Psychic Gallery (Interview with a Ghost)

Garrison Keillor says that everyone in Lake Wobegon, his fictional town in the American Midwest, is Lutheran. The Catholics are Lutheran, the Jews are Lutheran, and even atheists have a Lutheran God that they don’t believe in. He means that the residents of this part of the world run to a certain niceness–a steady, conservative good nature, as if life was one big hot dish supper. Salt of the earth people live here. So when I got the chance to see a Midwestern psychic who claimed to talk to the dead, how could I resist?

I work at a small book and gift shop in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s the kind of place where you can buy incense or a statue of Isis, order a crystal or an aura reading. We book events too. The one in question was called a “psychic gallery,” featuring a woman from Chicago who claims to deliver messages from “the other side.” I’d been hearing about the amazing abilities of this psychic--goddess, as she called herself--since I started working at the shop. They told me she could give detailed messages from real, specific loved ones, containing information she would have no ordinary way of knowing. Did I believe all this? No. Well, I’d believe it if I saw it. When Linda, my boss, asked for a volunteer helper, I decided I'd go. I wanted to balance this hearsay with some first-hand impressions.

That evening, I couldn’t help but notice that Linda and I were not the only middle-aged white women present. There were a couple younger women, but no men. We were a circle of comfortably solid women dressed in earthy colors, pale complexions the mark of serious winter, hair dyed in various shades of mousy brown and gold. Why, I wondered, would such a normal, well-adjusted lot want to talk to the dead? Did each have hidden wounds or spicy secrets to expose?

We’d spoken with two of the attendees in the shop earlier. They drove a hundred miles for this, from the little town of Sparta. They rented a hotel room, braving a snowstorm and downtown parking. There would never be anything like this in Sparta, they told us. Everyone there was stuck in their ways, fearful of anything a little different, suspicious even of children’s karate lessons. Tonight’s event would allow these two to let their hair down.

Judging by all the boxes of tissue strategically placed around the room, we'd be letting down a lot of hair.

Finally, the psychic emerged from behind a meditation screen and hobbled to her seat. She sure didn’t look Lutheran. Flamboyant long hair and chiffon robes, bright makeup and jewelry, covered probably the most obese woman I have ever seen. When she sat down you couldn’t see her knees. She needed support to walk, for which she used a knobby staff decorated with ribbons and crystals. Linda told me all this weight helps her stay “grounded,” even though it also causes severe medical problems. It’s the price she pays for her powers.

She sat and introduced herself briefly, with warmth and humor to put us at ease. We sprayed around some essential oils and anointed our third eyes, and the communication with the dead got started.

”This is amazing. This has never happened, in all the years I’ve been holding these galleries. I sense, in this very room, the presence of… so many men. Fathers.”

Okay, a room full of women of a certain age. Not a bad bet that some will have lost their dads.

”One of them has a name like Bob, or maybe Robert?” No response. “Rob, Richard, Ron?” Nope. “Something that starts with R-O? Or maybe B-O?”

“My husband’s name is Roy.”

“Is he on the other side, sweetheart?”

“No…”

After stumbling around in this way for a few minutes, the ghostly fathers got down to brass tacks. One by one the psychic brought women to sit before her, as an assistant stood by with fresh tissues. And to my surprise, the messages that emerged turned meaningful.

“Your father has something he wants to tell you, sweetheart.”

”Okay.”

”He says you were always the peacemaker of the family. Always the one to hear everyone’s side of the story. Is that true?”

Here the daughter, a tidy fiftyish woman with resignation etched into her wrinkles, began to break down. “Yes.”

”Sometimes you had to put aside your own needs for everyone else, is that right?”

”All the time, just…” She was really crying now. “Almost every single day.”

”Well, what your daddy… did you call him Daddy?”

”Dad. But when I was a little girl…” Tears stopped her from saying more.

”What your daddy wants me to tell you is, you don’t have to do that all the time. It’s okay for you to have your own needs. It’s okay to take time for yourself. Because you know what?”

”W-what?”

”Your daddy loved you very much. He wants me to tell you that he still does, where he is right now. And he appreciates everything you did for the family, all those things nobody but you could have done. He didn’t always let you know that when he was alive, but he wants to make sure you know it now.”

”Tell him I love him too.”

”You just did, sweetheart. He hears you right now. And he wants me to tell you that you’re strong. Very, very strong. And that everything’s going to be all right. Okay?”

”Okay.”

”All right, sweetheart, you can go and sit back down.”

And so it went the rest of the evening. A very plain woman got the message that her beauty lay inside her. A husband apologized for some things he said in the pain of his final illness. Some women were just happy to hear that their deceased loved ones were in a good place. A younger woman who wanted to conceive got a message from a grandmother that she could have a baby by having confidence in herself. Well, also by seeking out fertility treatment and having frequent sex. The dead are practical.

Nothing I observed convinced me this psychic was able to commune with a literal "other side." But she had a real power, an instinct for drawing forth the exact message each woman needed. She took people back into painful parts of their lives, hurts they may have been trying to bury, and helped them to find strength in their roots. She reinforced their faith in an afterlife. I saw nothing supernatural about any of this; all I saw was an empathetic person with a keen intuition about others. That was enough.

But the psychic was also a catalyst, because by the end of the evening another thing else happened. The women in the room started talking to each other. Really talking, whether they'd come that evening as strangers, family or friends. When it comes to bottling feelings, we women of middle age and middle west may be the champs. But here we were, talking openly about things that really matter. A feeling of freedom and relief pervaded the room, right along with the Angelic Ancestor Aura Spray. Linda offered me a ride home, and we spent the ride laughing and chatting in a way that made her seem more like a friend than my boss. I don't know whether the dead were communicating, but the living were sure giving it a try.

Everyone who attended seemed to feel their $25 and their evening were well spent. As for me, while I wasn't convinced of any psychic powers, I became less cynical about the purpose of this event. All of us gathered a little new strength to take back home--whether to a city neighborhood, or to Sparta, or to Lake Wobegon.