A TOWN FULL OF PSYCHICS: Inside Florida’s Mysterious Cassadaga

By Staff Reports

🌙 FLORIDA AFTER DARK — There is a town in Volusia County where talking to the dead isn’t a Halloween act. It’s the family business, and it has been since 1894.

Cassadaga is the oldest active Spiritualist community in the southeastern United States. Its founder, George P. Colby, a medium from New York, said his spirit guide — a Native American named Seneca — led him to this wooded patch of Central Florida and told him to build a camp where mediums could live and practice. The Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was founded in 1894; today the historic district covers about 57 acres of Victorian homes, and it sits on the National Register of Historic Places.

Spiritualism’s core belief is simple: the dead don’t go silent — they can still communicate, and mediums can relay it. Cassadaga’s certified mediums, healers and ministers live that out year-round: readings, healings, séances, church services and tours, all in a quiet little town between Orlando and Daytona Beach that the world knows as the “Psychic Capital of the World.”

The town keeps its stranger corners, too. Just up the road in the Lake Helen–Cassadaga Cemetery sits a red-brick bench built in the 1920s for a grieving widower — known today as the Devil’s Chair, with legends all its own. In Cassadaga, even the cemetery fits the theme.

Join the conversation: Have you ever had a reading in Cassadaga — and did the medium know something nobody could have told them? Florida After Dark wants your stories: send them to tips@floridachatter.com and yours could be our next feature.

Sources: Orange County Regional History Center; Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association; National Register of Historic Places (1991).

Photo: Ebyabe, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) — the temple in the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Historic District.

More Florida After Dark: the town of psychics is not Florida’s strangest resident. In Key West there is a 120-year-old doll people apologize to by mail — meet Robert the Doll.