When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [4]
“That name just rang a bell with me,” she explained.
Later that night, she got another call from a friend who had managed to talk to someone who had known her ghost when he was alive. What he’d neglected to mention in the conversations I’d had with him was that he’d been living in the basement of his parents’ house when he died. When they went into his room to clean it out, his family and friends discovered a whole wall papered with photos of Love.
It makes sense, I thought as everyone else in the room stared at Love. The guy was literally a stalker while he was alive. How much easier had it been for him once he was dead?
“At least he won’t be rattling around in my kitchen anymore,” Love joked, breaking the tension in the room.
Later that day, we piled in and out of the tour bus and I talked to the various spirits in the different houses the producers selected. And while I still got tons of questions from the writers—who, by the way, ask more questions than detectives, and I’ve worked frequently with both—I didn’t feel that same sense of skepticism from them. At least not while they were there with me in the houses.
Whether we’re aware of them or not, ghosts have always been among us—and they have been a part of my life since my early childhood. These days, I do believe that the mainstream is becoming much more accepting of the reality of earthbound spirits. People who sense that something isn’t right in their homes or business search out my Web site and seek my advice. Although I have never advertised what I do, word of mouth has resulted in countless calls coming in on the six phone lines installed in my house. (My husband has nicknamed them “the weird lines.”)
It was word of mouth, in fact, that led me to my job as consultant for Ghost Whisperer. About four years ago, I received a call from a woman who introduced herself as James Van Praagh’s assistant. Of course I knew who James was: He is one of the best-known mediums today. He doesn’t talk to, or see, earthbound spirits as I can. Instead, he is able to communicate with spirits who have crossed over, or gone into the white Light. I knew of his books and his daily television show, and I told Kelly that I’d be delighted to speak to him.
I was flattered to think James had even heard of me. At the time, I had self-published a few books, and articles about me would sometimes appear in the local Cleveland papers—usually around Halloween—but the majority of calls I got were from people who had heard firsthand from a relative or friend about how I had helped them rid their home of a ghost or had attended the viewing before a funeral to help them finalize family plans or straighten out misunderstandings.
Homeowners in Oklahoma had called James about their house being haunted, and he invited me to visit the house with him for his TV show. I was happy to help out. When James and I arrived at the house, the homeowners were cordial, if slightly overwhelmed by the number of camera operators and technicians and equipment operators who had crowded into their nicely decorated ranch home. Before we began filming, I took a walk through the house. I’d done enough television to know that dead airtime is not a good thing. And if a spirit isn’t going to want to talk to me or is going to be stingy with information, it helps me to know this in advance.
There were a bonanza of ghosts in this house—five in all—which was not surprising given the troubles the family was reporting: The checkbook would constantly go missing; the two boys in the family suffered from respiratory infections and were frequent nighttime visitors to their parents’ room, claiming they just couldn’t sleep in their room. The mother was sick of finding her kids’ expensive toys broken, each boy claiming he had nothing to do with it—he’d just found them that way.
So as the cameras rolled, I did what I usually do. I asked the ghosts their names and how old they were and where they were from. The parents wanted to know more about the ghost that they had always assumed was the imaginary