On New Year’s Day, 2018, Tiffany Hopkins left her home in Brooklyn and drove 12 hours through a winter storm to the tiny New York hamlet of Lily Dale.
Beside her was Nika, her red, chicken-hunting Husky – rescued from doggy death row – and, packed into a U-Haul truck, all her earthly belongings.
Burned out by a demanding job, decades of global travel, and feeling a desperate need to reconnect with her creative self, the 34-year-old had inherited a dilapidated cottage in the hamlet (pop: 275) about 50 miles south of Buffalo.
She figured she could save money by moving there while she worked out her next move.
What she didn’t expect was what one might consider the biggest career pivot of all time: from tech innovation to professional medium.
Lily Dale is the world’s largest community of Spiritualists. That means every single resident believes not just that communicating with the dead is possible – but that anyone can do it. They just have to learn.
And in her new book, Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide to the Dead, Tiffany describes exactly how she did just that.
But before she could discover how to get in touch with departed souls, she had a much more pressing – and terrestrial – job at hand.
The 34-year-old had inherited a dilapidated cottage in the town and figured she could save money by moving there while she figured out her next move
The cottage when the family first moved in in the 1910s
Tiffany and her dad swing into Lily Dale for her uncle Gary’s wedding in 1989
‘My uncle Gary had told me the cottage was uninhabitable after 20 years of neglect,’ she says, ‘but I assumed he thought I was a city slicker and was overstating things.
‘As it turned out, the place was uninhabitable.’
Her new home had no water, and even after she got it connected, the toilet, water heater, and kitchen sink were all busted. To go to the bathroom, she had to visit the fire hall across the street. And when she needed a shower, it was a 40-minute drive to the nearest truck stop.
She’d also inherited 20 years’ worth of ancestral trash – and two dead birds that had been there so long only their bones remained as evidence.
Despite all of that, she was determined to stick around. And, slowly, she cleaned, repaired, and, learning from her mistakes, built a cozy home she now adores.
In the process, she was also committed to finding out what all this ‘talking to the dead’ stuff was about. So, almost as soon as she’d unpacked her U-Haul, she sought out a local mediumship class.
What she learned went against the solid logic that had ruled her life for so long.
Trained at business school – in both Switzerland (‘for the financial roots’) and Singapore (‘for the focus on technology’), Tiffany had lived in Europe and Asia, ‘moved to Africa, then spent a season living out of two carry-on suitcases, traipsing across Brazil, Germany, and Australia.’
In the snow – after all the repairs finally meant Tiffany had heat, light, and water
The residents of Lily Dale believe that anyone can talk to the dead – they just have to learn how
‘Mediumship is a capacity that every human has, so the fundamental task at hand is to learn how to turn it on and off,’ says Tiffany
She was still living this fast-paced, high-stress life when, just before her 28th birthday, she received a call from her father.
He told her that her beloved grandmother had died. And, when work pressures meant she was unable to get back for the funeral, it was the final straw.
‘I quit my job and went home,’ she writes.
She dotted around the country a bit. But when she heard about the old family cottage in Lily Dale, something clicked.
‘I could reacquaint myself with my roots since I had grown up in the area before moving west with my family when I was eight,’ she says.
‘And I hoped that by living in this rural location, I could reduce my expenditure enough to work through the lean years of building my business.’
What she didn’t plan for, she says, was to fall in love with talking to the dead.
‘Anyone can become a medium. However, I didn’t intend to become one myself,’ she says. ‘Nobody has been more surprised than me that this is what I spend my free time doing.’
But getting to grips with the ins and outs of spiritualism was, she tells the Daily Mail, a ‘really steep learning curve’.
A common misconception – thanks to generations of horror movies – is that mediums have no control over which spirits contact them, making it understandably terrifying.
‘In popular media, we see evil spirits, involuntary possession, angry ghosts, murderous zombies, and many more terrifying transliving others,’ she says.
But, she claims, it is entirely possible to both turn the ability on and off at will, ensuring they never have to deal with an Exorcist situation ruining their day.
‘During my first few months in Lily Dale, I often wondered if my neighbors were reading my mind. I’d be walking the dog, someone would wave, and I’d cringe, thinking they knew how much I didn’t like the color of their house.’
She realized much later how mistaken – and paranoid – she’d been. No one was reading her thoughts, she says.
‘The practice takes focus and effort – things people rarely expend without a good reason.’
Lily Dale is the world’s largest community of Spiritualists – meaning every resident believes it’s possible to communicate with the dead
One of the first things Tiffany did was seek out a class to learn mediumship
She continues: ‘I remember an early reading, when I wasn’t sure I was going to keep going with it. I was really stuck in my head, and couldn’t find a way to make it make sense.
But my sister was like, “Will you just do some readings for my friends? They really want to experience it.”
‘So I said, OK, and I had such powerful experiences with these women.
‘The first one, I remember feeling I could sense her ancestors in the room around her. It was as if there were hundreds of women just behind her and with her.
‘Then right after that, I did a reading for someone, and I brought through this woman who felt so swan-like and so ephemeral.
‘I couldn’t see much for her, but I could feel her beauty. And I was describing her to the friend of my sister, and she was like, “Oh my God, that’s my friend who passed just a few days ago.”’
The experience convinced her to continue with her studies.
However, she concedes that there are charlatans – and within Spiritualism, there have been at least two bombshell accounts of fraud that made the national headlines.
‘In her fifties, one of the Fox sisters, credited with being the founders of modern Spiritualism as teenagers, gave interviews disclosing that all their work had been fraudulent,’ says Tiffany.
‘She later recanted the admission.
‘The other is the account from M. Lamar Keene published in his book The Psychic Mafia,’ she adds.
‘Keene details not only how he faked readings and séances but exposed a ring of other Spiritualist mediums who shared detailed personal information about sitters to use as evidence in messages.’
One of the Fox sisters, credited with being the founders of modern Spiritualism, disclosed that all their work had been fraudulent. She later recanted the admission
‘I could reacquaint myself with my roots since I had grown up in the area before moving west with my family when I was eight,’ she says
Quack medium M. Lamar Keene admitted that he’d faked readings and séances
So, yes, it’s clear mediumship can be faked.
However, by sharing in detail how it works, she says her hope is that more ethical mediums will emerge, and customers will be better informed, ultimately forcing the fakes out of the market.
Step one is to get quiet and take a moment to connect with yourself and the space you’re in.
‘It’s sort of like a meditation moment,’ she says.
Next is to consciously open a connection by asking whoever you want to contact to join you.
‘I do that by sharing my intention – this is why I’m here,’ she says, ‘and I invite the person to join me in that action.’
She claims that every medium experiences communication from the dead differently.
‘I start with a physical sensation of weight or movement, and that gives me a sense of what that person might be like.
‘Then I wait till I see a little something in my mind’s eye. It’s all extremely internal. It’s not like I get this nice movie. I know mediums that do get like a movie or download, but it’s very across the senses for me, and little bits and pieces that I put together.’
The most important part of the session, she says, is then translating what has happened, either by communicating it with the client, writing it down, or turning it into art.
She says that, after her beloved Nika passed, she would communicate with her spirit, then sculpt the image she received in clay. Other times she has created pieces of music, while some mediums make dances, podcasts, or weavings based on their session.
‘That’s what makes it mediumship,’ she says, ‘because it’s not just staying inside you.’
Slowly, she cleaned, repaired, and, learning from her mistakes, built a cozy home she now adores
On the porch with Sylvester the cat and Coyo, Nika’s pup
You can repeat the translating part as many times as necessary.
‘It’s like an interview… you get something out, you think about it, and you go back and ask for more. And then you ask for more.’
The fifth step is to say thank you to the spirit and close the connection by coming back into full consciousness, ‘so you can move on and not leave anything open or following you around.’
It takes time, patience, and a lot of trust, she says.
‘It’s been surprising to me how much I’ve had to learn to trust myself and just go for it, even in those moments when I’m like, «This doesn’t make any sense.»‘
Now, she says, she’s going a step further by exploring trance mediumship, a process where the spirit speaks directly through her while she’s in a sort of dream state.
‘It’s definitely another level of trust and acceptance,’ she tells the Daily Mail.
‘But it feels much more connected – there’s less of a gap between receiving information and then saying it.’
She also continues to work in tech, and believes the logical side of her personality keeps her from going ‘off to beyond’ and getting lost in the spiritual side.
‘It’s been really powerful to bring them together, but it’s also been a real struggle trying to figure out how to hold both of those in my being, because I don’t think there’s a lot of great examples in our culture.’
Beyond: A Living Person’s Guide to the Dead by Tiffany Hopkins is published by Sterling Ethos
