Cassadaga: America's Psychic Capital

The town of Cassadaga is the oldest active Spiritualist community in the southeastern United States, and it has been exactly what it is for over a hundred and thirty years. George Colby, a New York medium who claimed his spirit guide directed him south, arrived in Volusia County in eighteen seventy-five and homesteaded land in the scrubland west of the St. Johns River. He deeded the land to the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association, chartered in eighteen ninety-four.

The association built the community that remains today: a grid of streets lined with small cottages, a community center, a hotel, and a bookstore, all within a registered historic district. Roughly one hundred residents live inside the camp boundaries. Certified mediums offer readings from their homes. The camp holds Sunday services and spiritual healing workshops year-round. The name comes from a Seneca word meaning water beneath the rocks, the same name as a lake in upstate New York where early American Spiritualism was concentrated in the eighteen fifties and sixties. Cassadaga bills itself as the Psychic Capital of the World, a claim no other American town has seriously contested.