we call “life” is little more than a cruel joke.
Looking back I now believe that this was the day I was chosen to do the work that I do today—to act as a bridge between this life and the hereafter and to share the message with anyone who’ll listen that death is not the end of life, love, or relationships . . . but a new beginning.
Although I didn’t talk about it in my first book, there were several incidents that hinted at my ability. Like the time I worked for a company that sold burglar and fire alarms to homeowners. One night I was in the home of a woman who told me that she lived alone with her two children and wanted a system so they would feel safe. Halfway through my sales presentation I started bawling my eyes out, uncontrollably. She looked at me like I had lost my mind. I wondered if I had.
“Why are you crying?” she wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I just feel really sad all of a sudden, and I have no idea why!” I kept trying to compose myself, but I just couldn’t. “Who died?” I blurted out suddenly.
The woman whom I was talking to looked at me shocked. “What are you talking about? No one died.”
“Yes. Someone died . . . here . . . in this home.” I insisted, having absolutely no idea where this was coming from. Then, suddenly, I did know. “It was your husband. He died. In this home. Around a month ago. That’s why you want this system.
I have to tell you, he’s still here . . . with you.”
“How do you know that? How did you know my husband died here . . . a month ago?” she demanded, looking more than a little afraid of me.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “It just came to me.”
With that she asked me to leave.
I went to see my friend Mary’s new home before we went to lunch. I say “new” because she had just purchased it. While we were eating lunch, I said to her, “Did you know your home has a ghost?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted you to come and see it!”
How did I know it was haunted? It was a feeling I had. It was the same feeling I got when I would take a shower on Guam and felt like I was stepping out of the tub into a freezer. It was a chill I felt that wasn’t external, but internal. It was the feeling I received whenever I was in the presence of a spirit that hadn’t crossed over.
After lunch we went back to her house, and I had to use her bathroom downstairs. 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