The Devil’s Chair

It’s past Halloween now, but there’s always time for a spooky story at The Mystical Underground. That’s our daughter, Megan, sitting in the famed Devil’s Chair in the Cassadaga (Florida) cemetery. In case you’ve never heard of Cassadaga, it’s probably the most unusual small town in the state. It’s a Spiritualist community where many, if not most, of the residents are psychic/mediums who portend to talk to the dead.

Trish and I have been there many times over the years, usually staying at the 100-year-old Cassadaga Hotel, where we were once scared out of our wits in the middle of the night when we were the only occupants and the local bad ghost showed up at our door. But that’s another story.

This one is about the Devil’s Chair. The story goes that the brick chair in the cemetery had been built for an old man whose wife and daughter died in a fire and are buried there. Every day he would sit in the chair for hours facing their graves. Whether or not he communicated with his deceased family isn’t known, at least it’s not part of the legend.

When the old man died, people visiting the cemetery would occasionally get glimpses of an old man sitting in the chair, then he would vanish, and from there the legend grew and turned strange.

Supposedly, if you are foolish enough to sit on the chair at midnight and leave an unopened can of beer as an offering, the devil will talk to you. If you come back in the morning, you’ll see the devil…and the can of beer will be empty, but remain unopened.

I have the feeling that the legend might’ve been created by students attending Stetson College in nearby Deland. They were known for racing through Cassadaga on Halloween nights, shouting and throwing beers cans out the window. That went on for years until one Halloween an old wood-frame Victorian house burned to the ground. After that, for years, residents of spiritualist community would shut down the town on Halloween, but in more recent years the residents and shop owners have turned it into a spirited party night, and the hotel fills with visitors.

Somehow, Trish and I had never mentioned the Devil’s Chair to Megan, probably because we thought the beer can and the devil was a stupid legend. (After all, everyone knows the devil drinks Red Devils, Devil’s Cocktails or Devil’s Margaritas.) So recently Megan went to Cassadaga with three friends, who had never been there to get readings with our friend and favorite psychic/medium Kathy. One of the girls had researched Cassadaga and found the Devil’s Chair story so after getting readings they all went to the cemetery and had a seat. Well, three of them did. One girl refused to sit on the chair.

The synchronicity here…after Megan got home, she hurriedly cleaned up her living room because new couches were about to arrive, ones that she was buying on Offer Up. Not only did she get a good deal on the price for the couches, but the seller was going to deliver the furniture. Because of the delivery, the seller wanted a $50 deposit through PayPal or Cash App. And guess what? It was a scam. No couches arrived, the phone number and email were fake, and the ad vanished from Offer Up.

When I heard the story, I said, see what happens when sit in the Devil’s Chair? You met the ‘devil’ within a couple of hours! Interestingly, and another synchronicity, when Megan tried to send the $50, it wouldn’t go through either PayPal or Cash App. She couldn’t figure it out and was worried that someone else would get the couches. So she paid the $50 to a friend, who then was able to pay the scammer. In other words, she had a warning, but ignored it.

Maybe yet another synchronicity: I wrote a story a couple of years ago called The Devil’s Chair that appeared in a collection of our short stories called Outliers. And yes, it’s about that same chair and there’s a can of beer involved.