Lily Dale is a functioning village whose industry is mediumship. Inside its gate on Cassadaga Lake stand hundreds of Victorian cottages, a hotel, an auditorium, a museum, a library and two active Spiritualist churches, and on many porches hangs a shingle: registered medium, readings by appointment. Registration is the community's discipline; mediums who wish to practice within the Assembly must demonstrate their work to its satisfaction, and residency is limited to members of the Spiritualist religion.
The rhythm of the place is seasonal. In the summer program, visitors, tens of thousands across a season, come through the gate for workshops, healing services in which certified healers lay on hands, and the free message services held daily at Inspiration Stump, a tree stump in a old-growth forest clearing where mediums stand in turn and deliver brief messages from the dead to named members of the crowd.
Christine Wicker's reported account of the community describes the mixture that strikes every observer: matter-of-fact domesticity, real grief met with real kindness, commerce, showmanship and belief inseparably braided. Lily Dale calls itself the world's largest center for the religion of Spiritualism, and whatever one makes of the messages, the sociological claim is simply true: nowhere else does the movement born in 1848 survive at the scale of a whole town.