Conjuring spirits in Florida

For about 10 minutes, Toole moved his hands around Town’s upper torso and head mere inches from her face, careful not to touch her. As she sat silently, carefully breathing, he explained that he was channeling energy. When Toole was finished, he softly whispered in Town’s ear as a grin stretched across her face.

“I come here because it’s the only time I get touched,” a woman told Town during one session.

The sentiment of missing someone’s touch resonated with Town, whose husband “transitioned,” because “it never occurred to me that I was going through that as a widow.” Nearly six years ago, in the wake of his death, she devoted herself to the center entirely.

Toole and Town are part of a dense spiritual constellation concentrated among two neighboring cities, Sarasota and Bradenton in Florida, that also encompasses The Spirit University, a litany of roadside psychics and more than 100 mediums and spiritual guides. Unlike other American spiritual outcrops like Lily Dale, New York, and Cassadaga, Florida, Sarasota wasn’t founded as a spiritual community. And its wealth of spiritualists isn’t billed as an attraction.

As Americans search for means to cope with loss, and even though interest has grown immensely in the past century, the stigma of fortunetelling fraud, psychic scams and skepticism still haunts the practice.

“I thought I was a witch,” said Town, an associate minister at the Sarasota Center of Light. “Spirits would come to me — dead relatives and things like that.” It took the community in Sarasota to bring her out of her shell. And like any community, Town’s story demonstrates the value of a room full of people on any given day, the kinship, the warmth, the sense of being less alone in the world.

As a native, I’ve heard stories about Sarasota’s energy grids, vortexes, a Calusa force field that prevents hurricanes, and the 99-percent quartz-crystal sand at Siesta Key. All of it helps draw the metaphysical community. “You don’t move to Sarasota; you’re called,” a man told me. When I was growing up, the string of roadside psychics along Route 41 was as omnipresent as the car dealerships and pawnshops with their neon signs burning late into the night. It is where many psychics live and work today. In retrospect, it seemed absurd not to be more aware of the deep spiritual community here straddling the line between the physical and metaphysical worlds, but throughout my childhood, it was unclear what was simply Southern lore or if Sarasota truly held spiritual significance, what was real and what many deemed a “scam.”

Nationally, Americans increasingly consider themselves “spiritual but not religious,” according to a Pew Research Center survey, a metric that spiked to 27 percent from 19 percent in the past five years. While American spiritualism is often depicted as rooted in Native American, Caribbean, Latin American or African cultures, spiritualists today span a vast racial spectrum, and Southwest Florida represents a mere sliver of the broader spiritual diaspora.

Among the earliest evidence of a metaphysical adviser in Sarasota was on January 18, 1912, in the Sarasota Times, when advertisements for a tropical tree nursery and farm seed flanked the first mention of a “Clairvoyant Palmist” by the name of Princess Gladys. The ad appeared once a week for a month then vanished. That same year, John and Mable Ringling of the Ringling Circus bought their home along Sarasota Bay and in 1927 would move the circus’s headquarters to Sarasota. A slew of fortunetellers and palm readers followed.

In the 1930s, the word “psychic” was mentioned in Sarasota newspapers 116 times. By the 1970s, it appeared 1,555 times over that decade.

Catherine Rosenbaum followed her parents south when they retired from Philadelphia to Longboat Key in Sarasota. After a divorce in 2008, she turned to the stars, culling numerology, astrology and intuition to make a living as a reader or, as she would say, “a reflector.”

“The angels filled my books,” she said.

At 13, Rosenbaum would trace the constellations with her finger outside her home in Philadelphia. She took so strongly to the night sky that, at 14, her mother would take her for weekly lessons with an astrologer after school. Rosenbaum, 64, has been a full-time medium for 10 years, but noted, “I was born like that.”

She added: “I always felt what everybody else was feeling, but I never had a sense of myself.”

Now she does readings seven times a month at a shop called Elysian Fields in central Sarasota. While she often meets with private clients in person, much of her time is devoted to phone readings with people as far away as Taiwan.

As for the process, “It’s not something I can explain,” Rosenbaum said. She starts with someone’s name and birthdate and uses numerology, astrology and symbol-based systems; then she enters her clients’ auric field (a descriptor for the layers of energy that surround the body and correspond to chakras as stated), allowing their energy to envelop her. “Everything has information in it,” she explained, noting the presence of their fears, traumas and desires. “There’s no hiding.”

Rosenbaum believes that most people are looking for peace in their lives — the courage to take risks, pursue a dream or just fend for themselves. She and other mediums try to teach people to “stop living like other people.”

“I’m more evolved,” said Ondrej Zouhar, 37, a client. In 2017, he moved to Sarasota and began to see Rosenbaum regularly. He said he felt pressure to find fame and be perceived as wealthy, but with Rosenbaum as a guide, he felt as if he could finally trust himself, and the external pressure fell away.

Ultimately, it comes down to listening — a prosaic pursuit with profound outcomes: “It’s a beautiful thing to watch people become themselves.”

Victoria Ackerman, 57, the founder of The Spirit University, echoed Rosenbaum’s sentiment of becoming oneself. After abruptly coming off the drug Cymbalta, prescribed for the pain and depression associated with fibromyalgia, she found herself in an emergency room. “All of a sudden, everything stopped,” she remembers.

In what she calls her “near-death experience,” Ackerman made a promise to herself to recalibrate her life’s compass.

It began with a book, “Dream Healer” by Adam McLeod, a self-published memoir about a proposed connection between hard science and forms of healing that aren’t taken seriously by the Western medical community.

After devouring it and others, she began practicing Reiki. With clients, she said, visions would come to her as if she were sitting in front of a movie screen. At first, she shrugged them off, but as the visions returned, she began to poke around online about psychic development.

Piece by piece, she assembled a curriculum.

In 2011, Ackerman began holding classes in a vacant storefront in the Gulf Gate neighborhood — the soft opening of The Spirit University. Devoted to the teaching of mediumship, the school offers classes including tarot and telepathy. According to Ackerman, more than 10,000 students have enrolled in classes.

“I felt safe in that environment,” said Elodie Tarantino, 45, a practicing medium. She said the university provided a space where no one was ridiculed or felt abnormal.

Ackerman often encounters skeptics who suggest that mediums are nothing but roadside frauds. She said the program’s key is its focus on providing evidence, details and validation — specific information like names of those who have died or details from their past — in order to gain a client’s trust. The sweet spot is for a medium to offer six pieces of evidence for a reading of three to six minutes, and 30 pieces for an hourlong private reading. “That’s my litmus test to whether I’m myself connected andfor the client to know that you’re truly connected.”

Tarantino said of Ackerman’s ability: “She shows me she is connected.” She added that when it comes to communicating with those outside the physical world, “that connection needs to be proved.”

“I don’t go with the intent of proving life after death,” Ackerman explained. “I’m not here to do battle with anyone’s belief system.”

For her, sustained engagement with questions of love, death, mortality and identity imbue her life with meaning. “It teaches me to be much more understanding and empathetic to others, as well as myself.”

Ackerman notes that clients lean toward bigger questions like how to find peace or love. “How can I best improve my life?” is the main question. While many come for personal or professional validation, the vast majority come for closure.

Barbara Leighton, 68, did. After her husband died, she looked for ways to keep the thread between them intact. “It’s just a connection I miss having with him,” she said. By using mediums like Ackerman as a conduit, “I feel like I’m having a conversation with him,” she adds.

Ackerman said she believes that most people cannot see energy or spirits because modern culture is saturated with scientific pragmatism. But for those willing to consider what lies beyond the physical perception of the world, “it’s there,” she says.

Conjuring spirits in Florida

With Town seated, the Rev. Jim Toole, 60, took a breath, closed his eyes and positioned his hands just above the top of her head.

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