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By Root 256 0

this ghost was close to Love’s age, she was curious to see if they had anything in common. As the story unraveled, it became more and more interesting. The man admitted that he had gone to the same high school she did. A few years ahead of her, but still . . . He told her that he admired her work. He could name all the movies she’d done, and all the television shows she’d been on. He’d been killed in a collision, he said. The more we talked, the more uncomfortable I became. While he was being straightforward with his answers, they were all delivered with a smirk. If I’d met him when he was alive, I’d have called him a creep. Dead, he was no different.

Love obviously felt uncomfortable, too. She excused herself for a few minutes, and when she came back into the room her expression was thoughtful.

“Does he watch me when I’m in the shower?” she blurted out.

Hoo-boy, I thought. I knew the answer to this one without even having to ask. With the smirk spreading wider across his face, the ghost replied that he sure did. I didn’t bother relaying his enthusiasm, just nodded.

“He’s a pervert!” Love was disgusted, though she couldn’t help laughing at the situation. I’d already told her that most earthbound spirits couldn’t touch or harm people.

“He sure is,” I agreed.

It was clearly time to let this Peeping Tom go into the Light.

“You really don’t want her to think of you as a pervert, do you?” I said.

The ghost winced. It seemed as if I had managed to appeal to whatever moral standards this guy had.

“And now that she knows what you’re up to, it’s really not going to be that much fun for you anymore, is it?” I continued.

His shoulders slumped, and I knew he wasn’t going to argue with me. I made the white Light and watched him walk into it.

“He’s gone now,” I told Love.

While the circumstances under which I was talking to these ghosts were special, there was nothing remarkable to me about the encounter. As I’ve said, I simply take what spirits tell me as fact. Over the fifty years that I’ve been doing this work, I’ve talked to so many spirits—nearly all of them strangers to me—that I tend not to think about them once they have gone into the Light.

What I sometimes forget is that while I may take my unusual ability for granted, very few others do.

The next morning, I was sitting in a conference room on the Paramount lot. It would be the first time that the writers and stars of the show were meeting. I knew that many of the writers were skeptical about what I could do. In fact, later that day all twelve of them, the producers, Love, and I were going to pile into a tour bus and take a “Ghost Tour” of some houses so they could all watch me at work.

I wasn’t nervous about the upcoming tour. I’m used to dealing with skeptical people. In fact, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve no need to convince anyone that I can communicate with earthbound spirits. If I worried about what other people thought of what I do, the past fifty years or so would have been stressful indeed. But when it came down to talking about my work with twelve Hollywood writers who had probably heard all kinds of stories in their careers, I kind of felt like it might matter a little that they believed in me. Still, I vowed to stick by my philosophy: This is what I do. Believe in it or not, as you wish. All of this was running through my mind when Love came into the conference room.

“Heard you got your place ghostbusted yesterday,” one of the lead writers drawled, clearly hoping she’d have a snappy comeback.

Instead Love told everyone what had happened the previous day—how there had been two spirits and how one had been a creepy pervert. Now, I have found that most people exaggerate when they recount their ghost stories, but Love just stuck to the facts. Then she stepped over behind me and put her hands on my shoulders.

“Mary Ann doesn’t even know this,” she announced. And she proceeded to tell the writers what had happened after I left her house.

As you might imagine, she just hadn’t been able to get the creepy guy out of her mind. So she called some old