One Sunday morning in August, my sister and I heard a sermon by the Reverend Thomas G. Long at the Chautauqua Amphitheater. He spoke of the raising of Lazarus from the dead and moved us all with his admonition about the radiant light of heaven and its power to cast out death. In one of Pastor Long’s books, he speaks of the “wilderness of grief.”

Those lost in such wilderness sometimes venture to our county, to a place called Lily Dale. I’ve heard people say it’s a haunted place. But to me, it seems a serious place of contemplation and grieving, where visitors seek some kind of communion with and affirmation from loved ones passed on. Scalded by life, they visit there and walk its streets. They hope for what? An easing of their souls.

Lily Dale is a place of ethereal Gothic beauty on the shore of a little lake just outside Cassadaga, New York. Lovely as it is, when we walk through the gates we feel a sense of mystery. Open for tourists and visitors all summer season, in all weathers it has charm too and plenty of year round residents. So many of us who wander into Lily Dale now and then in our lives go with hearty disbelief about actually talking to ghosts. But in our heart of hearts, we hope it’s all true: The souls that make us who we are really do live on forever, just like our religion tells us, and maybe heaven is right here – just another floor in this house of life, a place where we are all happier, more forgiving, wiser.

Maybe, like some of the spiritualists say, the dead are right here with us every day. They are not in some obscure Other World, up there in the Heavens, but right here at one’s elbow, in the room with us. Perhaps the rustle of the curtains or the rocking of a chair on its own suggest their presence. Whatever it is, we recognize a haunting.

How many of us drive down a road, listening to the radio, when out of nowhere we smell a familiar cologne and at the time hear a song that calls back a loved one? How many of us have we heard others say, or have narrated ourselves, the anecdote of suddenly awakening in the night after someone has passed on to literally hear that person speaking to us, if briefly? And usually it is a message that soothes us, calms, quiets us, gives us reason to believe and steadiness to go on. We can say later it’s all nonsense in the light of day, and we usually do. Nonetheless we don’t forget such moments. They leave us stronger. It is akin to the feeling that swells the crowd of church goers after a fine sermon like the one I heard last Sunday at Chautauqua. Everyone turns around and smiles at everyone else. We all look and feel a bit astonished. Somehow these moments carry their own sense of proof. We may never speak of them again to anyone but we do not forget.

At Lily Dale, one can visit a psychic or a medium and for around $100, get a reading sometimes accompanied by a drawing or sketch. Through the years, I’ve had some readings that seemed trite and useless though later on, weeks later maybe, I might be struck by one or two things that made sense after some time passed. I’ve had a reading or two that completely altered my perception of the current situation or of a past incident, one that seemed to wake me up to a brighter perspective and a new way of looking at some tired old sorrow. I have left Lily Dale as I leave a fine sermon – with the stone lifted from my soul. It reminds me of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”

Just to walk the streets at Lily Dale can be a sort of mercy – rows of narrow streets lined by majestic trees, 19th century houses with gracious porches, the calm woods whispering, the lovely lake beyond one’s seat on a white bench, leaning into the northern Chautauqua hills. It’s the scent in the air and the quality of light, the shadowy hillsides graced with hemlock and elm. It’s the way the sun hits the branches of the trees and the way one’s heart floods with memories.

Maybe it was my father, fey in his way, who was the great story teller and who made the world seem brighter, finer, darker and more profound, who encouraged a sense that life was a peculiar mystery. My father had met doom early in life – a bobsled accident at age 14 where two of his friends died and he himself spent months recovering in hospital and home – and never forget the smell of it. He said he recognized it one vacation in Naples, Florida, 50 years later and tried to outrun it. But you cannot, he murmured. My father believed in foresight and fate like a good Presbyterian. He was a sharp witted business man who most would have termed a realist and a traditionalist, yet underneath that exterior self his vision of the world, of being, was that of a theological seeker, discontent with platitudes and simple explanations, certainly distrusting of dogma. I’m influenced by his views of life and death.

I think we are all haunted; our memories are full of ghosts. We are all haunted by something-failures, omissions, losses, traumas, griefs. We are haunted by silent things we never mention to another soul. Thus we recognize haunted places. They rise up in us, in our own interior landscapes, evergreen and dreamlike. These hauntings of self are part of surviving in a harsh world as others leave us, one by one. And sometimes we are drawn to exterior landscapes where we can breathe in the extraordinary air if only for a while and not have to explain it to anyone. We brush by the ghosts of our past, heartened somehow.