Millions of fans tune in weekly to watch NBC's hit show Medium, starring Patricia Arquette. The show's real-life inspiration is medium and psychic Allison DuBois, who uses her extraordinary abilities to help detectives solve crimes.
Allison says she first discovered her talent at age 6, when she saw her dead great-grandfather standing by her bed. She also hears voices, and when she was 17, one of them saved her life. "I heard a voice say, 'Move your bed.' So I moved my bed from the south wall to the east wall, and a couple of hours after that, a truck came barreling through my bedroom wall," she says. If she hadn't moved her bed, Allison believes she might have died.
When Allison was interning in a prosecutor's office, she realized her gift could help solve crimes. "It was my job to go sort the crime scene photos to go to court, and I started seeing things that were happening before the crime photos had taken place, before the person was actually killed," Allison says.
She decided to test her visions by writing impressions of three missing-persons cases and faxing her write-ups to law enforcement officials. She says law enforcement called her about one of the cases, and she told the officers when they would find the body of a missing child. "I just saw five years in my head, and they found her at four years and nine months after she disappeared," she says.
Published 02/15/2007
