Colby Memorial Temple

The Colby Memorial Temple in Cassadaga, Florida looks like an ordinary church from the outside. Built in 1923 in the Mediterranean Revival style, it has a sanctuary, a piano, and pews. But there's a second room behind those walls, and it's the reason the building exists.

The room is small, the story goes, just tables and chairs lit by a single red bulb. Casual visitors aren't allowed inside, the story goes, only as far as the threshold to look in. This is the séance room, where the mediums of the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp sit down to talk to the dead, and have since the year the building opened.

What happens in there has a name. During séances, accounts describe "apports" — objects that seem to materialize out of nothing and fall from the ceiling. Not cold spots, not a draft. Things arriving in the room.

The man who set all this in motion was George P. Colby, a trance medium born in New York in 1848. He believed a baptism in freezing lake water had thinned the veil between this world and the next. A spirit guide named Seneca, who appeared to him during a séance in Iowa, told him to go south and build a Spiritualist community. Colby reached Florida in 1875, and in 1895 he deeded thirty-five acres to the camp that grew up around the work.

A century later, the work is still going. Roughly 35 working mediums and healers belong to the camp; certification takes four to six years of in-person training. The Sunday and Wednesday services include hands-on healing, where healers move their hands around a seated person without touching them, followed by spirit messages delivered to people picked from the crowd.

The temple closed for a 26-month restoration and reopened around 2021, the historic plaster patched with hemp fiber. The pews are back. The piano is back. And behind them, the small room with the red bulb is open again — for the work the rest of us only get to watch from the doorway.