When I was done, I could hear her talking but couldn’t find her. It took me a moment to realize she was upstairs. I started walking up to the second floor of her home and became aware of a young boy, around twelve, standing at the top of the stairs, wanting to know who I was and if I was Mary’s boyfriend. When I told him she had invited me over to meet him, he offered to show me his bedroom which had nothing but boxes in it.
It turned out that Mary was in her upstairs bathroom and was talking on the phone. The young boy told me, “She does that a lot.” When she came out of the bathroom, Mary found me halfway in a small storage space in the bedroom.
“What are you doing in there?” she asked, laughing.
“Your roommate is a young boy,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, which stunned me. “I see him a lot. I didn’t tell you that because I wanted to see if you would pick that up.”
“He told me that this is where he liked to play.” I told her.
“What’s his name?” she asked me.
“How should I know?” I asked back.
“Ask him!” she said.
It had never occurred to me to do any such thing in all of the investigations I had done up to that point. That was something the psychics I brought on the cases with me did, and I wasn’t a psychic as far as I was concerned. But I asked anyway.
“His name is Michael. Now he says it’s Scott.”
“Which one is it?” I asked in my mind.
“He’s saying his name is Michael Scott, but he liked being called Scott more than Michael.” I saw a picture of a man wearing an officer’s uniform that looked like it was from World War I. “His father was an officer in World War I,” I continued.
I passed on several of the impressions I was receiving, such as the idea that he loved electronics and liked “to mess with your radio.”
“I woke one night and the radio was on in my room. I knew I turned it off before I fell asleep, but it was back on and going up and down the dial. I told him to knock it off; I was trying to sleep,” Mary said, laughing. “How did he die? And why, at such a young age?”
Again, I continued to pass on the impressions I was getting to her questions. “His lungs . . . something was wrong with his lungs. He says that they were black . . . he had a hard time breathing. His bed was right here near this window, and he liked to look out at the tree when he was sick.”
And so it went that afternoon, but I wasn’t taking much of it seriously because I thought that none of what I was saying could be verified . . . until we went back downstairs. We were walking through Mary’s dining room, and I said, “Scott is telling me that this was the kitchen when he lived here.”
“This was the kitchen for years until the owners I bought the house from remodeled it and made the patio area the kitchen.”
“Scott says there was a pantry here.” I said.
“There was until they remodeled. Part of the pantry is still here, but the other part they converted into the bathroom you were using.” Mary confirmed, hardly fazed by what I was saying. To her, it was her friend Anthony being a psychic.
About thirty minutes after I left that afternoon, a woman named Chris came to cleanse Mary’s home by burning sage. Mary told her to go on upstairs and do her thing. When Chris came down forty-five minutes later, she said to Mary, “Did you know that there’s a young boy upstairs who died from tuberculosis and used to lie in bed in his room looking out the window at the tree you have in your backyard?”
“Oh yeah,” Mary said, nonchalantly. “Anthony just told me.”
It was after that day when my friend Sarah died in a freak car accident. At her memorial service my friend Cheryl suggested to me that my “thing” was talking to dead people.
I didn’t consider myself to be a medium at that time. I didn’t even know what a “medium” was. Looking back on it, I see that I was like an alcoholic who firmly denied the idea that he’s a drunk.
CHAPTER
3
Don’t Call Me a Psychic
At the time that all of this happened at Mary’s house, if you would have asked me whether or not I was a psychic, I would have said, “No.” I didn’t consider myself to be a “psychic,” highly intuitive, yes, but definitely not a psychic.
Now I know I was halfway correct. A psychic is someone with a highly developed sense of intuition and who can feel, intuitively, circumstances or information about the person he’s “reading,” or their loved ones, depending on the type of intuition the psychic has developed. That intuition may even let the psychic know circumstances of loss or future events around the person he’s reading.
True mediumship, however, is something different altogether. For a medium, two elements have to be in place—a soul in the hereafter who wants to communicate and someone here who is willing to receive the messages. In other words, while psychics rely on their intuition to supply what they are passing along to their clients, mediums rely on communication from souls that have made the journey from this life to the next for the information they pass on. For short periods of time a medium can act as a bridge between this life and the next, linking the souls in the hereafter with their loved ones here and providing a human voice to the souls so that their messages can be communicated to those who otherwise couldn’t hear or feel them.
I consider myself to be a medium. When I’m doing a session for a loved one(s), unless the information comes from the souls in the hereafter, I won’t know it, and I don’t have anything to say unless the messages come from the souls themselves.
When it comes to passing these communications along, I’m not perfect and I have never claimed to be. When it comes to understanding what I’m hearing, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I often get it wrong with those who are still living. Messages from the souls can, and do, get misinterpreted by me.
People think that I, as a medium, “talk to dead people.” Actually, the exact opposite is true. They communicate with me. I listen and convey what I’m receiving to the members of their families who are still here. Whenever I’m doing a session, whether it’s one-on-one, either in person or over the phone, a small number of people related to one another, or a small group of up to twenty-five, most of whom are strangers to one another, I always tell people to keep their answers to the evidence I’m giving to either “yes” or “no.” I want only the absolute minimum information to let me know if I’m interpreting the evidence I’m receiving correctly or not. I say to people, “Most of what I’m telling you won’t make sense to me, and it’s not supposed to. This is not about me. It’s about you. As long as the evidence I’m giving you makes sense to you, that’s all I care about.”
The messages in each session I do are like pieces of a puzzle that eventually come together into a solid picture. While no two sessions are the same, there is a distinct pattern that they follow starting out with general information, becoming more specific, and usually ending with a fact, name, or event that is known only to the soul and its loved one.
So
