Camp Silver Belle in Court

SPIRITUALISTS: The New Era reported on testimony in an Orphan's Court case involving Camp Silver Belle, a spiritualist retreat in Ephrata.

The camp "was described by one side as a place of worship and by the other as a nest of 'quackery and fraud'" at a hearing on behalf of 13 heirs of a deceased woman whose will bequeathed $16,000 to the spiritualists.

The case had been in court for more than two years and had included as a witness a former assistant to Harry Houdini, who demonstrated for the court how some of the spiritualists' alleged supernatural feats were performed.

The attorney for the spiritualist group said the magician was a "side-show artist (who) knew nothing of theology and nothing of the doctrines of the Spiritualists."

In turn, the attorney for the 13 relatives who sought to break the will said the magician and other witnesses exposed the Silver Belle mediums as "gross and deliberate frauds."

Camp Silver Belle was founded in Ephrata by Ethel Riley Post Parrish, who brought the spiritualist group here from Florida in 1934. (Feb. 26, 1937)

Flashback Lancaster is compiled from the Lancaster Newspapers archives by Jed Reinert


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