In Brief
The Lake Helen-Cassadaga Cemetery sits beside the self-styled Psychic Capital of the World, where America's spiritualists laid their founder to rest. The records are so old that the city can't always say who lies under which stone — and one man seems to be buried in two places at once.
The Full Story
At the Lake Helen-Cassadaga Cemetery in Florida, the people who keep the grounds can't always tell you who is buried where. The records are that old, that spotty. In at least one documented case, a single man appears to be buried in two separate plots at once.
The cemetery sits in Volusia County, on the edge of Cassadaga — the town spiritualists have called the Psychic Capital of the World. It's where they buried the people who built American spiritualism, under monuments dating back to the 1800s. The founder of the whole camp is here: George P. Colby, the trance medium they called the "seer of spiritualism," who arrived in Florida in 1875 after, he said, a spirit guide named Seneca told him to travel south. He died in 1933 and was interred just up the road in Lake Helen.
Or so the stone says. The Orange County Regional History Center notes that stories persist his "grave there might be empty or that perhaps he is interred in New Smyrna." The town founded on talking to the dead can't be sure where its own founder lies.
That uncertainty runs the whole graveyard. A city commissioner, Roger Eckert, started noticing graves that didn't match the records around 2019, while identifying veterans' plots. "Like William Nutterfield is buried under a plot by Alice Mead," he said, "and there is no record of what the relationship is or if the plot was transferred over to him." A resident named Summer Bundy spent over 45 minutes uncovering her uncle's grave, swallowed under dirt and grass. The city said it was hunting for a company to digitize the records, maybe run ground-penetrating radar to find the unmarked ones.
Visitors report shadow figures moving among the trees after dark, though those accounts stay anonymous and uncorroborated. The famous Devil's Chair is here too — one of several brick mourning benches built across the family plots. But the real unanswered question isn't the bench. It's the man in two graves, and the founder in maybe none.
