Making contact Etna Spiritualist Association’s revitalized summer camp heals through communication with departed souls

ETNA – When you drive along the hills of Route 2, it’s easy to miss the village just off the road beyond an archway reading “Camp Etna.”

But if you turn down the dirt road that leads under the archway, the brightly colored cottages that make up the Etna Spiritualist Association’s campground can be seen sitting snugly together around a temple on the center lawn.

Bright green and purple, with one modeled after a gingerbread house, the cottages are home to a group of 50 spiritualists who live on the camp’s nearly 30 acres during the summer months.

“I drove under the archway and thought, ‘Wow, this place feels really good,'” said Barbara Dolliver, who’s been coming to the camp for 15 years. “It was that feeling that this is home.”

The camp has a tranquil feel, an atmosphere that Dolliver describes as magnetic. It’s a powerful place of healing and communion with nature, and has been since its founding in 1877, she said, relaxing at her cottage, now being painted bright green.

The camp is just wrapping up a busy summer of events and programming, and the Healing Light Spiritual Church of Etna, which the association formed last October, will continue its year-round Sunday services at the Town Hall.

Owned by the Etna Spiritualist Association, the camp’s cottages are owned by people who have been a member of a spiritualist society for one year and have participated in the camp’s activities. Nonmembers, including those belonging to other religions, are welcome to attend services.

Followers of spiritualism, which enjoyed its heyday in Etna during the 1940s through the 1970s, believe that they can communicate with spirits through mediums and that people can develop their souls through doing good and shunning evil. They also believe in God as a divine energy and in the Bible’s precepts of prophecy and healing.

Modern spiritualism dates to 1848 in Hydesville, N.Y., where hundreds of people flocked to the home of John Fox to witness his daughters communicate with the murdered spirit of Charles Rosna, the house’s previous owner.

Mediums, who are trained and certified through the Morris Pratt Institute of Milwaukee, can contact spirits of the dead, but should not be confused with psychics or fortunetellers, Dolliver said.

Mediums seek to connect people with spirits, often dead loved ones, who can be of help to them, rather than forecasting, she said. They don’t put curses on people and they don’t perform witchcraft, she said.

Dolliver was connected with her deceased daughter one night in 1991, the first time she visited the camp, she said. During a meditation circle, she was told that a woman with long, reddish hair named Karen was sitting by her right knee, holding a white rose, Dolliver said. It was her daughter, who had died at age 21, coming to say she was OK, she said.

It is through such communications that mediums can help people, Dolliver said.

“There is the impression out there, among hard-core fundamentalists especially, who’ve heard that this is a place of darkness or witchcraft or black magic, but they’ve never been here,” Dolliver said.

More than 50 people visited the camp on Aug. 13, a Saturday, for Mediums Day, when $15 readings by five mediums were offered all day long. The event was so popular that organizers had to begin turning people away by midafternoon.

Even with the increased activity during the summer, the camp overall is much quieter than it used to be, said Dwight “Dewey” Grant, who has been coming to Camp Etna for 63 years.

“Now, people don’t have time to come,” he said.

Grant, a man with frizzy hair, a gray beard and a unicorn tattoo on his right arm, recalled the days when camp members decorated the grounds for Halloween and held street dances. Back in the 1930s, 3,000 people would come to the camp by train on weekends, he said.

“Spiritualism is a religion that dies out and comes back,” said Grant, a year-round resident since 1979.

The camp itself is slowly coming back, as members are working to raise money and obtain grants to gut and remodel the 16-room inn and construct a new temple. The association is asking cottage owners who no longer visit the camp to turn the buildings over so they can be renovated.