MacMillan's Magazine/A Spiritualist Camp in New England

by Algernon Blackwood

Although my practical acquaintance with spiritualism ceased several years ago (at the close of a period of ardent investigation), my interest was suddenly galvanised into fresh life by the news that not far from the house where I was visiting there was situated a summer encampment of spiritualists nearly five hundred strong. Five hundred spiritualists living quietly among themselves, beyond all reach of chilling doubt and scepticism, was a temptation with a special charm; and there was no great difficulty in persuading my hostess that a visit would be interesting. We accordingly organised a party of four, and started behind a pair of long-tailed horses for a drive of ten miles up into the gentle, wooded hills that at this point render the coast of the State of Connecticut peculiarly attractive.

It was somewhat of a surprise to find five hundred spiritualists occupying a fortified position in this most rigid of New England States. Numerous as they are all over the United States, especially in California and along the slopes of the Pacific Coast, we hardly expected that the puritan spirit of New England would afford them sufficient favour and nourishment to encourage a settlement of this description. In our ignorance, therefore, it was something of a shock to learn from our driver that “Them spritilists are all over this part of the country, thick as p’tater-bugs.” To us, who knew that Connecticut suffered severely from the ravages of the Colorado beetle (vulgarly known as the potato-bug) this information came with some degree of picturesque force. “They’ve a powerful followin’ around here,” the man went on, “but I don’t take any stock in ’em.”

“From what class do they draw their supporters?”

“Hard to say; unejicated folk mostly, I guess.”

“Farmers?”

“No, not farmers at all,” he replied with vigour. “People from the small towns and villages; people that’s curious to know what kind of a place they’ll drop into later.”

“They have no great attraction for you?”

“None! They don’t tell you nothin’ worth knowin’, to begin with. Oh, but they’re plenty round here, more than you can shake a stick at; and they’re a good sort mostly, pays their bills and doesn’t drink. But they don’t pheaze me any!” The scorn of the driver, who himself came from a vigorous farming stock up country, was very instructive.

It was a sunny September afternoon. Some miles away on our right the town of New London stretched itself prettily along the banks of the Thames, a Thames that could swallow its namesake half a dozen times and show no appreciable rise. Behind us lay the blue line of the sea, dotted with shining white sails; and on our left the woods flowed away in graceful undulations that already hung aloft the crimson and golden banners of their flaming autumn dress. Presently the woods fell sharply away and a dark grove of pines came into view in a little valley below us. It was a secluded spot, protected on two sides by a loop of the river and on a third by the shoulder of the hills. Perfectly still and quiet, it lay literally in a fold of the river and the hills. Occasional threads of thin blue smoke, rising here and there over the dark pine-crests, alone betrayed the existence of busy human beings.

The first impression of the camp was a somewhat gloomy one, due partly no doubt to its sombre surrounding of dark evergreens and to the overshadowing presence of the hill which hid the setting of the sun. The gorgeous colouring of the surrounding maple woods further served to throw into contrast the subdued tints of the picture.

Nevertheless, this sudden aspect of the camp, as we afterwards remembered, gave to us its true note⁠—peace, remoteness from the world, an unearthly stillness, and, at the same time, a curious suggestion of sleepiness, heaviness, dullness that somehow seemed also to include the idea of stagnation. The air, hovering above the still pines, seemed denser than the surrounding atmosphere and shone with a lesser brilliance in the glory of the afternoon sun. The first appearance of the place was, on the whole, depressing. This impression floated up to us on the heights and in the sunshine, but as we descended into the little valley and entered within the shadow of the grove itself and saw the numerous wooden cottages under the trees, it seemed momentarily dispelled, though it returned afterwards with gathered force and renewed conviction.

A feeling that perhaps we were intruding upon scenes not intended for us, and that our unsolicited visit might not be welcome was considerably weakened when the driver tied his horses up to a pine tree and observed, with energy: “They’ll be out in a swarm to see you, and glad too, when they know you’re here. They like visitors.”

He sat down and lit his pipe, while we strolled up one of the little lanes that intersected the grove in all directions. The trees were dense and close together; and, though the roads had been marked out with evident purpose, the cottages had set themselves down anywhere and everywhere with the utmost irregularity. There was an air of irresponsibility about the place which was refreshing. Here and there, as if to give countenance to the road, a few cottages appeared side by side in a feeble attempt at a row, but the majority of them stood about saucily wherever the trees allowed them room. They were built, too, in all possible relations to each other and abutted at all manner of angles.

And the roads were not roads. They were the natural soft ground, covered with pine-needles: they were merely good honest trails, or vistas, cut with charming irregularity through the trees; and, if you did not like them, you could leave them and walk to your destination over the pine-needles elsewhere. Our feet passed along them in silence, and the general air of stillness about the camp was so marked that we instinctively lowered our voices almost to a whisper.

The swarm mentioned by the driver, who was evidently optimist or idealist, took a long time in making its appearance, but on the other hand no one blocked our way. Perhaps the few women we saw hovering about the cottages were its forerunners. One of these, with her arms bare to the elbows, was lazily engaged in the performance of some domestic duty, and when we asked her if any part of the camp were private, she replied that it was all open to the public and that we could go wherever we wished. However, a general tour of inspection over the forty acres, or so, revealed nothing very exciting, and we turned our attention next to the little cottages. These were all of wood, for it was a summer encampment, and the cottages were summer cottages; in two months’ time they would be deserted and under deep snow. Of the lightest possible structure, the walls were of unpapered, unvarnished pine-boards, and _ the roofs of thin cedar shingles. Only a few boasted two stories, but every one of them, no matter how small, enjoyed the luxury of a wide verandah running round the front and the two sides. On every verandah was the inevitable rocking-chair with a wicker seat, a high back, and broad arms.

So far we had come across no men and no animals. A few thin chickens, with draggled feathers, wandered disconsolately in the neighbourhood of one or two of the cottages, seeking what sustenance they could find among the dry needles. But the camp, as a whole, was so quiet it seemed almost deserted; and, as one of our party observed, it was a ghostly sort of place full of shadows and silence.

Although the houses were naturally inexpensive⁠—no one of them could have cost more than two hundred and fifty dollars (£50)⁠—there were everywhere evidences of neglect, poverty, and even dirt that were, to say the least of it, dispiriting. There was an unnecessary cheapness, an unnecessary vulgarity. Besides this, and in spite of the sweet fragrance of the pines, there was a closeness and stuffiness about the atmosphere that affected all our party alike, and exerted on our spirits an influence far from exhilarating. Moreover, the faces we had so far seen were of a low order, coarse, heavy, uninspired, with queer, farseeing eyes that lent them their only interest, and that an unnatural one. There was nowhere, so far as we could discern, the spirit of strong cheerfulness, nowhere the note of positive happiness. Brightness was a word that fell stillborn in that atmosphere and woke no echo. All of our party, though each one expressed it differently, acknowledged to the consciousness of a certain vague despondency, almost as if the campers were forever communicating with the spirits of the dead, yet winning from them no other doctrines than those of negation and despair.

The shadows were beginning to lengthen, and the sun had already dropped behind the shoulder of the hill, when we turned a corner and came suddenly upon the first man we had as yet seen in the community.

His cottage faced the road, and he sat on the verandah rocking slowly to and fro in a very dilapidated chair. He was an old man, tall, and very thin. His legs were crossed and his bony hands rested, one over the other, upon his knees. A spare white beard straggled over half his waistcoat, and his large hooked nose somehow reminded one of a vulture or other big bird of prey. At first, as we turned the corner talking in low voices, he took no notice of us, but sat staring beyond us into vacancy. But the next minute, hearing our voices, he turned his face in our direction and we met the queer gaze of his faint blue, watery eyes. It was a picture to impress the mind vividly, this spare, spectre-like old man, white-bearded and misty-eyed, sitting solitary on his verandah and staring into the shadows of the darkening pine-grove.

From his face our glance shifted quickly to a cardboard placard hanging in the window behind him with the words in bold type⁠—seer, $1 a sitting. Without leaving his chair he exchanged the courtesies of the evening with us in a weak, high voice and with a faint smile. One hardly knew how to continue the conversation thus begun, but he at once relieved us of all difficulties.

“Would you like to know who your guides are, or who is near you?” he asked in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were speaking of an ascent of the Alps, or a game of hide-and-seek.

“What can you tell us?”

“Most anything you want to know,” he answered obligingly, but with obvious sincerity; “who’s with you, and who’s thinkin’ of you in the spirit-world.” We hesitated and the old man saw his advantage. He turned to an elderly lady of our party. “A number of your friends have passed over,” he said.

“Passed over?”

“Passed over,” he repeated; “we never say died.” She waited expectantly. “Isn’t that so?” he asked, stroking his beard.

“Yes,” she said, “I have lost a good many.”

“Not lost,” he said with his faint smile, “not lost, only passed over.” There was a short pause. “There’s a tall, dark man behind you now,” he went on; “he’s looking over your shoulder at this very minute.”

This was a startling bit of news and one of the ladies in the party uttered a little scream. We all turned and peered into the gathering shadows while the seer went on to describe the tall, dark man with the minutest detail.

“What’s his name?” asked the lady concerned.

“I can’t quite get that,” he replied, as if making an effort to hear, “but he was very fond of you, and is so still. Do you recognise him?” The lady shook her head. “He wants to speak to you,” continued the old man; “he says he has something important to tell you⁠—a warning.”

“Won’t he tell it to you for me?” she asked,

The seer shook his head and smiled. “No; he says it’s for you alone; but he’ll tell it to me if I go into the trance-state, because then I don’t know what I’m telling, and don’t remember afterwards.” He continued rocking gently to and fro and staring into the darkness behind him as if he saw someone and was conversing with him.

We tried to make a bargain with the seer, but he was obdurate. Four shillings a head we considered too much, and he insisted on taking one at a time, and that one alone. He told us that during the winter he lived in H. and followed his profession with lower fees, but that in the summer he was obliged to raise them to a prohibitive figure, because he came to the camp to rest and recuperate. The sceptical and curious visitors, he explained further, exhausted and depleted him; it wasn’t worth it under a dollar a sitting.

We moved quietly up the silent lane with the uncomfortable feeling that the tall, dark man was looking over each one’s shoulder in turn and trying to whisper something portentous and unearthly into our ears, And, as we moved in and out among the cottages, we noticed that many windows showed placards similar to the one we had seen, with the various legends, Medium, Clairvoyant, Seer, Materialising Medium, Trance Medium, Crystal Gazer, and so forth.

It was now long after six o’clock and the occupants of the cottages came out in twos and threes to sit and rock on their verandahs. There were no lights in the streets nor lamps in the windows; the place was growing very dark and the air cooler.

We spoke to some of the women, especially when they were supported by interesting placards in the windows; but they one and all declined to sit for us before eight o’clock. It was too early, or they were too tired, or it was too soon after tea⁠—or something. If we cared, however, to come back at that hour there would be no lack of mediums who would be willing to enter the trance-condition and tell us all we wanted to know. To another visit, therefore, of a week later, we were obliged to defer the dubious pleasure of communicating with spirits at the moderate rate of two shillings a head.

It was a bright moonlight night when we drove over to the camp for the second time, and as we entered the grove the pines gave forth a mournful response to the breeze that came in from the sea.

As had been foretold, there was no difficulty in finding a willing medium. The first woman we addressed agreed to give us a sitting all together. She was a stout middle-aged person clothed in a slovenly brown dress that was loose where it should have been tight, and tight where it should have been loose. Her face, though coarse and generally unattractive, was in no sense bad. She was quite illiterate. “You don’t need to pay if it isn’t satisfactory,” she said, as under her direction we entered the stuffy little parlour that opened off the verandah, and seated ourselves in more or less of a circle. Her own chair was against a curtain which separated the parlour from the bedroom⁠—probably the only other room in the house. A turned-down oil lamp, that smelt abominably, stood on the table beside her and enabled us to see the play of her face. Otherwise, there was no light but the reflected glimmer of the moonbeams which lay outside like silver streaks among the dark tree-stems; while the only sound was the occasional muffled footstep of someone passing up or down the lane.

For about five minutes we sat in silence. The medium was opposite us, her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap. Just over my head a canary kept fidgeting in its cage and once, when I put my hand up and passed it over my face, I struck the bars and brought down a shower of seed all over me.

Suddenly the woman shivered audibly, and drew a long breath; at the same time she raised her face as if she were looking at us, though the eyes were still closed. Then she lifted an arm weakly, about breast-high, and let it drop again upon her lap. Recalling my former knowledge of the orthodox methods of procedure on such occasions I ventured to speak according to the approved formula, and said “Good evening.”

The woman’s lips, plainly visible in the lamplight, moved a little and a voice issued forth that faintly resembled her own, yet had a different accent. “Good evening,” it said.

“We’re very glad to see that you’ve come.”

“I’se glad too,” said the voice. “You’re all strangers, aren’t you?” It spoke in the broken English peculiar to the Indians, a jargon which is difficult to reproduce. On our answering in the affirmative, it went on: “But I know you all. I’se often with you and with the two squaws too.” There was no expression on the face as it spoke; it was like the face of a corpse.

“Are you an Indian spirit?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Silver Star.”

“Do you often use this medium?”

“Yes,” and here it laughed, “very often. She’s my medie; I come to her all the time; I’se her control.”

“Have I got a control too?”

“Course you has. Everybody has a guide, or a control.”

“Has everyone here got a guide?”

“Yes. The squaw next you has two, and the other squaw has one, and so has the brave beyond.”

“Who is my guide?”

“I can see him; he is a great big Indian; his name’s Black Hawk. He always look after you; he stand behind your chair now.”

It would be tedious to reproduce the conversations that were carried on in this manner between Silver Star and each one of our party in turn. The future was told, the past guessed at; prophecies were made, warnings uttered, and even jokes exchanged. One of our party was informed that her husband had passed over, which was true, and was still with her day and night. Another was told that he was shortly going to cut sticks (Indian for marry), which was also true, since the young lady of his affections was at that moment seated next him. Another was told, on the other hand, that his squaw was soon to pass over, which was not true because he had not got a squaw and was in no immediate danger of getting one.

Perhaps the scene had lasted in this way about half an hour when the voice said with considerable abruptness: “Now I must go; my medie’s tired. I wish you all good night and hope I see you again.” Throughout it had expressed the tenderest solicitude for the health of the body it claimed to be making use of.

Again a shiver, ever so slight, passed over the body of the woman, and she suddenly opened her eyes and stared round the room with a dazed and puzzled expression. Then she turned up the lamp and looked hard at each of us. For a moment no one spoke.

“Was it satisfactory?” she presently asked. By way of reply we handed her the money agreed upon. “Who came?” was the next question. We informed her that Silver Star had chatted pleasantly with us but had betrayed no information of value. “Ah, she’s only a child,” the woman explained. “It’s a young Indian child; she often comes. But did she stay all the time? Was there no one else?”

“No one else.”

“I’m sorry. Of course, they’re ’most all Indian spirits, but some know more than others. Eagle Feather comes sometimes. He tells a lot, but he’s very rough and hurts me; he is violent at times and knocks me about; he don’t mean no harm, but that’s his way, you see.”

She assured us also that we each had an Indian guide who was with us most of the day and looked after our welfare, keeping away the bad spirits. “I have a lot of them,” she said, as if they were pets, “and often see em among the trees out there,” pointing over our shoulders to the wood, “or they come to my bedside at night. I wouldn’t be without ’em for anything.”

We had little more conversation with her. She seemed happy and contented, and without the least fear of death, talking of the hereafter as if it were tomorrow or the next day.

Before we left that night we talked with other members of the camp, men and women, and saw the interior of several of the cottages. They were all the same; the people illiterate, unkempt, shabby; the rooms poorly furnished, vulgar, dirty. We saw neither books, periodicals nor pictures, with the single exception of a highly-coloured chromolithograph of a stout woman in a black dress with red cheeks, pearls round her throat, and shining dark eyes, who was “a wonder of a medium.”

The life of the camp, so far as we could gather, was quiet and uneventful. There was no pretence of occupation. The people came there from the neighbouring county as well as from far distant States, and they came to rest, and not to work. There were several shops in the little lane, a greengrocer, a stationer, and a butcher whose cart bore the inscription Spiritualists’ Camp. Many of those we spoke to were vegetarians. Alcohol was not to be purchased there in any form for love or money. We also visited a large meeting-hall capable of holding a couple of thousand people, and were told that it was used every year for the Annual Spiritualists’ Convention, and also during the summer for Sunday gatherings at which inspirational addresses were delivered.

In the immediate neighbourhood of the camp were farms and villages of the typical New England sort, and a little enquiry showed that their inhabitants paid no special attention to the campers, nor regarded them as anything out of the common. The fact was that every village had its own spiritualists; and, since the excitement of 1848, when the American movement received such amazing impetus from the Fox phenomena, the people had become so accustomed to it that they thought no more strangely of its devotees than they did of Christian Scientists, Theosophists, or Swedenborgians.

About ten o’clock, as we drove slowly along the silent lanes, no light was to be seen in any of the cottages. The grove was wrapped in stillness, and overhead the moon and the kindly stars looked down through the tangle of pine-boughs and helped us find our way out into the sweeter air of the open country.