Cassadaga Nights

“It’s like something out of a Clint Eastwood movie,” said the biker chick to her companions at the table behind ours, describing Cassadaga, the central Florida town we’d just checked out of earlier that morning. Our search for breakfast ended up at Gram’s Kitchen, a Deland diner popular with the chrome and handlebar crowd.

I imagined ol’ Clint squinting in the high noon, attired in a flowing tunic, smelling of nag champa, crystals dangling around his neck, trying to decide where to have his fortune read. Cassadaga’s a one-intersection ghost town in the middle of nowhere dotted with old cracker houses in various stages of repair, sporting shingles for their resident psychics and related service providers.

Long ago, during a séance, New Yorker George Colby was

told that he would establish a spiritualist camp somewhere down south. His spirit guide led him to this “amazing energy vortex” and he founded Cassadaga in 1894. One hundred fifteen years later, Jennie from the Block, Maleficent Mel and I arrived at the Cassadaga Hotel and checked into our room, a tiny little sweatbox at the end of a spooky hallway. A scary-looking wardrobe easily could have been a portal to the Netherworld.

Yes—I blew some hard-earned cash having my tarot cards read—I’m a sucker to discover what infinite possibilities might be wrapped up in the mysteries of the Universe (and a couple of things actually have happened, as predicted).

Communing with the psychic world worked up an appetite, so we headed for the shady grove of DeLeon Springs nearby. At the park’s Old Sugar Mill restaurant, we stuffed ourselves with pancakes made on our tabletop griddle. The icy spring itself was overrun with humanity cooling off in the hot midday sun, so we trundled back to Cassadaga and took a stroll around town.

Its few shops hawk all manner of metaphysical books, crystals and other paraphernalia; the one restaurant, located in our hotel, closes early. Unless you make your own fun, there is seriously nothing to do in Cassadaga, once you’ve exhausted your budget ferreting out mystical guidance from one of their mediums.

The liquid spirits appeared after our nap. We drained a bottle of sweet tea vodka and enjoyed an antipasto spread in our room as the sun went down. Then, cameras at the ready, we set off in search of the spirits Cassadaga is known for.

Our anticipated ghostly apparitions, like anyone else with an ounce of sense, must’ve headed to cooler climes in the midst of the summer heat—substantial photographic orbs were hard to come by, though we did see a few oddities and felt the requisite flash of cooler air in one particularly charged intersection near the lake.

Jennie from the Block launched into an impromptu frolic along the darkened shore as if she’d been possessed by the spirit of a long-ago picnic reveler—and a hirsute one at that, according to the shots Mel snapped. That was the freakiest, most unexplainable event that happened during our expedition.

Back at the hotel, we drifted off to sleep, window unit cranking, with nary a bump in the night.

UP NEXT: Scaling Mt. Dora