Camp Chesterfield

Camp Chesterfield began in 1886 as a Spiritualist camp meeting in Indiana, and became the home of the Indiana Association of Spiritualists four years later. The camp grew into a full campus over the twentieth century: hotels, a 1954 cathedral with stained glass, an art gallery, tree-lined lanes of cottages, a Trail of Religion, and a labyrinth, roughly thirty-four acres of it listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002 with forty contributing buildings.

The camp's history also includes an unusually well-documented record of exposed fraud: fourteen of its mediums were arrested in 1925 on false-pretenses charges, a 1960 infrared filming exposed a materialization seance, and a former medium's 1976 book described hot-reading practices there. Honest writing about the camp holds both things at once: it is a real, active Spiritualist community that has offered services, seminary training, and mediumship development for well over a century, and it carries this record in its own history. The Indiana Association of Spiritualists operates it today, with a preservation foundation maintaining the architecture.

Visiting

Events, services, and visit information are at campchesterfield.com; the camp is in Chesterfield, Indiana.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChesterfieldIN_ChesterfieldSpiritualistCampStreetView.jpg), CC BY-SA 4.0.