you can't hammer a nail into it, so they had to drill into each board before they could put the nails in. So you can imagine how long that took. But it was worth it because wood doesn't do well in Florida and this house is still standing even though it is over a hundred years old. There's no hauntings going on here, but it was it was a really cool house to check out.
The Snipes House was built by Joseph and Charlotte Snipes in the American Foursquare style. Joseph was the accountant for John D Rockefeller and he was very wealthy. Their house was the biggest house in Cassadaga and sits right across from the temple. The house was 4,000 square feet with a grand entryway and there was a gorgeous amethyst chandelier hanging in that entryway. The windows feature stained glass. Charlotte loved to wear a diamond tiara everywhere she went. When people would look back at old photos they would know who Charlotte was because she was wearing her diamond tiara. She got really ill and she would hang out by a window in the house. Charlotte passed away in the house and people started seeing her in the window. A neighbor across the street once complained because there was this woman in the window who would just stare at her. She said it was really unnerving and could they tell her to stop staring. The owners of the house said they had no idea who she was talking about because they didn't have anybody in the house that was older that matched that description.
There is a memorial dedicated to George Colby right before the temple and this is where our group took orb pictures. I captured a strange one with Kelly. There seems to be some kind of mist. We'll upload to Instagram too.
Then we also have the Colby Memorial Temple, which has both pews and chairs inside. This started as the Auditorium, which just had a shingled roof with cloth sides at first. This was replaced with a brick and cement building in 1923. It could hold 750 people. The floor was built to slope down and then there was a stage. The name was changed to honor Colby in 1975. Behind the platform is the Seance Room. This is lit with red light and table tipping is done in here. There is a large mirror on one of the walls and we all took turns taking pictures of ourselves in the mirror to see if we could catch anything strange. We got nothing. People often feel ill in there or light-headed. Just felt like a big closet to me. There is a lot of memorabilia in the temple. The first time I was in this building, they had these huge trumpets in there and if anybody knows anything about Spiritualism, one of the things that they do as a demonstration is they'll have voices that come out of trumpets. They would take these trumpets out of their cases sometimes when having a seance or a gathering and voices would come out of those trumpets and speak.
That ended our tour. Before we did the tour, we had dinner at Sinatra's Ristorante in Hotel Cassadaga. Great food! This is probably the most haunted building in the camp. It is across from the Andrew Jackson Davis Building. The small camp had lots of temporary visitors coming and it really needed a hotel. The original hotel was built in 1903. It was three stories and modeled after the Maplewood Hotel in the sister camp at Cassadaga Lake Free Assembly in New York. Visitors had to make reservations two years in advance, the hotel was so popular. The hotel burned down in the big fire in 1926 and the fire started on the second level of the hotel.
Hotel Cassadaga was quickly rebuilt and this one was two-stories and was fashioned in the Mediterranean style and stuccoed. There were forty-two rooms and a long veranda. This was privately owned until the Great Depression nearly bankrupted the owners and they told the spiritualists if you want the hotel, you can have it. It was privately owned again in the 1970s and turned into a registered nursing facility. By the 1980s, it was a hotel again. Today, there are sixteen rooms as renovations opted to make bigger rooms. There are antiques in the lobby, as well as a historic bar and there is a gift shop. And, of course, Sinatra's Ristorante, which also hosts a haunted attraction in October. The main spirit who is here is named Arthur and he used to stay in the hotel back in the 1930s and he'd love to walk to the end of the second floor it has two two floors he would walk to the end of the second floor he'd put a chair there open up the window and he'd have himself a gin and smoke a cigar and he would just love to people watch all the people who were out there. Well he ended up dying in the hotel and so now to this day people if they go to that window they will sometimes hear smell his cigarette smoke or his cigar smoke they even might smell a little bit of gin or alcohol and they definitely will feel a cold spot he also likes to touch people so a lot of the time people will feel a little pinch on their shoulder a tug on their shirt with him letting them know that they're there but they never see him.
And we should probably talk about the Devil's Chair at the Lake Helen Cemetery, which is right down the road. Most of the Cassadaga spiritualists are buried here. There's actually four brick chairs at the cemetery, but only one of them is considered the Devil's Chair. This has a brick border wall around it and the Devil's Chair is in the middle of this wall. You can sit in the chair. The story goes that a man's wife had died and he liked to come visit her so he had this built so that he could come and sit and visit her grave. Now, we don't know why there's three other burials that have them too, but perhaps they wanted to visit their loved ones too. The legend that goes with it obviously involved the Devil. They say if you sit in the chair at midnight, the Devil will communicate with you. And apparently he likes beer - who knew - so people will go in there with a beer and they'll leave it unopened on the chair. Then when they return the following morning, they find the beer is empty.
Cassadaga can't help but be full of spirits. After all, the purpose of this town is to facilitate communication with spirits. But we still have to ask, is Cassadaga haunted? That is for you to decide!
