The Psychic Next Door:
Ordinary People with
Extraordinary Powers
Karen Zimmerman
Stonegarden.net Publishing
http://www.stonegarden.net
Reading from a different angle.
California, USA
The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers
Copyright © 2011 Karen Zimmerman
ISBN: 1-60076-246-8
This is a work of non-fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and images are used with express written permission.
StoneGarden.net Publishing
3851 Cottonwood Dr.
Danville, CA 94506
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address StoneGarden.net Publishing.
First StoneGarden.net Publishing paperback printing:
September 2011
First StoneGarden.net Publishing electronic printing:
October 2011
Visit StoneGarden.net Publishing on the web at
http://www.stonegarden.net.
Cover art and design by Peter Joseph Swanson
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been possible without the cooperation and encouragement of its subjects – Claire Coustier, Dee Disparti, Deborah Carr Senger, Jason Lindo, Mair MacKinnon, Tiffany Vaz, and Gypse Jacquaar. Thanks for answering endless questions, and for contributing to my own personal growth. I think we all learned something new!
The publisher of my first book wasn’t interested in this one because it’s not ghost stories, so a big round of applause goes to Kristofer Stamp of StoneGarden.net Publishing, who loved the idea and was extremely generous with his deadline.
Vicky Walker, for her help in keeping and expanding on what was important and cutting what was not.
Keith Bowers, who urges me, every day, to be who I am in all my high weirdness, and vacates the house without complaint when I want to spend the whole day writing.
Introduction
Claire Coustier was the catalyst for this book, and her story begins it with chapter one.
Meeting Claire set me off on my own journey of discovery, of acceptance, and of a way of looking at the world. I was one of those kids, and adults, who people would characterize as “different.” I had a lot of curiosity, and was always attracted to things that others thought were weird or forbidden.
It’s the typical misfit kid type of story, but with a twist. Since I was small I could see ghosts, spirits, whatever you want to call them. I had dreams that came true. And my quest to understand what I was experiencing and feeling led me down a distinct path that was not entirely of my own choosing.
Without seeking them out, I found myself surrounded by people who were, to all appearances, quite ordinary. They had regular jobs, they grocery shopped, had car problems, good relationships or bad relationships — all those sorts of things that make up a typical life.
But they all harbored a secret, just like I did. They were constantly aware of a world beyond the everyday one. Because they had to be — they had no choice. It was just the way they were, and there was no changing it or denying it.
These people cropped up in my life in various ways. I met Claire at a local Botanica, where I was learning how to work with cowry shells as a complement to the tarot cards I already knew how to read. We became close when, after I opened a bookstore, she came to hang out and then to do readings every other Sunday.
Jason, a sensitive, came into my life when he accompanied some paranormal researchers to my haunted bookstore.
Dee, psychic extraordinaire, also came to check out the ghosts in the bookstore. Jason, who knows Dee, suggested she might be interested in being in this book.
Mair is my massage therapist and naturopath. We met because my former massage therapist went on maternity leave. She thought Mair and I would get along well, and she was right. It just happened to turn out that Mair sees ghosts, too, and has spirit guides that help her in her healing work.
Tiffany came to me through a psychics’ group on Facebook. The group has more than 1,200 members, and she was the only one who answered my solicitation for psychics to tell their story.
Deborah — so psychic — was introduced to me by Janice Oberding, my friend and fellow writer.
And then there’s Gypse Jacquaar. She was the only person to answer my ad on Craigslist for a tarot card reader to work every other Sunday in my bookstore. Turns out she recognized me immediately — we had been Gypsies together in France in another lifetime. Oh, and we live three blocks apart. Go figure.
No one in this book is a “professional” psychic. They all have jobs, careers, and vocations. Psychic is just what they are, just as they are left-handed or right-handed, tall or short, thick or thin. Most do readings now and again for small sums. They seek to share what they know with others. All have kind hearts.
I conducted the interviews in person when possible, and by e-mail and phone when logistics didn’t allow face-to-face meetings. Everyone answered the same questions, which led to other questions, which led to. … It all became very organic.
Besides being psychic, these people have some things in common. They share a belief in a higher power, whether they call it God or Jesus or something else. They all have struggled with acceptance in their daily lives. They’ve lost and made friends because of their “specialness.” Their lives have brought them joy, sorrow, pain, and pleasure.
Just like you. Like ordinary people. Only these people have extraordinary powers.
Chapter 1
Claire Coustier
Claire Coustier is a library technician at the Alameda Free Library. She has worked for the Alameda library system for over 40 years, but most of the patrons don’t know about her abilities.
She is a third third-generation psychic through via a vein that runs from her grandmother, Rosa, and through her mother, Flora. Her mother’s family is Portuguese, from Hawaii, and her father’s ancestors are French. Her family has lived in Alameda, Calif., since 1894.
To meet Claire is to meet a vibrant, yet homey woman. She is short and zaftig, with wavy black hair and a beautiful, welcoming face. You notice her calm, practical approach to everything and her honest desire to be helpful. Those of us who know her know she comes with something extra.
I met Claire at a Botanica where we were taking a class in reading cowry shells. We immediately bonded. Then, in 2004, she did a reading for me. She told me, among other things, that she was sorry, but she could to see that I would lose an older male member of my family, an older member, within two years. At the time, I had an uncle who was 95, so. I figured it would be him. Everyone else in the family was healthy, I thought.
Almost two years to the day, my father died.
From 2004 to 2007, I owned a bookstore in Alameda, where I persuaded Claire to give psychic readings every other Sunday. The bookstore was haunted, and Claire she was in touch with several of the spirits there.
This is her story.
Claire Coustier’s introduction to her psychic abilities came at a tender age, and in a dramatic fashion — her grandfather came back from the dead just to say goodbye to her. As we sat down to dinner, she told the story in a very matter-of-fact fashion — it was just another day in the life of a third-generation psychic.
“I have to go all the way back to when I was four years old,” she begins.
“My grandfather was dying, and back then, they did it the old old-fashioned way —– they died at home, and I remember the whole ritual around it.”
Claire recalls she was in the kitchen with her aunts, when she heard someone cry out. Her mother and grandmother, both sobbing, came out of her grandfather’s bedroom with a priest. The bedroom was right next to the kitchen, where the women of the family were congregated. Soon, the men of the family came in from the yard and garage.
“It dawned on me that grandpa was in his room all alone,” Claire says.
She grabbed a book, which at age four, she could not read. But she liked the pictures and she liked to make up stories about them to “read” to her grandfather.
“I went into his room, and grandfather was very still in the bed, and I can still remember how everything was set up —– the sick call kit, etc., but the candles had been snuffed out and there was only one small lamp lit.”
She says she remembers tugging on her grandfather’s sleeve and asking him to wake up. “He opened his eyes, and he turned his head to look at me. I said, ‘Grandpa, I want to read to you,’ and he motioned with his left hand, over his shoulder, like this (Claire makes an over the shoulder pointing motion), and pointed to a chair — this very heavy chair that was behind me.
“I realized that he wanted me to move this chair toward the bed, because it was the only way I could climb up onto the bed. But I couldn’t move the chair, as it was too big.
“So I said to him, ‘I can’t move it,’ and from behind the chair came hands and arms, and I remember seeing a long white sleeve, and it picked up the chair and moved it toward the bed.”
Claire sensed someone behind her, but she didn’t look back. “My focus was to get up on that chair so I could get up on the bed and read my little book to my grandpa.”
She climbed onto the bed, where her grandfather wrapped his right arm around her. She began to get very, very sleepy. And she also sensed someone sitting in the chair.
“So I said to my grandpa, ‘I am really sleepy, can I sleep here with you?’ I heard a voice in my head say, “’That’s a very good idea, niña. Take a nap.’”
So she fell asleep. “I didn’t know, until a few years later, that the priest wanted to gather the family for a blessing, and they couldn’t find me. They thought I might have wandered outside because the door was open.”
During the search, her mother finally went into her grandfather’s bedroom, and there found Claire, curled up, asleep in the bed, with the chair next to it. “And my mother knew that chair was not next to the bed when she left the room, and she also knew the chair was very heavy,” she recalls.
Her mother Flora, called her grandmother Rosa, who came into the room, followed by the priest. The priest took Claire into another bedroom. He had to walk through the kitchen, because that was the only way out of that bedroom. And of course, everyone asked what had happened. The priest replied,“This child has already been blessed.”
Because Claire was only four, she didn’t realize her experience was odd. Since she wasn’t sure what had really happened, she didn’t discuss it with anyone.
Eight years later, the then 12-year-old Claire, her mother, her grandmother, and her Aunt Margaret were cutting flowers and putting them into coffee cans to take to the cemetery, and they needed some twine. Her mother dug into a cabinet to get it and came out with the twine and a children’s book.
“I saw that book,” Claire says, “and I said, ‘Ooh, that’s the book I read to grandpa!’” She had not seen the book since that night and didn’t know what had happened to it. Her mother, grandmother, and aunt looked at her and asked when and where she read the book to him. She told them it was the night he died.
She pauses. “My mother and my aunt stared at me and said it could not have been, and I told them the whole story.” They insisted she must be mistaken.
“No, no,” they both said. But my grandmother just sat there and said, ‘Wait — if niña says someone moved the chair and grandpa was awake, it’s so.’ And that was it. She had the final word.”
Years later, when Claire was older, she asked her grandmother what she really thought about the whole event. “She told me it was the Angel of Death. And he was allowing me just a little more time to spend with my grandpa.”
She continues, “If you think about it, it’s scary, but the way my grandmother says it, so gently, it was just like, ‘Ooh, okay.’”
I asked Claire if perhaps her grandfather wasn’t really dead when she went into the room. “Well, the priest, my mother told me, had medical training, and having been at a lot of deathbeds, he knew when a person had died,” she says. “No breath, no heartbeat … Grandpa was dead.
“What I think is that when the priest and my mother and my grandmother came from my grandpa’s room, he had died. When I went in to see him, and tugged on his arm, the Angel of Death let him come back just one more time.
“That’s scary, because here I was, doing something perfectly innocent, perfectly natural, and out of love. … And this odd thing happened. Now, when I think about it, I can talk about it and not cry about it. But for a while, it was difficult to accept.”
The Angel of Death, in Christianity, is the Archangel Michael, who carries the souls of the dead to Heaven. Claire’s family is Roman Catholic.
Claire Learns To Use Her Psychic Powers
Once her grandmother was aware of Claire’s abilities, the training began. Rosa gave readings to everyone in the neighborhood. She would not accept payment, but people would bring her things such as something they baked or some fruit. Word got around and it was said, “Go see Rosa, she will have an answer.”
Claire’s first deck of “fortune-telling” cards was a gift from Rosa. They were called “Tekla Cards” and they had only pictures —– no words or pips, like a regular card deck. She advised Claire to use a stone or any tiny object — perhaps a ring — from whomever she is reading for, something they might carry with them all the time, and taught her how to arrange the cards around the object. Then, “Just listen and see with your mind,” was Rosa’s advice.
At first, Claire didn’t understand what her grandmother was talking about. “I saw her doing readings, and she talked to me about how the ability works and how at times it won’t and what she would see with her ability, but I’ve found that with each reader it works differently and that the symbols can mean something different, never the same thing to each individual reader.”
It wasn’t until college that Claire started doing readings for people. One day, she recalls, “I’m sitting on a bench between classes and laying out the cards, but without anything in the middle, no object. I’m looking at the cards — they were not talking to me, but I wanted to get familiar with the symbols.”
As she sat in the sun, a young man approached and who asked what she was doing. He scoffed at her “Oh, like fortune telling,” he said, “That’s all fake, you know.”
Claire was not amused. “That’s like saying my Granny was a fake.” She asked him if he wanted to test the cards.
The young man agreed, and when she asked him for an object he carried with him or wore all the time, he produced a car key. A plain, ordinary car key. Claire knew this was meant as a challenge. She asked him to shuffle the cards, and while he’s shuffling, to mentally push his energy into them.
“After he does all of that,” Claire continues, “I laid out the cards just as my Granny showed me, around the key. Next thing I know, I’m seeing in my mind pictures and hearing voices whispering words to me and I’m telling him about this trip he has planned, but I tell him it’s not going to happen and why, and about a girl he likes…”
The young man was surprised and pleased. “He asks me what career he is going into, and I see a seven-pointed star floating over his head. Now, this is 1966, and we are not going into Vietnam yet, although the war is going on, so I said that law enforcement is going to influence his career choice.” It turns out that is just what the young man was
considering for a career.
This young man’s response to Claire’s abilities stood in sharp contrast to her high school peers.
Claire’s family had cautioned her, early on, to not tell anyone about her family’s psychic abilities, warning that people would make fun of her. Although her family’s ethnic background and culture — Portuguese and French — were accepting of psychics, ghosts, and spirits, they told her, most of the people she met were not.
“I stuck with keeping things secret, until my sophomore year in high school, when it all came out. I was lucky to get a date to the prom,” Claire says. “It was that bad. I didn’t have friends.”
It was one of those silly things, she says, where one girl kept saying of a certain boy she liked, “So-and-so is going to pin me. I’m going to get pinned. I love him so.” It was typical high school stuff. But Claire knew the truth — “‘No he’s not! He’s dating so-and-so behind her back.’ And when the girl asked how I knew that, instead of making something up, I blurted out, ‘My guides told me!’”
The girl’s mocking response was, “So, you’re one of those. Spooky girl! Spooky girl!”
Word soon got around. Nasty letters were shoved in Claire’s locker, and someone smeared feces on it on one occasion. Not one to be cowed, she got involved in drama and music, where personal differences were more accepted, but in all her other classes, she was tormented —mocked or ignored. “From then on, until I graduated, my life was miserable,” she recalls. “I had no friends, nothing.”
Rosa did not attempt to comfort her granddaughter. “You opened up the door,” she told Claire. Rosa was not one to coddle; she was a complete pragmatist. She had warned her and Claire disregarded the warning.
She did have one classmate, Claire relates, that who seemed to accept her and was curious about her abilities. “One girl, what was her name? I can’t remember. Anyway, she asked me what she thought was going to happen to certain people,” Claire says. “In particular, she was interested in this one guy who was the class clown. Mostly, I was telling her, ‘This person is going to do okay; this person is going to have some problems. That one is going to have five kids and no husband.’ You know, that sort of thing.
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