Lia and was now home in the Light. This unwelcomed and unknown guest in my own home helped give me one of the most incredible validations that I have ever received.
Suzane Northrop
New York
I have had the honor of working as a trans-medium for over thirty years and have experienced countless connections with dead people (DPs) along the way. In turn, these connections create some great stories for people to share. But here is a story I would like to share of my own special happening. It involves what transpired during the testing done by Dr. Gary Schwartz for the 2000 HBO documentary “Life Afterlife,” which later formed the basis for his book The Afterlife Experiments.
There were a number of mediums involved in the testing, including John Edward, George Anderson, Anne Gehman, Laurie Campbell, and me. The tests were to be conducted at the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
We landed in Tucson and went directly to the lab for the taping of the documentary. It was there that for the first time I met Dr. Schwartz and his team. Although we weren't fully familiar with the ground rules, we did know generally that each medium would be asked to do what he or she does so well.
We weren't told specifically what would happen until the next day. We would each meet with the same “sitter” (that is the person being read by the medium) whom we had never met. Each of us would be wired up to monitors as was the sitter (whose name I learned later was Patricia Price), and all information collected would go into the computer as data. From that data Dr. Schwartz would be able to ascertain percentages of “hits” or accurate information. The electrical impulses would be analyzed to see if any of the mediums were reading the sitter's mind. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy but hey…I was just the guinea pig! You can read all about this as it's been documented in Dr. Schwartz's book The Afterlife Experiments. However, here I would like to talk about a back-story that didn't make it into the book.
On the day of taping we all arrived at the lab which was appropriately named “The Living Energy Center.” I remember noticing a large man in the waiting room. I assumed he was one of the grips or guys who work with all of the film equipment and crew. I honestly didn't really think much of it until later that night when all the filming was finished, at least as far as the testing of the mediums was concerned.
As it turned out, the sitter had lost her son who, along with his dog, had dominated the information coming through to each medium. After sixteen hours of taping, we would finally meet with Dr. Schwartz to discuss what had transpired. It was then that I learned the guy I had taken special notice of—Michael whom I thought was a grip—was actually the husband of the sitter whose son (also named Michael) had dominated the readings.
Michael (the father), who was not into all this medium stuff, had stood outside the testing room listening to all the information coming through from his son. Included was validating information that Michael had never told his wife of almost thirty years. The information was so strong that Michael went from being a total nonbeliever to feeling, for the first time since his son's death, a sense of connection, a sense of his son wanting his parents to know that he was alright.
Later I would learn that Michael actually went to his local biker bar in the mountains and shared with everyone all the information from his dead son. This was very out of character for Michael, and he was running the risk of having all his biker friends think he surely must have gone off the deep end. But he just told it as it was.
After performing the initial afterlife experiment, one of Dr. Schwartz's main concerns was that people would say this study wasn't perfect. He asked if we would come back to Arizona to do additional studies in a more demanding environment. This time we would have more than one sitter, and we would not be able to see or hear the sitters, so we didn't know if they were male or female, young or old, etc.
So, six months later, we were again coming back to Tucson, Arizona at Miraval, a luxury resort, where this time the testing would be even more intensive. The night before this second round of experiments, John Edward and I were sitting around talking and came up with the idea of doing our own little study. We decided to ask for his mother and my father to show up from the Other Side. We left it at that and returned to our own rooms until the next day.
Right before leaving to go to Miraval where all the testing was taking place, Laurie Campbell came into the room where John and I were getting ready to leave. Out of the blue she asked John, “Did you by chance sit on your mother's curler box or something like that?” John turned several shades of red. It seems that when he was very young in order to see out the car window, his mother had him sit on her curler box. We looked at each other not saying anything but knew, “Hmmmmmmm. That's one out of two!”
We left for Miraval where at this time there were only four mediums left from original five—John, Laurie, Anne, and me. We were scattered all over the facility away from each other. When the sitters arrived, as noted, we couldn't see or hear them.
This was a two-day affair. After seeing at least seven or eight people that day, it was towards the very end of the testing session when the next-to-last sitter walked in. I started giving the information I was getting. I sensed something familiar about this particular sitter and continued to read getting a wealth of clear information from her deceased husband such as how he died, his name, etc. When I was all done and the session was over, I was allowed to turn around and see who the sitter was—it was none other than Patricia Price, the original sitter from the original experiment! But here was the kicker: her husband Michael had died about a week before the testing. It was so odd, even for me, knowing that he had been there physically in January and now, six months later, he had joined his son.
Right after the first testing when Michael went to his biker bar and shared with everyone about what had happened, he started doing things that were totally unlike him—which is often a tip-off that the person's soul knows that the transition to the afterlife is near. For instance, Michael had never used a computer in his life, but Patricia was to find a number of love poems and letters from him on the computer after his death. And two weeks before their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Michael had started saying things like, “If I don't make it to our anniversary, know how much I love you.” This was very out of character for Michael. It was revealed that Michael was now with his son Michael, Jr.
Needless to say, when I turned around after the session to see it was Patricia, I was in shock knowing her husband Michael had just joined their son.
After our session, she left to be read by John. I was finishing up with one more sitter when the next thing I knew John with Patricia and one of the facilitators came running over to me. John said to Patricia, “Tell Suzane what you just told me.” Patricia turned to me and said that when she was around John, she kept hearing the name Paul. Paul is my father's name, and he did the same thing as her husband Mike: worked on cars and was a car salesman as well.
John and I looked at each other knowing, “That's two!” He had the validation of his deceased mother coming through Laurie, and now I had the validation of my father coming through Patricia and Michael. Both John's mom and my dad were playing their own tricks of the day from the Other Side and giving us two mediums our own personal validations pretty much on demand.
And so our secret experiment within the afterlife experiments had been an unforgettable success.
