DeLand 
A few miles south of DeLand, tucked among the pine hills near Lake Helen, lies one of Florida's most unusual communities: Cassadaga, a village of mediums and mystics often called the Psychic Capital of the World. Its origins trace to George P. Colby, a traveling medium who, the story goes, was guided south in the 1870s by a spirit named Seneca to find "the high pine hills overlooking silvery lakes."
Colby found those hills in Volusia County, and on December 18, 1894, he and several fellow Spiritualists secured a charter for the Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Meeting Association. A few weeks later, on January 3, 1895, Colby deeded thirty-five acres of his homestead to the new association, formally establishing the camp. They named it after Cassadaga Lake, New York, already a center of Spiritualist activity, tying their Florida settlement to a broader nineteenth-century movement.
The camp grew to roughly fifty-seven acres and endures today as a working Spiritualist community of certified mediums, healers, and historic cottages. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, Cassadaga draws curious visitors from around the world and remains one of the most distinctive threads in the tapestry of West Volusia history — a quiet, otherworldly neighbor to the Athens of Florida.