Crossing Over Read online

  “He died of an aneurysm in the intestine.”

  Now it started getting really interesting. Here is the rest of Ramey’s account, exactly as she wrote it. She put my words in italics.

  There is another female above you who is coming in. It’s an R-L sound.

  Her name was Rilla and she was my other grandmother. (John looked at me a little startled.)

  Ramey, she was murdered.

  True.

  She was hit over the head.

  True.

  Was she killed in the kitchen?

  No.

  Well, they’re showing me a room with food.

  She was killed in the dining room.

  And the person who killed her was a young man who couldn’t talk right, like this. (He talks slowly, slurring his words.)

  He was retarded. By this time, I had clapped my hands over my mouth and I was in tears.

  She’s saying “Estelle” or something like that. Does that mean anything to you?

  Oh, my God. My middle name is Estelle, though I haven’t used it for forty years. It’s not on any documents, and even my husband didn’t know this about me. And I was named after my grandfather, Estil.

  Who had the problem? (He made a drinking gesture.)

  My grandfather, Estil.

  He then looked at me apprehensively. There was another murder. Do you know that?

  I did.

  This is a male above you, with a “D” initial. He was shot twice in the side. I feel the impact.

  All true, except for the fact that this was my Uncle Cody. That would be a “C.”

  Write it down. I may be off on the name, but I’m never off by the initial.

  I put a big “D” on my empty notepad.

  He has a “K” attached to him. Katherine.

  His daughter. We call her Kitty.

  John went on to talk about my dog who was with my family. He mentioned details that no one could have known. My middle name being Estelle, which I haven’t used in forty years. I hated it. There was nothing that didn’t make sense, except for the “D.” Finally, he said that they were pulling back and asked if I had any questions. I was so blown away that I couldn’t even speak. And so the session ended. I looked down at the pad. The only thing I’d written down was a “D.”

  There was something great about that. I had been in the experience so completely that I couldn’t possibly take notes.

  Rick came back to the room, and we went downstairs and drove over to an Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard for dinner. Ramey had asked Adora to come, but she had another business dinner to go to. And as far as she was concerned, I was just another psychic looking for a little publicity.

  We tried to have a friendly business dinner—talking about getting me on talk shows to promote the book, about the infomercial, Rick discussing his ideas for a TV show—but Ramey, sitting next to me and across from Rick, was someplace else. Finally, she said, “Wow. I can’t talk about all that right now. I’ve got to talk about what just happened.”

  Ramey started telling Rick about the reading, filling in some blanks for me. “I was a good subject for you,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of deaths around me.” The two murders in her family were decades old. Her grandmother—the sweet one—was seventy-five years old when she was killed by a nineteen-year-old in her home in Kentucky in 1976. “He was retarded, this kid,” Ramey said. “He was shoveling the snow at her house. My grandfather had died three weeks before from lung cancer, and she kept this kid on to help her, and he raped and murdered her in her own home.”

  I wondered what the deal was with the diamond ring Ramey was wearing. Her other grandmother—the tough one—was the first one through the gate when Ramey arrived at the hotel, and she really wanted it known that it was her ring. Ramey had mentioned that there was a story behind it.

  “This ring has had a very long and strange life,” Ramey said. “It was given to my grandmother by my grandfather on their tenth anniversary. That must have been around 1919. My grandfather was a law student when they got married, so they were too poor for a ring. She gave the ring back to him on their twenty-fifth anniversary. She had the center diamond set in a man’s ring, surrounded by Pave diamonds set in platinum. When my grandfather died, my grandmother gave it to my father. When my father died, my mother kept it. When I was three, my mother and grandmother had a big fight because my mother had started dating the man who became my stepfather. My grandmother was a widow for fifty years. She didn’t believe in marrying more than once. So she wanted the ring back. She was so mad that she threw her glasses against the wall and broke them. The next day she had to go to another town to get them fixed. And while she was out of the house, my mother packed up everything that would fit in the car and left town forever. We moved to her parents’ home in another part of Kentucky. Before she left, she gave the ring to the preacher to give to my grandmother. Eighteen years later, it showed up set back in a woman’s setting for my college graduation. I put it in a drawer and didn’t wear it for five years. One day I decided I was over the whole thing and put it on. I’ve worn it every day since.”

  Ramey’s grandmother seemed just as domineering as a spirit as she had been on earth. But even she wasn’t as forceful as Ramey’s cousin Jimmy. “He was like a surrogate father to me,” she said. “He was older. Sixty-three when he died. And I adored him. He was a fabulous person with a great sense of humor. He was buried in his pajamas.

  “You said, ‘Jimmy is telling you that he knows that things were apart when he died.’ It’s true, I couldn’t get to him. There was a jealousy issue with his wife, and I never got to say good-bye. He had been ill with emphysema, and he died right after my mother lost her husband, my stepfather. She had just talked to Jimmy, and he said she should go out to California. So my husband picked her up at the airport, and the next thing we know, we get a call that Jimmy died. For me to get my mother back to Kentucky for the funeral was very difficult. She had just gotten here. And I couldn’t leave her. So I couldn’t get to the funeral. But ever since he died, which was February 12th a year ago, I’ve talked to Jimmy all the time. I talk in the car. I say, ‘If ever an opportunity presents itself, please come back, please say something.’ So driving over tonight, I was excited. I kept going, ‘Okay, Jim . . .’ And then, he comes right through and you tell me he’s the one who instigated the whole thing.”

  Rick listened attentively to Ramey’s recap. He had heard and observed more than a few stories like this just from being around me—in fact, he had one of his own—but he was glad for Ramey. “That’s pretty amazing,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to hook him up with my friend at Brillstein-Grey. To see if maybe there’s something there.”

  “Oh, absolutely there’s something there,” Ramey said. “This is a show. I mean, if we could take what I just experienced and put it on the air, it would be so powerful.”

  I can’t say that wasn’t nice to hear, or that it took me completely by surprise. My guides had been giving me glimpses of a show for a while—and this was back when I was in my great expectations mode, before the crash. Still, my immediate concern was the book that was coming out in a matter of days and the publisher’s determination to get me on TV. “I’m worried that they’re going to book me on shows I don’t want to do,” I told Ramey. “I don’t want someone telling me, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’” I really liked Ramey, and now that she had her own personal experience, she could really sell me to her friends who ran all those shows.

  “I’ll talk to them, and I’m sure I’ll be able to get you booked. But really, forget other people’s shows. You should have your own show.”

  Which would mean, I guess, that Ramey’s cousin Jimmy, this guy who was buried in his pajamas, hauled me out to California so I could square things with his little cousin, and while he was at it, get me my own television show.

  “Can I do this?” Ramey asked. “Would you let us try to do something?”

  “Sure,” I said. �
��Go ahead.”

  Ramey called her partner, Adora English, from the car on her way home. “We’re doing a show with John Edward,” she told her. “The medium.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, really.

  “The guy with the book,” Adora said. “This is a joke, right?”

  “You’re not going to believe what happened. I think it can be great television.”

  Adora began to laugh uncontrollably. “I can just see us in pitch meetings,” she said. “Yeah, we got this guy, he talks to the dead! It’ll be great!”

  Ramey knew it sounded a little crazy, but she didn’t really care. After she punched the end-call button, she started thinking again about her reading. The only thing that didn’t make sense to her was why her murdered Uncle Cody kept insisting his name started with a “D.” And then, driving through West Hollywood, it came to her. “Cody was all we ever called him,” she told me the next day. “But that was his middle name. His first name was David.”

  The Tale of the Manatee

  I GOT MY OWN SHOW RIGHT AWAY. Okay, it was the infomercial. Not exactly cutting-edge television. But it offered something I craved: control. Or so I thought.

  One of the first things Chad Murdock and I discussed when he came to the hotel in Los Angeles was where we were going to shoot. The location was very important; we wanted a beautiful, idyllic setting. Say . . . the Caribbean.

  So over the next few months, Chad started looking there. He found a place but couldn’t work out a deal. He had a bunch of other possibilities, from Barbados to California. There were a couple of nice spots in Tampa, Florida. No, I said, I don’t want to go to Florida. Too pedestrian. California? Too far. Back to the islands. Chad found another location in the Caribbean, and it looked like we were set. But then it turned out that the place wasn’t available when we needed it. So what about Tampa? No—keep looking. A third possibility. A third snag. Tampa? Okay, okay. Tampa.

  We arrived in Florida in the middle of February 1999, and any illusions I had about this being my show—any fantasy that all these TV people were here to carry out my every wish—were quickly demolished. I knew I was in trouble even before we shot a foot of tape. Our pal Elmer Fudd, the marketing company boss whose idea of television production was what went on at a Toshiba factory, wanted me to read the woman who would be the host. “I know you can’t control the process,” he said—and as soon as those words left his mouth I knew he thought I could control the process because deep down he thought this wasn’t real—“but it would be really phenomenal if, on camera, you could wow her so that she could be visibly and emotionally reduced to tears. You know, so she can know firsthand what it feels like when she’s selling these products.”

  And I was surprised when The Boys got pissed?

  “First,” I said, “you’re right. I can’t control this. Second, I can’t make someone cry. And I wouldn’t try, even if I could. Sometimes people hear the information and get emotional, but no medium’s intention is to make someone cry. Third, I already know this woman’s mother has passed. She died when she was very young. She told me that. So I can’t read her. I can’t be objective.”

  And fourth, I might have said, Who on earth would watch the host of an infomercial collapsing in tears and not think it was the lamest setup? I know a sucker is born every minute, but that’s not the demographic I’m going for. This guy says he “understands the process,” but just in case this is really just a scam, maybe a harmless gimmick to make people feel better, he wants to cover all the bases and make sure I know some things in advance. Just in case. He wants me to do an attack reading on this woman—hit her hard, hit her fast, get the reaction. That’s the money shot. He’s thinking about how he’s going to sell these products.

  By this point, Ramey and Adora had come through and gotten me on a few shows—Sally, Maury, Entertainment Tonight—but this was my first foray into what Rick Korn had in mind: a television production built around me. This was a pretty big operation, fifteen or twenty people, and it hit me that I was putting my credibility in their hands. Did they really get what I do and want to help me get my message out, or was this just another sell job to them? I trusted Chad, but those guys from the marketing company were scary.

  We were shooting the infomercial at the waterfront house Chad had rented. And it was like he said, beautiful, a mansion right on Tampa Bay. A thread of the show was going to be Judy Guggenheim, a leading lady of after-death communication and co-author of Hello from Heaven!, interviewing me about my work in the living room, a huge, sun-splashed room adorned with white columns that made it feel like the drawing room of a governor’s mansion. Judy and I sat in formal chairs on a red Oriental rug, facing each other at an angle. There was a large vase of flowers on a table to our side; a grand piano off my shoulder; and an elegant, winding stairway in the background. The room opened out onto a large patio with a pool. A wooden stairway descended from the patio to the beach, and fifty yards beyond was a sort of pier. It was a jetty of wood planks sitting atop a column of rocks and boulders jutting about twenty yards into Tampa Bay.

  Judy started with the basics, asking me to explain the difference between a psychic and a medium. I explained that all mediums are psychics, but not all psychics are mediums, and began a discourse on spirit communication. But then, maybe ten minutes into the interview, I started feeling a connection, and a pull. I was trying to focus on Judy’s questions, trying to talk about how I get my information, when I started getting information. I knew the schedule was changing.

  Judy asked me something, but I just cocked my head and stared off with my mouth half-open, the way I do when I’m in receiving mode. After a few seconds in freeze frame, I explained that someone was coming through and I had to stop. “I’m sorry, I can’t even listen to you because this is coming in so loud,” I said. “Let’s just get this out of the way, and then we can go back to the interview.” Chad, of course, didn’t see this as an annoying interruption. “Do not stop rolling,” he told the crew.

  “Just keep going,” Judy said to me. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s happening is I’m trying to conduct an interview with you and help explain the process, and something else has totally taken over. There’s like a totally different program happening where someone’s trying to get their message through. You know, they wait for no one.”

  The production crew was caught off guard. This was an infomercial—spontaneity wasn’t exactly their specialty. I felt like I was being pulled to my right, but when I explained that the energies coming through could be for anyone in the house, there was chaos. All I remember is a lot of people with equipment scurrying around in every direction. Chad went to an adjoining room where he had parked the marketing people with a monitor so they could watch the taping. He told them to come into the living room. Now the entire production team was standing in front of me—camera operators, assistants, even Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd. “Who is it?” Chad asked.

  “It’s none of these guys,” I said.

  Now I was drawn toward the back wall of the house. “Who’s over there?” I asked, pointing to my right. “I think I’m back over there.”

  Chad looked over and saw a wall with nobody near it. “Nobody’s been there the whole time,” he said.

  “Yes, there was,” I insisted. “It’s right over there. There had to be someone standing right there. . . . Who’s on the other side of that wall?”

  Chad looked at me for a second, then took a breath, as if something had clicked. Two sets of sliding glass doors flanked the wall. They led out to the patio, where he had set up a production table. He slid one of the doors open, and leaned out. “Nicole, would you come in?” he said.

  Chad’s assistant producer, a woman in her twenties with a beautiful, round face framed by straight black hair, poked her head in tentatively. She saw everyone looking at her. “It’s a male figure coming through,” I said. “There’s an impact to the body.”

  “Oh, my . . .” Cha
d said. He definitely knew something.

  I looked at Nicole. “This is for you, isn’t it,” I said.

  “Okay, clear the room,” Chad said. Judy got up and gave Nicole her seat next to me. The sound man brought over a body mike. “Ed, we’re still rolling?” Chad asked the cameraman, who nodded. “Still rolling.”

  Chad, it turned out, had suspected this might happen since the moment their plane from Los Angeles had touched down in Tampa. In fact, he had been hoping for it, although he had carefully avoided saying anything to me. As they were landing, Chad told me later, he saw that Nicole was crying. He asked her what was wrong. “Remember the story I told you, about Roger?” she inquired softly. “This is the first time I’ve been back here since then.” Oh my gosh, Chad said. He hadn’t connected it when they were searching for a location for the shoot. The worst thing that had ever happened to Nicole happened in Tampa. She had told him the story, but he didn’t register the place. And now he had brought her back here. He hugged her and apologized. “I’m going to get you through this,” he said. “I promise.”

  Chad stood with Nicole as the sound guy attached her mic. She seemed to be bracing herself, nervously remarking that she had no shoes on. When she was ready, she looked at me uneasily. I stared away, focusing on the spirit who was so boldly barging in on our little infomercial shooting.

  “Someone’s coming through, and they’re making me feel like they passed from some kind of head trauma. This would be something that was an impact. There’s a very strong bond of love that’s connected here; and there’s a feeling of unresolved, unfinished, but continued business, which is really strange for me. Is this a male figure who’s passed?”

  Nicole nodded yes and wiped away a tear.

  “Because it’s either a brother of yours, or like a boyfriend. It’s a male figure to the side. Do you understand that?”

  She nodded again, and now her cheeks were glistening. Judy handed her a tissue.