Where the Action Is

Spirits don't often talk about life after death, and the Spiritualists themselves differ on what happens. They don't agree on how long the spirits stick around to converse. Some think spirits aren't available right after death because they're too mixed up about their states. Others think spirits linger for only a short while and then go off to do whatever spirits do. And then there are those who think that the spirits stay available as long as anyone on earth still remembers them.

Some Spiritualists believe in reincarnation; some don't. "There's going to be skid marks on the clouds if they try to make me come back," Lily Dale historian Joyce LaJudice said.

Spiritualist heaven, called Summerland, does not have streets of gold, but it does have flowers. Lily Dale resident Richard O'Brocta said his dead wife has visited him many times and taken him on a tour of her Summerland house.

"She lives in a little white house with a stream running by it," he told me. "It has flowers around it. She's taken me there to see it. I've been inside. She works in a hospital taking care of babies that died. She helps raise them. Everyone has a job. People are the age they were at their happiest time in life. I'll be thirty-two."

I never heard anybody talk about their dead relatives having met God. The most specific inquiry regarding divine whereabouts that I ran across came from a book by the late California Episcopal James Pike, who believed he had contacted his son. This particularly surprised the bishop, because his liberal theology hadn't convinced him that life after death exists, but the messages that came from his son did. The bishop asked the boy whether he had seen Christ. His son answered through a medium that he had been told he wasn't ready to meet Jesus. He also said Jesus was talked about in the afterlife as a seer and mystic but not as a savior.

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