I'm sitting in a rocking chair in a small charming town in western New York.

It's postcard perfect Americana.

The streets are lined with colorful Victorian houses and quaint B&Bs.

It's the kind of town where people wait from their porches and hold movie nights in the local auditorium.

But if you look closer, you'll see this town is different.

How many places can you go where you go to a coffee shop and people are talking about the, you know, the spirit people that walked around their bedroom or their living room?

And you hear it at all the different tables, all the different things.

And of course, then there's the lovely sign in the, in the maplewood hotel lobby.

No sands in the lobby, please.

I'm Sam O'Brien, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to Lilliedale, the world's largest surviving community of spiritualists.

A town with the unofficial motto, no one dies in Lilliedale.

Even if you don't believe in ghosts, stay with me.

In this town, there's more than one way to connect with the death.

More on that, after this.

I think, and a lot of people have told me this, that you don't know what it is when you're crossing into the gate and coming in here.

But to me, there's almost a palpable sense of not just spirit, but the energy of, you know, a higher reality, you know.

Sharon Klinger is one of 36 registered mediums who come to Lilliedale each summer.

She makes the trip from Cleveland to spend several months serving spirit.

This means passing on messages from the dead to the living, at both public services and private sessions.

Some tourists come to Lilliedale seeking a spectacle, but spiritualism is more than just a side show.

A lot of the people who come here don't know that spiritualisms are religion.

...