My Cassadaga Halloween
by Anne C. Petty
Years ago, I spent one memorable Halloween along with three friends at Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, the famous enclave of mediums in central Florida. We stayed with friends in nearby Deland, who were openly wary of the place and suggested we should just go trick or treating with them around their safe little neighborhood. But we’d made advance appointments with several famous mediums living in Cassadaga and were, ahem, stoked.
On Halloween morning, we drove out to Cassadaga, which was appropriately spooky looking, with very old wooden two-storey houses slouching under ancient thick-limbed, moss-draped oaks. We strolled around the unpaved village roads just soaking up the atmosphere, and then split up to find our appointed mediums and get our readings. We met back for lunch at the Cassadaga Hotel, which if it wasn’t haunted, truly deserved to be. We compared notes, agreed it was all interesting, with some possible examples of True Seeing, but nothing spectacular or conclusive.
That evening we attended a large group class in visualization techniques taught by the legendary Eloise Page, a dynamic little lady who had me believing–-at least for the duration of the class–-that I could in fact see beyond the veil of the mundane. I think I still have her autograph somewhere. By evening’s end, we packed into our car and headed back to Deland. We’d had a great day hanging out in Cassadaga with certified mediums, but nothing supernatural had actually happened. A bit of a letdown, but what had we been expecting, really?
Our host in Deland was still out trick or treating, so we sat around in the living room sharing our readings and talking about channeling, auras, thought forms, Annie Besant, Jane Roberts, Edgar Cayce, C.W. Leadbeater, and other such folk. We pretty much agreed that while it was fun to speculate about paranormal phenomena and get readings from mediums, none of us had actually experienced anything out of the ordinary, wishful thinking aside.
And it was at that precise moment that we heard a loud crash from the kitchen. We scrambled to our feet, and ran to see if our hosts had returned or what. There was no one there, but one of the breakfast bar stools was lying on its side. Our friends had no pets, and we couldn’t see anything that would have made the stool fall over.
I was standing at the back of the group and felt the hair rise on my arms. At the same instant, I heard a voice say my name very distinctly right beside my left ear: “Anne.” I whipped around, but saw nobody. My heart nearly stopped! I told the group what I’d just experienced, and everyone was genuinely spooked. We righted the stool and sat around in the kitchen with all the lights on, hyperventilating, and waiting for our hosts to come back (which they did about 30 minutes later). To this day, I have no explanation for what happened that night, but it has fueled some tasty horror scenes for me as a writer.
Anne Petty is author of the Wandjina horror/dark-fantasy series, three books of literary criticism, and many essays on writing, mythology, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Recent short fiction includes her award-winning story “Blade,” and “The Veritas Experience,” published in The Best Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2009. Anne is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. She is a founding member of the Tallahassee Writers Association and is a regular presenter at writers’ conferences and pop-culture conventions such as Dragon-Con in Atlanta. In 2006, she founded Kitsune Books, a small press specializing in literary fiction and book-length poetry collections. Anne has a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University. She is online at http://www.annepetty.com/.
