Lily Dale, the town of mediums

A real, 145-year-old town of practising spiritualist mediums

Lily Dale is a hamlet on the east side of Upper Cassadaga Lake in the Town of Pomfret, western New York, about an hour southwest of Buffalo, and it calls itself the world's largest center for Spiritualism. It was incorporated in 1879 as the Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers, renamed the City of Light in 1903 and Lily Dale Assembly in 1906. Its purpose was to further the science, philosophy and religion of Spiritualism, whose central tenet is communication, through mediumship, with the dead.

It began as an auditorium tent ringed by smaller tents on platforms for the summer season. By the 1880s these had become permanent cottages, small, with gingerbread scrollwork and screened porches, on narrow tree-shaded streets. The Assembly owns the land, and the houses sit on 99-year leases. About 275 people live there year-round; between 10 and 15 mediums are in permanent residence and some 40 during the season, most of them reverends of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, which was founded in 1893 and has its headquarters here. Its first president, Harrison D. Barrett, was a Lily Dale resident. Around 22,000 visitors come each year for classes, church services, mediumship demonstrations and private readings.

The grounds hold the Forest Temple, an open-air structure facing rows of outdoor seats; the Healing Temple, where the laying on of hands has gone on for more than a century; the Marion Skidmore Library, with one of the largest collections of Spiritualist literature in the country; and the Inspiration Stump in a grove of its own, where visiting ministers and speakers declaimed so often that it still shows the wear of their boots. Leolyn Woods, a 10-acre tract of old-growth forest, has eastern white pines 135 feet tall and trees estimated at 200 to 400 years old. In 1915 the cottage of the Fox sisters, the movement's famous mediums, was moved here from Hydesville; it burned on 21 September 1955.

The Spiritualists were abolitionists and supporters of women's suffrage. Lily Dale outlasted similar camps as they declined, and in 2022 most of the hamlet was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district. Admission is charged in the summer season, waived on Sunday mornings for church, and the grounds are free and open the rest of the year. The HBO documentary No One Dies in Lily Dale was filmed here.