No One Dies in Lily Dale

Recently I watched a psychic-ly sprinkled documentary called 'No one dies in Lily Dale'.  

Now before I get started on my review I need to clarify that this is not about Lily Dale, the Melbourne suburb.  People are still (unfortunately) dying in this Melbourne suburb.  This documentary is about a different Lily Dale, a Lily Dale that is located in the small upstate town of New York.  It's a town inhabited by spiritualists.

What are spiritualists?

Good question.  In short spiritualists are a group of people that believe that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body and that communication with this soul/spirit is possible.  Spiritualism is considered a religion and has roots dating back to the 1840's.   The history of this spiritualist movement is rather interesting, Abraham Lincons wife once organised a spiritualist seance in an attempt to talk to her dead son, though for this post I would rather discuss the documentary rather then the history.

Ok, so back to doco.

Lily Dale is a town inhibited by mostly mediums.  People searching for answers travel far and wide to this little town in order to seek spiritual advice and more importantly talk to their dead loved ones.  The doco follows three of these people, each of them on a quest to find peace in their loved ones deaths.  Admittedly these people are suffering from tragic losses, one man has lost his young son in random shooting, a woman has lost her fiance in a freak accident and another woman has lost her young adult son to an aggressive cancer.  Really they are desperate for closure.

As desperate as they are for closure they each have a different attitude and different willingness to believe in the medium.  For instance, the man that had lost his son to the shooting was desperate for answers, he wanted to know that his son was ok, he wanted to know that it didn't hurt,  he wanted to find peace in the situation.  I thought he almost had total faith in the mediums.  He didn't try to test them at all, he wore a picture of his son around his neck like a flash card in order to guide the medium to his son's spirit.  I mean really, he was not making it very difficult at all for the medium to 'see' who he was there to communicate with.  

The woman who lost her fiance to a tragic accident was a little more subtle.  She had an open mind, she wanted to believe, though she maintained some rationality (and did not wear a tell tale photo of her husband around her neck).  One of the mediums she saw claimed that he was in fact talking to the soul of her dead fiance.  The medium proposed some quite unbelievable things that the spirit was communicating, to which the woman got fairly upset.  I won't go into these things in case you are planning to watch the doco.  Though it was rather refreshing to see the woman reject his reading, as hurtful as it was, and try again with another medium.  Her second medium-attempt went much better and the medium she consulted was even able to tell her how her fiance died, which was helpful as the events were a kind of mystery.

Finally the woman who lost her son to cancer was the most medium-resistant.  It was as if she had gone to Lily Dale to test her own faith as a Christian.  Christians obviously prohibit and do not have a favorable view on mediums and psychics.  This last woman almost just wanted to make sure that her son couldn't communicate and just in the slight chance that he could, that she had done everything in her power to 'hear' him.

So how did the mediums fare?

As mentioned, one of them failed tragically, not only hurting the woman that was seeking answers but getting major facts wrong.  Others did ok and others, such as the 'pink' lady, were totally impressive.  I really would have enjoyed the documentary much more if it had of focused on the mediums rather then people searching for answers.  It would have been quite interesting to learn how the mediums discovered their gifts and what elements made a successful reading and so on.

I think the most interesting thing about this  documentary was that a town like this even exists!  Imagine walking down a street in which the majority of residents were psychics, the stuff of dreams for psychic-philes (ok that is not a word I just made it up) like me and maybe you.  Some of the mediums even offer internet and phone readings, which are tempting, but I think (and what I think is the major message of this documentary) I will proceed with caution............and not too much desperation.