The Devil’s Chair, Cassadaga

A real chair in a real spiritualist town, wrapped in dare-legend

Cassadaga, a small unincorporated community in Volusia County, Florida, calls itself the Psychic Capital of the World, and it earned the name honestly. In 1875 the trance medium George P. Colby of Pike, New York, a regular at the Spiritualist summer camps of Lily Dale near Cassadaga, New York, came south at the bidding, he said, of a spirit guide named Seneca who had appeared to him at a séance in Iowa. On 18 December 1894 the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association was chartered, and Colby deeded it 35 acres. The camp has grown to 57, with the Cassadaga Hotel, the Colby Memorial Temple and some 55 homes full of mediums, and it became a historic district in 1991.

On the edge of it, in the cemetery shared by Cassadaga and Lake Helen, is the Devil's Chair, a brick-laid graveside seat in the Thatcher family's burial plot. Sit in it at midnight, the stories go, and the Devil will speak to you. Leave an unopened can of beer on it overnight and by morning it will be empty, in some tellings opened, in others drained straight through the sealed top. The Sanford historian Charlie Carlson recorded the legend in his book Weird Florida, along with the guards posted at the cemetery each Halloween to ward off pranksters.

There are actually three such brick chairs in the cemetery, in separate family plots, but the Thatcher chair is the easiest to reach, so it took the legend. Seats like these were once common. In the 19th century families often built mourning chairs at the graveside so visitors could sit with their dead, and once the custom faded the dares grew up around them, a pattern repeated in graveyards across the country. Dr. Deborah Bauer of the Seminole County Historical Society puts the Cassadaga version down partly to misconceptions about the spiritualist camp next door.

As for the beer, the Reverend Louis Gates of the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp has confessed. In the mid-to-late 1900s, he said, people came out drunk and left cans by the chair for the Devil, and local teenagers hid nearby, drank them and put the empties back. "It wasn't the devil drinking the beer," he said, "it was us teenagers."

Vandalism eventually brought a fence and a curfew: the cemetery closes at dusk, and anyone inside after 7 p.m. is trespassing. Colby himself is buried here, among the camp's first spiritualists, and Red Cypress Brewery once brewed a Devil's Chair beer in the chair's honour.