Crossing Over Page 9

  Donna’s grandfather seemed to be really loving this. He was making me feel his personality. “He’s like a politician working the room.”

  “That’s so him,” Donna said. “He was the president of the Ladies Garment Workers local; he helped people from Italy get work in the textile industry. The Italian-American Businessmen’s Association named him Man of the Year.”

  “Who’s the singer?” I asked.

  “Oh, God. He played the organ and sang all the time. He made a record of a song he wrote. ‘Baci, Baci.’ It means ‘Kiss, kiss.’ It’s about someone going to Italy and falling in love with the country. He’d play the organ and lead us in singing it at every party. Everyone in the family knew the words. ‘Kiss, kiss, kiss like this.’ ”

  When I talked to Donna about that night many months later, she still couldn’t believe it. “This was so surreal,” she said. “My grandfather had just passed. And he was checking in.”

  Donna became captivated by spirit communication for the same reason I did. “My father died so suddenly,” she explained. “It was such a shock. One day he was here, the next—boom. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to know where he is. What is he doing, what is it like over there? I had this quest of wanting to know what the other side looked like. I would go to Borders and get stacks and stacks of books about people’s experiences. I would read them straight through in one night. I didn’t even know who wrote them. I was obsessed.”

  But she wasn’t content to read about other people’s experiences, or even to come to readings and lectures and hear someone else tell what it was like. She wanted a more direct connection. She wanted to see if she could develop her own abilities. That’s something I try to encourage people to do, so from time to time I present a workshop called “Building Bridges.” Donna attended one I gave the summer after I first met her, in the summer of 1997. She and the others in the group began with a meditation. Then I led them through a series of visualization exercises to bring them to a place in their consciousness where they could greet and communicate with spirits. Start on a beach, I instructed them. Breathe deeply, close your eyes. . . .

  Donna remembers:

  I’m sitting there doing the exercises. John says to let the white light flow around us and through us. . . . I get a woman in her sixties or seventies with frizzy auburn hair. She has a pear-shaped body. She’s carrying an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag, and with this I’m getting that this represented that she was taken care of at home. She’s smiling. And then I see, written across her chest, “Jean.” She looks old, but I’m getting that she is the mother of someone my age. This is the very first time I’m doing this, so I think I’m just making this up, imagining it. After a few minutes, John asks those who felt they got anything to stand. I stand, even though I don’t know what I’m doing and I have no idea if what just happened was really a spirit communication. I really didn’t think so.

  I told everyone what I saw and felt, but I didn’t say “Jean,” because that’s my sister-in-law, who I was with, so I didn’t think that meant anything. But then somebody said, “I think that may be my mother.” She described a woman who had that body shape. Her hair was auburn, but she dyed it black. She had hospice care. But that’s pretty general. And then she said her mother’s name was Jean.

  “Oh my God, I swear to God that’s the name I got!” I said. “I didn’t say it because my sister-in-law is Jean.”

  The girl who stood up was about my age. She said, “The reason you were confused is because she had me when she was in her forties. That’s why she looks like my grandmother. But that’s my mother.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  She said, “Would you like to see a picture of her?” She took out a photograph, and this was the woman I had seen—same head shape exactly, same body shape. Her face was kind of average. Everything was the same except her hair was black. If I described the person I saw to a sketch artist, this is what he would draw. I could not believe I did this.

  After the workshop, Donna began to dabble at home. She would practice with her sister-in-law. “I tried getting things on Jean’s brother,” Donna said. “And she validated them. Things about his personality, about her wedding. He was a high-functioning Down’s syndrome, and I totally got his personality. I said, ‘Wow, maybe I’m really doing this.’ I got a great feeling from it, because I was giving Jean such a tremendous thing.”

  I talked to Donna from time to time and always told her I thought she should keep working on her abilities. Over the next couple of years, she would occasionally practice on Jean. She wasn’t bold enough to ask anyone else, so there was a limit to how much she could develop. Besides that, she had gotten busy. She’d had her first child—not a son named Anthony, but a daughter she and her husband, Tommy, named Julia.

  One night in October 1999, Donna was sitting in the rocking chair in her baby’s nursery, just watching her sleep. She wondered if anything would come through if there wasn’t anyone in the house except Julia.

  All of a sudden, I get this woman who comes forward. She looks like she has dyed blond hair. She comes toward me, and I get two names written across her. I’m realizing that this is how I get names. I don’t hear them. I see them, in big letters. The two names are Carol, and either Annette or Antoinette. It flashed very fast. Then she showed me a puppy, a cross, and then a sunset. I immediately connected this woman. It was John’s mother. I had seen a picture of her in the One Last Time video. I said, “If you’re really John’s mother, tell me something really important to validate that this is you.” She looked at me and said, “Tell him ‘Pooh.’ It was like a movie in my head. I was seeing her say this, but I heard my own voice. I grabbed a pad and wrote down what had just happened. The next morning when I woke up, the first thing I felt was John’s mother. She said, “Tell him bear.”

  “John, you’re going to think I’m crazy,” Donna said on the phone. “I don’t know if this was your mom. It looked just like her from the picture in the video. She told me Carol and Annette. Or maybe Antoinette.” A friend of mine named Carol was starting to spend some of her free time helping me organize my office. And Antoinette was a woman who had just been hired to do publicity for a tour I was doing through the Learning Annex, a nationwide adult education organization.

  “And then I asked her for a stronger validation. And she said, ‘Pooh,’ and then this morning, ‘bear.’”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Do you know what you just did? That was my third symbol.”

  I was more composed this time. After the Guiding Light message, this was just icing on the cake. I was thrilled to get it, but by now I had come to understand that I shouldn’t get much more excited by the Pooh bear than by any other validation.

  Since One Last Time was published, I’d had dozens of letters and contacts from people claiming to have gotten a visit from my mother, delivering messages that made absolutely no sense. Is that one of the signs? they’d ask. People have stopped me in public to tell me they “got a sign.” I found this hilarious because there was no way my mother would be talking to all these people. She was not a very sociable person over here. I don’t think she became everybody’s pal over there. I stopped paying any attention to everyone but professional mediums such as Shelley Peck and Suzane Northrop, who I know have relayed messages from my mother. But she seemed to take quite a liking to Donna Marie.

  After the Pooh bear message, I told Donna not to expect to hear from my mother anytime soon, if ever. But two weeks later, she had another visit. When she first started trying to build bridges to the spirit world, Donna had gotten a marble notebook to write down everything that happened. But after a while, the only thing inside were records and notes of encounters with my mother. The first one was October 10, 1999. The next was only fifteen days later, on October 25. Then another one a week later, on November 2. Ten visits in all, the last one on July 11, 2000.

  Some of the information she got was incredibly detailed, as accurate as any I’v
e gotten in my own work. Early in June 2000, Donna came to see me and said she’d had what she thought was another visit from my mother a few days before. “I’ve got to ask you this,” she said. “I’ve just got to ask. In your bedroom, do you have a large, dark wood bureau with a hutch with a mirror? Because your mother showed me your bedroom. The furniture is light wood, and if you pull out the top right-hand drawer, there’s a little box with a letter in it from your mom, or a piece of paper with writing on it. I’m seeing this like a movie. She’s making me the camera. She’s wearing a blue dress. She shows me a shiny gold steering wheel.”

  Donna’s description of my bedroom and the furniture in it was dead-on accurate. And in the bureau she described, there is only one drawer that’s mine. All the others are Sandra’s. And in that one drawer is my mother’s old red jewelry box, which has some of her old jewelry, along with some of mine. And with the jewelry is a folded-up letter my mother wrote, specifying who should get what jewelry.

  The gold steering wheel? I had just gotten a new car.

  Donna continued relating the latest visit. “I said to her, ‘Tell me something you used to say to John all the time.’ She gave me the song ‘C’est La Vie.’ It was one of those one-hit wonders in the ’80s. I heard it on the radio all the time. I heard it in my head now.”

  “My mother said that all the time!” I said when Donna told me this. “I would ask her if it was Italian.”

  Donna says it wasn’t until my mother gave her the Pooh image that she believed she might actually be able to do spirit communication. “I wasn’t even trying to get her,” she said. “Why did she choose me? That’s when I started feeling maybe there was something to this.”

  I began encouraging Donna to work on her abilities, just as Lydia Clar and Sandi Anastasi and Shelley Peck urged me to do years ago. Most important, I told Donna, she had to do readings. “Who am I going to read?” she asked doubtfully. She had a point. She couldn’t do friends and relatives for the same reason I don’t do them. What was she supposed to do, set up a table at the Sunrise Mall? So I started having her come to my office to do readings, using a little room off the dance floor I installed in the middle of the office so I could still teach a few students ballroom dancing.

  I started bringing in anonymous friends of mine for Donna to read, just as journalists have done when they’re trying to test me. I have her sit in a chair facing the wall, then I bring in the subject to sit behind her. Because she can’t see them, and because I instruct them to give only yes and no answers, she’s forced to focus on the energies, with only my coaching as a guide. Since I’m often tapping in to the same energies, I can tell what she’s getting, what she’s not, and sometimes why.

  One night, I brought two friends in. She tried to read the first one, my writing collaborator, Rick, but not a single thing registered. A virtual zero. But as I listened to the details that Donna was imparting, something clicked. I went outside to the office and asked for Joanne, a friend who was in the office that evening, to come into the room. When she came in, everything made sense to her. The second person was my good friend Ernie, whose grandmother came in loud and clear for Donna. Like anyone with marvelous natural talent but virtually no experience, Donna needs to just do it. As she gets more familiar with how spirits come through for her, and, through practice, hones her skills at interpreting the messages, she will become a superb medium. One day, she came to the Crossing Over studio, and was in my dressing room while my executive producer Paul was there. She looked at him and said, “I’m seeing ‘MARTY, MARTY, MARTY’ right in front of you.” Paul smiled. “My father,” he said. “He passed a few years ago.”

  Just as my guides summoned Lydia Clar to my house to get me going when I was fifteen, I believe I’m supposed to put Donna on her own path. Three times in my life, I’ve had people tell me that I was going to meet someone named Donna, who had a baby, and that I was going to help her. Two of them were fellow psychics. The other was the very same Ernie, who looked at me a few years ago and said, “John, who’s Donna?” It’s also no accident that my mother chose Donna to relay the third and final sign, or that she has come to her so often.

  How does Donna feel about all this? It’s a lot of pressure to put on someone who just wants to raise her family and teach high school biology. “If God really wants me to do this, He will put things in my path,” she says. “Why did your mom come to me? She could have come to anyone. It’s more than a coincidence.” She knows that there will be challenges to her personal life if she actively pursues this work that some people consider a cross between practicing witchcraft and selling swampland. “What will my family say? What will people at school say? I’ll have to deal with it.” She wasn’t quite ready to let me use her last name here. Donna’s husband, Tommy, a businessman with a law degree, started out as a skeptic, but he didn’t stay that way for long. He’s seen too much evidence firsthand, much more than most people. He has always supported Donna’s need to explore this world. And he knows how good it makes her feel.

  “I’ve read nine people now,” Donna said one day in the spring. “When these spirits come into my mind, it’s almost like meeting new people. They make me feel them so powerfully. Ernie’s grandmother—her warmth literally made me smile. It washed over me. She left such an impression that I thought about her for days. This has changed the way I look at life and death. It’s been a great help in the grieving process over my father. So if I can help someone, I have to do that. I feel very humbled. If God wants me to do this, who am I to say no?”

  — CHAPTER 3 —

  The

  Producers

  The Tube

  As you may have guessed, I’m a recovering TV junkie. Well, maybe not quite recovering. Nobody knows this better than my friends in the spirit world. When I’m doing a reading, you never know when I might toss out the name of some secondary character in a show that got canceled after thirteen episodes in 1978 because somebody’s father thinks that’s the best way to get me to say that he was a plumber named Ed.

  But liking TV and wanting to be on TV are two very different things. When I first signed the contract to write One Last Time, I told the publicity people that they would have to figure out how to promote the book without putting me on the TV circuit. I didn’t want my face on television, and I hated the idea that someone would be telling me I had to do this show or that show—and maybe it was a show that might sensationalize or belittle the subject. Control, especially of my medium work, is paramount to me. There was also a part of me that didn’t feel right about doing what amounted to commercials for myself, hawking spirit communication like Paul Reiser selling ten-cents-a-minute on AT&T. Not happening.

  Happening. A year later, I was calling TV producers myself and asking them to put me on their shows. I’d had, shall we say, a change of heart. The publicity people had sat me down and said: John, listen very carefully. This is America. It’s 1998. If you want to get your book into a lot of hands, you have to go on television. They were right, of course. If I wanted the book to be successful, I would have to get off my high horse and do what everybody else does. I mean, look how many books there are in Barnes & Noble. But that didn’t mean I was willing to give up the big C. If I wanted to keep control of this, I would have to be my own publicist. In the back of my mind, I thought that if I made enough of my own contacts, I might be able to pick and choose which shows I went on. My guides gave me the green light, or maybe a blinking yellow. Proceed with caution.

  When I started doing radio a few years before, I’d found that I didn’t need a publicity person or agent to get me on shows. I was better off making contacts with producers myself and explaining who I was and what I did. It was pretty straightforward—call the station, get the producer, make my pitch, and usually, schedule a time. Or, better yet, get a call from a producer who had heard about me from a colleague at a sister station and wanted to have me on. TV was bigger, I knew, but producers are producers, right?

  I began calling t
he main phone number of shows and finding out who was in charge. Being the anal-retentive person I am, I kept careful lists of contacts and phone numbers in a looseleaf binder, leaving a space to make notes of what people said when I called and how and when I should follow up. I began cold-calling producers on two coasts, hoping to talk my way into somebody’s studio. I wasn’t in any position to be that particular, but I hoped if I made enough contacts, I could be. How hard could it be? I felt if I they just talked to me, they would get a real feel for the work, not some hyped, hocus-pocus mythology. I remember a national show in 1994 called The Other Side that kept trying to get me on to do topics like hauntings and poltergeists, evil spirits and spells. When I told them all I wanted to do was come on and do what I do, they told me no thanks—that was already being done.

  Now, four years later, it seemed that if this was something already done, it was making a nice comeback. People who talked to dead people were positively trendy—and the ones with books were always getting on TV. So at least they would know what I was talking about, but of course there was always the risk that this time it really was already done. Oh, no, not another medium. As far as I could tell, though, there still were more TV shows with time to fill than mediums with books to sell.

  One of the first shows I called was Leeza. I liked Leeza Gibbons. She seemed sincere and bright, and her show seemed a level above the usual daytime fare. You know, today’s theme: “I slept with my mother’s boyfriend and she got mad and hired a hit man and that’s why she’s in prison and I dress like a slut and have seventy-three body piercings.”

  I had a contact at Leeza, a producer named Joyce whom I had called sometime earlier. I knew she was a spiritual person but didn’t think she was into psychic stuff. Still, she was a good place to start. When I called, though, someone else answered her phone and told me the producer I was trying to reach had left the show. Oh, I said, is there someone else I can talk to about an idea I have for a show? You can talk to me, the woman said pleasantly. Her name was Ramey, and she explained that she was a “special projects” producer. It was her job to find unusual ideas, “not your run-of-the-mill show with trailer-park guests and all that stuff.”