Spirits serene... and less so

In Lily Dale, New York, the dead don't die. Instead, spirits fly among the trees and stroll along the streets, sometimes dressed in garb more common 120 years ago, when Lily Dale was founded and suffragette Susan B. Anthony was 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. 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.

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"
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If spirits do roam the earth, and if those who sense them are to be believed, then there are benevolent spirits and decidedly malevolent ones. No two places in America better represent this yin and yang of the spiritualism question than Lily Dale, a placid community in Chautauqua County, New York, and Alcatraz, on an island in San Francisco Bay, now a museum in what once was a super-maximum-security penitentiary. 

The Fox sisters. From left to right: Margaret, Kate and Leah

The Lily Dale story starts with the sisters Kate, Margaretta and Leah Fox, in a New York hamlet named Hydesville. There, in the family home, the sisters claimed to hear ghosts rapping out mes-sages. They came up with a pattern of responses, including knocks and finger snaps that they said the spirits answered; the sisters were communicating with the dead. The Foxes organized demonstrations in public places, charged observers a fee, and their fame spread. By 1855, the trio were seen as the founders of an American spiritualism movement, which grew to a million adherents. In 1916, the Fox's childhood home was moved from Hydesville to Lily Dale, at the north end of Cassadaga Lake, and pilgrims began to flock. Today, many of the 500 residents of the charming town are happy spiritualists, and travelers from the netherworld are equally at home. It is said that the wall between here and there is so thin in Lily Dale, even skeptical visitors are unnerved by... something.

If the spirits of Lily Dale are comfortable, those of Alcatraz have never been. In fact, the Bay Area's Miwok Indians avoided the island for fear of evil presences. But in 1859 miscreant Miwoks were sentenced to spend time there in penance: the island's first prisoners. By 1912, a huge edifice, originally a fort but soon to become home to the country's most hardened criminals, had been constructed on the site. Gangsters At Capone, "Machine Gun" Kelly and "Doc" Barker checked in; few checked out in their lifetimes—and some maybe never. Capone can be heard playing the banjo, as he did in his day.

The late Sylvia Brown

In Cell Block C, an unearthly racket once grew so loud that the noted psychic Sylvia Brown was called in. She said a man named "Butcher" was to blame. Sure enough, when records were checked, Cell Block C was where mob hit man Abie "Butcher" Maldowitz had been murdered by a colleague inmate in the laundry room. 

From Life Magazine Special - "Strange But True: 100 of the World's Weirdest Wonders"

Purchase here!