George P. Colby was born in 1848 in Pike, New York, and grew up to become a trance medium who traveled the country giving readings and seances. Among his spirit guides was a Native American he called Seneca, who Colby said directed him to establish a Spiritualist community in Florida. In October 1875, the Colby family arrived in Jacksonville by train and took a boat south up the St. Johns River to Blue Springs Landing. From there, they traveled by foot through dense scrub until they reached the spot Seneca had described, on the shores of what is now Lake Colby. He filed a homestead claim in 1880 and was granted 145 acres in 1884. A decade later, on December 18, 1894, Colby and several other Spiritualists secured a charter for the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association. Weeks later, on January 3, 1895, he deeded thirty-five acres of his homestead to the new association. Colby died in June 1933, but the community he planted in the Florida scrub endures.

Cassadaga's residents are quick to distinguish their practice from fortune-telling or entertainment. Spiritualism, as taught here, follows nine guiding principles and holds no dogma or creed. Mediums in the camp must be certified through the association, a process that involves demonstrating their abilities before established practitioners. The community maintains a hotel, a bookstore, and a calendar of services, classes, and healing sessions open to the public. The atmosphere is more church fellowship than carnival sideshow. Sunday services include messages from spirit, delivered by mediums to members of the congregation. For visitors seeking a private reading, the bookstore maintains a list of certified mediums available that day, each working from their own home within the camp grounds.

Cassadaga's reputation has seeped into American storytelling in ways the camp's founders could not have predicted. Carl Hiaasen used it as inspiration for the town of Grange in his novel Lucky You. Cherie Priest set much of her novel Brimstone in 1920s Cassadaga. Michael Connelly's short story The Safe Man brings its protagonists to the community, later adapted into an Audible podcast series in 2022. The BBC investigated it in the 2008 documentary Around the World in 80 Faiths. Jamie Loftus devoted extensive attention to the camp in her podcast Ghost Church. Films, television episodes, and novels continue to draw on Cassadaga's unusual identity, each interpreting the place through its own lens. The community takes the attention in stride, having spent more than a century existing in the gap between skepticism and belief.

Cassadaga today remains remarkably small, a cluster of modest structures nestled among live oaks draped in Spanish moss. There are no chain restaurants, no strip malls, no traffic lights. The camp grounds cover roughly the same acreage Colby deeded in 1895, and the community's population has never been large. Nearby Colby-Alderman Park preserves the natural landscape that Colby walked through when he first arrived. The Devil's Chair, a brick bench in the nearby Cassadaga cemetery, has become a local legend in its own right, drawing curiosity-seekers who have nothing to do with Spiritualism. The community sits at the intersection of Florida's tourist culture and something older and stranger, a place where the ordinary rhythms of a small Southern town coexist with the conviction that the dead have not entirely departed.