Rebirth and Overcoming Fear

I just returned from PA with my son, his best friend, and my husband Patrick for a delightful funfilled weekend at the Great Wolf Lodge, the largest indoor waterpark in Northern America.... think millions, no billions, of screaming little toddlers and prepubescent children in the wet bathingsuits with obese parents standing befuddled looking around at the skyscraper-high tubes of rafters and giant 2-ton water buckets suddenly spilling water down on all of them, as they run-walk-stroll in their bare fungal feet in puddles of indoor water.... yes, I was there.. I endured it by spending money. Way too much money. Two overpriced movies on the television set with the sticky remote controller and the wall sconce light that wouldn't turn on, and then TWO, yes, two, massages at the spa next to the video arcade, the last one was an aroma rub with body scrub and perfumed oils and loads of skin lotion even in my scalp. From there, Patrick insisted I had to try a water slide with him because it would be the last time in my life I would have this extraordinary opportunity. Buoyed by a rum and coke, I squeezed into my largest black bathing suit and marched proudly with him to the 5-story staircase where we waited in line for 45 minutes. Good thing I wasn't able to wear my glasses so I was fairly oblivious to the height (I am scared of heights). We then jumped into our double tube and were shoved down a dark sightless tube of rushing water. I was told to remember only one thing: "Do not let go of the handles.." "But but but" I protested as we were shoved into the tunnel. "I JUST WENT TO THE SPA AND I AM COVERED WITH CONDITIONER AND I AM AS SLIPPERY AS A FISH HOW THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT ME TO HOLD OOOOOOOONNNNNN WHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" And yes, Patrick had taken me down the equivalent of the Black Diamond Slope of Water Tunnels. We loopty-looped, we went upsidedown, we were tossed from one wall to another as we plunged into further darkness................. As I practiced my Lamaze breathing, all I could think of was that this was like birth delivery of sorts where really all you want to do is scream at the top of your lungs at the father of the child for getting you into this mess to begin with. And before you knew it, we had been expelled like a giant turd into the light of day, and I hobbled out of my slimy raft and glared at Patrick.


How was your day?

The Allison DuBois Meltdown

I recently caught the tail-end of the reality series "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" - not a show I normally watch - and thought maybe I had dreamt the outrageous witchy persona of well-known psychic medium Allison DuBois, whose life formed the inspiration for the popular TV series "Medium."  I was so shocked and horrified by her behavior, I actually watched the entire episode, aptly titled "A Dinner from Hell," when it was re-aired at a later date just to make sure I hadn't missed something.  I just wanted to check my own reality.  Could Allison DuBois have really sunk that low?

Yup.  She did.  I felt like I was watching a train wreck.  She was apparently quite drunk on boat-sized martini-looking drinks, puffing theatrically on her electronic cigarette, as she snarled visciously, bared her animalistic teeth, and threatened the other dinner guests with her unique psychic ability to see inside their minds and predict their deaths!  Was she working overtime trying to become a regular on this show?

Her most famous quote of the dinner:  "My dad said live life large and make no apologies for who you are. I don't give a shit what she says about me! She can fuck off. I can tell you when she will die, and what will happen to her family. I love that about me!"


Really?  DuBois has apparently fired back at the network stating the show was edited in such a way as to make her look bad.  But anyone who saw the show knows it would have been impossible to edit her seething, snarling facial expressions; her outrageous and vulgar language; her pseudo-Biblical-sounding pronouncements of "Know this-sssssss" followed by psychic threats to the other dinner guests; not to mention the attempts to judiciously blur out her obvious hand vulgarities of middle fingers and masterbatory motions.

I am glad she loves herself and her abilities.  Good for her.  However, for someone who has managed to achieve the level of fame and popularity that she has enjoyed, she fails to realize that she is an ambassador of psychics and that her failure to use proper decorum and elegance in the world of non-psychics, leaves all the rest of us holding the bag, so to speak.  We all look bad when someone as ostensibly talented and most certainly blessed with good fortune and good looks as Allison DuBois jumps off the deep end.  Even casual viewers have stated her face looked almost "demonic"!  Which leads me to another point.

When psychics begin to use their "powers" for evil, negative, narcissistic or underhanded purposes, the great irony of the universe is that they actually lose their powers!  This happened, for example, with a number of psychics including Uri Geller when they tried to use their predictive powers to benefit themselves in the stock market!  This is why it is so important for psychics to stay on the straight and narrow path of making sure they use their gifts for the greater good of humanity. 

Allison DuBois needs to take a large step back and re-evaluate her gifts.  If she continues to use them as a personal threat against others instead of a human service, they will soon evaporate.  Certainly, her followers will evaporate long before that happens.

Speaking with John Edward 20 Years Later

A little over 20 years ago, I went out to a seminar on Long Island to listen to a young, relatively unknown psychic medium named John Edward.  He was funny, engaging, personable and spoke about ways in which he got psychic information which were startlingly like my own - even though I was, at that time, a practicing attorney with no apparent psychic gifts.  I liked him immediately.  Intuitively, I felt he was the real deal - he came up with bizarre facts which were verified by flustered and amazed people in the audience.  At the end of the seminar, he sat down at a table and I was the only person who went up to talk to him afterwards.  I had just bought his new book and asked him to sign it.  Why?  I believed he was going to be famous and I wanted his autograph while I could still get it.

Fast forward 20 years, and John Edward is arguably one of the most famous psychic mediums in the world.  I have been an avid devotee of his various cable and network shows, and have been constantly amazed at his ability to come up with very precise "evidence" (as the Spiritualists would say) of the spirit world.  When you watch enough of his shows (the information he gets, how he gets it, the associations he makes in his own mind, and the shock or denials of the audience members), you stop worrying about whether he had hidden microphones or shills in the audience - it is quite obviously "real."

I had the opportunity to go to one of his "small group" sessions in East Rutherford, NJ, this week.  I had apparently bought ticket #1 and was there with an intimate group of approximately 400 or so people - all anxious to get a reading from him.  I have never felt compelled to get a reading from any medium, let alone John Edward, because I never wanted to steal the medium away from people who really desperately need a reading - those who have suffered the tragic loss of someone important in the lives.  But I decided to raise my hand during the question session and was lucky enough to be called up by him.

John asked me to stand up and I was handed a microphone.  Then he asked, "Is the man sitting to your left with you?"  I said yes.  It was my husband.  "Sir, would you please stand up also," asked John.  My husband Patrick, who is French, stood up next to me.  Before I could ask my question, John asked us, "Have you lost a baby girl in your family? With the name Corinne?"  Having watched hundreds of his shows, I knew that fetuses count as much as live babies in the psychic world of "family."  So I admitted to having two miscarriages in my life.  But I knew the question was meant for Patrick.  John had strangely asked Patrick to stand up and the name "Corinne" is clearly French.  However, Patrick - who is a concrete, literal and mostly skeptical type of person - could not think of anyone in his family who had lost a daughter or baby named Corinne, so he immediately said, "No." 

John did not and could not pursue his psychic "lead" and so I was allowed to ask my question.  I asked him what he felt about the large number of mediums, psychics and paranormal investigators who seem to feel automatically compelled to clear out or "cleanse" spirits and get rid of them from the location they are allegedly haunting.  Did he agree with this as a kind of knee-jerk automatic response to finding spirits?  One famous television medium supposedly announced with great pride one year that she had cleared Gettysburg of all 51,000 spirits of the men who had died there during the Civil War.  Of course, having taken many trips there since the alleged "cleansing," I know that claim was bogus.  At any rate, John gave a thoughtful and complete answer- saying that with all the new ghost hunting shows on television this seems to be what people think they can do - usually for a fee and with an overinflated ego.  He suggested that either spirits ought to be left alone to co-exist with the living or the person being "haunted" should deal with the ghost themselves.  He emphasized that people view spirits as the Hollywood version - scary and threatening - whereas spirits are generally in contact to express love.  I couldn't agree with him more.  It was good to hear him say it.

After the show was over, I said to Patrick, "Why didn't you tell him about the fact your mother always said she had miscarried a baby girl?" Patrick's shook his head and said his father never believed her story, and the fetus was never named Corinne.  Patrick comes from a family of three boys.  Here's the problem:  When responding to psychic information, you need to stop your logical mind from dictating what you think you know or don't know.  A "baby girl" can still be a fetus.  It is possible Patrick's father never knew the full circumstances.  It is possible that someone in Patrick's family could still verify that his mother had thought about naming her "Corinne" or something similar-sounding, even though the fetus was never named.  The point is that obtaining, delivering and responding to psychic information is like a dance and neither party is in control of all the facts.  Clearly, in my mind, John had a message to deliver to Patrick, but we will never know what it was because the unfolding of the psychic information was nipped at the bud by logic.

WWII Cryptanalyst Decodes Military Attack Using Intuition

I met Arnold Franco on board the Jeanne D'Arc, a French military ship, during a cocktail reception while docked in the New York City harbor.  A graduate of Queen College, where 60 percent of the class of 1943 were enlisted or called to military duty, Franco, now age 83, served with an elite group of code breakers - or crypanalysts -with the 3rd Radio Mobile Squadron.  In 2005, Franco was awarded the prestigious French Legion d'Honneur for his outstanding work during the war. 

As we stood on the metal deck of the ship, sipping our cocktails and looking at the Manhattan skyline, I decided to tell Franco about my chosen profession and my book on psychic intuition.  He seemed fully accepting and told me an incredible story about how he once used intuition in his military decoding activities and, as a result, was able to warn the Allies about Hitler's plans to invade southern France and saved countless numbers of human lives.

A coded German message came into his hands one day.  It was suspected to be an order to begin preparations for an atack somewhere in Europe around the Mediterranean Sea.  The message was heavily coded and, probably because it was top secret, did not contain the ordinary codes used by lower level orders from the German command.  The only letter the Allies were able to decipher was the letter "J" which appear once as the second letter of a scrambled word. 

Franco described the moment of his insight when he suddenly and instantaneously realized that the letter "J" was the second letter in the city on the small French island of Corsica, known as "Ajaccio."  He told me that his intuitive guess of "Ajaccio" was not a logical guess. He somehow suspected or intuitited that the coded word would be the name of a place and this place was the location of Hitler's attack.  He had no reason to logically suspect either one.  His knowledge of geography from his school days was pretty good so his brain was able to pull up the city of "Ajaccio" as having the letter "J" in the second letter spot.  He was also aware of another fact - not immediately relevent or obvious at the time - that Hitler was a student of Napoleon's military strategies, in particular, Napoleon's disasterous attempt to invade Russia.  Thus, in Franco's mind, he made the strange intuitive leap and correlation that this message might be related to Napoleon!  Therefore, since the city of Ajaccio was Napoleon's birthplace, the connection suddenly jumped out and made total sense. 

Psychic intuition is intimately linked with those other things we know and accept such as educated guesses, subliminal information, gut feelings and past knowledge.  The brain operates on multiple simultaneous levels and is capable of achieving extraordinary feats.  It is time that conventional military, legal, and corporate officials recognize its value.  Arnold Franco's intuitive leap is an excellent example.

My New Radio Show on Para-x.com Radio

My good friendnd co-host Pat Eldridge and I are launching our brand new radio show this coming Friday, December 10, 2010, called "Hot Leads Cold Cases" on Para-x Radio (http://www.para-x.com/) at 8pm EST.  The show is intended to spotlight ways in which psychic detectives, police, detectives, and law enforcement can interact effectively to help solve crimes and cases.

Also, we plan on discussing ways in which psychic mediums can be useful in other types of investigations, such as paranormal investigations, psychological profiling, and medical mysteries.  The idea is to create a forum for skeptics and believers alike to discuss the ways, if any, that psychics and mediums can be utilized as effective tools within conventional investigations to help solve mysteries and crimes.

We will also be devoting a portion of the show to working on real investigations.  Anyone desiring this kind of help should email me at ndt@theskepticalpsychic.com in advance of the show with an outline of the issues involved and the kind of help needed.  As usual, there are no guarantees - but my personal experience has led me to believe that very often psychic guidance can provide clues, tips or possible unforeseen pathways for investigators to pursue through traditional methods.

My New Book Explains Psychic Ability

According to Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the reason why skeptics have, for very good and sound reasons, refused to acknowledge the validity of "psi" ability is no one has been able to explain why or how it functions within the brain. In his article "Why Most Scientists Do Not Believe in ESP or Psi Phenomena," he states:

"The deeper reason scientists remain unconvinced of psi is that there is no theory for how psi works [modus operandi]. Until psi pro­ponents can elucidate how thoughts generated by neurons in the senders brain can pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response, as it was for continental drift sans plate tectonics. Until psi finds its Darwin, it will continue to drift on the fringes of science."

This is exactly why I wrote my recently published 440-page book entitled "Psychic Intuition" - now available on my website, www.theskepticalpsychic.com and www.amazon.com (and also Kindle format). My book explains how psychic ability works, what it is and is not (because most skeptics don't understand what it really is or involves), and why skeptics and psychics literally do not share the same reality and so, in a sense, they are both correct.

I have interviewed many of the world's most famous neuroscientists, physicians, psychics, artists, artificial intelligence experts, physicists, military experts, psychologists, and others involved in the field of intuition. The entire purpose of my book was to create a bridge of understanding between skeptics and believers, scientists and psychics. I lay a simple scientific foundation so that even die-hard skeptics can appreciate the direction I take. The book is loaded with scientific studies, research, and analysis, as well as my own personal anecdotal stories to illustrate different aspects of psychic ability, and terminates with my highly original theory. And yes, I offer a neurological theory for the existence of psychic ability! The bottom line is that we have innate psychic ability, most of us lose it for a series of reasons, but the good news is that it is indeed a trainable skill.

I hope all skeptics will check out my book and I am interested in your feedback!

International Perceptions of the Paranormal

A haunted cellar in a Swedish restaurant



Having just returned from a whirlwind trip of visiting ten countries, I was interested to see how people from many diverse cultures respond to stories of the paranormal.

While on a cruise in the Baltic Sea, I met an Israeli family currently living in Belgium. Of course the conversation over breakfast necessarily turned to what everyone did for a living. I have overcome my reluctance of many years about telling people what I do - fearing that they will either become silent with embarassment of not knowing what to say next or take me less than seriously. So I introduced myself as an attorney-turned-psychic-detective, figuring at worst, my pronouncement could be an interesting icebreaker for the conversation. Indeed it was.

The husband was intrigued - but quickly stated he was a skeptic about all such matters. His wife and even their 14-year-old son also claimed to be skeptics. However, when I told them about meeting their famous fellow-countryman and world-famous psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller in London, their attitude changed. Apparently, the son and several other family members had witnessed one of Uri Geller's famous television shows, broadcast all over the world, in which he asked everyone to put a spoon or something made of metal near the TV set and claimed that he would simultaneously cause spoons all over the world to bend.

In fact, I remember Uri telling me about this program. He also did a program where he claimed to have caused London's giant tower clock Big Ben to stop ticking for a minute or so and then restarted it along with broken watches all over the world. Being a skeptic myself, I did not put much stock in Uri's fantastic-sounding story and I attributed it to a bunch of hype.

It turns out that this family put a spoon on top of their television set and literally watched it bend by itself during Uri's TV show. I asked them over and over again, where the spoon was placed (on top of the TV); whether anyone touched it (no); whether they could actually see it moving (yes); was there a noticable difference in the bend (yes); and so on. I was actually quite shocked to have run into a family that had witnesses this alleged worldwide psychic event. The young boy claimed that it freaked him out so much that he still thinks about it and is still someone frightened by the spookiness of watching a spoon bend by itself. Several cousins and his aunt and uncle also witnessed the spoon bending. Everyone was apparently quite shocked.

It's funny how the world is a small place. Only last month, I attended a party with many Israelis present. When I brought up my "profession," one of them (clearly a no-bullshit type of Israeli businessman)told me he had been in the same army detail with Uri Geller while doing his military duty, and had watched firsthand how Uri had been able to accurately help the soldiers with psychic reconnaissance and locate objects that were hidden.

And here I am. I actually had the opportunity in private to watch Uri bend two different spoons before my very eyes and yet, still, I question the reality of it. I mistrust his magician origins and I mistrust my own eyes. It is so difficult to overcome our mental prejudices which are nothing but a lifetime accumulation of practical personal experiences about how the world does (and therefore "should") operate. While none of us really trusts anecdotal evidence of the paranormal, we should learn to accept multiple similar reports of such activity - since scientific "repetition" in the normal sense of the word is generally not possible.

It is so easy to bump into the paranormal and the psychic all over the world, no matter where you go, or who you talk to. We are all just embarassed to talk about such things.

I met a very pragmatic woman who lives outside of Helsinki, Finland. She is the owner of a huge horse farm operation. She confessed to me in private that there are two ghosts on her property: a kindly female ghost who lives in the old main house who was probably once a servant and who turns lights on and off and turns doorknobs, and a male ghost who lives in the horse stable.

While dining at one of the best restaurants in Sweden located in the collective basement cellars of five 17th century townhouses near the water, I was told by several waiters and waitresses that the restaurant is haunted by a female ghost who was the proprietor of the establishment in the mid-1600's when it served as a tavern house for local sailors. It is also believed that her lover haunts the cellar with her. In fact, I was told, many of the waitresses and waiters refuse to go certain rooms because they are just too freaked out by the presence of the ghosts!

Clearly, ghosts and psychic attunement are univeral phenomena. So is our shared international fear of them... I did not have to look far to find people with experiences with the paranormal. They are everywhere - in every country in the world regardless of culture or societal mores. It is time we began to engage in an intelligent conversation about these kinds of phenomena without fear of being ridiculed or deemed hare-brained.