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Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead

Amazon.com Price:  $14.99 (as of 20/04/2019 05:23 PST- Details)

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Description

In Lily Dale, New York, the dead don’t die.

Instead, spirits flit a few of the elms and stroll along the streets, every so often dressed in garb more common 120 years ago, when Lily Dale used to be founded and suffragette Susan B. Anthony used to be a frequent guest.

According to Spiritualists who have ruled this Victorian hamlet for five generations, the dead don’t go away and they stay anything but quiet. Each and every summer twenty thousand guests come to consult the town’s mediums, who can hang out a shingle only after passing a test that confirms their connection to the spirit world.

On the hot June day when reporter Christine Wicker comes to the world’s oldest and largest Spiritualist community, she is made up our minds to be aware the name of the game forces — human or another way — that keep Lily Dale alive. She follows three visitors: a newly bereaved widow; a mother whose son killed himself; and a beautiful, happily married wife whose first talk over with to Lily Dale brings an ominous warning.

Are the mediums cold-hearted charlatans, as Sinclair Lewis wrote of them? Or are they conduits for a hidden world that longs to bring peace and healing to the living, as psychologist William James and muckraker Upton Sinclair once hoped to prove?

Investigating a movement that attracted millions of Americans in the 1800s and now barely survives, Wicker moves beyond the mediums’ front parlors and into the lives that tourists never see. She follows the mediums to a place where what we know and how we realize it is the greatest mystery of all.

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