Crossing Over Read online

  It’s even better than archaeology because it’s not about ancient bones in the desert, but living spirits in the air. Spirit contact is an excavation of the soul of human experience. Not only that, I don’t have to wait twenty years between great finds. They come on a regular basis. And the best ones can be the easiest to get. More often than not, the most specific validations—the big wallop or the quirky little detail that blows any shred of skepticism out of the water—just comes to me, without much work at all. There’s no tug of war with a confusing energy, no sweet-talking a reticent spirit, no tortured game of twenty questions because I’m being shown an image that could be interpreted twenty ways. It’s like a sneeze without the buildup. Boom—it passes through my brain and hits the air before I can even think about it. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m saying as I’m saying it. And then, after it’s out, I think—and sometimes say out loud—Oh, wow, I can’t believe I got that. Where’d that come from? I call it falling out of a reading. I hear the words when everyone else does, and I react just like them. For that moment, I’m sitting with them, detached from myself. Wow, did you hear what that guy just said? That was so cool.

  It never gets old.

  — CHAPTER 4 —

  Proving

  Grounds

  20-60-20

  Looking back on it now, the infomercial was a failure in every way but the most important one. It introduced me to the essence of television. It gave me a tremendous education in the marketing of a medium and the importance of protecting the integrity of the work in a world crawling with people whose main interest is exploiting it. Yes, a big, blinking yellow light from The Boys. Especially now that so many people were watching.

  I can’t prove this, but I feel safe in saying that more people than ever before are coming to believe in either the fact or the possibility of an accessible afterlife. And they’re not just the people who have always been believers. When I first began doing group readings and lectures, the audience was almost all female, mostly middle-aged, and from working-class backgrounds. Now I see a much more diverse crowd. There are many more men—even if some of them are still there because their wives dragged them—more younger people, and more people who would have dismissed what I do as ridiculous not too long ago. They may still be skeptical, but they’re willing to consider the possibilities. And that’s good enough for me. I can work with an open mind.

  When it comes to spirit communication, it’s a 20-60-20 world. Twenty percent are True Believers. You don’t have to convince them of anything. In fact, a percentage of this percentage can be so uncritical, so un skeptical, that they’ll believe anything. And that’s not good. For one thing, they can be taken in by a less-than-competent, less-than-scrupulous psychic. And they may be so consumed with grief and a need to hold on that they forget they’re still living here—and their loved ones are living there. It’s an important distinction. This subgroup can be as frustrating to me as people who believe nothing. Speaking of which—that’s the second group of twenty percent. These are the True Nonbelievers. Whether it’s fear of the unknown or just an ingrained, overly intellectualized belief system, they have no need to consider the phenomenon, let alone explore it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—they know for a fact that when you’re dead you’re dead. Skeptics, cynics—whatever you call them, their minds are closed for business. Don’t even bother.

  Then there is the great middle class—the sixty percent who aren’t sure what they believe or don’t believe. But they’re interested, open, and more than likely would like to believe. They just need a good reason. Most people—probably even the confirmed cynics—would like to think that there is something more after this. The cynics won’t find out there is until they get there—can you imagine their reactions the moment it happens? But for the majority of people, all it takes is a convincing personal experience to remove or at least chip away at the doubt that comes naturally. There’s nothing wrong with that. Skepticism is healthy. So long as it doesn’t keep people from at least poking their heads through the curtain for a look-see.

  It’s that sixty percent I think of most when I’m working—I’m trying to do as much as I can to raise the curtain. Not that it’s my goal to convince or convert anyone, let alone everyone. But I would like people to have a meaningful experience, and to leave with as much information and understanding as possible, so they can make their own judgments. This doesn’t necessarily mean delivering a jaw-dropping reading every time. First, I can’t do that. Second, that might not even be enough for some people—even those who are open to the possibility of another existence after this one. People grieve in different ways, and even a great reading by a medium will not take the place of the process people have to go through to survive the pain of their physical loss. No matter how many validating facts I give them—even if they have absolutely no doubt that the person they loved was in the room with them, talking to them through me—they know they will never see that person again. Most people feel some comfort from a positive reading, and many are profoundly moved. But others find it confusing and upsetting.

  I read a journalist named Lynn Darling one night in 1999 at the request of a documentary producer named Lisa Jackson, who wanted to use the reading in a TV special she was doing for HBO. It was a fun session for me because Lynn, a writer for Esquire, was a very intelligent, quick-witted, and intellectually demanding person. She seemed to enjoy the experience, in a very different way than most. Many people come to me ready with expectations and tissues, anxious for an emotional experience that will lead to comfort and closure. Lynn approached it more like the journalist that she is, even though she wasn’t writing about it herself. She was intrigued by a good story, but part of what made it good was that it wasn’t obvious. There was a lot to think about, a lot of questions to ask. A lot to challenge.

  Lynn brought a lot of spirits with her, but the reading centered around the person I was sure Lynn was happy to connect with: her late husband, Lee. That assumption turned out to be wrong, but not for the reason you might suspect.

  Lee Lescaze was also a journalist, and a well-known one. He was a top reporter and editor at the Washington Post and then at the Wall Street Journal. He had once reported from Vietnam. Now he was reporting from an even more distant place. His dispatches to me were filled with the kind of detail you would expect: that Lynn carried a small box that had been his, that he had died from lung cancer, that he was older than she was and had a prior family. And this nugget, the kind of specific, unknowable thing people tend to latch onto as proof: Lee was telling me that Lynn had been in a lingerie shop recently, and he had been there with her. “There’s some kind of a bra issue,” is how I put it to her, blushing the way I always do when spirits make me talk about their personal lives.

  “Some kind of bra issue?” Lynn asked, giggling. Lee was telling me that Lynn had gone into a store thinking about buying some kind of underwear that was not really her style, but which he had once wanted her to wear. “Oh, how funny,” she said, confirming that it was true, not nearly as embarrassed as I was.

  Lynn seemed to appreciate the experience and was very gracious when she left. So I was puzzled when Lisa Jackson, the producer, sent me an advance tape of the program months later. In a post-reading interview, Lynn’s primary reaction was annoyance. In fact, she seemed angry. She acknowledged being touched at first, wanting to believe that she could talk to this person she thought she could never talk to ever again. But she realized upon reflection that she was just suspending belief as you might when you go to see a movie. “The more I thought about it, the more the misses started entering into it,” she told Lisa. “There were dates that meant nothing, anniversaries, and lots of relatives that don’t exist, as far as I know. He has an answer to this, which is that Lee was passing a message onto somebody else. But the composite portrait was a very general one.” She felt that whatever information I had gotten right was because she had unconsciously helped me, answering questions, giving me cues, leading me.r />
  Watching the tape, and remembering the reading, I wondered how she could call all the specific validations I’d given her a “general” portrait, or how she had concluded that I was essentially interviewing her. But, of course, it wasn’t a complaint I hadn’t heard before. What really took me aback was her reaction to the whole idea of connecting with loved ones. Rather than bringing her some sense of comfort, or expanding her perceptions of life and death, it seemed to make her frustrated. It didn’t ease her pain; it made it worse.

  “He comes back and says he’s okay?” Lynn said. “I mean, he’s dead. How okay is that? I didn’t find any consolation in the fact that Lee might be there. In fact, it’s kind of disconcerting. If you think about it, it brings up more problems than it solves. My husband’s around, and he’s not talking to me, or at least he’s only talking to me in the living room of this guy on Long Island. Now, does that mean I should be involved in some sort of post-mortem marital therapy? I mean, should I be dealing with the fact that he’s not talking to me? And why isn’t he talking to me—is it something I said? Maybe he didn’t like the lingerie. Maybe he’s mad that I go out with other people. And I’m not sure I wanted him in the lingerie shop.”

  Lynn was doing something I had never seen: She was rejecting this man she missed so much—even ridiculing him. That’s how much this unnerved her. Of course, she would say she was ridiculing me and my work, not the memory of her husband or their relationship. But it seemed to me that the only reason she was so disturbed was that she did believe it on some level. Otherwise, she would have just laughed and started looking for the trick.

  “Death is a very personal thing,” Lynn said. “And it’s an incredibly, incredibly hard process, the process of accepting someone’s death, believing it, having closure with it, going on with your life and still keeping the memory of your loved one ever green in your mind. And the fact that he’s here in the room watching me try on underwear doesn’t do a whole lot for that process.”

  There was a time when this kind of indignant, seemingly glib reaction would have put me nearly into a rage, devastated me for days. Mediums do this work out of love, at least the ones I know and respect. We expend phenomenal amounts of energy to try to help people. So knowing we have given someone a negative experience instead is like kryptonite to us. I did take Lynn’s rant personally at first. Oh, my God. I didn’t do my job right. I didn’t explain something right. She didn’t understand the process. And, of course, I was mad. I e-mailed Lisa Jackson, saying I loved the program overall, that she did a great job with a difficult subject—but what was up with that wacko woman who didn’t want her husband watching her buy underwear? Came Lisa’s reply: Well, that wacko woman is my close friend.

  Response to reply: Now that I’m taking my foot out of my mouth. . . . That I could laugh about it was actually a big step for me. It all went back to that day in the pool in the Caribbean when I told myself: Get over it—get used to it; you’ll never be able to satisfy everybody. Some people won’t be happy until I pull up a chair and sit their deceased relative right down in front of them. After I thought about it, I knew this was Lynn’s thing, not mine. And I felt more sympathy than resentment. After all, here was someone who seemed to believe—or at least was open to the possibility—that her husband’s spirit was alive and with her. And yet she found that much more upsetting than comforting. How could that make me anything but sad for her?

  I also knew that there are people who feel the way she does. Maybe they wouldn’t express it exactly the way an acerbic writer would, but not everybody embraces my work, even if they believe in the afterlife. For example, even though the afterlife is a key tenet of my own Catholic church, and many Catholics openly include spirit communication in their own lives, the church itself frowns on it. So rather than taking Lynn’s words as a personal attack, I saw them as a dose of reality that people should see. It’s part of the process—not just deciding whether you believe, but figuring out what it means if you do. Lynn’s point of view was valid and poignant. I was glad the producer included them. Just as I want people to understand the process as I see it, I need to understand how it feels to them and appreciate their point of view.

  Process. That’s probably my favorite word in all this. It’s why I wanted the infomercial people to show more readings—show what this is all about. Put in more raw footage of Nicole’s reading, showing exactly how it unfolded. The vast majority of people have never been exposed to the unfiltered reality of a reading by a medium. Misconceptions and mythology are the grunge we in the field are constantly trying to scrub away. That’s why the mass media gets us excited—and gives us the willies. Whether it’s journalism, entertainment, or that stuff all over TV that you can’t identify as one or the other, you never know what you’re going to get when you say yes. Unless, of course, you have your own show—but let’s not talk about that right now. So when I got that first call from Lisa Jackson late in 1998, I was interested but wary.

  Lisa was with Linda Ellerbee’s Lucky Duck Productions—hmm—and she was producing a documentary on after-death communication (ADC). It wasn’t the usual fare for Ellerbee’s company. The veteran broadcast journalist and her staff had produced award-winning children’s programs for Nickelodeon and public affairs specials about the Supreme Court, AIDS, and other weighty, mainstream topics. But the growing interest in ADC had gotten the attention of HBO. This was at a time when I was making my first tentative steps into television, planning the infomercial. Judy Guggenheim had recommended me to Lisa, and she wanted to see if I might be one of the mediums she could build a documentary around.

  After a few phone conversations, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be on the program. I didn’t know what kind of show they were planning—a debunking could almost be taken for granted, and a real hatchet job always had to be considered—and going on camera without having any control over how it came out made me very uncomfortable. The shows I was going on to promote the book were essentially unedited interview shows, not taped and neatly packaged programs that could be slanted in whatever direction the people making it wanted. And I still had no burning desire to see my face on television. If something that appealed to me came up, fine. If not, even better.

  I had a counterproposal. I asked Lisa if she would be interested in using me as a behind-the-scenes consultant. I could help guide her over the pitfalls, serve as a technical expert, maybe help shape the program. Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time talking to Lisa about the work of a medium, explaining my ideas for how they might do the show. I must have done too good a job, because all I seemed to do was confirm Lisa’s initial impulse that I should be in front of the camera. I felt much more positive, too. I was very impressed with Lisa and concluded that she was taking a serious, open-minded look at the subject. And since HBO was known for original programs that were fresh, smart, and often daring, I was satisfied that her documentary wouldn’t be sensationalistic, or worse, an ambush.

  What caught my imagination most was Lisa’s ambition. She wanted to go beyond the standard approach—“Is (Your Medium Here) Speaking to the Dead?”—and break some new ground. Her enterprising idea was to have some of the leading mediums tested by a University of Arizona psychologist who had developed an interest in “survival of consciousness” research. Lisa said it hadn’t been determined yet how we would be tested, but that this professor, along with his wife, a fellow psychologist, had some interesting ideas. And HBO was prepared to foot the bill.

  I was intrigued by the idea. With my strong desire to increase knowledge about mediumship, and my affinity for health and medicine—not to mention my perennial curiosity about what exactly goes on in my brain—I was tantalized by the idea of a scientist being brave enough to open an area of research for spirit communication. But at the same time, I wanted to know what I was getting involved with. Who was this guy, and what was his point of view? What prejudices might he be bringing with him? Most important, what kinds of “tests” did he have in m
ind? Lisa sent me a twenty-five page proposal outlining his thoughts, and how he proposed to test the mediums who agreed to be in his study. I read through it and thought: Huh? It was a very esoteric description of a test this professor was calling “Whose Mind Is Being Read?” As far as I could tell, he was trying to determine where information came from. Did it come from our dearly departed? Or was the medium simply reading the thoughts and desires of the sitter? It would basically have us try to determine if both fictional characters and real people were dead, alive, fictional, or nonfictional. Confusing? For me, too.

  “I’m not doing that,” I told Lisa. “It’s like some psychic parlor game. It has nothing to do with mediumship.” Lisa thought I should talk to Suzane Northrop, who was also thinking about participating. Suzane is a wonderful medium from New York whose skill and integrity—and toughness—are beyond question. “Suzane’s doing this?” I asked Lisa. I didn’t know her all that well at the time, but I had a hard time believing Suzane would take part in this test.

  But before I called Suzane, she called me. “Are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” I said. “Are you?”

  “Oh, God, no way. It’s bullshit. It’s never going to prove anything about mediumship. I couldn’t even understand half of it.”

  But even though both Suzane and I thought the psychologist’s idea was totally off the mark, a funny thing happened. Talking about it made us both want to pursue this further. We both felt that if a serious academic researcher wanted to study spirit communication in an honest and open-minded way, we shouldn’t let the opportunity pass without even talking to the guy.

  Testing, Testing

  GARY SCHWARTZ IS A UNIQUE MAN. He’s the kind of college professor who really takes the concept of academic freedom to heart. A bearded New York native in his fifties, he started out as an electrical engineering student at Cornell, but wound up with a doctorate in psychology from Harvard. He stayed on the faculty there for five years, then went to Yale for a dozen more. His specialty was “psychophysiology”—the study of the mind-body connection. As the director of a Yale center devoted to research in that field, he studied biofeedback, the mind-body relationship to emotion and pain, and the treatment of stress-related disorders. While at Harvard and Yale, he published six papers in Science, the official publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the most prestigious research journals in the world.