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In his song “Casa Dega,” Tom Petty tells the story of a mystical experience with a palm reader in Florida’s most mysterious town. One hundred miles south of Gainesville, Cassadaga is close to Disney, but so far away.
Tonight in Casa Dega I hang on every word.
Tom Petty*
[HOMECOMING ’81]*
1979 — Damn The Torpedoes
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Cassadaga slows down with the warmer weather, but the town remains year round a refuge for those who want to delve into the unknown, for those who hope to be healed, for those who come to commune with the dead.
Of uncertainty, visitors expect certainty. Of fear, courage. Of death, life.
Call the residents mediums, spiritualists, sensitives or psychics, or brand them charlatans or kooks. Cassadaga is their home.
George P. Colby, who for 73 years spread his psychic work and his watchword “Tranquilidad,” trekked through Florida wilderness in 1875 to fulfill a childhood prophecy and establish a spiritual center in the South.
Led by spirit guides the Unknown and Seneca, the Roman philosopher, he founded the present site, now winter headquarters for the National Spiritualist Association.
Cassadaga’s 35 acres crouch behind a hill, split down the seams by State Road 430A, which mangles its way through western Volusia County, five miles southeast of Deland, less than two hours from Gainesville.
The road divides north from south, physical from spiritual, and living from dead.
On the north lies the town grocery, beauty parlor, tavern and post office. On the south lies the camp and two old stone portals standing silent sentinel over the entrance. On the north, the serene atmosphere of small-town U.S.A. – a lazy black dog sleeping in the shade of the store’s veranda. On the south, a disquieting stillness – Cassadaga Hotel, a two-story myrtle green building, curtains drawn, conspicuously closed for spring and summer.
It is a Friday afternoon. Cassadaga is at peace. The sun beams high above. A faint western breeze rolls dust over the road. Storm clouds encroach from the distance.
Eleanor the grocer stands, arms akimbo, in|the/doorway. A man without shoes sits on a faded red, white and blue bench, its rear legs partly gnawed away by termites. The man sips Miller from a bottle. Town dog Psychic Sam rests comfortably amongst the flies at the tips of the man’s toes.
Conversation is casual.
“When’s it gonna’ rain Eleanor?” asks the man.
“At four,” Eleanor answers assuredly. “When I get off work.”
Eleanor possesses no psychic abilities by her own ad-mission, yet she knows the 40 or 50 camp residents, most of whom spend half their year in New York, where spiritualism allegedly was born more than a century ago.
Modern spiritualism is credited to the now famous
“Hydesville Rappings,” which occurred in a cottage near Hydesville, N.Y., in March of 1848.
The Fox family, the story follows, was disturbed by mysterious rappings. Despite the increased intensity and number of bizarre noises, the two youngest girls, Margaret and Katie, remained calm enough to discover that the raps could be translated.
“It was thus revealed,” according to church literature, “that the raps were made by a peddler who had been murdered in that cottage and whose body had been placed in the basement. Further proof was forthcoming. His untiring effort athrough raps proved he still lived and had retained his consciousness and memory. It answers the age-old question of Job, revealing: There are no dead.”
A wrinkled woman in her 70s, rouge caked heavily, giving her sagging cheeks the appearance of leathery pomegranates, walks in front of the post office, adjacent to the store.
“I can’t stand it any longer,” the woman says.
It is the awesomeness of silence, the lack of motion, loneliness, the woman loathes.
“I’m a psychic,” says the woman with pomegranate cheeks,” and I haven’t had work all week.”
The woman walks away, leaving two strangers looking at a cardboard placard in the post office window. The sign reads: “Mini Readings Saturday – 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Refreshments First Spiritualist Church.”
On Saturday the two strangers seek information from the grocer. They are greeted outside the store by an old woman.
The woman is toothless. She has hoary hair and lopsided eyes.
“I married a man from Connecticut,” she says without explanation. “We divorced, and then I married my husband…”
The woman says her mother moved to Cassadaga 10 years ago. She lived in the camp, but her mother died three years ago. Her head facing the ground, the old woman walks into the street, bumping into a parked car.
“Honda” she says, puzzled. “I didn’t know they made cars.”
The strangers enter the store: A man of 40 stoops behind the counter, between breakfast roll packages and cigarette cartons.
The grocer glances outdoors. He sees a young man dragging the red, white and blue bench back where it was the day before.
“They steal my benches at night when they’re drinkin’ beer and feelin’ no pain,” the grocer says. “The trick’s making them bring ’em back early the next morning.”
At 9 a.m., the benches are back early. The grocer begins to talk about the weather. Then he says he is a realtor. But, sensing the stranger’s wish to talk about the camp, he changes the subject.
“I’m not much of a believer in the camp,” he says. “My wife had a few readings, though.”
“Mini readings? They’re only a couple of dollars. Last about 15 minutes. Regular readings are $5 to $15. They’re about 45 minutes. Depends on the medium.
“Who’s the best medium?” the grocer asks, seeking the correct question. “Hard to say. Once had this girl who was so impressed with one medium she brought her boyfriend back. But he wasn’t impressed in the least. It depends.” The strangers saunter outside and watch a plump woman in her 20s with her 3-year-old daughter. The plump woman is screaming into the telephone on the corner. “I don’t like rednecks,” she hollers. “They’re prejudiced.”
The little girl creeps through a broken glass pane in the phone booth and models for the stranger snapping photographs.
Near the bench, a mother and her 30-year-old daughter stand anxiously, like tourists, donning loud dresses that reveal their fat thighs.
“We’re from Fort Lauderdale,” the mother says, her daughter nodding her head in agreement.
They are in Cassadaga to meet a highly recommended clairvoyant, the mother says. They want answers: their love lives, their futures, their deceased friends.
“Look,” the mother says, ashamed, glaring at a pregnant calico kitten. “She’ll be nursing kittens when she’ll get pregnant again. I hate men.”
At noon the strangers cross the road and read the billboard in front of the camp: “Mediums Certified By The So. Cassadaga Camp Association Reside Within The Camp Grounds On This Side Of The Highway.” The sign, the grocer had said, was constructed to prevent visitors from accidentally visiting one of the two mediums on the north side of the highway.
Walking past the stone portals, the strangers follow a winding road, lined with tidy white houses, neatly trimmed yards, colorful gardens of roses and spring flowers.
All is quiet.
A tall rectangular building overlooking Spirit Lake is the church. Inside, rows of wooden benches are still and empty, except for a trickle of guests entering for the mini readings.
Fans whizz away, stirring the hot air. Old women unfold card tables. A picture of Christ hangs over the altar.
Books in the back of the room provide details about spiritualism.
“The inhabitants of the spirit world under proper conditions have the power to – and many do – return to this world and manifest themselves in various ways, from a mental impression…to a visual appearance. The extent to which this can be done depends upon the knowledge of the controlling spirit and the kind and degree of mediumistic qualities possessed by the sensitive,” the passage reads.
“Impressions from the spirit world are not necessarily infallible truths, but may partake of the imperfections of the mind from which they emanate and of the misinterpretations by those to whom they are given.”
Mediums gradually take their places: an old woman demands the front corner, where the church floor is inclined; a paternal looking man with a thin mustache sits beneath the Christ picture; a middle-aged woman with a blue jacket walks behind the altar.
Medium Diane Davis chooses a corner. Medium David
Rice sits up front.
Davis, a pleasant-faced woman in her 20s, is dressed neatly in navy blue. She greets a woman of 21. The women are unfamiliar with each other, even though later it is learned Davis lives in Gainesville and the guest is a UF senior.
Davis begins with a series of statements: “Sudden reaction in childhood…autumn leaves and early snow, you’ll be on a plane to Bethesda, Md… return to school for a second degree…life working for government… member of family died in service…friend Karen in need of help…July a key month…October birth month of friend…”
Thirty minutes pass and following some questions the female visitor leaves. Some statements, she says, seem frightfully accurate – the possibility of working for the government, being in Maryland and a death in the service.
Some seem patently false – a traumatic childhood and an important October birth month. And some, perhaps most. seem essentially unknowable, imponderable – a second degree, a friend Karen in trouble and the importance of July.
David Rice, 30ish, gaunt, dressed in red shoes and gray pants, showing greasy nails, shakes hands with me. ‘I work by voice vibrations,” Rice says. “so let me hear your voice now and then.”
He begins with a quick prayer and then: “I see a frail woman on your mother’s side. She is in her 70s. She is no taller than 5-foot-7. She is saying, ‘Go forward, go forward Does this make any sense.”
“No,” I say.
“I see you surrounded with words,” he continues, un-daunted. “Many words. You are writing. Does this make any sense?”*
“Yes,” he hears this time.
“You are very successful with words. I don’t see you writing books for a while, maybe three years. I see you in the mountains, out of state, writing articles for newspapers and magazines. Not just one magazine or newspaper, but many.”
After a few more visions, Rice allows questions. I ask whether my father has psychic ability and learn:
“There is a woman with long brown hair who lives out of state. A sister. She is the one with psychic ability,” Rice says.
“Yes,” I say, “that makes sense.
It is 3 p.m. and outside the church the strangers begin to swelter in the sun. A young woman waiting for her reading asks me how it went.
“I have some psychic ability,” I say.
“Good,” she retorts. “Then maybe you can start giving readings yourself.”
On the road, the two strangers seem no more certain, no more courageous, no closer to eternal life than they had before they arrived. Yet something intrigues them about Cassadaga.
Perhaps it is the people, they think, entering the highway in their car. Or perhaps it is just the vacuum so prevalent in an era of spiritual death.
State Road 430A twists and winds, like an unctuously coiling rattlesnake, among the contorted trunks of cabbage palms and oaks. Spring sunlight sifts forebodingly through sieves of Spanish moss. Flecks of light scatter across the highway, bare and gray. Violets and wildflowers grow askew on sloping banks, festooning a veneer of green foliage.
Cassadaga is left behind.
—30—
alligator
Friday
May 31, 1979
vol. 71 no. 147
• The Alligator‘s Patrick Cronin goes psychic in Florida’s most mysterious town. Cassadaga, for Gainesvillians, a short day trip away.
Day Tripping [#1.]
Mysteries In The Florida Jungle
Day Tripping [#2.]
Weeki Wachee to the Moon [SR50]
“Oh baby now I think I’m starting to believe the things that I’ve heard/ Cause Tonight in Casa Dega I hang on every word/ That she said to me as she holds my hand/ And reads the lines of a stranger/ Yeah and she knows my name yeah she knows my plan/ In the past in the present and for the future.
Tom Petty 1981
1979 —
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Tom Petty used the spelling “Casa Dega” simply as “poetic” license. He wrote the song on an airplane after reading a newspaper (Alligator?) article about the real Cassadaga. Later he admitted he just spelled it wrong.
Riding Giants
