In this episode, we start by widening the lens beyond Lily Dale, exploring a few lesser‑known spiritualist communities scattered across the country. Heather brings us into the world of Camp Casadega in Florida, touching on its history, reputation, and the way these communities have shaped modern spiritualist practice. From there, she introduces Camp Chesterfield in Indiana, the place we planned to visit, but the weather had other ideas.

🚗 The Trip That Wasn’t

This is where the episode slips from curiosity into fate. We were packed, ready, and already half‑living the weekend in our minds. The readings, the quiet corners, the sense of stepping into something old and sacred. And then, with uncanny timing, the medium emailed. A divine message revealing the truth: we were about to drive straight into a state of emergency.

🌧️ Historic Flooding & A State of Emergency

Just hours before departure, Indiana was hit with catastrophic flooding. Interstates buckled. Surrounding counties were evacuated. The state declared an emergency. And in a moment that felt like luck, intuition, or something higher, the medium Heather booked emailed that morning to warn you about the unfolding disaster.

Instead of heading south, we found ourselves completely replanning our vacation for the second time and heading up the the camper for a weekend of quiet relaxation instead.

We reflect on the intersection of planning, intuition, and the unpredictable Midwest. Sometimes the story isn’t the trip you take, it’s the one you almost took, and the forces that stopped you.

Overview

In Part 2 of our Great Lakes series, Heather takes us to Lake Erie. The shallowest, stormiest, and most temperamental of the five. Erie has always been a lake of contradictions: calm one moment, violent the next; fertile waters paired with shipwreck‑heavy shores; and a long history of strange sightings that blur the line between folklore and possibility. This episode explores Erie’s personality, its shipwreck history, and the enduring legend of Bessie, the lake’s own cryptid creature.

🌫️ Lake Erie: The Restless Lake

• Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, averaging only 62 feet deep, which makes its storms fast, brutal, and unpredictable.

• Because it warms and cools quickly, Erie has long been known for sudden squalls, dense fog banks, and waves that rise out of nowhere.

• Its shoreline is home to over 1,400 documented shipwrecks, many still undiscovered beneath shifting sediment.

• Erie’s waters have been central to regional industry, Indigenous history, and the War of 1812. A lake with both strategic importance and spiritual weight.

⚓ Shipwrecks & Strange Sightings

Lake Erie’s shipwreck record is matched only by its reputation for the uncanny.

• Sailors have reported serpentine shapes, massive wakes, and unexplained disturbances in the water for more than a century.

• Early 1900s newspapers ran stories of “sea serpents” spotted off Sandusky and Cleveland.

• Modern boaters still occasionally report large, fast‑moving shapes beneath the surface. It’s enough to keep the legend alive.

These sightings set the stage for Erie’s most famous myth.

🐉 The Legend of Bessie

Bessie: sometimes called the Lake Erie Monster, is the region’s most enduring cryptid.

• First widely reported in 1793, described as a massive, snake‑like creature.

• Sightings continued through the 1800s and early 1900s, often by fishermen and sailors who swore they saw something too large to be a sturgeon.

• Modern accounts describe a creature 30–40 feet long, grayish, and capable of moving quickly through shallow water.

• Whether folklore, misidentification, or something else entirely, Bessie has become part of Erie’s cultural identity, a symbol of the lake’s unpredictability and mystery.

Heather explores how these stories reflect the human need to explain the unexplainable, especially in places where nature feels bigger than us.

In this first part of our Great Lakes series, Sharon takes listeners into the world of Lake Superior, a place that behaves less like a lake and more like a living ocean. After Heather opens with broad Great Lakes context, we narrow our focus to Superior’s temperament, its long history of shipwrecks, and the cultural and spiritual weight that surrounds its waters. This segment lays the emotional and historical groundwork for the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the lake’s most famous and haunting loss.

Superior’s size, depth, and violent November storms give it a personality, unpredictable, unforgiving, and almost sentient. Its cold, oxygen‑poor depths preserve wrecks and human remains, creating an underwater world where the past never fully disappears.

From the Bannockburn to the Western Reserve, Superior’s tragedies form a lineage of disappearances, broken hulls, and unanswered questions. Some wrecks are documented; others simply vanished. This history shapes the lake’s ghostly reputation and sets the stage for the Fitzgerald.

The sinking of the Fitzgerald isn’t just a maritime disaster, it’s a story that lives on in families, museums, and Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad. The song becomes a form of collective mourning, a way for people to feel the weight of the tragedy even decades later.

Lightfoot’s opening lyric leads us into the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, Gichi-gami, and the Anishinaabe understanding of the lake as a living relative. This perspective reframes the lake’s storms, moods, and tragedies as part of a spiritual relationship with the land and water.

The Fitzgerald’s cargo ties the wreck to the broader story of iron mining in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the exhaustion of high‑grade ore, the rise of taconite, and the economic collapse that followed. This theme connects natural resources, industry, and the idea of balance with the land.

Reddit threads, ghost stories, and discussions about preserved bodies reveal how the Fitzgerald continues to haunt the public imagination. Conversations about adipocere, underwater graves, and ethical curiosity show how the wreck still raises questions about death, memory, and respect.

References:
Youtube videos Interviews w/ Cpt Cooper - https://shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/

2007 ghost distress call reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghoststories/comments/18i3sex/a_nautical_ghost_story_from_my_sailor_uncle/

Gordon Lightfoot song - https://youtu.be/FuzTkGyxkYI

Preserved bodies/ Discussions of Death Customs - https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/comments/120p99t/the_wreck_of_the_ss_edmund_fitzgerald_which_sunk/

Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum - https://shipwreckmuseum.com/the-fateful-journey/