What Do Haley Joel Osment and I Have in Common?
a short history of seeing dead people
Q | How old were you when you first started noticing your abilities? Did you have someone earth side to process it?
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A | In some variation or another, this is probably the most frequently asked question that I receive.
How and when did you realize you could speak to the dead? How did you nurture this gift?
When did you first realize this was a gift of yours?
Have you always been able to see ghosts?
You get the idea.
If you’ve hung around me for any length of time, you know that I answer this question pretty much the same way whenever I’m asked. I always assumed that everyone communicated with ghosts and that it was one of those Midwestern things that we didn’t talk about, like periods and sex. It wasn’t until college that I learned this was erroneous.
Perhaps you remember the show Medium. It aired on January 3, 2005. (I looked it up.) The general concept is that Allison DuBois (a character based on a real person) uses her mediumship abilities to speak to the dead and help the Phoenix police solve perplexing crimes, a solid procedural.
One evening early in its run, my mom had it on in the living room while I was home visiting. Offhandedly she marveled, “Wow, I didn’t know that people could do that,” or something to this effect. In my head I responded, “I didn’t realize that others can’t.” That was the moment when it came into clear focus that the way I perceive the world differs from most.
Ghosts have always been part of my life. I played checkers against them as a kid. My grandfather died when I was in fourth grade and regularly came to visit with me. In high school they threw house parties when I was home alone. None of it seemed weird.
I knew enough not to discuss it, not because I thought it wouldn’t go over well. Even if a little confused initially, my parents would have been onboard. When I did concretely share with them, they sort of nodded and said it made sense. That’s actually been a lot of the reception within my friend circle.
So it wasn’t until my twenties that I became acutely aware of my abilities. This was also a point when the volume of what I was hearing and seeing and sensing was amping up markedly. Walking by a display of orchids at a Los Angeles farmers’ market, I would hear, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” from the excited plants. (They’re sweet but simple flowers.) Ghosts seemed to find me EVERYWHERE. It was no longer only deceased friends and family who desired to interact.
It was all too much.
What did I do? I shut the whole thing down as best as I could. I wanted nothing to do with it, with the exception of ghosts like my grandpa who were closest to me. I figured if I could turn off my abilities then everyone would go away. Nope. That’s not how it works.
To answer your second question, no. I did not have anyone living to help me make sense of it. The psychics and mediums and energy workers that I had met over the years could not get away from me fast enough. Many of them commented that they had never seen so many ghosts in one place. As I have come to understand, it freaked them out.
The other common reaction was for those two and three times my age to be jealous of my abilities, despite my not understanding or having a handle on them. My mere presence would elicit anger. Trust me, as a sixteen year old kid who was struggling with depression, this made no sense.
Somewhere around that time, my mom and I attended a house clearing workshop. The facilitator ended the afternoon by bringing out a singing bowl. It was the first one I had ever seen, and I thought it was so darn cool. She demonstrated the method of circling the mallet around the rim to get it to resonate then asked if anyone would like to try. Heck yeah!
On my first attempt, the crystal bowl began to fill the room with sound drowning out all other noise. I sat there fascinated by the reverberations it created, enjoying the vibrations as they bounced off my skin. Swoop. Next thing I knew, the mallet had been grabbed from my hand and the sound of the bowl was being dampened by the facilitator’s palm. She didn’t want to be outdone.
It was experiences like this that cued me to keep mum.
So I did until my mid-thirties when all hell broke loose and my nervous system collapsed for the first time and choosing to embrace my abilities or be incapacitated for the rest of my life seemed like my only options. That’s a story for another day. And yes, sometimes run-on sentences are necessary in order to fully convey the appropriate sense of chaos.
Bottom line, it took me years to come into my own with these abilities. There have been more than a few missteps. That said, I can’t imagine life without them.
P.S. I watched a Graham Norton clip recently in which M. Night Shyamalan explained that one should NEVER give away spoilers no matter how old the movie. My apologies, Night. I hope you can understand.
Have a question of your own? Don’t hesitate to ask! Reply to this email, drop it in the comments, or submit it here. I answer as many as I can.
