1
LIGHTNING STRIKES
MY PSYCHIC ABILITIES SPEAK
As the phone rang for what seemed like the hundredth time
that morning, I stifled an urge to throw it out the window. Instead, I thought
of all the deadlines I had to meet in the next few hours. It was 1976.
DisneyWorld had opened four years earlier, and millions of visitors were
pouring into Orlando, Florida, looking for a vacation from their
responsibilities. I envied them. As a young single mother of two girls, I
rarely found time for myself before or after work. And as director of advertising
and public relations for the Hyatt Hotel, my responsibilities didn't let up
from the moment I walked in until the day was blessedly over: I had ad layouts
to approve, out-of -town VIPs waiting to tour our convention facilities,
advertising salespeople to talk to. Over the ringing, I could hear an irate
hotel guest snapping at my secretary in the outer office.
With a sigh, I picked up the phone. It was my friend Mary.
More aggravation! I liked Mary, but what was she thinking? She knew what my
days were like, yet she continued to pester me at the office, asking for help
in promoting a lecture by a well-know local psychic, Ann Gehman. She wanted me
to book Ann into the Hyatt.
"Just meet Ann, that"s all, I’m asking,” Mary pleaded.
I could think of any number of reasons to refuse: Psychics
are all frauds and charlatans. Management will never go for this. And I just
don’t have the time! With two daughters to support and no husband to help me, I
needed every minute I could get. But then I thought of the precious minutes
that I had already wasted this week arguing with Mary. Maybe I should just bite
the bullet, meet with her, and get her off my back. I lit a cigarette, leaned
back, and gave in. With a sigh, I told Mary I would meet her at Ann’s office at
seven that evening—after work.
At least the meeting gave me something different to look
forward to. Throughout my hectic day I found myself contemplating the evening’s
appointment. I smiled when I tried to picture how Ann would look. I figured
she’d be dressed in gold jewelry and colorful skirts. Maybe she would look a
witch, dark and mysterious. Or Halloween-style—ugly, with a wart. What would my
bosses say when they found out I was booking gypsies into their hotel?
By seven o’clock, when I met Mary at Ann’s office, I was
actually looking forward to meeting this exotic creature, and was ready to be
ushered into a dark, candle-lit den. So I was a bit disappointed when the
receptionist ushered us into a small but expensively furnished room—nicer than
mine, in fact. And when Ann rose from behind her elegant French provincial desk
to greet us, all of my preconceptions were shattered. Petite and charming,
dressed in a tasteful pale blue business suit, she looked like a high-powered
executive. No crystal balls in sight.
I must have looked as astounded as I felt, because Ann
smiled when she saw my reaction. Seeing me for the skeptic that I was, she
asked if I would like a mini-reading. Sure, why not? I was already here.
She closed her eyes and began speaking in a gentle,
soothing voice, telling me things about my two teenage girls, Karla and Reené,
my recent divorce, the large surgical scar I had on my stomach—she even saw the
new chair in my office. I felt a slight tingle run through my body. Oddly, what
most impressed me was that she knew about the chair. Mary could have told her
about my two girls and my divorce, and even about the scar. But how could she
have known about my wonderful new chair? I had just gotten it and hadn’t had
time to tell anyone about it. She was still speaking, telling me more, and her
accuracy amazed me. The tingling grew stronger.
I had to admit she was fascinating—and not at all what I
had expected. Maybe my bosses wouldn’t mind if she graced their hotel. Before
the evening was over, I had agreed to promote her forthcoming lecture and rent
her the Hyatt’s small auditorium, at the hotel’s lowest price. I didn’t care if
got in trouble—this could be interesting.
*
As the next few days and weeks went by, my fascination did
not leave me. I wanted to learn more about psychic phenomena. Maybe people like
this really did exist. Ann was real enough. She gave me a few books
about psychics and psychic phenomena, and I read them with great curiosity. But
I was raised to be skeptical about outlandish claims, and I found it hard to
believe the stories: dreams that came true, seeing into the future, visiting
the past . . . It was very difficult for me to accept that people could do
those things. And none of the books told you how it worked. For my money, a good
science-fiction thriller would have been more plausible.
The psychic world, however, wasn’t going to let me off the
hook that easily. One morning my friend Joanna called. Joanna was a great
person, but I thought she had some odd ideas. She was a Winnebago Indian, and
her spiritual connections grew out of that identity. She found spiritual
activity in all things and felt everything had “vibrations” and “auras.” Now
Joanna was calling to ask me if I wanted to come over and meditate. I had never
tried meditation before, but I was willing to give it a go. I had read a little
about it, and I knew that it was supposed to relax you. I could certainly use
some relaxation!
My best friend, Ellen, would also be there. Ellen reminded
me of a redheaded pixie with a large bust—and she had once been a nun. After
ten years in a convent, followed by another ten years of marriage, she had lost
her faith and now proclaimed that she believed in “nothing.” I wasn’t surprised
that she was reluctant to join us.
“Ellen, there’s no hocus-pocus involved in meditation,” I
told her firmly. “It just relaxes you.” I was projecting more ease than I felt
about the project—I needed some company in this adventure. In the end she
agreed to come, but only because it gave her an excuse to get away from her
husband’s visiting relatives.
Despite our reservations, we liked it. Joanna taught us
how to breathe slowly and evenly and feel our muscles relax, and then to do a
mantra meditation. As I focused on a single word, and repeated it over and over,
I could feel all of the tension around my responsibilities grow softer and less
pressing. It was very pleasant, and we held another meditation session the next
week. But at our third meeting, something happened that would change my life
forever.
On that early Sunday afternoon Ellen, Joanna, and I sat at
my round kitchen table. The hot Florida
sun filled the room with bright light. We started off as usual, breathing
slowly, growing calm, silently repeating our word. Suddenly, a surge of energy
pulsated through my body. I felt as if I had been plugged into an electric
circuit and all that electricity was racing through me. My stomach hurt
terribly and I cried out from the pain. Then things really started happening. A
voice that sounded nothing like mine came from my mouth, saying things I had no
control over. I could see passing images as the voice spoke, but my ordinary
self wasn’t listening or paying attention. Instead, while the voice spoke I was
thinking, What’s happening to me? It was an eerie sensation, it scared
me, and I wanted it to stop.
I forced my eyes open and looked around the table. Joanna
had tears flowing down her cheeks. She was saying, “That’s Grandma. She called
me Ginger Bear and we called my mother Memaw. That was my Grandma. My Grandma.
Thank you, Noreen. God bless you. Thank you so much.”
“Joanna, what are you talking about?” I was scared and
mystified.
“The message. You gave me a message.” Joanna looked from
me Ellen.
“I don’t think she remembers,” Ellen said. Ellen, the
realist, reached across the table and took a sip of my cup of coffee. “What the
hell is in your coffee, Noreen?”
Joanna murmured softly, her dark eyes still wet from the
tears, “You’re a medium, Noreen. You have just spoken to my grandmother, who
died three years ago.”
Uh-huh, I thought. Sure. I was too tired to
care. Whatever had happened, I was completely exhausted. “My hands feel like
they are on fire.” I blurted out, ignoring them both.
Joanne placed her hands on mine and said to Ellen, “Feel
this. Heat is just radiating off her hands. Noreen, you may be experiencing
healing powers.”
Ellen rolled her clear blue eyes in exasperation.
My hands were very hot, but I found that I could tolerate
the sensation after my initial surprise wore off. I could handle what was happening
to me physically, but Joanna was frightening me.
“Noreen,” she was saying, “please come over here and take
away my headache. I have a violent headache. Use your hands to heal me.”
I didn’t believe in touch-healing any more than I believed
in talking to dead people, but I really wanted to put an end to this. So, to
pacify her, I did what she asked.
Standing behind her, I placed my hands around her head
without touching it, and took a deep breath. At once, that jolt of energy
reentered my body, and again the voice came out of my mouth. I thought to
myself, I’m going crazy! I bet there’s insanity in my family that my mother
never told me about. What the hell’s happening to me? After a few minutes,
my eyes opened and I went back to my chair rather sadly, figuring I had really
lost it.
But Joanna was thanking me again. “Oh, thank you, my dear,
and God bless you. You have made me so happy with your messages. And guess
what?”
What?” I responded absently. My head was throbbing.
My headache is gone.”
“Break time! Break time!” Frantically, Ellen made the
football “time-out” signal and put a protective arm around me. She really was a
good friend, I thought, to stick by me when I had so clearly lost my marbles.
Finally, Joanna went home to tell her family about the message
from Grandma. After she left, Ellen looked at me with concern. “Noreen, what
the hell is going on? Did you make up that stuff?”
Damned if I knew. “I’m so confused, Ellen. I don’t know
what’s going on, but I didn’t make it up.” I thought maybe Joanna’s fervent
belief in all things psychic had been working on my subconscious. “Look Ellen,”
I said, “Let’s get together tomorrow after work and see what happens when we do
it without her around.”
*
This marked the beginning of our practice sessions. Over
the next few months, we met almost every night. After work, I would cook dinner
for my girls and rush over to Ellen’s apartment. Her husband, Len, was a
reporter for the local newspaper. He worked evenings, so we had the place to
ourselves.
After a long meditation, I would enter into what we called
the “weird state of consciousness.” Then the tolerant skeptic Ellen and I would
approached the problem like research scientists, conducting tests and
experiments on me. Unfortunately, we had no real understanding of what we were
really doing.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying. In my spare moments at
work, I read every book on psychic phenomena I could get my hands on. I mined
every resource—from Edgar Cayce to J. B. Rhine’s classic experiments at Duke,
from spiritualism to Tibetan Buddhism—for clues about new ways to explore the
possibilities of my growing ability to enter deep trances at will. During my
evenings with Ellen, I practiced what I had read about. With her cold logic and
skepticism, she was the perfect counterbalance and kept me from feeling like I
really was losing it.
One night Len came home early and caught us in the middle
of a session. Throwing his suit jacket over an empty chair and loosening his
tie, he laughed. He was a good-looking Sicilian with a dark eyes and a great
body, but he also was a cynical reporter who didn’t believe in psychics.
“When are you two going to start chanting, 'Bubble,
bubble, toil and trouble’?” he teased us. “When do the eye of the newt and the
liver of the toad come out?”
He was just leaving the room with a beer when I asked
impulsively, “Do you want to test me?”
Len stopped and smile strangely at his wife’s nutty
friend. Ellen felt tense, and rose to playfully shove her husband out of the
kitchen.
“No, wait a minute now,” he said, lightly moving her aside
and stepping toward me. “Test you? How?”
“Just give me a name of a deceased relative. I don’t care
how far back in history you might want to go. I’ll tell you about him—or her.”
Len sat next me to, sipped his beer, and slowly set the
can on the table in front of him. “Albert,” he said. “His name was Albert.” It
was a challenge. Len crossed his arms and stared at me. I closed my eyes and
wiggled in my seat to get comfortable as I pushed my long dark hair back from
my face.
“I want to see
Albert. I want to see Len’s Uncle Al—” I opened my eyes and suddenly looked at
Len. “Was he your uncle?”
“Could be. Go on.”
I closed my eyes again. Suddenly, images came into my mind
and I began to describe his Uncle Albert. “He has dark hair, a receding
hairline. He’s got an olive complexion and pock marks on his face—he looks kind
of sinister.” Then a cold feeling ran through me when I saw that he had a rope
around his neck. Then I saw his feet, in worn brown loafers, swinging a few inches
above the floor. He had hung himself. I opened my eyes and looked straight at
Len.
I was accurate—Uncle Albert really had hung himself. But
Len still wasn’t buying any of it. He pointed to an empty 7-Up can on the table
and said, “If you can make that can move, you might convince me you’re
psychic.”
“Let’s do it, Ellen,” I urged. Why not? We had never tried
anything like that before, but I had read about Russian psychics who could move
objects with their minds. It was called psychokinesis. Ellen and I sat on
opposite sides of the table with the can between us. Taking deep breaths, we
focused our concentration on the 7-Up can.
Naturally, it didn’t move.
Maybe we should both be on the same side of the table.
Again, we took deep breaths and focused our minds on the can. It didn’t budge,
but a thundering crash came from the bedroom—it sounded like a car had hit the
wall. Len rushed into the bedroom to see what happened and came back into the
room shaking his head and looking confused. Nothing was amiss in the bedroom.
Ellen and I looked at each other smugly, but said nothing
and continued our concentration. A few minutes later, a shattering noise made
us all turn to look at the large plate glass window in the living room. But
nothing had happened. Even I had to admit this was a little strange.
Len stood up abruptly and said, “That’s enough of this
foolishness. I need to get some sleep. We’ll see you later, Noreen.”
When I saw Ellen the next day, she told me that Len tossed
and turned all night. Every time he closed his eyes, he said he felt something
sitting on his face. He kept hearing loud noises in the apartment, and finally
ended up sleeping on the couch with the lights and radio on. He told Ellen he
didn’t want her to do any more “psychic stuff” with me.
But Ellen was my best friend. Naturally, she ignored his
request and we continued our development. Our sessions just ended earlier.
*
Slowly, this “psychic stuff” began to take root in my
life. I didn’t understand it, but I couldn’t deny it either. I was completely
captivated by the amazing new world that had opened in my mind. I started
neglecting my job. All I wanted to do was practice what other people claimed
they could do in the books I was reading.
Once the word got out, the hotel’s maids, secretaries, and
waiters became willing participants in my experiments. I would touch their
rings or watches, and see pictures in my head that told me about them and their
lives. They loved it and I loved it. My boss, however, did not love it. He was
becoming suspicious of the heavy employee traffic in and out of my office. I
didn’t want to be caught—or stopped—so I devised a new way to practice during
office hours.
On Mondays, I would make several phone calls to
businesspeople in Orlando,
inviting them to see our hotel facilities and join me for a magnificent
complementary lunch. After the meal, I would casually mention psychic
phenomena. If they didn’t scream “evil” or hold up a cross, I’d pursue the
subject further. Finally, I’d be pulling off their watch or ring and giving
them my psychic impressions. I hoped to see things they could confirm—body
scars, the place where they lived, what their loved ones looked like, and the
kind of car they drove. Mostly, I could. My accuracy amazed my luncheon guests,
and it still amazed me. When I look back on those days, I am astonished that I
lasted as long as I did at my job. I think I was driven to do all these
impromptu readings just to prove to myself that my strange talent was real.
The exciting new ability that had been switched on that
morning in Joanna’s kitchen didn’t go away, and I didn’t want it to. I loved
being able to do this, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was hooked. To no
one’s surprise except my own, after three months of practicing my psychic
abilities at home and at the office, and letting my work slip at the hotel, I
was fired.
Some psychic I was turning out to be. I didn’t even see it
coming.
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