In its first big showing since the pandemic began, the Spring Holistic Psychic Fair kicked off with hundreds of visitors filling the Wareham Elks Lodge on Saturday.

Organized by the First Spiritualist Church of Onset, the fair offered visitors dozens of vendors and readers at tables across the lodge. In one section of the room, readers sat at a grid of tables, with each medium providing their own style of reading. 

Some tabletops were empty, save for the reader overlapping their hands atop their guest’s hands. Other readers slapped down tarot cards, searching for the information that visitors were seeking. One table was covered in a variety of small shells and rocks, while another had one large amethyst geode sitting between the reader and her client.

On Rev. Kathleen Hoffman’s table, a tall portrait of a man face her and her client, as Hoffman does spirit drawings for her visitors.

Church treasurer Larry Becker says Hoffman has helped him with a spirit drawing. Sometimes, he said, mediums can amaze with what they know about the people they’re reading.

“Sometimes you say, ‘How do they know?’” Becker said.

Becker clarified that not all mediums are psychics, who he classified as people who work with seeing the past and future. Within the church’s beliefs, mediums work spiritually, helping people connect with those that have passed.

The church tries to keep negative energy out of people’s readings, he said.

“We will never tell a person, ‘Go to the doctor,’” Becker said.

Becker said the church’s fair is the largest in the area, evidenced by the huge crowd filling the lodge on Saturday.

Beyond the readers, the fair also hosted many vendors, who sold a mix of jewelry, soaps, portraits, incense, sage and other items.

Saturday was vendor Loren White’s first time at this particular fair, but she’s sold jewelry at other fairs in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for years, she said.

She enjoys making jewelry, and she tries to “make sure it’s a good fit for everybody,” White said, showing off the anklet and necklaces that she wears herself. Though she lives in New Hampshire, she’s from Brazil originally White said, which inspired the name of her business: Bahiana Beads Jewelry, after the Brazilian state of Bahia.

White has been making jewelry since she was 15, she said, and has now spent decades putting beads, shells and pieces together to create pieces anyone can wear. 

“I love shells,” White said, grinning. “Summer is coming!”

Another vendor, Ashley Merithew, was selling crystals, sage, oil burners, hand-carved wooden boxes and other items from a store she used to run, “A Link Between Worlds.”

Merithew also came to the fair from New Hampshire, selling her goods to the hundreds who stopped by the lodge Saturday.