In Brief
Cassadaga is a town in the Florida pines where several dozen certified mediums live in plain frame houses and make their living talking to the dead. A trance medium named George Colby founded it in 1875, after a spirit told him exactly where to go.
The Full Story
In Cassadaga, Florida, the dead are part of the address. Several dozen certified mediums live here in plain frame houses on a wooded patch of Volusia County, and they make their living talking to people who aren't there. Fewer than 100 people live in the town full-time. It is, by its own nickname, the Psychic Capital of the World.
It started with a vision. George P. Colby was a trance medium from Pike, New York, who left the Baptist church as a young man to travel the country giving readings. He told people that one of his spirit guides, a Native American he called Seneca, appeared during a séance and described a stretch of Florida land where he should build a home for Spiritualism. The exact spot, Colby said, would be settled by a "Congress of Spirits."
In October 1875 he came to find it. He took the train to Jacksonville, a boat up the St. Johns River to Blue Springs Landing, then went on foot through dense scrub until he reached the pines and lakes Seneca had described. He stayed.
The charter for the camp was granted December 18, 1894, and on January 3, 1895, Colby deeded thirty-five acres of his homestead to the new association. That patch of woods became the oldest active Spiritualist community in the southeastern United States.
It still works the way Colby left it. Spiritualists here believe life continues after death and that trained mediums can reach the people who've crossed over. Certification takes at least four years. "During every service that we have, there is always a demonstration of the Continuity of Life, or what we call giving messages," says Reverend Jim Watson — the dead, addressing the living, on schedule.
Believers say the whole camp sits on a vortex, a knot of psychic energy thickened by a century of this. Ghost tours describe apparitions among the houses and a sense of being watched in the parks after dark. No single named ghost anchors it. The reputation belongs to the town itself — a place founded on a message from the other side, where the line to it was never meant to close.
