Chapter Excerpt

SO . . . IS ANYONE here now?” Jennifer Love Hewitt sat across from me, pouring a cup of tea. We were in her kitchen, and Love (as she prefers to be called) was meeting with me as she prepared to begin the first season of shooting what would become the CBS hit series Ghost Whisperer. I wanted to pinch myself. Me, a fifty-something housewife from Cleveland, was sitting and casually chatting with a well-known actress, sipping tea in her sun-filled kitchen on a summer afternoon. I was there because Love’s character on the show, Melinda Gordon, can see and communicate with earthbound spirits. And so can I.

“There are two spirits here,” I told her.

“What do you do next?” Love asked me. Although we’d known we’d be working together on Ghost Whisperer, this was the first time we had met, and I felt her studying me closely.

“Well, you can ask them questions,” I told her. “When you’re ready for them to leave, I can make the white Light and let them cross over. And then they’ll be gone.”

Like most people I work with, Love had all kinds of questions, both for me and for the spirits sharing her home. And although she couldn’t see or hear her ghostly housemates, I could see them as plainly as I saw her, and they were more than happy to talk with me.

“Tell me who’s here,” she said.

“Well, there’s a woman over there,” I said, gesturing at the doorway. “She says she’s Lon Chaney Jr.’s ex-wife.”

Love looked startled. “Lon Chaney Jr. used to own this house! How did you know that?”

I wasn’t surprised she wanted to know. I’d been asked this kind of question literally hundred of times; it’s as if people suspect I have some previous knowledge of their lives and circumstances. Each time I patiently explain that I’m not a psychic. I can’t read minds or see into the future. I can only tell them what a spirit tells me. And that’s what I told Love.

“Well then, ask her how she likes my singing,” Love said with a grin.

It seemed like a strange question, but when I looked over at the ghost, she was smiling. “She’s having a bit of fun with you,” the ghost told me. “She’s a wonderful singer. She has recordings and everything.”

Love asked a few more questions, we all chatted pleasantly, the spirit admitted she was ready to go into the Light, and I helped her leave.

Then Love asked, “Who else is here?”

I hesitated. All my years of experience told me that this next encounter wasn’t going to be as pleasant as our chat with the former Mrs. Chaney. But in my work I’ve learned not to venture my opinion unless directly asked. “There’s a youngish man here, too,” I said.

The ghost, probably about thirty, with neatly cut light brown hair and an athletic build, lounged insolently in a corner. He stared at me in a way that was far from welcoming.

Again, Love had a lot of questions. But this time, her queries became very specific, very quickly. When people ask me to talk with the ghosts in their homes, it can seem a lot like a game of Twenty Questions: What’s your name? How old are you? Where did you live? How did you die? People are naturally curious, and there’s something about asking questions of someone they can’t see or hear, but who has been sharing their home and watching their routines, sometimes for years, that makes them bolder than they might be if they’d simply met at a cocktail party.

Because 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 girlfriends from high school.

“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 friend of their younger child. The older boy just hung back at the edge of the group, but I could tell he was worried about something.

While they are young, most children have a remarkable ability to see or sense the spirits who surround them. For some, these ghosts—especially if they are the spirits of children themselves—become the “imaginary friends” who break toys or cause loud one-sided conversations. For other children, these not-real people cause very real unease.

“The man in the plaid flannel shirt who shows up in your bedroom sometimes really scares you, doesn’t he?” I spoke directly to the older boy, who nodded and burst into tears. I glared at the spirit in question, a young man with a bad mullet hairdo and a flannel shirt. He stared back with a surly expression, just like the bully he was. But most ghosts, no matter how mean-spirited, don’t intimidate me at all.

I turned back to the boy. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I promise he’ll be gone after today.”

True to my word, I made the white Light, and one by one all the spirits departed from the house, including the ghost of a next-door neighbor who had wandered over, curious to see what was going on with all the lights and crowds, but only too happy to be able to take advantage of the chance to leave his earthbound existence.

After we had done this shoot together, I came to consider James a good friend. He knows many, many people from all walks of life and frequently calls me to say he has a friend or acquaintance or business associate who might need my services. Because James lives on the West Coast, whenever I was out in that area he invited me along to dinners or cocktail parties. Inevitably there was a ghost or two on the premises. Earthbound spirits are pure energy and need energy to subsist. And believe me, what with actors, directors, writers, and other types of creative people, Hollywood has energy to spare.

The idea that became Ghost Whisperer came out of one of these parties. James had invited me to join him and a few friends for dinner. The host and hostess—a studio executive and her husband, a television writer—were warm and welcoming. They lived in a glamorous old house that had once belonged to the cowboy actor Tom Mix. Tom wasn’t there that night, but there were several other ghostly dinner guests joining us. The food looked wonderful, but luckily I wasn’t hungry. I learned long ago that if I’m invited to a dinner party, it’s wise to eat my dinner at home before I go out. Once I’m at the table, I’m always so busy answering questions that I almost never get a chance to eat what the host is serving!

This time was no exception. I told the hosts about the frustrated writer ghost who spent his time with the husband in his study.

“This explains your trouble in deciding where to set the story you’re working on,” I told him. “You thought you should set it in the mountains. The ghost thinks it would work better at the beach.”

The man and his wife stared at me openmouthed.

“There’s another spirit here, too,” I told them. “She came with the antique bureau you got recently—the one with a mirror on it.”

The woman frowned. “We don’t have an antique bureau in the house.”

“It’s downstairs,” the ghost told me.

“She says it’s downstairs,” I repeated.

The other couple at the table gasped. “We live downstairs,” the woman explained. “And we recently bought an old bedroom set at an auction. It has a bureau with a mirror.”

I wasn’t surprised. Ghosts often attach themselves to material possessions such as important pieces of furniture, jewelry, or vintage cars. I guess they feel that if they can’t take it with them, they’ll just make sure they don’t lose sight of it.

The rest of the night passed quickly, with me trying to steal bites of my dessert in between answering more questions about the spirits in the house with us, and about others I have encountered in my line of work. As James and I were leaving, our hosts walked us to the door.

“Your experiences are amazing,” the man said. “They’d make a great TV show.”

I didn’t really think that much about it. Since I’d been in California, lots of people had told me that my ghost stories would make great TV. But nothing had come of it. So when James called me a few weeks later and told me to get myself right down to the Starbucks at the corner of Hollywood and Vine to meet with a producer named John Gray, I didn’t have any big expectations.

When I got to the Starbucks, I realized that I had forgotten to ask James what John Gray looked like. All I knew was that he was from New York, not California. My husband, Ted, had come with me to the meeting, and when I spied the tall, thin man in a black windbreaker pacing outside the coffeehouse door, I sent Ted out to see if I had indeed picked out the New Yorker from the California coffee crowd.

In fact I had, and our meeting lasted three hours. I simply told John what I did as he asked question after question. The first thing he asked me was where we could go to find some ghosts.

“We don’t have to go anywhere,” I said. “There are spirits here right now.”

“Right here in Starbucks,” he said, looking around.

“Right here in Starbucks,” I confirmed.

I told him about the ghost of an older woman I’d been watching while waiting for him to arrive. She’d been standing very close to a handsome young man who resembled her, and who I suspected was her son. Whenever an attractive woman came through the door, Mom would do everything she could to get her son to glance in that direction. Of course, he was paying more attention to his BlackBerry than anything else, and her frustration mounted each time another potential daughter-in-law left without notice.

Then I told him about the ghost of an older Mexican man who was standing behind the counter with the barista. He was touching all the dials on the espresso machine and generally wreaking havoc until the poor kid who was working at filling the coffee orders was at his wit’s end.

John just listened to me talk and stared at the kid as he dropped cups, splashed steamed milk, and spilled espressos. If you watched the pilot episode of Ghost Whisperer, you’ll remember that both these ghosts were worked into the script.

I left the meeting thinking how much I had enjoyed talking to John. I never expected the call I got a few hours later, though. It was James, telling me that John was interested in doing a show about a woman who could see and talk to ghosts.

Once I began traveling out to California fairly regularly to work with the writers on the show, it became customary for me to spend time on some of the sets and soundstages. Ghosts can be very disruptive, particularly to electrical equipment and lightbulbs. It takes only one expensive piece of equipment to malfunction or one actor to get showered with glass from an exploding light for the people on set to ask me to clear out the lingering spirits who just can’t seem to accept that their final credits have rolled.

It’s easy for anyone to get a bit starstruck after spending time in Hollywood: Everywhere you look, you spot familiar faces from film or television. Before you know it, you’re hoping to run into your favorite celebrities at the corner Starbucks. I was no different when it came to Hollywood spirits. Each time I checked out a studio lot, a soundstage, or a prop storage area, I hoped I might run into a big star, like James Dean or Elvis. But for the most part, I met a lot of B-list starlets and old technical guys who just hadn’t been able to bring themselves to leave the business they loved.

Being affiliated with Ghost Whisperer has certainly changed my circumstances. It’s raised my profile and increased both believers and detractors. I’m sure it’s no surprise to find out that I’m a big fan of the show. The character of Melinda Gordon is glamorous yet grounded, and the spirits she encounters are complex and interesting. So it may be a disappointment to hear that I don’t find my own life as a paranormal investigator quite as dramatic. I see and talk to ghosts nearly every day, and if each encounter were so steeped in drama, frankly, I’d be exhausted. The truth is, a good TV show is scary and sexy and highly theatrical. It’s entertainment, not real life, after all.

Seeing and talking to spirits is a part of my real life and something I’ve done since I was a child. As far as earthbound spirits are concerned, I have an awful lot of experience. One of the producers on the show, exasperated after listening to me complain about the way one of the actors looked in ghostly makeup, suggested that maybe I should write a book to make sure that people know what’s true and what isn’t.

Born out of exasperation or not, it was actually a pretty good idea. Blood may not drip down the walls, and the attic may not be host to swarms of buzzing flies, but the reality is that ghosts are all around us. And more often than not, the truth is much more intriguing than the fiction. This book tells my real-life story—from early-childhood years spent attending funerals with my grandmother to my current day job as a paranormal investigator. I’ll share stories of working with law enforcement, celebrities, sports teams, and completely average folks, all of whom have been amazed at what I can tell them from talking to the spirits who surround them. I’ll discuss the myths and realities of earthbound spirits. And I’ll tell you how you can become more attuned to them and protect yourself, your home, or your family from unwanted visitors.

Since I’ve been working as a paranormal investigator, I’ve watched the fascination with earthbound spirits increase and become mainstream. But along with all the interest, there’s also a lot of misinformation out there. There are things everyone should know about dealing with ghosts, and I’m prepared to tell you about them. In the chapters that follow, I’ll share remarkable stories from my career, as well as practical advice that will help you peacefully coexist with the earthbound spirits who cross your path every day.

Copyright © 2007 by Mary Ann Winkowski