Etna Spiritualist Association - The in-betweens: the spiritualists, mediums, and legends of Camp Etna

The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna

MIRA PTACIN

For my soul pack: Andrew, Theo, Simone, Huck, and Maybe

In memory of Mickey Jackson

July 7, 1939July 15, 2018

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

Aristotle, Poetics

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

Simone de Beauvoir, La Vieillesse

God looks suspiciously a lot like the ruling class. Religion is politics in the sky.

Gloria Steinem

W hen I guessed correctly that it was my brother, Julian, coming through, the licorice-colored coffee table rocked back and forth a couple of times before tipping, my knees catching the thing before it could fall to the ground.

Its him, said Janice.

The heavy table pressed into me, hard. Hes giving you a hug, Janice continued, exhaling with steady assurance even though my brother Jules had been dead coming on twenty years.

Outside the cottage of Janice Nelson-Kroesser, chocolate-milk mud puddles booby-trapped the path to her front door. A thin April fog hovered over the slushy gravel driveway, ambivalent, like a shy snake. Beyond Janices parked minivan, a gaggle of boarded-up cabins lined Pond Street: cold, dark, cockamamie and hibernating, waiting for their summer residents to wake them up come May, to have life zapped back into their old gingerbread-house bones. Behind them, the air sap-filled and sweet, a tall forest of pines with creeping bittersweet, chopped logs, and brush, made way for a little clearing in which sat a port-apotty with a laminated note taped onto its door: BE AWARE! TOADS HANG OUT ON THE TOILET TISSUE ROLL.

It was spring in Maine and we were at Camp Etna, the 141-year-old Spiritualist community brought to life in 1876 and, compared to its explosive popularity back in its youth and teenage years, kept pretty much secret for the past fifty. It was a hard place to find, and if it hadnt been for a friend, Celia, mentioning it to me, I probably never would have really known that Spiritualism was an actual religion, nor would I have ever found this sleepy hollow. I was thirty-four years old, living in Maine, and until this year I had never heard of Camp Etna. Despite its Burning Mansized popularity back in the nineteenth and twentieth century, most people I spoke to knew zilch about this place either. When I asked the gas-station clerk a quarter mile down the road from Camp Etna if she had any idea of what happens up the street and behind the rusty iron gates at 77 Stage Road, she handed me my change and my bag of Cheetos, looked at me blankly, and supposed that the place was just a summer camp for Cub Scouts. She wasnt entirely off in her guessthe enchanted hamlet did build lots of bonfires, and it was for scouts, its just that Spiritualists were the kind of scouts who ventured into the afterlife rather than into national parks. They spoke to the dead rather than earned merit nature badges, so thats what I told her: Camp Etna is a magical living organism of a community of clairvoyants, mediums, psychics, flute-playing shamans, table tippers, trance channelers, mind-readers, dousers, Reiki healers, angel painters, past-life readers, hypnotists, paranormal investigators, and other like-minded Spiritualists.

By Spiritualist, I dont mean spiritual, as in, Im not religious, Im spiritual or Im trying to meditate more, eat more vegetables, and be more spiritual. No. Camp Etna is legitimately a religious camp, and Spiritualism (with a capital S) is a legitimate, organized, officially recognized, tax-exempt religion. Unlike most religions, Spiritualism is fairly young. Like most religions, Spiritualism was founded by humans who believe in a higher power and life after death, as well as living life with purpose, and have dedicated that purpose to their religious pursuit. But what makes Spiritualists different from the most popular American religions (a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute estimated that 69 percent of Americans are Christians, 45 percent professing attendance at a variety of churches that could be considered Protestant, and 20 percent professing Catholic beliefs) was that Spiritualists believe each and every living human has the power and was born with the tools to access and communicate with that great unknown directly, as well as talk directly to people who have passed and gone back to the big white light. In other words, Spiritualists have two major beliefs in their faith: that it is our duty to practice the Golden Rule, and also that we humans can talk to the dead if we want to. They trust that ghosts are not facile, are not hoaxes, and are much more than white sheets with eyeholes cut out. Spiritualists believe that the human spirit is with us always, even after people die, and that we have the tools to reach these spirits. Spiritualists believe that somewhere within our flesh, our eyeballs, our brain, our muscle, fingernails, bone marrow, hair, and heart is an organic phone line from which we can chat with God, access angels, and converse with the departed if we want to. Spiritualists are also willing to provide scientific evidence to prove what many people may otherwise believe to be a bunch of bullshit.

And as for the rest of us? Some people believe them, and in them. Many are on the fence. Others laugh in the face of the Spiritualist belief system. Regardless of what the outside world thinks of it, the religion lives on. Since its birth in the late 1800s, Camp Etna, the tiny rugged hamlet in the middle of rural Maine, has served as a sacred meeting ground for the mystical evolution of many of these Spiritualistsa place for them to meet regularly to sharpen their swords, learn new skills, heal others by accessing the great beyond, tighten their worldwide community, and eat some really good homemade pie and pot roast. Despite efforts to shut the religion down and shut the women up, to shove them into the corner under the label hysteria, despite all this, a century and a half after its conception, the camp still remained a living and breathing community. Today, as summer neared, Camp Etna was yawning and stretching, once again about to open its gates for peak Spiritualist season.

The inside of Janices cottage was snug and calm and smelled like roasted vegetables and melon-scented candles. This was their summer place; Janice and her husband, Ken, called it Phoenix Rising. Small wooden signs with words like Laugh and Love and Welcome hung on the walls, the font painted in curled, feminine letters.