Can You Hear Me Now?

(page 3 of 3)

Blithe Spirits

Minneapolis clothing-store owner Josi Wert says she was amazed when Krupp described her grandparents, imitated her father’s “cowboy way of talking,” and disclosed details of her stepfather’s suicide. And when Krupp insisted that Wert had three daughters, Wert, mother of twins, “totally got chills”—early in the pregnancy, she had carried triplets. Chills aside, Wert remains a “super-pragmatic” person. “When I get stuff that makes sense, it’s cool, but it’s just more information. I don’t live my life by it,” she says.

“Even if you don’t believe a word she says, it’s entertaining,” says Carol Brooks, Wayzata mother of three and Animal Humane Society board member. Brooks hasn’t tried to reach the dead, but she has asked for Krupp’s assistance in dealing with serious family matters. She also learned from Krupp that her horse, Wally, didn’t like his plain name. His stall now boasts a new nameplate: Sir Wally III. Animal communication is “always a hoot,” Brooks says.

Some people seek out mediums for life guidance—a sort of inspired coaching. St. Paul teacher Eve Johnson Blackwell says that Jet Sophia has guided her through job transitions and advised her on sensitive family matters. “I believe she confers with my spirit guides, higher self, whatever you want to call it,” she told me an in e-mail message. “She is impeccable and hasn’t ever been wrong, in my estimation.”

As for contacting the other side, which Blackwell also has done, comfort is the primary goal. Several families of individuals lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks sought, and continue to seek, Krupp’s aid, which the psychic offers gratis. Alison Crowther, whose son Welles died in the attacks, was referred to Krupp by another family. But she was cautious when she first called the psychic.

“I didn’t know if it was legitimate, and I didn’t want to be taken advantage of. I didn’t tell her who I was,” Crowther says. At first she was disappointed: “Right away, she began describing my son in ways I thought weren’t accurate,” Crowther recalls. “I figured she just didn’t know.”

Krupp kept referring to someone in a stairwell, wearing a white shirt. Crowther had assumed her son, an equities trader, was trapped in his 104th-floor office and was wearing a suit; months later, however, Welles’s unburned body was found at Ground Zero—an indicator that he must have been below the crash area. Crowther also happened upon a published eyewitness account describing a man wearing a white T-shirt and a red bandana who worked with firefighters to get people out. She recognized him as her son, a trained volunteer firefighter since age 16, who always carried a red kerchief (as did his friend, snowboarder Tyler Jewell, to honor him during the recent Olympics).

Crowther, a former sales management executive who says many people in her family take all this with a grain of salt, stays in touch with Krupp and has embarked on a spiritual journey of her own. “I have a belief in the possibility of psychic work, tempered with the understanding that this is an area ripe for being abused,” she says. “What has transformed me is that I, without question, own the knowledge that there’s life after death, and that is a powerful thing.”

Jenette Nelson, who teaches art and conflict resolution in Stanley, North Dakota, lost her daughter Ann, a bond broker for Cantor Fitzgerald, in the 9/11 attacks. A former student who knew Krupp suggested that Nelson seek help with her intense grief.

“She has called many, many times, and it’s always when I’m in my most acute stage of suffering,” Nelson says, recounting a time when she’d cried all night and Krupp called first thing in the morning, saying she hadn’t wanted to wake her earlier. Once, when Krupp reported that Ann was ice skating on the other side with Amy and Aaron, close colleagues who died with her, Nelson contacted the coworkers’ parents. She learned that Aaron played hockey and that ice skating was Amy’s chief hobby.

Nelson says Krupp once just called to tell her that Ann “liked the stones”—whatever that meant. Nelson knew immediately; she and her husband had just been choosing stones for a fireplace. “She tells you such little things that nobody else would ever know,” she says. “They’re not really significant things, but they’re unique things.”

Nelson says that before her daughter died, she never would have sought out a psychic; the church in which she was raised frowned upon such things. But her current place of worship is more accepting. “This is a whole new level of spiritual thinking for me,” she says. “It’s been so comforting.”

The mediums say they enjoy helping people. “I’m in service to the one that is God, and that’s not a man in the sky with a beard, I might add. God to me is all of us, because we’re all connected,” Pelton says. Adds Sophia: “I had one woman who came in distressed and crying and left smiling. Nothing had changed except that she could see her situation from a different perspective. We bring to light people’s own wisdom and ability to heal.”
 

Scam or Solace?

Of course, there must be a logical explanation for all this mystic mumbo-jumbo.

Mediums can surf the Internet for facts. They can read body language for affirmation and denial. They can use information so generic that it will resonate with anyone willing to interpret it for personal consumption. Often, they can drag details right out of you without your realizing it. But do they?

“And what are the dead doing?” Carol Thacher asks. “Are they just able to figure out who the mediums are, then watch who their appointments are with so they know when to come and when not to? It’s basically absurd. But is it comforting? You bet. How wonderful it would be to believe [my husband] Steve is up there getting messages to me. How much more tranquil I’d feel about dying.”

Still, in our conversation about all this eerie stuff, Carol points out no one has analyzed the psychics’ accuracy rate. (Indeed, I don’t buy the vision, offered by one psychic, of my mother on the other side, knitting something pink—she couldn’t knit and hated pink.) Carol also notes that positive messages seem to be the rule. Otherwise, who would return? (In their defense, mediums say that they do get negative messages but they couch them: “Exercise more” instead of “You’re too fat.”)

“The whole thing smacks of a big scam,” Carol adds. Yet for the first time, psi has her attention. How did her name wind up in my reading? There are not that many people with the same last name, she says. “Why didn’t she choose Olson, Hansen, Larson?” Carol says. “That’s the thing that absolutely caused my head to spin around. While I’m not in any way, shape, or form converted, I am one little toenail away from being a complete cynic.”

Change, like science, is slow. But as we wait, and I sit here sipping water with lemon, I’ll confess that sometimes, when I’m in the car driving too fast around a corner, I glance at the back seat. Just in case.

Cathy Madison, a Minneapolis freelance writer, is a former editor of the Utne Reader.