Can You Hear Me Now?

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Hold the Line, It’s Granny

Scared. Nervous. Freaked. Oh. My. God. The trepidations of the first-time medium visitors I spoke with were remarkably similar. Allison DuBois, upon whose life NBC’s Medium is closely based, says in her book, Don’t Kiss Them Good-bye, that clients will benefit most from working with a psychic if they share some personal details and affirm correct information as it’s presented. Yet most first-timers aren’t that trusting.

“I didn’t say one thing. I was clutching my rosary the whole time,” says Melissa Gabriel, owner of New Beginnings Face and Body Spa in St. Paul. Nevertheless, she was “astonished” by details her family found “shocking,” including a depiction of her deceased grandfather playing the banjo and singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” his favorite song.

Other first-timers were equally tight-lipped. “I tried not to give anything back,” says another woman, who requested anonymity. But the psychic told her things about her daughter, killed by a train more than a decade ago, that no one—not even her husband—knew. “She described the little bags, blue with white ribbons, I’d bought for the cookies we baked together the year before she died,” the woman recalls. “It was astounding.”

During his first visit to Krupp, Reddin thought he could outsmart the medium by asking her the names of his deceased grandmother’s parakeets. Before he had a chance to spring the trap, however, Krupp described his grandmother—with two birds on her shoulder—in perfect detail. “I thought, ‘Uh-oh, I’m in for a ride now,’” he says.

“Most of what she said was scary, because there’s just no way that she’d know it,” says Sherri Hallerman Gould, an attorney with Wells Fargo. Gould had never met with a psychic until she was contacted by Krupp, who had found her by asking a friend of a friend whether she knew someone named Sherri whose mother had died. Gould’s family arranged for a reading.

During the conference call, Gould’s sister wanted to know whether her particular presence was acknowledged on the other side. Krupp described the deceased mother pointing to something on her wrist, something shiny with a basket-weave pattern and something dangling off it. The sister recognized it as the watch—gold with diamonds, a basket-weave design, and a safety chain—that she received when her mother’s jewelry was divided among the family.

Krupp also described bamboo placemats that Gould’s mother had once made from old wallpaper. “There’s no way that it could be random,” Gould says. “There was too much information. None of my friends could ever know about that—my mom lived in Birmingham, Alabama…. I’ve always thought, ‘What the hell do we know?’ It’s comforting for me to think there’s something after this.”

Krupp asks visitors to think in advance about whom they want to contact and what questions they want to ask during readings. But particular respondents and answers, she cautions, are not always available on demand. The dead have their own agenda.

“We get what we get,” says DuBois. “It depends on the strength and clarity of the energy on the other side, our ability to receive the message, and the willingness of the loved one to whom we convey the message.”
 

Words Cannot Describe

If you want to stump a medium, ask her how she does it. “Words are so limiting,” laughs Maureen Pelton, an adjunct faculty member with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing, where she teaches health-care professionals to tune into their own intuition. “I can actually see people’s frequency, coming in through the top of their head. It’s vibration I can see, feel, and hear—that’s what I connect to,” she says. “Literally every human being has their own unique ray, and I tune into the ray. I’m really talking to their souls.”

Pelton says she can read people pushing their carts down the grocery aisle, a disconcerting side effect. Krupp encounters the same dilemmas. “I go to buy makeup and there’s somebody’s grandfather at the Clinique counter,” she says. She once described to a bank teller the woman she saw standing next to her, and the teller asked her colleagues to call the police; Krupp was escorted out. Now she is more careful to ask whether someone wants information before she offers it.

“I’ll get an image or sense, and then I’ll hear myself talk about it. I don’t think, I just say it,” says Jet Sophia, who describes a sort of cloud containing images or visible features. Sophia (who recently changed her name from Nancy Evechild) developed an insatiable curiosity about psi when she took a class in 1980; by 1987, the mother of three had left behind bus-driving and shoe repair to be a full-time psychic.

All these women, who charge from $40 to $175 for an hour’s session, made mid-life career moves to become professional psychics. Krupp owned a temporary employment agency and an executive-recruiting business. Pelton practiced traditional psychotherapy. While their styles differ, they do share similarities in their approach. They provide clients with tapes of the sessions. They often say, “Let me look”—but none of them needs to have met the person they’re dealing with to do a reading. Krupp prefers working over the phone because people are more relaxed and less emotional. Sophia can read from an e-mail or letter. Most psychics are stingy with specific predictions, however. Sophia says they represent only the future as viewed from one point in time. Pelton considers them disempowering, a denial of free will.

What is most uncanny is the psychics’ ability to capture—whether from the other side or the client’s own unconscious—a departed one’s expressions, the cadence of his or her voice, and themes that marked the person’s life. During my visit with Sophia, for example, she told me my deceased father was smoking, a lifelong habit he never managed to break, and that he wanted me to quit worrying: “He says to tell you there are more toxins in worry than in cigarettes,” she reported. It sounded like something he would say.

Psi is a talent like any other, usually showing up in childhood and available in degrees, these mediums insist. Krupp doesn’t like to do other-side readings for any particular client more than once a year. Pelton believes her skill has been passed down through maternal lineage; her daughter shares it.

“It’s like playing the piano. Many people have the ability to play the piano. Some find a teacher, practice, and turn it into a skill. Others never even see a piano,” Sophia says. “And if you ask someone how they play with such feeling, I don’t know how they could answer.”

Scientists can explain psi no better than mediums do. In his new book, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, Radin focuses on interconnectedness, long a precept in Eastern philosophy. Reality is nothing like clockwork, as we used to think, he says. Instead, it’s “woven from strange, ‘holistic’ threads that aren’t located precisely in space or time. Tug on a dangling loose end…and the whole cloth twitches, instantly, throughout all space and time.”

“I love all those theories. I could sit and listen to physics, metaphysics, and stories about morphic resonance and other dimensions for a long time,” Sophia says. “But I’m happier with The Church of Who Knows. That’s my belief system.”