Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead

Christine Wicker's Lily Dale, The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead, published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2003, is a journalist's book length account of the New York Spiritualist community, built on Wicker's own time living in and reporting from the town, interviewing mediums and residents about their practice and belief. Wicker was a longtime religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News before writing the book, giving her reporting instincts and access an academic outsider might not get as easily. Its strength is that sustained embedded access, letting the book describe daily life and belief inside a living Spiritualist community in the community's own terms. Its limit is that it is journalism rather than a peer reviewed ethnography, structured around Wicker's own narrative journey and skepticism as much as around systematic documentation, so a claim needing rigorous sourcing on Spiritualism's institutional history or doctrine benefits from an academic study of American Spiritualism alongside this personal account.