12th ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM @ LILY DALE
July 23-25, 2026
Curated by Shannon Taggart
$225 FULL 3-DAY EVENT TICKET LINK IS HERE
*Please note, Lily Dale has a $15 Gate Fee
SINGLE DAY TICKET LINKS:
JULY 23: THE ZABRECKY HOUR $40 TICKET LINK IS HERE
JULY 24: SYMPOSIUM DAY 1 $100 TICKET LINK IS HERE
JULY 25: SYMPOSIUM DAY 2 $100 TICKET LINK IS HERE
First time visiting? There’s much to explore in Lily Dale, including free healing and message services. You may want to plan extra time to explore beyond the Symposium.
Need a Room in Lily Dale?
LILY DALE’S HISTORIC MAPLEWOOD HOTEL *Open for booking in March
LILY DALE GUEST HOUSES
LILY DALE CAMPGROUND
Travel Questions? EMAIL ME
Starting Monday, July 20
Assembly Hall Program
Early Program
This year, I have also added a pre-Symposium program on July 20, 21, 22 & 23.
Thursday, July 23 @ 8:30 PM
SYMPOSIUM OPENING EVENT
The Academy of Magical Arts at the Magic Castle Presents:
The Zabrecky Hour
The Zabrecky Hour
Join us for a one-man comedy, magic, and variety show like no other. For more than two decades, Zabrecky has headlined theaters, magic festivals, and conventions around the world—from Tokyo to New York City. He has appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us and has been honored with seven awards from the Academy of Magical Arts at Hollywood’s famed Magic Castle.
Friday, July 24th
9 am—6 pm
SYMPOSIUM DAY I
9 AM
Breaking the Fourth Wall: Understanding the Paranormal Through Fiction, with Joshua Cutchin
“When you look at the phenomenon, the phenomenon looks back.” This saying, popular among paranormal thinkers like the late John Keel, speaks to what he called the “reflective factor.” But what drives this strange reciprocity? Join Joshua Cutchin, author of Ecology of Souls and Fourth Wall Phantoms, as he explores the mechanisms that let us see beyond the frame of ordinary reality—into a realm where anything seems possible. Here, fictional characters come to life, UFOs mimic their pulp depictions, cryptids step out of folklore, and urban legends materialize as genuine hauntings. Drawing on examples of “fourth wall breaks” (metalepsis) from ancient myth to modern cinema, this presentation suggests that truth isn’t just stranger than fiction… truth is fiction.
10AM
Fraud and Performance in Mediumship and the Paranormal, with Jack Hunter
The séance—as well as other forms of mediumistic demonstrations—undoubtedly possesses a performative element. Like an actor on the stage or on the screen, or a magician in the theatre, mediums of different kinds perform with their bodies in front of an audience to manifest the presence of invisible intelligences—sometimes on a stage, sometimes from a lectern, sometimes in a private circle of sitters. In calling the séance a performance, however, it is not my intention to suggest that it is all “make-believe.” There are complicated depths to performance, which has been used throughout time to very great effect - to tell stories, alter consciousness, and bend the rules of consensus reality. Trickery, illusion and performativity run throughout the history of spirit mediumship and the paranormal. In this presentation, Author and founding editor of the journal Paranthropopgy, Jack Hunter PhD will will untangle some of the threads of this relationship, drawing on perspectives from the history of Spiritualism, anthropology, performance studies and parapsychology.
11AM
The Materializations of Franek Kluski, with Paul Gaunt
Franek Kluski, sometimes referred to by researchers as the “King of Mediums”, was born in Warsaw in 1873. From around 1918 to 1925, he provided psychic science with some of the most “puzzling evidence on record” through his wide range of physical mediumship. His final period, 1921-1925, was his most powerful phase, during which he reportedly produced materializations of human spirits. He was one of the first mediums to show ectoplasm emanating from his body, with a “fluid” described as a stream a meter wide at human height. In this illustrated presentation, Paul Gaunt will discuss Kluski’s unique production of materialized forms, which has not been reproduced by any other medium to date.
2PM
Spitting Out the Apple: Psychedelics and Psychical Capacities, with Maria Mangini
The Eden story is not just a tale of being thrown out of the prelapsarian park. In addition to the loss of innocence, immortality, purity, and perfection, humans were also deprived of the preternatural gifts, which included instantaneous, non-learned understanding with which we could know the world without the need for study or experience. The capacity for intuitive knowing and psychic proficiency are natural but neglected human attributes that can be developed through training and exercise.In this talk, Maria Mangini PhD FNP explores how psychedelics present the opportunity to assist the development of psychic abilities by awakening the use of neglected but natural perceptual pathways.
3PM
The Stone Tape Theory and the Sonic Uncanny, with Leila Taylor
The recorded voice is inherently spectral, a disembodied trace of a person detached from time and space. It's no wonder the most common evidence of a haunting is sound: footsteps made without feet, an inexplicable bump in the night, the fragment of a phrase on a tape recorder. How do you capture the voices of the dead? What do ghosts sound like? From a haunted electronics lab in a BBC made for tv movie to the Gold Room at The Overlook Hotel; from the 19th century theory of “place memory” to Discovery channel ghost hunters, this talk, by Leila Taylor—author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread—explores the spectral sonic and our desire to document the voices of the dead.
4PM
"A Place Known Only to the Spirits": A Fortean History of Pennsylvania, with Timothy Grieve-Carlson
Writing from the Pennsylvania frontier in 1750, the Lutheran missionary Henry Muhlenberg reported that “there are more necromancers here than Christians.” Muhlenberg was being a bit hysterical, but he was commenting on an undeniable fact about the people who were drawn to the territory. William Penn’s radical policy of religious freedom turned the colony into a magnet for Europeans with esoteric, unorthodox, and otherwise unacceptable religious and metaphysical beliefs. This unique cultural circumstance has made Pennsylvania one of the most significant sites of paranormal and Fortean phenomena in the historical record. In this talk, Timothy Grieve-Carlson will explore the historical causes and contemporary significance of Pennsylvania’s rich Fortean history, including the earliest descriptions of American poltergeists, séances, and psychical phenomena.
5PM
OTHERWORLD
Otherworld podcast host Jack Wagner in conversation with Shannon Taggart + special guests.
Saturday, July 25th
9am—6pm
SYMPOSIUM DAY II
9AM
Magic Maker: Artist as Magician with Pam Grossman
Artists are Magic Makers. They embody the archetype of the Magician, becoming a bridge between realms, and collaborating with invisible entities to conjure their work. Using the power of their craft, they bring Creative Force into intentional form—and their imaginations quite literally change the world around them. Creative people often speak of being channels for inspiration, while others refer to communing with their muse. For many, this is more than mere metaphor, as artists throughout history have employed magical techniques to tap into their creativity, express powerful messages, and make contact with the sacred. In this illustrated presentation, author Pam Grossman explores the deep relationship between creativity and magic, putting forth the idea that they are perhaps one and the same.
10AM
Bibliophantoms, with Asti Hustvedt
Provoked by the death of her brother-in-law, the novelist Paul Auster, author Asti Hustvedt (Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th-Century Paris) explores what it means to “get lost” in a book. She frames reading as a kind of mediumship—a state in which the reader becomes a site of possession, a host for the author’s consciousness. Drawing on the figures of the medium and the hysteric, this talk argues that the act of reading is not merely a cognitive process for decoding inert signs on the page, but a kind of séance: a weird and complex collaboration between the living and the dead.
11AM
Heathens of the Heavens: George Kuchar on John Keel, Whitley Streiber, and Jacques Vallée, with Andrew Lampert
Born in 1942 and raised in the Bronx, twin brothers George and Mike Kuchar were 8mm filmmaking dynamos whose audacious style, kooky humor and far out subject matter made them darlings of the 1960s underground. Gifted an 8mm camera for their twelfth birthday, they worked together and eventually apart over the ensuing decades to create an unparalleled body of brazenly madcap works. George, who passed in 2011, was especially prolific, producing hundreds of films and videos that explored every facet of his personal life and peculiar interests. He believed in extraterrestrial encounters, and claimed to have experienced a few, including a visit from the real Men in Black. Over the years he made many riotous movies about aliens, mythical beings and creatures that could only emerge from his vivid imagination. In this talk/screening, Andrew Lampert will provide an introduction to George’s delirious movies and feature footage of his remarkable circle of friends and admirers, who include John Keel, Whitley Strieber and Jacques Vallée.
2PM
Listening to the Cosmos with Andrew Jackson Davis: Creative and Social Liberation through the Spiritual Spheres, with Matt Marble
Though often misunderstood, the concept of the “spiritual spheres”—most famously exemplified in his notion of “Summerland”—was central to 19th-century philosopher Andrew Jackson Davis, who claimed in trance states to explore distant planets and higher realms of being. His cosmic, or “Harmonial,” philosophy became a foundational strand within the broader Spiritualist movement, but Davis has remained overlooked and even dismissed since his passing. Artist and historian Matt Marble of the American Museum of Paramusicology will provide historical and metaphysical context, guide participants through Davis’s seven spiritual spheres, and draw connections between his model and the creative practices of figures from 19th century Spiritualist composers to luminaries like Sun Ra, Alan Hovhaness and Alice Coltrane. In this presentation, artist and director of the American Museum of Paramusicology Matt Marble invites attendees to consider how Davis’s spheres can still serve both as a viable map for the creative process and as a framework for social and spiritual liberation.
Portrait of Andrew Jackson Davis by Tim Kerr, from the exhibition ‘Spiritualist Heroes.’
3PM
Electric Dreams: George Van Tassel, Solgonda, and Their Integratron, with Daniel Paul
Deep in the Mojave Desert night, next to what is believed to be world's largest freestanding boulder, on August 24, 1953, former aerospace man George Van Tassel received a visitor. By his account, a space person named Solgonda expressed concern that as human beings are learning the wisdom of their lifetimes, they are too old and ready to die. The solution was a laboratory machine, based on Solgonda's instructions. Over the next 25 years, his own somewhat abbreviated life ending at age 67, this ultimately unfinished project, today known as the Integratron, became George Van Tassel's life's work. George Van Tassel held specific beliefs around electricity as spirit and combined a variety of bio-electrical approaches into the Integratron technology, intended to extend human life through electricity. In this presentation architectural historian Daniel Paul will introduce the Integratron, emphasizing electricity's prominent place in Van Tassel's spiritual and life extension systems.
4PM
Weird Studies Live, with Phil Ford & JF Martel
Professor Phil Ford and writer J.F. Martel record a live episode of Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast exploring ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
AFTER PARTY
Saturday, July 25th @ 7 pm
Free entry for 3-day event ticket holders! Secret venue outside of the Lily Dale gates.
Co-sponsored by Illuminated Brew Works.
Artists-in-Residence 2026
Sponsored by Sacred Grounds Coffee House
PEGGY AHWESH
The Night Sky
Screened Installation
Peggy Ahwesh came of age in the 1970's as a Super8 filmmaker in the Pittsburgh punk underground. Her interests are wide-ranging, and include re-editing found footage, play acting horror and melodrama and inventive uses of low-end, popular technologies- all towards turning the conventions of cultural identity and the role of the subject on end. Film retrospectives include: Girls Beware! at the Whitney Museum (1997); Filmmuseum, Brussels, Belgium; Carpenter Center at Harvard University; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2003); Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (2020); Women Make Waves International Film Festival, Taiwan (2024) and Cinematexas 6, Austin, Texas. Ahwesh is Professor Emeritus of Film & Electronic Arts, Bard College.
GUY BLAKESLEE
Guy Blakeslee is an American musician, songwriter and producer, best known for his solo work and his role as the lead singer and guitarist of The Entrance Band.
"A singular voice and point of view; one of the most talented and original musicians working today." — NPR
Photo by Lael Neale
TIM KERR + UP AROUND THE SUN
American DIY “Self-expressionist”, musician, producer, photographer, skateboarder, artist, and Texas Music Hall of Famer Tim Kerr joins us again for another exhibition of Spiritualist heroes created especially for Lily Dale + performance with Jerry Hagin and Jane Gillman as Up Around the Sun.
WITH GRATITUDE
Special thanks to supporters and sponsors Charles & Penelope Emmons, Ed & Lauren Thibodeau of The Bird House at Lily Dale, and Ralph Smith.