Etna, Maine

Etna is a small Penobscot County town, incorporated in eighteen twenty, but it earned a peculiar footnote in American religious history. In the late eighteen hundreds it became home to a Spiritualist camp, one of dozens that spread across New England after the Fox Sisters' famous eighteen forty-eight séances ignited the movement. Etna's camp drew believers who thought the dead could communicate with the living, and summer meetings drew hundreds into its wooded grounds for lectures, mediums, and open-air services. Many of these camps faded by the early twentieth century, but Etna's association with the Spiritualist movement left it a quiet curiosity along the Maine interior, a reminder that the search for what lies beyond was once taken very seriously in the pine-shaded towns of New England.