Cassadaga front office. Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
Friday, March 27, 2026
When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly.
I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in New Smyrna Beach, poking lizards and watching late-night TV in a room covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. I liked to watch my mother be mothered by a grandma who would never let us call her that.
Mimi asked what I wanted to do now, by which she meant, did we mind stopping at an antique mall nearby. This was my childhood, Mom said. Mimi had been a Boston antiques dealer, a detail covered in Mom’s memoir in progress, which I’ve read and Mimi hasn’t. The book is about being raised by hippies, and how you can feel loved without feeling safe.
I’d conceived of my role that weekend as moral support in general, and specifically in the project of locating lost paperwork involving dead men. Such items included a trove of love letters sent to Mimi in the early sixties, which Mom wanted for book research, and stock certificates belonging to Dan, who, despite practicing as a Manhattan lawyer, did not have a will—thus rendering Mimi, his sister, the executor of the estate. She’d come into the role after Dan was murdered on a spring afternoon, while walking on a bike path outside of Albany. We still don’t have answers. In the fall, a twenty-five-year-old man was charged with one count of second-degree murder—seemingly not premeditated, a random act of insane violence against a practicing Buddhist.
That was also the reason for the one activity I’d added to the itinerary. Sometime in the past decade, someone told me that there is a Psychic Capital of the World. The Psychic Capital of the World happens to be an unincorporated community in central Florida called Cassadaga, and is twenty-three miles from Mimi’s house. She’d been there before, by virtue of living nearby and being the kind of person who would go to a Psychic Capital of the World, which is one of the ways that we are alike.
But she hadn’t gone in years and thus could not vouch for the currently practicing psychics. (Many of them, at Cassadaga and elsewhere, are quacks lacking the gift, she said. Not all are as talented as the tarot card reader at the Russian Tea Room in Boston who once predicted that Mimi’s two daughters would each birth two daughters.) She once went to a Sunday-morning séance with Dan, actually, which doesn’t surprise me. He was very spiritual, if not a Spiritualist, the belief system at Cassadaga: an understanding that individuals continue to exist after the change called death, and that it’s possible to communicate with them.
Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
According to an online calendar, there would be a séance at Cassadaga on Saturday. I called the number and the medium answered. I felt compelled to tell him everything about us, but I worried he’d google things like Dan’s case, tainting the experience I wanted to believe could be legitimate. Anyway, he was all business; he’d hold three spots. We talked about it over drinks at the Sea Vista Motel and Tiki Bar, with a view of the part of the beach where cars are allowed to drive, and beyond it, the rolling Atlantic. Mom and Mimi said they’d go, mostly because they love me. Admission was twenty-five dollars in advance and thirty at the door. Mimi said that if he really was psychic, he’d already know we were coming.
That night, we stayed at Mimi’s new house in a development atop a swamp, bought with Dan’s lawyer money. Her old house, which she still owns and Mom thinks she’ll never sell, is a shrine to a life’s worth of stuff that once was valuable, materially or sentimentally, but has been tarnished by rat shit and smoke damage. The new place has a screened-in porch Mimi calls the lanai, and we watched a family of ducks line up in a row, then peel off one by one, while she dragged on a cigarette.
Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
Inside, on Mimi’s bed, we went through little sacks of jewelry. She let me take a sterling swordfish charm, a spiral chain bracelet, a jewel-encrusted costume ring, and a frog whose mouth hinges open—a roach clip. There’s a silver walnut pillbox that I really wanted, but Mimi wasn’t ready to give it away. This exasperated my mom; she had me point it out again so she’d know, for when Mimi dies.
Saturday, March 28, 2026
I dressed in all black, which Mimi said would let the spirits know who to come to. Around my neck I wore a brass whistle. It belonged to Dan and had been issued by the army, and it slotted into the hollow of my throat. Should we take some of Dan with us? Mimi asked. So I scooped a thimble of his ashes into a rinsed-out anchovies jar and he rode shotgun in the pocket of the door as we headed west, when the storm started. The windshield wipers were no good. We sailed along as if in a submarine.
Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
Cassadaga was gray and dripping wet. In the Seneca language, Cassadaga means “water beneath the rocks,” according to some people; to others, it’s “rocks beneath the water.” I spied a few figures huddled under awnings. We got our bearings at the bookstore and welcome center, which offered crystals and merch, and in the back was a bulletin board, on it a yellow paper advertising the Saturday Night Live Séance, limited to twelve participants. Come and join with people of like minds and you may receive a message.
Two women behind the register were talking about the weather. One singsonged, Weird energy today. What do you mean? I asked. It’s not good or bad, she said, it just feels weird, like it does sometimes.
A block over was Horseshoe Park, featuring a spiral meditation walk, and the Fairy Trail, a tiny jungle of trinkets and carved trunks. Inside a heart of white rocks, we scattered our bit of Dan. We kept crisscrossing another family: three kids running around and a woman who seemed to be their grandmother, scolding them. I couldn’t hear exactly; the Spanish moss seemed to soak up the sound.
We were due at the Slater House, a meeting venue that hosts a library of Spiritualist texts, at 7 P.M. We had a couple hours to kill and headed to Sinatra’s Ristorante, Cassadaga’s only restaurant inside its only hotel, owned by Frank’s grandniece. In the lobby, freelance psychics lounged on couches, making meaningful eye contact. There was a wooden Meditation Station, which looked like a confession booth missing the priest’s side. We ate but didn’t drink, adhering to the pamphlet’s warning that attendees under the influence of mind-altering substances (alcohol / drugs) will not be admitted.
Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
It was still light out, but the lamp was on above the door of the little white house, which we opened to meet Reverend Phil. The front room was sparse and also white. Unsmiling and dry, the reverend stepped aside to let us pass into a dim and carpeted room, and I saw he had a white ponytail down his back.
Eleven chairs were arranged in an oval. Three people were already sitting, all tattooed millennials in selvage denim, who told Mimi the comfy armchair had her name on it. After us entered another threesome: middle-aged women I recognized from Sinatra’s, where they’d been at the bar with goblets of red wine. A wide-eyed woman sat with her feet planted firmly on the floor. She introduced herself as Angel, amazingly, and said she was training under the Reverend, who entered last, big and barefoot.
Phil first told us about the origins of Spiritualism in New York in the 1840s, when two sisters reported rappings on their bedroom walls. He showed us a conical horn two feet long and known as a ghost trumpet. If the energy was strong enough, it would supposedly hover off the floor, though I worried we were all too green and skeptical for anything to happen. Phil gestured for each of us to go around and share. Mimi, to his left, kicked us off, but said only her first and last name, refusing to give a crumb. So that was all that I, and the other seven, gave too. (I felt the bloom of shame that people would assume my last name had been chosen rather than inherited. Of course a girl named Rainbow would be at a séance on a Saturday night.)
We turned off the lamps and the room was bathed in red, from the ceiling lights. The Reverend led us in a guided meditation. You are walking through a forest. You reach a beach. You walk ten steps. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. An animal joins you at your side; that’s your spirit animal. You come to a bonfire. A figure emerges from the flames and hands you a crystal. They retreat. Another figure emerges. They walk with you. Open your eyes.
It was hard for me to meditate. The whole time I thought about how I was supposed to be not thinking. In trying to let go I grasped what was right in front of me tighter. My spirit animal did join, a little tabby cat brushing my ankles, though it might have been only because Phil told us that, if we felt called to speak aloud a message from Spirit, not to let the cat get our tongue. I saw Uncle Dan in the flame, but it might have been because I wanted to see him there, because I don’t know many people who have died, because, at that moment, I might still have had his remains on my hands.
Phil asked Mimi, first again, if she would share what she saw. She described a green crystal and the cat that had been her spirit animal, too. Then Phil and his apprentice riffed on that. They stepped into her vibration. They saw an older gentleman; he was slapping his knee. He had a boisterous laugh. He was cracking Phil up. It’s not Dan, Mimi said. She saw their father instead. Phil asked Mimi if she had a bucket list, because her father wanted her to do everything on it. It’s a pretty short list, Mimi said.
Angel described Mimi as independent, leery of people—like a cat. But loyal, once she lets her guard down. Angel said: You don’t need people. Or rather, you don’t want to appear like you do. I stole a glance at Mom.
ANGEL: I also feel that you have an archangel that’s watching over you. Gabriel, possibly. A strong, strong white spirit.
MIMI: I feel protected all the time by the spirit world.
When it was my turn, I froze up. I described the red hair of my mom’s friend Holly, who I had seen in my meditation. She is still alive, but Reverend Phil was describing her like she was dead. I started panicking that the red hair was about my little sister, whom I worry about constantly. I crossed and uncrossed my fingers and my toes. Dan appeared to me as a shock of white, smirking. I understood that he knew everything but was reticent to reveal it. Phil said some platitudes about how Dan was proud of me, but the expression I’d seen was more bemused.
Angel felt a lot of love surrounding and coming from me. Thank you, I told her. This was about making us feel good, I realized. The sign in the welcome center had advertised healing services. One of the Sinatra’s girls saw a green orb hovering in the corner of the room. Yep, that would be Uncle Dan, Phil said. I didn’t see anything in the corner of the room.
At the beginning, Phil had told us that the other séance participants might begin to appear differently to us, the features of the deceased projecting over faces or blending in. By the way, he told me now, you’re transfiguring. You’re a Victorian queen wearing a crown. Someone else transfigured too and she said she could feel it in her face, she was taking deep breaths and rocking back and forth. I thought maybe it benefited the experience to come under the influence of drink.
I preferred Angel. She could read people. She identified an unresolved pain in Mom, which I agreed with—not in a catastrophically tragic way, just in that she carries the weight of everyone she loves within her. Phil, meanwhile, described Uncle Dan as some kind of honky-tonk who was knocking back forties in heaven, when Dan would never—he was always very concerned about inflammation.
It took more than two hours to go through the nine of us, and the last three still felt rushed. By far the most time was spent on Mimi, Mom, and me. I think Phil wanted to convince us. At the very end, he said he was getting one more message. It was Uncle Dan. He’s asking you—Phil turned to Mimi—have you found the letter yet?
Photograph by Greta Rainbow.
Sunday, March 29, 2026
It was too cold to lay on the beach and I wanted to go to Mimi’s hoarding house, to see if it matched up with my memory. A hurricane had destroyed the treehouse in the backyard. Inside, there were stacks of paper everywhere, which we three picked up and shuffled through and put down again. We left without finding the love letters from long ago, nor the certificates we’d need to access Dan’s corporate shares that had gone missing only because Mimi had misplaced them. I had no sense of what kind of letter Dan had wanted us to find.
In the evening, we talked about the séance, remembering phrases, wondering about the other people there. No, the Reverend might not have had the gift, but I liked him, by the end. I think that, after hearing a stranger describe what Dan wasn’t, I understood a little better what he was. Mimi didn’t like Phil. She said, He should get a haircut and a real job.
But I do feel angels watching over me, Mimi said. Do you think that’s true for everyone?
I considered. I think everyone feels special. I think you have to, to survive. Because why else get up every day, if you’re not living a unique life? Maybe not every soul is looked after by someone who holds power in the universe. But does everyone believe they are?
Greta Rainbow is an editor of The Creative Independent, an arts columnist for The New York Review of Architecture, and a lead contributor to Blank, a literary newsletter from Dirt Media.
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