must also thank my young children, Gabe (age 10), Evie (age 7), and Phina (age 4), who somehow managed to play quietly while I sat at the computer in a corner of the living room and wrote up the stories for this book. I know it was hard for them to understand why they had to be so quiet, especially in the dead of winter when they couldn’t go outside to play, but they managed to pull it off with only a few disasters. Thanks for reminding me what it’s like to be a kid, my little turkeys.
Of course, it goes without saying that I owe Mary Ann more thanks than I’ll ever be able to muster. Her level-headed, no-nonsense, and honest approach to everything—including her own amazing ability—is a trait that sets her far apart from the crowd. Without it, I don’t think I could have got through this book, and without her confidence in me, even when I lacked confidence in myself, I wouldn’t have had a book to get through in the first place. Thank you, Mary Ann—I will never be able to repay you for everything you’ve done for me and everything you’ve taught me over the last decade.
I’d also like thank my college roommate and ever-present friend since then, Erich Burnett, who not only gave me my first paid writing assignment, he helped me hone my journalistic skills to the point that I was later able to join him on the editorial staff at Scene in Cleveland. He was also the person who introduced me to Mary Ann when she told him she needed to find a ghostwriter—for that, Erich, I can never thank you enough.
Finally, I’d like to thank my brother, who never did anything more with his stories than entertain me. Don’t think I’ve forgotten those nights, Andrew, when we’d sit up after we were supposed to be in bed and you’d make up stories on-the-fly, right as you told them to me. Without your tales of “The Veil of Black A” and “Starship One,” I don’t think storytelling would ever have occurred to me as a career choice.
—David Powers
INTRODUCTION
WHEN I FIRST STARTED HELPING PEOPLE communicate with earthbound spirits and helping those spirits cross over, I had very little to go on. At first, my grandmother was always with me because I was just a child, but because Grandma didn’t have the same ability as me, she wasn’t really able to give me much insight into how I should go about things. Along the way, I picked some things up myself, was told some things directly by the spirits, and had my abilities extended by whatever Power gave me this gift in the first place.
One of the things I picked up from my own experiences was to always take a notepad and pen with me into every job. It seems so obvious now, but back when I first started doing this in earnest, it didn’t occur to me. Usually the spirits were family members and I could just pass their messages on directly, or they were completely unrelated, and, to be frank, no one really cared what they had to say as long as they said goodbye and left them alone.
Bess was the spirit who taught me to keep a notebook and pen with me at all times, and she was also the first ghost to ever give me a recipe. I’d never thought about lost recipes until Bess either. In hindsight, I should have expected both things: the need for paper and pen, and the need to pass along recipes.
Food is everywhere. We have to eat to survive, if nothing else, but for most of us food defines our days. Morning is the time between breakfast and lunch; afternoon comes before dinner. Yet eating is much more than survival or a way to break up the day. It is a social experience. We conduct business lunches, we raise money with pancake breakfasts, and we share the day’s events with loved ones over dinner—and it wasn’t too long ago that eating was only half the experience. The other half was preparation. The size of the kitchen used to be much more important than how much space the living room had for a home theater. It used to be that an average kitchen had stove tops crammed with pots of simmering soup stock, drying racks holding freshly baked bread, and chopping boards festooned with chopped vegetables.
Times have changed. In this new age of toaster-pastry breakfasts, power lunches, and fast-food dinners, eating has become a chore and cooking is considered a hassle. Even so, most of us still define good times and good memories with food: the cookies a favorite aunt baked, or the chicken soup you always had at Grandma’s. I’m sure somewhere out there, some people even fondly remember the aroma of a nut roll made by a woman named Bess.
Eleanor, the woman who called me about Bess, lived alone. Her husband had been dead for years, and since then Eleanor had become more involved with the church. That’s where Bess first ran into her—when she was alive, I assumed. Eleanor loved to bake, and her specialty was nut rolls. There was only one problem, as Bess explained when I got to Eleanor’s house: “She can’t bake worth a tinker’s cuss.”
Bess must have been 80 when she died and she was actively trying to get Eleanor to stop baking her nut rolls: She’d blow out the pilot light on the stove, she’d steal key ingredients, she’d put the butter that Eleanor had left out to soften up back into the fridge—anything she could think of. I couldn’t fully understand it. Eleanor was actually baking the day I went out there, and the house smelled delicious.
“She goes around giving those nut rolls of hers away, and everyone just throws them out. I mean, look at them!” Bess offered, motioning to the cooling rack where Eleanor’s signature nut rolls were. I turned and gave them a harder look, and Bess was right. They might smell good, but they sure didn’t look good. They weren’t roll-shaped, for one thing, and they looked more pasty than golden-brown.
“What?” Eleanor wondered, seeing me turn to look at her baking. “What’s the ghost saying?”
Fortunately, I do not have to talk with earthbound spirits out loud. For me, the whole conversation takes place in my head. That has saved me a lot of heartache over the years because it allows me to filter what the spirits are saying. Not that I ever make up things or put words in their mouths, but I can soften the blow when need be. Some ghosts—just like the people they were in life—have very little tact. The things they say can be mean and hurtful, even if they didn’t mean them that way. So talking to them in my head gives me the chance to rephrase things and be more polite, sometimes even more diplomatic.
“Oh, we’re just talking about baking,” I replied carefully. I didn’t quite know how to tell this sweet old woman that her special nut rolls were so bad most people threw them away the second she’d gone. One glance around her kitchen told me that Eleanor derived a lot of pleasure from baking.
“Do you only notice things happening when you’re going to bake?” I asked, turning back to Eleanor.
“Yes.”
“Well, Bess was a baker, too,” I said. “So that explains that.”
“Does she like my baking?” Eleanor asked hopefully.
“Tell her I like her cooking,” Bess said. “She makes good meatloaf and decent chili, and her stew doesn’t look bad. She just can’t bake. Can you stop her from baking?”
“No,” I told the ghost. “It makes her happy. I’m not going to tell her that, and once I’m done here, you won’t be able to bother her anymore. So you might as well go into the White Light once I’ve made it for you.”
We cook because of that connection to food that is always there. We want to cook for sustenance and joy. What I’ve learned over the years in talking with spirits is that this connection with food is not broken after death. In fact, some spirits become earthbound because of food. Perhaps there’s a recipe they didn’t intend to take to the grave, or that was passed on incorrectly, and they need to make sure it survives. Maybe they don’t like a relative’s cooking and are literally haunting them in the hopes of correcting the error. Sometimes they even understand that food can heal in little ways,
