I'm going to try something a little different, and by something a little different, I do mean go to a haunted museum. The library at Cassadega offered a number of interesting offerings when it came to spiritualist literature, but not much in the way of cultures existing outside of the white metal class in the nineteenth and twentieth century. So I'm hoping that Sea Green's Haunted History House and Museum will be better. It's in this little purple building near the teeny tiny post office that's almost always closing, and it looks and sounds like a bit of a tourist trap. But I happen to know that it used to be a Cassadega History museum before being rebranded to be a little more pop culture touristy, and I hope there's still some of that inside. It's not like an official part of the camp and is not claimed or vetted by the mediums. So you'd think that Sea Greens can get a little loosey goosey punk rock with how they present their history. Ten bucks later, I'm in. Actually, I did have to gently reject the manager who was trying to sell me a haunted doll for twenty dollars on the way in. Like, look, I have twenty dollars, but I just don't want a haunted doll. I'm flying spirit airlines on the way home. Do you really think we can afford the risk? We cannot. But I'm in the museum, and as I suspected, a lot of newspaper clippings and primary resources around Cassadega and twentieth century spiritualism are still here. It's really just a matter of finding them among the many framed movie posters, and my favorite, a full sized jigsaw doll on a little tricycle jigsaw from Saw. Actually, if you haven't seen Saw, stop the podcast right now and go watch Saw. At least Saw one. Some of the best sociological storytelling of our lifetimes is contained in James Wand's Saw Saga. Actually, on one of my first dates with the guy that I eventually lost my virginity too, on August two ten, we watched five Saw movies in one sitting. Did not take a peabreak, did not kiss, should have married him, didn't became a comedian. You know where that gets you? You start doing some gonzo stuff, Where does that get you? I'll tell you where that gets you Central Florida in the middle of the day in a haunted museum, sitting next to a jigsaw doll the size of a human three year old. Not too bad. I have no regrets. To quote a hot Dog Bun I saw in Toledo last summer, we wear the chains we forge in life, which I agree with the spirit of There's other factors at play, for sure, but I see where the hot Dog Bun was going with it. Where are we We're at a haunted museum, and honestly, there's more useful information here than I was expecting. There's acknowledgement of the Fox sisters, for example, including the fact that they had claimed at one time that spiritualism was a hoax. The museum also includes the admission that spiritualism had experienced a decline in the late nineteenth century, something you would not catch the camp sanctioned mediums fessing up to. There are some references to indigenous culture, but they're about on par as anywhere else in the camp. There's this small room right past the entrance that references Native culture. They certainly have more books than the library did on the subject. But the twist is you're not allowed to touch the books. Here there's this little laser jet printed sign with a drawing of the girl from the movie The Ring, the one who crawls out of the TV seven Days to Live. The sign says this, please don't touch books. Some are so old they will fall apart. Some are haunted. Either way, it won't work out well for you. Thanks management and the indigenous imagery they do use in the room ranges from innocuous to outright offensive. There's this flickering red light bulb to set the tone for the haunted museum. There's a couple of figurines depicting Native life. There's the first of many scary mannequins scattered throughout the building that the owners dressed in iParty costumes to fit the theme of any given room, and make no mistake, I love the haunted mannequins, but the haunted mannequin in the Indigenous History room does seem to be wearing a costume that was left over from Disney's Pocahontas, so not great representation wise. In a different room, there's a mention of voodoo practices in New Orleans, but it's only in passing. Mostly just a couple of tourist posters for other places in New Orleans. But even this is more acknowledgment of other spiritual idea as in cultures. Then most areas of the camp will do. I need to get back to these mannequins for a second. The second mannequin you encounter at Sea Green's haunted History House and Museum has been attempted to be dressed as the Cassadega Camp founder George Colby. Now the management must know they're not dressing the mannequins very convincingly. This one, for example, is a female coated mannequin wearing a Mark Twain wig, complete with handlebar mustache and a suit that is at least two sizes too large, So you can only tell who the mannequin is intended to be by the sticky hello my name is George name tag they've attached to the lapel. But even around this silly mannequin, there are some little historical documents. In this case. Newspaper articles from the eighties and nineties headlines like Cassadega mediums have the right spirit, spiritualists converse with the dead and living tourists and a very optimistic Cassadega springing back after a period of decline. There's also some esoteric history I've never heard about until coming here. One exhibit shows letters between President Harry Truman and a d o J employee named William Underhill, who was a spiritualist and at one time managed the Cassadega Hotel. So it has its problems, but Sea Green's Haunted History House and Museum is iconic. They get all of the history out of the way in their first couple of rooms and then just make a hard mostly irrelevant to spiritualism, pivot into ghostie pop culture and media. After that. Instead of, for example, a room full of information on spiritism and a spiritismo, there's a whole wall of framed pictures of those neckbeards on the Sci Fi channel who claimed to hunt ghosts. There are brief, factually questionable explainers on things like tarot cards, reading tea leaves, palmistry, astrology, a pile of Jack Skellington toys. Why not, and not to go back to the mannequins again, But since I know you're curious, here are my top three mannequins. At the first is a woman dressed as a pilgrim who has my haircut, and her name tag reads hello, my name is Priscilla, the Puritan Queen of the desk Okay. Coming in at number two. Male mannequin dressed in iParty griffin door robes. His name tag says hello, my name is Neville. Then my bottom is not that long? Horrible. Finally, a mannequin that is also a huge gorilla wearing sunglasses, a hat from disney World and a Pride bandanna with a name tag that says, and you're not ready for this? Hello, my name is George. There's two. George is the founder of the camp and also a gay gorilla. Amazing. No notes if you don't want to visit this museum at this point, I don't know how else to sell you on. The history here is minimal. For sure. There's no reason a history museum needs a wall full of clown masks, or a wall full of dead baby dolls, or a whole room dedicated to things that are just vaguely scary. I couldn't get a read for the theme on this room. It's madness, it's anarchy. But it's also the only place you see even an attempt to touch on other spiritually based religions. However poorly done. And it's poorly done. So this week on Ghoest Church, I want to create a little audio room for two religious movements that were heavily influenced by American spiritualism, A Spiritismo and the Black spiritual Churches of America. So hop on your tricycle, my little jigsaw, because the theme song is I'm bailing on It. I'm bailing on It. Music playing us jash and good look. Welcome back to my little slice of central Floridian paradise where I'm returning to my hot waterless hotel room at the Hotel CASTI day go to sit through the notes I took away from the library the evening before. It was a weird night in more ways than one, but there's no time to think about that right now. Instead, I flipped through the pictures I took on my phone of book pages that stuck out to me in the moment, and I asked my spirit guides, which I'm remembering correctly, is a guy named Dawn, a lady named Helen, a swan, and two archangels. I asked them to show me something. Here's what I know. Spiritualism was far from the only white dominant religion to make their way on stolen land in Florida during the late nineteenth century. Baptists and Methodists came to the area less than twenty years before, and Protestants only had a twenty three year head start on the Spiritualists in forming a permanent presence in Volutia County. I wasn't aware of the majority of the actual history behind the land that Cassadega was settled on when I arrived at the library in town for my two hour cram session. I wanted to sort of experiment and see how much the library would teach me and how vested the spiritualists who lived there now are in acknowledging any history that isn't directly taken from the mouths of settlers who got them started. As you know by now, there wasn't too much. One of the books had caught my attention from across the room. Had had this bright blue cover a little older and in gold script it said what is spiritualism and who are these spiritualists? And I thought, yeah, exactly, I should call my podcast that I want to know. So I opened the book the page eight and there is a prominent heading that reads spiritualism is not spiritism, So let me be the first to say yes, m no, they are not the same systems of belief, but, like their names would indicate, there is a lot of shared history and ideas between these movements. But this book is pretty aggressive in distancing spiritism. Page eight reads this spiritualism must be differentiated from spiritism. The terminologies of the two words absolutely necessitate, as every scholar knows entirely different meanings. Chinese Indians and Utah Mormons are spiritists believing in present spirit communications. Most of the African tribes of the Dark Continent worshiped demons believe in spirit converse, but certainly they are not intelligent religious spiritualists. Holy shit. In addition to being outwardly racist, most of this information is wrong, and so to any current practicing spiritualists that denies a history of racism within the religion, that's your book, you guys. It's likely that spiritism specific glee as being singled out here because of its popularity among people in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. So this library does mention spiritism, sure, but not in a kind way, which is a shame, because spiritism is inherently influenced by spiritualism and is the core of Espiritismo, possibly the widest practiced version of spiritualism today. So a quick history, So how do you get from spiritualism to a spiritismo? In short, Hydesville and the Fox Sisters led to spiritualism. In the eighteen forties, Spiritualism inspired a French guy named Alan Cardick. Alan Cardeck did some investigations of spiritualist phenomena and modified the beliefs to call it spiritism. Cardick writes a book that arrives in Latin America and is a huge hit. In Latin America, there were large amounts of people from Africa brought and enslaved by colonizers, which led to blending their spiritual traditions with cardex ideas that were popping off in the area. And this is approximately how a spiritusm began, a variation on American spiritualism, whose exact beliefs and rituals vary with some significance depending on the region it's being practiced in. The most popular areas include Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and each branch is influenced by some degree by the indigenous cultures of these countries and indigenous African spirituality. So to start, who is Alan Cardik? First things first, that's not his real name. His real name sounds expensive. It's hippolyte Leon de nizard reveil Okay King Mr. Four names. Was raised in France as a Roman Catholic the early eighteen hundreds and didn't develop an interest in even the concept of the seance until he was in his fifties and encountered spiritualism, so he became interested in the movement the Fox Sisters had began around the same time a lot of people did, but he approached examining spiritualist phenomena with the mind of an academic kind of skeptically, and so upon investigating on his own terms, he was quick to dismiss Franz Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism and stated on many occasions that there was a high likelihood that there was some fraudulence at play with a lot of the medium's working, particularly those that were doing the really spectacular physical stuff, but he didn't think it was all bullshit. Alan Cardick did not claim or endorse the full spectrum of spiritualist phenomena and all of its spirit photography habitet acts, spirit hands, and ectoplasm. And I know I still have to tell you about ectoplasm, but it's not going to happen this week. I think it's going to happen next week, So relax. Hell. After investigating Alan Cardick boiled down his beliefs to the following simple statements. True mediums could provide information that they couldn't have known at the beginning of a reading. True mediums could demonstrate the skills a spirit had that they themselves didn't possess. I think a specific handwriting, speaking the language they didn't know. All that good stuff. And finally, true mediums were able to communicate or even mimic the personality of a specific individual that had died. Cardiac called his scale back belief system Spiritism Original tent out of ten, and he published his first and most successful book on the subject, which was basically five hundred or so question and answers on what spiritism did and did not endorse in eighteen fifty seven. And if you thought the belief system sounded like a ripoff of spiritualism, wait till you hear the name of his book. It is the Spirit's Book. Wow. I mean, look, he was an academic. He was not an artiste. Not everyone to think of an incredible name like ghost Church, which I did not think of. My producer Sophie thought of it, so thank you Sophie. Anyways, as creative genius Alan Cardiac explained it, spiritism was about uniting three of the main interests of the nineteenth century together, those being science, philosophy, and religion under a singular belief system. In some ways, it was much easier to buy into Spiritism because of its clarity. The Fox sisters had assembled the belief system of Spiritualism kind of in real time in this chaotic way, and didn't have a lot of control over dictating what they did and did not think was real. In the case of Cardec and Spiritism, the Spirit's Book was far better equipped to serve as a sort of alleged scientific endorsement to mediumship as well as I viewing the moralistic ideas that tend to define religion, and for its time, it's a pretty progressive text. It endorses the idea of evolution, a theory that some public schools still won't teach, and at the time Darwin's theory had been published less than twenty years before Cardek started writing. The book also incorporated Eastern reincarnative ideas in a way that spiritualism proper always skewed a little too Christian to commit to. Many branches of a spiritismo uses Cardek's work heavily influenced by spiritualism as sort of the foundation. In general, a spiritismo requires belief in an omnipotent God and belief in the spirit realm. Like American spiritualism's sexy signature blend of a non wrathful but still basically Christian God without all of the heaven, hell and brimstone. A spiritismo believes that spirits inhabiting our bodies can evolve over time in their morality, and that communication with a spiritistas or mediums basically will help facilitate this process of growth. Other shared practices include trans mediumship, or a medium's ability to become possessed by a spirit and completely change their voice and mannerisms in the process. You might remember this phenomena when I shared a clip of Reverend Dr Louis Keith channeling Lucerne. You pick your time of us down to the very second of your all time. You pick your time when you enter this aspect and you pick your birthdage months day. You pick your name long before you get here, whether you like it or not. Another blend of indigenous traditions combining with spiritualist ideas was the a spiritus most spin on the seance, the mesa or mass that required practitioners gather around a mesa or table, often with additional rituals or embellished altars that could include goblets of water flowers, small statues and figurines, tobacco and candles. Music can be integral to the experience. In her paper Spiritist mediumship as historical mediation African American pasts, Black ancestral presence, and Afro Cuban religions. Researcher Elizabeth Perez described lyrics that maybe understood as products of the Cuban and Puerto Rican histories from which they emerged, rich in the experiences of women, persons of African descent, and those from the lower classes, excluded from the official histories, yet still resonant to day. Unlike spiritualists in Cassadega, those practicing a spiritismo tend towards group sciences, not the one on one sessions that are commonly practiced in Lily Dale, Cassadega, and other camps. So Alan Cardix book. The Spirits Book became very popular in several countries that were in a state of physically and intellectually violent colonial flux throughout the nineteenth century, and the branches that develop tend to be very specific to the culture, history, and moment of the area they existed in. I wanted to give examples of a few different branches here, including Puerto rican A Spiritismo, a Spiritismo de cardon A, Spiritismo Cruisal, and Santa Rismo, each having very unique traditions. Let's start in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico had been colonized by Spain back in the fifteen hundreds. Spain brought disease and religion and kidnapped enslaved people, and like most imperialists and express desire to quash the indigenous cultures and practices that predated their invasion. Many African enslaved people, forcibly brought to the region were from the Yoruba land region of Africa that includes what is now Nigeria, the Binian Republic, and Toba. Their beliefs included spirit communication and many different gods and goddesses, just as different indigenous American groups slowly pooled their ideas with other groups, tribes, and often escaped slaves taking refuge in Spanish Florida, a new system of beliefs began to emerge, what is now known as Puerto Rican espiritismo. This combination of Yoruba practices and that of indigenous Puerto Rican people known as Tanos, also brought in the concept of metaphysical healing and the use of some physical mediumship meaning tobacco spells, etcetera, and even some Spanish folk medicine found its way into the evolving spiritual culture. The concept of healing was a significant part of a spiritismo, to the point where an entire branch, a Spiritismo di Cordon, was built around the concept. These sounds like rituals would generally consist of a circle of people chanting, swinging their arms and beating the floor until a hypnotic trance state was achieved. It's said to be a very intense ritual mentally, physically, emotionally, with no real leadership system except for a head medium who would purify the room to protect others from bad spirits before a ritual began. What I also think is really interesting is that these ceremonies tend to have a very open door policy. This particular branch blended elements of Catholicism, Kardecian Spiritism which does sound like star Trek, and Tana religious rituals, implementing dances called aratos. Alan Cardick's work became popular among different classes in different ways. Different classes tended to practice with different ceremonies, and the upper class remained most engaged in espiritismo during wartime. A good example of this is the Ten Years War, a conflict that began in eighteen sixty eight in which Cuba fought Spain for their independence and were supported by Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Dominican volunteer troops who shared their struggle. This was the most engaged the middle class had ever been with the movement, as they began to lose soldiers who they knew. This is very similar to what was happening in the Continental US with the Civil War around the same time. Because of the variety of blended cultures and political tensions, even war branches of a spiritismo developed in Puerto Rico. One leaned further into cardex work and was called White Table a Spiritismo for the seance table, while others used American spiritualisms increasing popularity as a means to practice their indigenous religion that had been deemed uncivilized by the imperialists, such as the Congo religion. Over in Cuba, losses from the Ten Years War increased a spiritis most popularity and spiritual beliefs brought by an increasing number of enslaved African people helped shape the ideas further. For the record, slavery was not abolished in this area until eighteen eighty six. This particular offshoot was called a spiritismo cruise Ou, which pulled from some Catholicism and another African diasporic religion called Palo that developed among enslaved people in Cuba. They would use Palo cauldrons and others significant objects while still observing Catholic saints. Because this branch was innovated and frequently observed by enslaved people, spirits channeled would often be deceased enslaved people who spoke Bosol Spanish, which was a dialect that was developed out of necessity that combined the colonizing enslaver's language with ki Congo, a Bantu language spoken by enslaved people who were originally from the Congo. This branch of the spiritismo is alter heavy. I think photos of the dead candles to summon their specific spirit. And finally, there was Santa Rismo, a blend of you guest it Spiritismo and Santoria, which was one of the most popular religions innovated in the nineteenth century in Cuba. Santoria is an African diasporic religion that combines elements of the Yoruba religion from West Africa, Roman Catholicism, and spiritism. As written by Kardak in their prod Do, says mediums can communicate with spirits while themselves possessed by the dead. Leaders include the Godfather and Godmother Awesome aka the Padrino and Madrina, who conduct mediumship sessions around a table and play or sing Afro Cuban chants and prayers to attract good spirits. Rituals would sometimes end with a ceremony called sahumerio, a purification ritual that uses charcoal, garlic, and herbs to extract evil spirits and wash them away with blessed water. A Spiritismo at large became extremely popular and outlived the American spiritualism craze in the continental US, which had pretty thoroughly wound down by the nineteen twenties. Even though a Spiritismo was banned during the Cuban Revolution in the nineteen fifties, the movement didn't die out. It was just forced underground, and there are plenty still practicing in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil now, with Brazil aiming nearly four million practicing members as of two thousand ten. Spiritismo and if many forms tells the story of forced enslavement, of imperialism, of an underclass combining multiple systems of belief for their circumstances. Should any of it had to have happened, No, these circumstances were born of oppression, which makes it particularly relevant that a spiritismo and spiritualism are enmeshed in this optimism, the idea that what is coming next will be better than what you're experiencing now. So I decided to ask an expert. Dr Carlos Camacho is a sociologist whose dissertation is called Navigating Ocha LGBT Practitioners, Participation and Navigation of Lukumi. There's a section of this paper that focuses on spirit communication and a spiritismo entirely. He's also an alumnus of the Bechtel cast. But we're not here to talk teenage mutant ninja to today. We're here to talk religion. Here's a bit of our conversation. So Alan Cardick heard about and started saw this wave of spiritualism that was spreading in the Americas and in Europe, and wanted to create his own more quote unquote scientific approach to this um and so that version got really popular in Puerto Rico and in Cuba where UM. The reason it's relevant to my research interests is that when the enslaved peoples from West Africa were brought to the Caribbean, the Yoruba people specifically, there were lots of parts of their religion that were left behind, and so one of the things that they had in Nigeria, um what is today known as Nigeria, was the Agun society, which was their way of connecting with ancestral spirits and the dead, and that didn't come over in mass in the same way. And so as part of the process of recotification of the religion in Cuba, there was a bringing in of certain parts of other traditions, including the particular brand of diesel or spiritism that became really popular in the Caribbean, especially in the Spanish speaking Caribbean. That then when Locumi sent thatia came to the United States, it came um here with the waves of Cuban, Puerto Rican and other migrants bringing the traditions. In the studies, a lot of Camacho's research traced how and why Cardix ideas were implemented into the existing spiritual practices of displaced African people and groups indigenous to Puerto Rico and Cuba. He unpacks that process and the controversy that surrounds it in academia here. So, when the peoples were brought over Um to be enslaved in the America's, one of the groups that came first arguably in popularity in Cuba was the Eco and Go or Congo people um and so they brought their traditions that today we would call Balo boombe Um balomonte Um, which is a Gongo religion that was similar to Lucumi and Santia recodified in the in Cuba and then spread to the Americas. When the Oruba people came over the way, they engaged with religion was that they were willing to bring in other factors, and so they were able to bring people in, which from a certain perspective makes sense. You have something that works, we're going to bring you in and we're going to use it. And so one of the things that is at times theoretically fraught. Various academics have different perspectives on what the process was, but the gist of it is that when the europa people came, you could not practice the religion in the same ways in the Americas the way it was practiced in Africa and Nigeria. In Uruba land, you had the Ocean people living in the Ocean Village, and so all the priests lived there. If you needed to do something with Oshan, you would go to the Ocean village. If you were a Shango priest, you lived with the Shango people, and so these things were very separate and distinct. Priests were initiated into one priest that was not tenable for the enslaved peoples in Cuba, and so part of that recodification was initiating each other into the mysteries of various arisia too maintain the religion, to keep the spirits alive in the Americans because you couldn't do it the old way, so you had to create a new way. Part of that the Egogun society did not make it to um the America's in the same way at the time, and so it spitted these more as it got popular with the whites in Cuba and Puerto Rico. It worked, and so they were able to then use it and bring it into their practice with their own flavor to then communicate with their ancestors. And so one of the things that was interesting is that and this is this part is very um between believers and academics and scholar practitioners. There's a lot of um in fighting about some of the specifics of this UM, but that in your Ruba land, you had your ancestors. It was one collective group of people. It was just your people. Once you bring the Americans into play, you have the native peoples that are on the islands who are in various stages of a genocide per the European expansionist imperialists UM forces UM and so there's different types of dead spirits walking around that has to be engaged with because now you're on someone else's sacred land. And so there was an incorporation of certain classes of spirits that then began to be part of this reformulation. And so there were certain things that became more popular in Cuba that now are sort of standard, like use of tobacco to engage with spirits that wasn't necessarily something that would have been done by the people in Yurubu land before enslavement. And so there was a lot of these shifting um and changing forces, and so it's spited these minds of practice. While not indigenous to the Ruba people, the Gmo people, or the native people's of the islands, it served a function to fill the gap that um was stolen the enslavement, that they weren't able to continue to practice. And so one of the things that my godfather often talks about is that it has to make sense, and for them, it made sense to have this new practice that might have some Christian um overlays, like you start um spiritual nsis with the our Father, but once you get the spirits in the room, it's a very non Christian conversation and there's a lot of non Christian things happening. And because he's been listening to the show Brag Carlos brought up an important distinction between spiritualism at present and a spiritismo then and now, the tendency spiritualists have to channel the odd dead famous person, whether it be Benjamin Franklin or JP Morgan just spitball in here. Camacho makes the following distinction and spoke on the changes he's noticed following the history of a spiritismo. There are really famous spirits that, as far as I'm aware, are commonplace in a spiritismo. Um. What you do see is you'll find um native spirits and enslaved spirits that are around trying to help their descendants to improve given their experiences, to not have that be replicated in the current generation. Uh, which is an interesting phenomenon in a variety of different levels. But you also see a very clear given the politics of certain parts of the Lukami community being very sort of pro black, very sort of um pro people of color, um anti imperial, given that there are some of those political dynamics, the way spirits communicate and are translated is a little different. So in Alan Cardis spiritualism, the way it's sort of the classes of spirits are understood, like you do have the Native, you have the African you have these very rigid stereotypical caricatures, but in practice, given how some spirits do not identify themselves in that way, there has been a movement away from that in that at least the last thirty forty years. And I think that's also shifting socio political dynamics. In the United States. The religion Lukumi came to the US in the sixties, and so you had Black nationalists, you have the Young Lords, you have all of these distinct socio political movements, and then you have this religion that was kept alive by enslaved people's So there's a particular politic that some in the religion today sort of maintained to shift some of those dynamics and relationships with spirit. Thank you again to the wonderful Dr. Carlos Camancho. You can find out more about him and his work at the links in the description of this episode. The final area of spiritualism that it's difficult to find acknowledgment of in Cassadega are volumes on black spiritualism in America. Now, that is not to say that there are no black spiritualists, but for a religion that was founded on the ideas of abolition and found an early supporter and none other than Frederick Douglas. Some may find the persistent whiteness of spiritualism confusing. In fact, my opinion is that the Cassadega Spiritualist camp right now excuse less progressive than when it was founded. Many of the spiritualists I talked to in Florida are center left politically or libertarian and straight up Republican in more cases than one, pretty far from their somewhat radical origins. It didn't feel awesome, and it made me question how early spiritualists had characterized themselves. And upon further investigation, reports that early Spiritualists in Cassadega had been extremely welcoming of the black community, many of whom were freed slaves, may have been exagg rated at the time. It's an exaggeration that follows Cassadega to this day, as suggested by a trip Advisor review I found from a black couple in that declared the camp quote the most racist place in Florida, and that's got to be a real contest. Here's how the spiritualists put it. I'm taking this from the current definitive Cassadega history book, or the one that's still in print, called Cassadega the sounds oldest Spiritualist community. This is a section on the Camp's earliest relations with the black community. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they Camp made an effort to reach out and touch the African American community in the vicinity. Even so, most blacks initially shied away from Cassadega. They disappeared from the streets after sunset, mused to one observer, and watched the spiritualists attending the meetings with much reticence. According to a local white spiced account, African Americans evidently feared Northern spiritualists as ghosts or goblins. In however, Professor William F. Peck addressed a large delegation of blacks and told them that the spirit world had been chiefly instrumental in bringing slavery to an end. So this account is loaded and extremely biased, almost completely ignoring the general politics of the American South in the late nineteenth century. Because regardless of what they considered to be a progressive community, it's understandable that local black residents would not have been interested in fraternizing with a mostly white Northern frene religious group that was already attracting a lot of controversy and speculation because this was an area that, at different points in history was literally run by the KKK. And while Professor Peck's actions flew in the face of racial taboos of the time by lecturing to a black audience at all, it's safe to say that the most potent years of diversity and cooperation within Spiritualism had already passed by the time Cassadega opened in the eighteen nineties. Spiritualism was always a woman dominated movement, even when male mediums began to crop up with some success, and several black women were involved in its formative years. One of the reasons this is is because close allies of the Fox Sisters, a white couple named Amy and Isaac Post, Isaac Post going on to become a medium and write some early Spiritualist texts, where radical Quaker abolitionists who were known for their left wing politics in upstate New York and would harbor fugitive enslaved people in their home as they were getting into spiritualism. It was this group of Quakers that first brought abolitionist, suffragist and all around legend Sojourner Truth into the spiritualist fold beginning in the mid eighteen fifties, after Truth gave a speech on abolition in the area. She bought a home in Harmonia, Michigan, and became associated with the Battle Creek Spiritualist community. This was considered to be one of the early spiritualist utopias that eventually fell to make way for wait for it, a training center for the U. S. Army during World War One. However, it's not known whether Truth ever formally joined the community, but spiritualism has certainly laid its claim that she did. Sojourner Truth was unquestionably the most famous alleged black spiritualist of her era, but far from the only well known black woman to early spiritualism. There was also Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who fled her abuser in the early days of spiritualism and met with none other than Amy Post, who encouraged Jacobs to write on her experience. Under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs wrote a seminal nineteenth century memoir called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. As a writer who had lived on both sides of slavery, Jacobs leveraged her belief and abilities to place emphasis on the pain and suffering that black people had endured in America. But, like Sojourner, truth spiritualists lay claim to Jacob's unequivocally, but scholars aren't convinced that she was a converted believer. Aaron Eve Forbes wrote in her paper do Black Ghosts Matter? Harriet Jacob's spiritualism? As she does with the slave narratives and domestic fiction, Jacob's quickly masters the discourse of spiritualism, using it to gain for herself a voice in the social debates of her day, while at the same time subtly and carefully reworking that discourse to suit her own ends. Writer Harriet E. Wilson was a novelist and a successful practicing trans medium of her time. She debuted in Boston in eighteen seventy six and became one of the first black spiritualists to lecture in what would normally be segregated spaces in New England. She channeled spirit as well as messages on abolition and intersectional feminism. There was also Rebecca Cox Jackson born in sevent who experienced the relatively common spiritualist awakening visions and interactions with Spirit as a child, but being born a free black woman in Pennsylvania, could only credit her reading and writing skills to Spirit. Being barred from a formal education herself, Jackson would go on to establish a popular science circle in her home, which didn't only offer an opportunity to include more Black Americans in the movement, but centered them and gave an opportunity to speak with their dead. Jackson became a local legend in a culture where Black Americans, specifically black women, had perspectives that were frequently disrespected or outright ignored. Spiritualism and mediumship was an opportunity to not just center there often ignored experiences, but explain them in their own words, with significance and an emphasis that was nothing short of religious. So what happened? Why aren't there far more black spiritualists living in and lecturing at Cassadega with regularity? You might be able to guess. While there had been successful black mediums working in the early years of the religion, white spiritualists weren't always as committed to equality as they may have sounded on paper. A perfect example of this came in eighteen ninety three, one year pre Cassadega, when the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, originally called the National Spiritualist Association literally the n s a was founded. Now, for the record, Cassadega was affiliated with the n s a C for a long time, but has since struck out as an individual entity all its own. But this was not the case in the late nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, virtually all of American society was still racially segregated, and the n s a C was no exception. While black people were a part of the religion, black members would be placed in quote colored auxiliary society is unquote within spiritualism. Unsurprisingly, this insistence on segregation in an allegedly progressive religion led to increased tension, and many black spiritualists saw a need to design similar religious organizations in which they could be leaders, not auxiliary appendages. This came to blows in a big way around World War One. The n s a C decided that there was a need for a completely separate, all black Spiritualist organization and installed Joseph P. Whitwell, a white spiritualist leader, to lead a meeting in Cleveland in April of This resulted in a significant protest. Six out of twenty delegates requested to attend, Withdrew furious that this historically equality touting religion was still insisting on segregation. It was popularized by abolitionists. It's so bizarre. The fourteen remaining delegates formed the National Colored Spiritualist Association of Churches, still appointing some white spiritualists as their leaders. The organization was not long for this world. The next year, the n c s a C formally adopted the same declaration of principles you still here at the beginning of Cassadega today, including we believe that the highest morality is contained in the Golden Rule. Whatsoever he would that others should do onto you, do you also onto them the brainworms. It requires for your segregated group to claim the Golden Rule as a part of your religion is just I hate America. It's extremely difficult to find records of the n s a C, but it is said to have existed until the nineteen seventies. It's possible that after the Civil Rights movement there was no more social precedent for segregating spiritualism. But during this stretch of a half century, there became many other spiritual options for Black Americans that didn't require operating as an auxiliary for a white religion, most popularly the movement of independent Black spiritual churches, many of which still exist today. Dr Margharita Simon Guillory wrote on the history of black spiritualist churches in her wonderful book Social and Spiritual Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches, in which she unpacks this crossover between early black and white spiritualists and examines the ways in which Black spirituality is to this day often overlooked in religious history. Her primary research was done in New Orleans, where she described the Black spiritual culture in an interview with the Religious Studies Project in Spiritual Churches, the African American Spiritual churches um that that I researched are a blended religious group, and I like that term blendedness and what they've done. And they have conjoined all of the various elements from institutionalized religions, and I'll talk about that in just the moment, and they've created their own unique religion, specifically the spiritual churches in New Orleans. They've conjoined Protestant traditions with the focus on Pentecostalism, they pulled from their worship style. Catholicism is a major bedrock in spiritual churches in New Orleans just because Catholic religion, Catholicism is the predominant is still today the predominant religion. That's that's practice in New Orleans and particular in Louisiana in general. They also incorporate American spiritualism, the ability to communicate with the dead that was birthed in Western New York in Highsville, New York. They also sort of conjoined and mix into their faith who do and voodoo and this this notion of voodoo is derived directly from Haitian voodoom. So and when you look at sort of their belief system in their ritual practices, you could see a little of all of these religions. Guillory's research was primarily done in pre Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and I highly recommend her work. She breaks down the religious intersections, of which spiritualism is just one that defined these religions that were dominated by black women. She also gets into how environmental racism has destroyed or weakened the Black spiritual church movement. Following her Kane Katrina, a number of churches were destroyed and then reclaimed by the city as eminent domain, drastically reducing the number of spiritual churches in the area. The ways in which the changing landscape around spiritual churches we can tell a lot. If you look at the change in landscape of spiritual churches, it tells us a lot about other landscapes and shifting landscapes in New Orleans, demographically escapes, social landscapes, economic landscapes, political landscapes. If you just focus on the spiritual churches, we could see all of these sort of dynamics that are going on post Katrina. About seventeen of the fifty plus churches that were in New Orleans or operating in New Orleans pre Katrina were located in the ninth ward um, so they were destroyed. And the last chapter of my book sort of talks about that the ways in which not only did they not only were some of them structurally destroyed, but because of some very deliberate economical and political and structural changes that occurred in post Katrina New Orleans, they were sort of the lands in which these churches, even if they were in a position where they could have you restored the church they were taken and they were converted to green spaces. I'll be linking to more of Guileleris work in the description of this episode. But by the mid twentieth century or so, the spiritualist religion as it had been founded by the Fox Sisters had lost many black spiritualists to independent spiritual churches and other movements. And based on this history, it's no wonder why and so what we see is a religion that was popularized by abolitionists that by the early twentieth century was still proving hostile to black spiritualists. In the case of Cassadega, this issue appears to be compounded by the even more intense racial inequality in the American South once that affected the Cassadega area immeasurably in the early twentieth century. By November, the ku Klux Klan was holding open parades in nearby Daytona, Florida, in an attempt to intimidate local black voters out of voting at all. To stage essentially a complete political coup of the area. The KKK burned to black theaters in Daytona as well beat people and when completely unpunished by law enforcement who were deeply invested in looking the other way. Clan candidates virtually swept judicial, municipal and legislative office primaries in something called the Clan Vocation was held in an event that attempted to declare Florida as a quote self governing realm in the invisible Empire unquote. This is just a hundred years ago, and this deeply racist terrorism literally surrounded the Cassadega community. But the KKK never came to Cassadega. Maybe a relief for the camp, But the books I consulted indicate no record of the majority white religion being public allies to Black Americans as they had been in the early days of the Spiritualist movement. One would think if they had been, the KKK may showed up. The history book Cassadega, the sounds oldest Spiritualist community treats this as something of a mystery, talking around the issue like this, Cassadega escaped the clan's wrath during the nineteen twenties. The terrorist group did not so much as burn across in the Spiritualist community. Defies explanation considering the crimes committed by the clan and the victims who suffered their drubbings. The revived KKK of the twenties fantasized of a cultural purity that is one Americanism. One could speculate that because Cassadega went dry before either state or national prohibition became law, and since the Spiritualist manifested a strong sense of patriotism, the clan looked elsewhere for more appealing targets to terrorize. Perhaps the Spiritualists seemed too ordinary to typically American to attempt the clan. If the town's progressive ideas on race and gender coupled with its unorthodox faith, bid Cassadega sitting duck for the clan. What saved the tiny community from the clan ends abuse remains a mystery, even if you're willing to put this writer's dog whistle of too ordinary and too typically American as a way of describing middle class white people. It is at least true that Spiritualists in Cassadega proudly displayed the American flag and historically celebrated patriotic holidays with regularity, And it may have been this jingoistic tilt that protected the majority white religion and deterred Black and Indigenous people from wanting any part of it. But most of this information I have to find on my own time. It's not available on the camp's grounds. And I'm very grateful that there are scholars who have dedicated their careers to preserving the histories of movements like a Spiritisma and the Black Spiritualist Church, ones that are so underdiscussed that I didn't know they existed before working on this show. And okay, I sort of bear ate the lead earlier. Things did get interesting after my night at the library in Cassadega, So if you will indulge me, let's go back there for a second. My two hours were almost up the night I was at the library, and I hadn't been able to do much more than frantically snap pictures of books that don't exist anywhere else and could easily be lost to history forever. If a leak sprung in the ceiling, and given how much maintenance a lot of buildings in Cassadega need, it's not out of the question. The married volunteer librarians from Rhode Island continued to talk to the main librarian, Richard, in a thick accent that makes me homesick whenever I hear it. It's an accent that cannot be reproduced in movies. Matt Damon forgot how to do it ten years ago, and no one wants to talk about it. But the librarian's voice is slow and soothing. He advises the woman from Rhode Island to calm her temper in her dealings with spiritualists, something her husband is eager to jump on, he says, keep telling her to calm down. You know you want to be a medium, and you can't be walking around getting piste off all the time. I want to ask them for more time here, because sure, this place is kind of a mess. But between random volumes on World War two and sticky ancient doctor filled books, there are documents and ideas that might not exist anywhere else. I'm flipping through something called a spiritualist solo graph from that reads as your galactic father mother, I Liolia, seek to warm you with my heart's love and try to fill you with the wisdom and understanding which will help you find the easy way and the light burn for you are my own dearly beloved children. On other book reads, was Abraham Lincoln, a spiritualist and the book itself kind of feels around in the dark for about eighty pages before admitting, no, probably he wasn't. I pick up a CD rom on the ground that says the story of how the sun has influenced cultures since this start of written words, twenty seven minutes of the most important history you will ever witness. There's more solographs with illustrations of the sun within the sun, a wheel within a wheel, the beam within a beam, old volumes of the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research from the nine twenties and thirties. But I already know there's no way that the library is going to be open a second longer than seven o'clock. I can hear the librarian nearly counting down the minutes until he can go home with his dog, and I know there's no use in asking, so I take pictures in the low overhead lighting until the minute I can't anymore. My phone gets all hot in my hands, like when you're trying to finish an argument with your boyfriend before a plane takes off. That's to me picking a fight before getting on a Spirit Airlines flight. Well, good for you all, So my time at the library is up, and the volunteers from Rhode Island and the librarians start to pack up, shut off the lights behind me. As I leave, I get the feeling that a lot of what I managed to capture from the library, however frantically documented, won't be much help to get to the bottom of the spiritualist movement if there is one, and scrolling through my phone at the Hotel Cassadega later that night, I realized that I was right. But something happens as I'm leaving the library that night, and I want to be careful to protect this person's identity. But what I will say is that I am approached by a medium at the camp who I've met before. We have a good rapport, and they asked me what I've been eating on nights like this, nights like the three before this one where the one restaurant in town, Sanatra's Restaurante isn't open. And I tell them the truth. I have been walking to the gas station a half hour away and getting stockpiles of diet gatorade and those little fried chicken bites that come in paper cups under heat lamps. Pretty good stuff. The medium laughs and asks me if I'm here is but I am serious. The reason I've been doing this is because a different medium implied to me the other day that it would be a bad look for a visiting reporter who is still seeking out the approval and cooperation of the spiritualists to be ordering delivery for dinner, and I took it to heart. So the medium I'm talking to laughs and asks me to go to dinner with them, and I say yes and go to their car. Now does that sound dangerous? Sure it does, But I have a policy in these kinds of situations where every single instinct is to say no, and uh to say yes and see if I die or not. So we're on our way to Perkins Restaurant, the Dennis of Florida for a four course meal of salad, half sandwich, a slice of pie, and better information on spiritualism in its current era than any disheveled library could have provided. So what I learned at dinner is for another time for today. Spiritualism's history is full of these kinds of characters. Believers and deniers alike have intense opinions and systems of belief, and the influence of the religion extends far in spite of their somewhat diminished power today. And yes, this extends to its influence on the evolution of the Black Spiritualist Church and a Spiritismo. And for my money, one of the major failures of Spiritualism to this day is to acknowledge issues and their own history that i'd wagers still presents a major barrier to entry to the religion to this day. And then there are conflicts within the religion that are just weird. And next week we're gonna look at one of my favorite kinds of historical stories, a weird and petty conflict between two famous people who you think would have something better to do, but they don't. In our penultimate episode of Ghost Church, I'll be taking a look at the decades long battle between Harry Whodini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for real. And yes, I think we actually are going to get to ectoglossoms, So look forward to that. That's next week on Ghost Church. Wow. Ghost Church is a Cool Zone Media production created, written, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus. The show is produced by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Ian Johnson. Our theme song is by Speedy Ortiz that's Sadie Dupley, Andy Moholt, Audrey, Zy Whiteside and Joey Dubeck. Music is by Zoe Brad