Spiritualism in Melrose
From the Melrose Historical Commission
Fay and Houdini in Melrose
With Halloween ghouls, witches, skeletons and spirits festooning yards and homes throughout Melrose, let’s remember an earlier time when Melrose was the very center of the Spiritualist world.
In 1848 in Hydesville, NY, two young sisters heard strange rapping noises in their home and came to believe they were communicating with the spirit of a murdered peddler. Their experience, publicized and promoted by their mother, soon gained wide attention and a large following. Initially known as the Rochester Rappers, the believers of this fast-growing religious movement worked to develop their gifts of psychometry (reading the spirit of inanimate objects), levitation, mediumship and spirit manifestation. The era of modern Spiritualism had arrived.
Organizations such as the American Society of Psychical Research were formed to support the rising number of Spiritualists who believed they could communicate with those on the other side. The Boston-based Spiritualist newspaper Banner of Light was first published in 1857 and its nation-wide circulation reached numbers as high as 30,000 during the 50 years it was published weekly. In a time of social upheaval and following so many Civil War casualties, many were drawn to seances and other ways of communicating with the dead. The Banner of Light regularly published messages from the spirit world. In early August 1866, this newspaper announced a first-of-its-kind meeting to take place right here in Melrose.
On August 30, 1866, mediums, clairvoyants, and others who could or wished to commune with the spirit world started arriving in the woods adjacent to the Ensign Thomas Lynde home (built c. 1693, demolished 1956, the site of Hunt’s Camera today). Spiritualist leaders had leased this property for its bucolic setting and easy access by train line or wagon. They called the woods Pierpont Grove in honor of a recently deceased Spiritualist reverend. We know the area as Pine Banks Park and Oak Grove.
This First Great Spiritualist Camp Meeting was called to order on that first day with 300 attendees. Spiritualist leaders from all over New England took the stage, sleeping and eating in tents, extolling the natural beauty of the setting and the invisible throngs of spirits that sought to communicate with the attendees. One young woman from Malden fell into a trance on stage and the spirit of a young man voiced through her his experience being “hurried out of earth form into spirit-life”. By lunch time there were 500 attendees and by dinner time two thousand thronged the woods of Pine Banks. By the fourth and final day, the camp meeting drew 10,000 spectators, with horse wagons jamming the roads from all directions. These mass gatherings would be an annual event in Melrose throughout the late 1860s.
71 Trenton St, home of the Spiritualists Mr. and Mrs Lillie in the late 1800s
The Banner of Light newspaper reported on Spiritualist topics and advertised spirit guides and seances. One such Spiritual guide was Mrs. R.S. Lillie of 71 Trenton St., Melrose (1844-1911). Mrs. R. S. Lillie (born Hanna Marie, she took the name of her spirit guide Ralph Shepard) was quoted in one of her lectures explaining that “the message of Spiritualism was not merely to lift the burden of sorrow from the human heart—not merely to dry the tear, and assure us that our loved ones still live, but it calls to come up higher — to live nobler, truer and better lives”. She performed all over the country along with her husband John T. Lillie, noted for his singing performances during her lectures. She even performed in Boston with the son of one of the original “Rochester Rapper” sisters, said to have developed into a talented “rapping” psychic medium himself. The Lillies were early founders of the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale NY that was established after the 1879 Spiritualist camp meeting held there that is today the world’s center for Spiritualism and the study of psychic phenomena. 22,000 visitors each year take classes and visit with private spirit mediums there. The Melrose Park neighborhood in Lily Dale was named by the Lillies in honor of their home here in Melrose.
Spiritualist publications of the day advertised other Melrose psychics including Mrs. W. H. Cushman, who channeled spirits through music, and Mrs. C. Fanny Allyn, a trance medium. But for nearly a half-century Anna Eva Fay of 1121 Franklin St. was the most famous mystic stage performer and mind reader. Born in Ohio in the early years of the Spiritualist movement, she started performing when still a child, eventually becoming an international star. When not performing her distinctive Spirit Cabinet show, she hosted seances at her home in Melrose and was visited there by her friends magician Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Spiritualist movement had over 8 million followers by the late 1890s, but its popularity declined steeply in the 1920s. Local Melrose newspapers of the day advertised local seances but predominantly published skeptical articles revealing many of the practitioners to be more charlatan than spirit guide.
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