A Diary from the Psychic Capital of the World by Greta Rainbow

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By Greta Rainbow<br>June 12, 2026<br>Diaries

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

Cassadaga front office. Photograph by Greta Rainbow.

Friday, March 27, 2026

When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly.

I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in New Smyrna Beach, poking lizards and watching late-night TV in a room covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. I liked to watch my mother be mothered by a grandma who would never let us call her that.

Mimi asked what I wanted to do now, by which she meant, did we mind stopping at an antique mall nearby. This was my childhood, Mom said. Mimi had been a Boston antiques dealer, a detail covered in Mom’s memoir in progress, which I’ve read and Mimi hasn’t. The book is about being raised by hippies, and how you can feel loved without feeling safe.

I’d conceived of my role that weekend as moral support in general, and specifically in the project of locating lost paperwork involving dead men. Such items included a trove of love letters sent to Mimi in the early sixties, which Mom wanted for book research, and stock certificates belonging to Dan, who, despite practicing as a Manhattan lawyer, did not have a will—thus rendering Mimi, his sister, the executor of the estate. She’d come into the role after Dan was murdered on a spring afternoon, while walking on a bike path outside of Albany. We still don’t have answers. In the fall, a twenty-five-year-old man was charged with one count of second-degree murder—seemingly not premeditated, a random act of insane violence against a practicing Buddhist.

That was also the reason for the one activity I’d added to the itinerary. Sometime in the past decade, someone told me that there is a Psychic Capital of the World. The Psychic Capital of the World happens to be an unincorporated community in central Florida called Cassadaga, and is twenty-three miles from Mimi’s house. She’d been there before, by virtue of living nearby and being the kind of person who would go to a Psychic Capital of the World, which is one of the ways that we are alike.

But she hadn’t gone in years and thus could not vouch for the currently practicing psychics. (Many of them, at Cassadaga and elsewhere, are quacks lacking the gift, she said. Not all are as talented as the tarot card reader at the Russian Tea Room in Boston who once predicted that Mimi’s two daughters would each birth two daughters.) She once went to a Sunday-morning séance with Dan, actually, which doesn’t surprise me. He was very spiritual, if not a Spiritualist, the belief system at Cassadaga: an understanding that individuals continue to exist after the change called death, and that it’s possible to communicate with them.

Photograph by Greta Rainbow.

According to an online calendar, there would be a séance at Cassadaga on Saturday. I called the number and the medium answered. I felt compelled to tell him everything about us, but I worried he’d google things like Dan’s case, tainting the experience I wanted to believe could be legitimate. Anyway, he was all business; he’d hold three spots. We talked about it over drinks at the Sea Vista Motel and Tiki Bar, with a view of the part of the beach where cars are allowed to drive, and beyond it, the rolling Atlantic. Mom and Mimi said they’d go, mostly because they love me. Admission was twenty-five dollars in advance and thirty at the door. Mimi said that if he really was psychic, he’d already know we were coming.

That night, we stayed at Mimi’s new house in a development atop a swamp, bought with Dan’s lawyer money. Her old house, which she still owns and Mom thinks she’ll never sell, is a shrine to a life’s worth of stuff that once was valuable, materially or sentimentally, but has been tarnished by rat shit and smoke damage. The new place has a screened-in porch Mimi calls the lanai, and we watched a family of ducks line up in a row, then peel off one by one, while she dragged on a cigarette.

Photograph by Greta Rainbow.

Inside, on Mimi’s bed, we went through little sacks of jewelry. She let me take a sterling swordfish charm, a spiral chain bracelet, a jewel-encrusted costume ring, and a frog whose mouth hinges open—a roach clip. There’s a silver walnut pillbox that I really wanted, but Mimi wasn’t ready to give it away. This exasperated my mom; she had me point it out again so she’d know, for when Mimi dies.

Saturday, March 28, 2026

I dressed in all black, which Mimi said would let the spirits know who to come to. Around my neck I wore a brass whistle. It belonged to Dan and had been issued...