Camp Chesterfield’s Materialization Séances

Camp Chesterfield, near Anderson in Madison County, grew out of the Spiritualist movement that swept the Midwest after the Fox sisters’ rappings in 1848. In the 1880s a group of free-thinkers in Anderson gathered at the hall of J. W. Westerfield for lectures on mesmerism, trance speaking and spirit contact. After visiting a camp meeting in Michigan they set up their own, and in 1890 Westerfield, as president of the Indiana Association of Spiritualists, led the founding of Camp Chesterfield. (Wikipedia gives other founding dates, from 1886 to 1890.) It began as a tent city and became a community of cottages, a grocery, a bandstand and an ice-cream parlor. Programs from the early 1900s advertised trumpet mediumship, slate writing, spirit photography and “materializing” mediums.

Materialization was the camp’s showpiece. Sitters gathered in a darkened room in front of a curtained cabinet in which the medium sat; the dead were said to step out in ghostly form to be recognised by relatives. One of the best-known mediums connected with Chesterfield was Ethel Post Parrish, a trumpet and materialization medium who, with her husband Myron Post, lived at the camp from 1923 and later founded Camp Silver Belle in Pennsylvania. Her cousin Mabel Riffle ran Chesterfield. M. Lamar Keene later wrote that 1953 photographs of her guide “Silver Belle” at her Pennsylvania camp had been faked by double exposure.

The camp was challenged repeatedly. In August 1925 fourteen mediums were arrested on charges of obtaining money under false pretenses after a news-service reporter investigated; the charges were eventually dropped. In 1960 the researcher Andrija Puharich and Tom O’Neill, publisher of Psychic Observer, filmed two séances with infrared film. Their report, published on 10 July 1960, said the footage showed obvious fraud by the medium and her cabinet assistant; the materialized figures were living people who had come in through a side door. In 1965 the writer Allen Spraggett called a materialization he saw there “a fraud so crude that it was an insult to the intelligence.” In his 1976 book The Psychic Mafia, the former medium M. Lamar Keene, who had worked at Chesterfield, described the tricks of the trade, including how sitters’ written names and questions were kept and shared. And in the March/April 2002 Skeptical Inquirer the investigator Joe Nickell, who had visited undercover, reported that a medium gave him a “reading” based on information he had planted.

The camp survives. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, was named by Indiana Landmarks among the state’s most endangered sites in 2015 and 2016, and remains a working Spiritualist church that offers services, classes and readings. Many people find genuine comfort there; this entry records the documented history of the séances, not a judgment of the faith itself.

Reported spirit forms “materializing” from a cabinet, trumpet voices and spirit photography; investigators documented trickery.

The darkened séance rooms and cabinets at the camp’s cottages and auditorium, Chesterfield, Indiana.

Camp Chesterfield features in histories of American Spiritualism, in the Indiana Historical Bureau’s writing on the state’s Spiritualist movement, and in skeptical literature such as Nickell’s Skeptical Inquirer article. It is also a stop for visitors interested in the history of mediumship.