It is somewhere around 10:00 at night and I am sitting on a wet bench in the middle of an old growth forest inside of Lily Dale known as the Leolyn Woods. A heavy layer of clouds block the light of the moon and stars; the only sound is that of the occasional raindrop falling through trees. This is the last stop on the ghost walk, and at the request of our tour guides, we have shut off our flashlights and phones. It is so dark that I can’t see the two dozen or so others sitting around me. I can’t hear them either as we are supposed to be meditating. We are at spot where spiritual contact regularly occurs and are encouraged, if we wish, to silently invite a deceased loved one to make their presence known.

I’m not convinced that such a thing is possible, but the unknown is so vast that I’m not ruling it out. This is the kind of strange and interesting event I was expecting to experience when I arrived, and for the past seven hours, I have not been disappointed. What I was not expecting was the tranquility of the place. Even sitting here in the middle of a dark forest asking the dead to speak doesn’t feel as creepy as it should. Residents and visitors are friendly, easy to talk to. Earlier, I met a retired couple who came from Seattle in a motor home, a group of college girls on a road trip from Alfred University, and a woman who makes the trip from New Jersey ever year.

Like the best ghost walks, this one has been more of a history lesson than anything else. The two-hour walk from one end of Lily Dale to the other has covered its evolution from a camp where freethinkers and Spiritualists gathered to its incorporation in 1879 and its current status as one of the largest Spiritualist communities in the world. Also noted were the many famous people who visited here, including Susan B. Anthony, whose radical notion that men and women were equal found an audience here. She spoke several times in Lily Dale, applauding Spiritualism as one of the only religious groups that practiced equality.

That’s not to say that some of the history here didn’t send a chill down my spine. For example, the “precipitated spirit paintings” displayed throughout Lily Dale are said to have appeared on canvases during séances, without a paintbrush or the touch of a human hand. One on the strangest events of the evening occurred where the cottage of the Fox sisters used to stand. (The alleged communication between the young Fox girls and the spirit of a murdered peddler caused a nationwide stir in 1848. Their cottage was later moved here from Hydesville, NY, where it stood until it burned to the ground in 1955.) Anyway, the woman next to me took a picture, then nudged me and whispered, “Am I crazy or is there some weird about this picture.” I looked at the screen and didn’t see anything at first, then noticed what appeared to be the image of a human skull in the darkness just behind the tour guide. “That’s what I thought,” she said and asked our guide to have a look.

He saw it too as did a few others who gathered around for a look. Some were convinced it was a skull, others waved it off as merely a light cast by the flash of another camera and the product of the collective imagination of a group of people on a ghost walk.

The silence of the dark forest is broken by a voice–one of the tour guides–asking if anyone experienced anything during the mediation that they would like to share. Out of respect for the privacy of those who spoke up, I won’t give specific details here, but I can say that one person claims to have felt the touch of his late wife and two others say they received a message, one from a father, the other from a friend.

The flashlights and phones come back on. We are all thanked for attending and reminded of the outdoor services that will be held here tomorrow where mediums will be on hand to relay messages from beyond to those in attendance. Then, we all head out of the woods and back to our rooms or campsites. Some people are quiet and some are chatty. I walk with a small group of people also staying at the Maplewood and we end up hanging out on the porch for a while, talking, laughing, most expressing wonder at what they saw and heard while a few express their doubts.

I wake the next morning to a bright and warm day that promises to be excellent riding weather. If the Maplewood is haunted, I need to sleep in haunted hotels more often because despite a small, lumpy bed, I slept better than I have in months. I go in search of breakfast and lay my jacket in the sun to dry.

Riding out of out of Lily Dale in the early afternoon, I am not sure what to make of my short visit, but I’m glad I came and will undoubtedly be turning it over in my mind for a while. As for where the road is taking me next, I am heading north, thinking Buffalo or Niagara Falls when I pass a vineyard. The smell of grapes baking in the sun gives me a better idea and I start heading east … for the Finger Lakes.