In the world of psychic mediums, John Edward is the closest thing there is to a bona fide rock star. Thousands attend his sold-out seminars and watch his show on the WE television network, John Edward Cross Country. He says he's known of his supernatural abilities since an early age, when his mother and grandmother would invite psychics into their home.
"I act as a conduit between the physical world—here—and what I call 'the other side,'" John says. "I act as that conduit, like a bridge, and I bring through their information. So it's like they beam me their energy, I interpret it in my frame of reference, and I pass it on to the person I'm sitting with."
John says one reason he is so gifted at communicating with the dead is that it is an outgrowth of his natural inclination to teach. "I'm educating people about the energy of where they're at in their life, and maybe how this can actually help them. Because to me it's not about the reading, it's not about the connection that I'm making. It's about the empowerment that somebody can get from it as they move forward as a result of that pivotal moment," he says.
He says that when he reaches a dead person, the information comes to him almost like he's having "a daydream." "I quiet my mind through meditation and prayer and then I pay attention to what I'm thinking, what I'm hearing and what I'm feeling," he says. "And it's as if I'm being impressed with this energy. So it's not coming from me. It's coming from outside of me."
Kim is having trouble coming to terms with the sudden death in November 2006 of her sister—was her death a suicide or a murder?
John says he feels an immediate energy when trying to reach Kim's sister. "Okay, you have these different energies that are coming in," he says. "They're telling me to call you by a different name, Kimmy or Kimberly or something completely different from Kim. But they make me feel, like, don't call you Kim." Kim says that her sister used to call her "Kiminy Cricket," after the Disney character Jiminy Cricket.
John then says he is getting a feeling indicating suicide. "My sister was a warrant officer in the Army," Kim says. "She came back from Iraq late 2004. She passed away November 26th and it was questionable whether it was suicide or murder. I was told that my sister was shot and I think that's why there was the issue of suicide or murder because all of us immediately thought, and that's all we knew, was that it was murder. The forensics are still out, so the case isn't closed."
Kim says the hour-long reading with John has helped ease her worries about what had become of her sister after death. "I was brought up Catholic, so I really was raised to believe that [if you commit] suicide, you end up in the fiery flames of hell," she says. "That was my biggest fear." She says she no longer worries about that.
Two days after Kim met with John, the Sierra Vista Police Department in Arizona officially ruled that the death was a suicide…just as John's reading indicated.
In a reading with Darcel, John experiences something he says is not uncommon—he isn't able to get a reading from her dead friend.
John says there was another pivotal time he wasn't able to make a connection. His own mother was seriously ill with lung cancer, yet he says he had failed to see it. When the doctor informed John, he refused to believe that he'd failed to recognize something so important. "I said, 'Well, I happen to be one of New York's top psychics.' And I said, 'If my mother had cancer, somebody upstairs would have given me a heads up.'"
When the doctor showed John X-rays, he says he knew that the tumor would be benign. However, it turned out be the "grossest malignancy" the doctor had ever seen, John says. "I learned a very valuable lesson … that I have limited access to what I'm shown. I do believe we're all here to learn lessons. And I do believe that this is of God or whatever and that I needed to have that experience. I needed to be put into check to keep my ego way out of the way."
Although John isn't able to read Darcel, she says he did, in fact, help her deal with the death of her friend Tawanda. "John started talking about how many people don't believe in a coincidence. And at that time, a lightbulb went on for me. … When she passed away, I was by her bedside and I asked her to come back and visit me. And ever since then, I've been seeing the number 111. I would wake up in the middle of the evening and I would see the number 1:11 on my alarm clock. When I pulled up in front of the studio, the address across the street was 111. I knew that Tawanda was validating for me that everything that has happened is not a coincidence."
Joy and Allison are hoping John can give them comfort after the death of Laurie—Joy's daughter and Allison's twin sister.
A few of the ways that John shows Joy and Allison that he is really channeling Laurie is by knowing her middle name (Ann) and saying "Baby Girl" (Laurie's nickname).
John also says, "Now, I don't know if you took it off, if you stopped wearing something jewelry-wise, but somebody's telling me that they know you took off, whatever the thing is." Joy and Allison explained that while Laurie was undergoing treatment for the cancer that eventually killed her, the whole family wore LIVESTRONG bracelets. When Laurie died, they all agreed to take off the bracelets together on January 1, 2007.
John has more to tell Joy and Allison. "She's making me feel like she wasn't upset. I feel calm, serene and in control. Like that's the feeling. And I feel like I'm more concerned if I'm talking first person now for her, I'm more concerned about you. … I feel like you need to know that there was nothing else I possibly could have done. I have to say there's a feeling of—this is going to sound crazy, and I'm so sorry—gratitude. I have a feeling of appreciation and gratitude."
John says that because the dead are unable to speak directly, they communicate through "vibrational frequency," he says. "They have to lower their frequency … to be able to make the connection with the medium. The medium has to raise their vibration, for me it's [through] meditation and prayer. And then there's that gap, and in between that great little divide is where the information comes across and where, I think, interpretation can go out. I think that [the dead] are 100 percent accurate in trying to come through. I'm not. The medium's not. We can completely misinterpret."
When he is in contact with the dead, John says he is routinely overcome with sympathetic or empathetic emotion. "Almost like a wave that hits me," he says. "For a complete stranger, I'll have this amazing feeling of love. Somebody that I don't know, that I shouldn't have an amazing feeling of love towards, I'll just love you. I'll feel this feeling. That's what I do."
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Enter it now
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.
Since she discovered how the information she receives can help in investigations, Allison, author of the book We Are Their Heaven has continued to help law enforcement officers as a psychic crime profiler. She says she gets information about a case by "head-tapping" the criminal. "I look at the first name of the victim, and there's some impressions that are left on a person—their parents, how they die. And if it's at the hands of somebody else, then I'm able to actually connect through the victim to the perpetrator and get in their head," she says. "The victim bridges me to the perpetrator so that I can get into their head and see through their eyes."
Even if a suspect has been named, Allison tries not to look at photos or other information. "I like to go off nothing, where I'm untainted. I'm not tainted by anything. Then my information is raw and clear," Allison says. After the first impression, sometimes she does look at the pictures and performs a second reading. "But I already know who he is from being in his head. I've already felt his motive," she says.
Allison gives insight into her process as she looks into the case of 19-year-old Jackie Hartman. She was last seen at a gas station near Phoenix in the early-morning hours of January 28, 2007, after her sister dropped her off to meet a man she had met only two weeks earlier. Later a man was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. He is awaiting trial. Hundreds of law enforcement officials, family and friends searched for Jackie for days after her disappearance, and a family friend asked Allison to give her impressions of the case.
Allison says she believes Jackie has died. She adds that she believes Jackie was choked and lost consciousness before the "final impact," so she might not have felt what was happening to her.
Allison says she thinks the struggle started in a vehicle and ended on the ground, and that in her mind, she saw an embankment where Jackie would have rolled down. "I was shown a funeral and Jackie being laid to rest, so she will be found and her parents will have that," Allison says.
While the information Allison receives is often disturbing, she says she tries to not let it distract her when she is working. "When I'm getting into the head of the killer, I can't get pulled in emotionally, because if I do that, I get scattered and I'm not focusing on the information. I'm not pulling the information that makes me the killer's worst nightmare," Allison says. "I have to be very clear on why I'm there and fall apart later."
Candace died in a bike accident in late 2006, leaving behind a husband, Wade, a 14-month-old son, Owen, and her mother, Mary. When Allison meets with Mary and Wade, she says she sees Candace as she looked as a little girl. "Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter how old they were when they died—like she kept showing herself little. Sometimes they do that because that's when they were the happiest and the most secure," Allison says.
Wade says Allison knew details of Candace's death that he didn't tell her. "She was hit by an automobile and hit the windshield and really shattered her head and had major internal injuries. And Allison—without knowing what had happened to my wife—brought up that she had major head injuries," Wade says.
During the reading, Allison tells Mary and Wade that Candace heard them when they went to the hospital, after she was already gone, and that she is now at peace. Allison also brings up a photograph of Candace and Wade on vacation in Hawaii. "When we sat down, she knew nothing, and that picture from Hawaii was sitting [at home] in my living room," Wade says.
Wade tells Allison that he and his son sing together and think of Candace every night. Allison says Candace feels that moment, and that she has a message for her son. "She says, 'Mommy loves you.' She comes to him in dreams, but she also sits at the end of his bed at night to make sure he's okay. So just try to maybe explain that Mommy's his angel now, because she says she's his angel," Allison says.
Wade says he was a skeptic before he met with Allison, and he made sure not to give any personal information before the reading. But Allison's knowledge of the Hawaii picture and of other personal things that she could not have researched made him let go of his skepticism.
"I don't think you need to become a believer until someone close to you dies, and then you want to believe in something," Mary says. "I am so thankful for [Allison] because I always knew [Candace] was in me and her spirit, her energy is intense around us, but you allowed me now to talk to her. I know that when I talk to her now, she responds."
Many people are skeptical of psychic ability, and others want scientific
proof. Dean Radin, the author of Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, says he, too, was skeptical at first, but now he thinks it's clear that some psychic abilities exist. "What they suggest is that experience is entangled, is interconnected among people," Dean says.
Dean says there are more than 1,000 experiments concerning psychic phenomena that have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and that many scientists are simply unaware of them. Allison even participated in a study for four years at a university in Arizona. "Science is made into very deep specialties. You know about your one area, but you may not know what's happening in the next area," Dean says.
Both Allison and Dean say psychic abilities are like having an extra talent. Dean compares having psychic abilities to being a phenomenal athlete, like Tiger Woods. "Some people have very different skills, and mediums like Allison are able to do things that the rest of us can do to a very small extent, but they can do it more reliably," he says.
"I see mediums
like—there are canines that can hear a whistle that human beings can't hear.
There are some people who can hear on a level that other people can't hear,"
Allison says. "We just hear at a higher level."
