What separates the living from the dead? Come to Cassadaga, Florida, if you yearn for an answer. Because this is a place where some say the veil cloaking the afterlife is especially thin.
There are dozens of psychics here who will give you answers. Seances are held at regular times. For a few dollars, spiritual readers can lead you forward using all their tools — tarot, the study of auras, trances, and more.
You can stay in the 1927 Hotel Cassadaga that still looks like something from the Roaring Twenties and comes complete with a happy ghost named Arthur who smells of cigars and bathtub gin. Or you can wander through the surrounding Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp amid beautiful old houses built near a spring-fed lake where a New York medium named George P. Colby first came in 1875.
Here, Colby founded the self-styled Psychic Capital of the World. He was led to this spot by a spirit guide named Seneca, a long-dead Native American with ties to a hidden Congress of Spirits. It goes without saying that this otherworldly Congress held vast knowledge of the sacred places that dotted the American wilderness in those days.
Colby’s association of spiritualists still continues today. Miraculously it has survived Florida’s constant cycles of boom and bust, thriving now from the more recent surge of interest in anything New Age.
Other Florida winter camps and Chatauquas failed through the years. But not this one.
Maybe the success is because Cassadaga offers something much more than what a few folks dismiss as parlor magic and foofaraw. Many people travel here today simply to see what Florida once was like. — The vanishing Florida that felt wild and free.The Old Florida with its sparse population and occasional roadside attractions.
Even today, Cassadaga is as seductive as it must have been to Colby and his many rich Yankee followers in 1875 — people who came to this Volusia County backwater as much to enjoy the warm winters as to commune with the dead.
It’s simple, you see. — Nothing is more Old Florida than Cassadaga. Absolutely nothing.
It looks like a village from Florida’s past, left out of the mainstream hubbub of theme parks, condominiums, and raging politics.
Cassadaga still conjures the delicious quirkiness that always has been the hallmark of a state first built by proud Spanish conquistadors who got lost in its swamps and by headstrong pirates whose stolen treasures sank beyond reach in its hurricanes.
Robert Craig Waters 