Alchemy in Cassadaga

We’re written before about Cassadaga, the Spiritualist community in central Florida where nearly everyone talks to the dead.   Recently, though, a series of synchronicities took place involving the town.

On January 7, I taught an astrology workshop at the Cassadaga Bookstore. The next day, I received an email from Whitley Strieber saying he was going to be in Cassadaga sometime in January and wondered if we lived close enough to join him. I thought he was headed there in connection with his recent book, Afterlife Revolution, that he wrote with his wife, Anne, who passed away on August 11, 2015. It turns out that Anne “called” Whitley there.

So on January 23, we drove up to Cassadaga with our daughter, Megan, and her roommate Tony, later joined us. We  met Whitley and our friend, Peter Levenda at the hotel. Peter is also an author  whose fascinating writing focuses primarily on the occult. His most recent book, Sekret Machines: volume 1 of Gods Man and War is co-authored with Tom Delonge. The book “transcends speculation and is based on unprecedented access to officials at the highest levels of government, military and industrial agencies who have provided insights and assistance never before experienced by any researchers in this controversial field.” (from Amazon)

What better place for writers about the paranormal to meet up than in a town of Spiritualists?

Over dinner – and lunch the next day- the conversation was all over the place.Whitley talked about how he and his wife, Anne, have been in contact since her death and how they wrote Afterlife Revolution together.

Peter, an expert on occult forces – in Nazi Germany, in alchemy, in the world! – talked about famous alchemists Thomas and Rebecca Vaughn, whom he wrote about in his book Tantric Alchemist.

Whitley offered our daughter, Megan, advice on writing (she’s working on her first novel) and her friend, Tony, who spent three years in LA trying to break in as a screenwriter, shared some of his experiences.

One of the most fascinating points in the discussion involved Whitley’s implant, which he has written about in his books. He explained how it affects the vision in his left eye. It’s as if a slit opens in his vision and words scroll across it. He has to adjust where he looks to be able to decipher it. The implant was inserted – by humans, not aliens – behind his left ear when he and Anne were living in their cabin in upstate New York, where his abduction experiences took place. On his website, he writes about what happened when he had surgery to remove the implant.Teaser: the surgery didn’t work. The implant moved.

Over dinner, we talked about  writing, UFOs, disclosure, climate change, spirit contact, alchemy, the publishing industry, Hollywood, Hitler and Nazi Germany and the uncanny parallels to Trump and his administration.

The climate change part of the conversation was unsettling, particularly with climate change deniers in the white house and as head of the EPA. Rob, Peter, and I live in South Florida, and are all intending to move. Whitley, who wrote the Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, on which the movie The Day After Tomorrow was based, believes that the water from the rapid melt of ice in the Arctic is pushing down on the ocean floor, compressing it. At some point, it will rebound and the explosion of rising water will be devastating.It will sink parts of the US coast just as fast as Atlantis sank.

At the core of this conversation lay questions about the nature of reality, how paranormal experiences – and contact with aliens (or whatever they are) and spirits – alter how you see the world and yourself within it. For most of the evening and the next day, I felt like I was in the presence of ancient alchemists. It was exhilarating.

The next morning, Whitley had a reading with psychometrist Kathy Adams and described it as “profound.” Kathy reads objects and picked up on something related to a novel Whitley is writing that no one else knows about.

I took the photo in the Cassadaga dining room, where these decorative lights that festooned the walls came out looking like orbs, a fitting backdrop!