The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers

by Karen Zimmerman

  “Well, she asked me about that class clown. Was his first name Rich or Doug? I can see his face right in front of me. And I looked and I looked and I told her that I didn’t see any future for him. Six months after we graduated from high school, he was killed in a automobile accident.”

  Claire says she didn’t see the boy as a spirit after he died. She told me that spirits would try to contact her, day and night, which is why her grandmother taught her about barriers. She never wanted anyone from the spirit world to come visit her in the middle of the night, so her grandmother taught her how to put a stop to that. “They were only allowed on my terms to come and talk to me,” she says. “I was too young. I was a little afraid.” One of the essential lessons for a psychic is how to deal with spirits when they want, not for the spirits to force themselves upon them.

  Today, Claire talks to spirits all the time. Wherever she goes, if they reach out, she responds. Several of her relatives visit her at home, including one who makes coffee. The phantom coffee smells so good; it’s frustrating to Claire and her boyfriend that it’s not real.

  Claire Meets Her Guides

  I asked Claire about the spirit guide she had mentioned. “Granny explained that to me,” she says. “That we each have our team of spirit guides; they come in as needed. They all have their jobs. She warned me not to confuse guides with guardian angels. You have one or you can have many guardian angels. They work on higher stuff to help us have a greater understanding and spiritual awareness, and also help you keep calm if something awful happens.”

  Claire went on to talk about her team of guides. “One of my guides, my alchemist, whom I call Brother John, because I didn’t have a name for him, he showed himself at Mission San Gabriel, during the day. I was eleven years old.”

  She explains that her family went to Disneyland, and on their return trip, they stopped at some of the missions along the way, at the request of her grandmother. At Mission San Gabriel, run by a Franciscan order, they met a donkey which would end up playing the part of catalyst in her meeting Brother John.

  “The donkey had a shed, water, and feed, etc. He was easy to get to, and a very friendly little donkey,” Claire remembers. “It turns out he had a job.” The donkey walked a circular path that turned a wheel to pump water into the cistern so the gardens could be watered. He did it in the morning and in the evening.

  “When it was his time out, he would get petted and fed. I was petting this sweet little donkey, and standing next to me was this monk,” she recalls. “He had his hood up, which I thought was odd on such a hot day.” The donkey turned and stretched his nose out and the monk started scratching him behind the ears.

  The monk told Claire that the donkey enjoyed it. “He likes to be scratched behind the ears.” When Claire offered the monk carrots to feed the donkey, “He turned to me and I remember his eyes as twinkling and blue. And he smiled. And proceeded to disappear…”

  As you can imagine, Claire was a bit shocked. Her grandmother took charge. After calming her down and asking her where the monk had been standing, Rosa walked over and began moving her hands around, as though she was feeling the air.

  She turned and said, ‘Ooh, that is just one of your spirit guides, not to worry,’ and smiled.

  Later on, when Claire meditated as her grandmother taught her, she learned that Brother John was her alchemist, and he has introduced her to her other spirit guides. “He is specifically my alchemist, and he doesn’t talk to me; I just know when he is around.” Claire says Brother John is the silent worker behind the action, getting her energies elevated, making sure they are flowing correctly for spirit communication.

  Claire says she felt him most acutely when she was in the hospital for kidney surgery. Alchemy was a predecessor to chemistry, and alchemists used a variety of laboratory equipment. It seemed natural that he would appear and comfort her in such a setting, almost as though he was working along with the doctors to help her get well.

  Claire has seven guides, but she met them bit-by-bit, when it was time to meet them, she tells me. She says a lot of people who are aware of having spirit guides at all think they have only one guide, but what they don’t realize is that they actually have a hidden team. The guide they think is their only one is usually the gatekeeper, the one who speaks for the group.

  “Another guide is my philosopher, a little tiny lady named Madame Woo,” she says. Madame Woo, Claire says, is three-quarters Chinese and one-quarter English, and was killed in 1937 when Japanese soldiers invaded China. She has another who was a Navajo Shaman. Each guide has a specific function.

  Besides Madame Woo and Brother John, Claire says her other guides include her gatekeeper, whom she refers to as Isis, because she has a name Claire can’t pronounce. “She is Egyptian and was a priestess in one of the Temples of Isis. She prefers to work bringing in those spirits who wish to communicate and keep out those who are harmful, or warns me to take spiritual protection as needed. She doesn’t like to talk through me because she does have a temper, and does not suffer fools lightly.”

  Her spirit doctor is Reverend Anderson, a doctor of theology and an Episcopalian minister. Claire says he died in 1918 of Spanish influenza when he was in his 60s, in Philadelphia.

  She has an Indian guide, or Shaman, who is half Navajo and half Lakota. She calls him Buffalo Man, because when she sees him, he is wearing a headdress with buffalo horns. “He lived in the early 1800s,” Claire says. “He is the one who tells me what I need to do if I am not well, or if someone comes to me for a reading needs to see a medical doctor.

  Another set of guides Claire talks about are from not so far away — they are members of her own family.

  “I have a spirit child and a spirit parent,” she explains. “The spirit parent tends to rotate, but right now, it’s my father’s mother. That’s not to say I don’t have other people coming in. I will, from time to time, have other family members coming in, like my Uncle Mike. And while I wouldn’t trust his business acumen, he does help sometimes, and is trying to make up for being such an SOB. Some are trying to make amends for things they did to me and to the family when they were alive.”

  Her spirit child is named David. “I was pregnant one time and lost the baby. But, I knew it was going to be a boy, and had he been born, I would have named him David. Now he’s a grown man on the spirit side, but he’s still my spirit child. He helps me keep in touch with kiddy things, helps me remain playful. He tells me it’s okay to blow bubbles, to ride the merry-go-round, to be a kid.”

  Claire’s spirit parent didn’t come to her until she was a teenager. Her original spirit parent was her aunt Violet, her mother’s sister. “She helped me get through my teen years and early 20s. Then, after my father’s mother passed away, she stepped in.”

  “I kind of wondered why my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Rosa, who taught me so much, didn’t step in. But I realized it wasn’t her job. “I even asked Madame Woo, ‘How come?’ I was told it isn’t Rosa’s job. She’ll be with me when I need her. But it was not her job. She has other things she has to do. You just never know until you get to the other side what your job will be.”

  Claire was born in 1947, and calls herself a “twixt” child, moving between the old ways and the new. Her parents grew up with Old World culture, which played a large part in how she was raised. She says the Old World culture involved a better understanding of nature and the cycle of life, as well as a certain deportment and politeness. Family, school, and God were all-important, and family came first.

  The eldest male was the leader, but in truth, in her family, Claire says, it was the women who were the mediators and overruled the men’s decisions. “My grandmother was the true matriarch. The power than emanated from her was palpable.” Yet, Claire has to operate in the modern world. If she had a child of her own with these abilities, she says, “I would be showing him my parents’ life, my grandparents’ life, and saying, — ‘This is your foundation, this is where you will be learning fro
m — this is what will help you understand all of this.’”

  Three Generations of Psychic Women

  It’s predominantly the women in Claire’s family that who have the psychic ability. Her grandmother accepted and used her abilities, and she taught Claire at her knee. And Claire’s mother, Flora, had abilities of her own — she always knew who was calling on the phone and who was knocking at the door, things like that. But a traumatic experience made her turn way from her sixth sense.

  Flora was born in 1919 and had three sisters. Her eldest sister, Mary, had run off and gotten married, but her two younger sisters, Alice and Violet, had died. Violet died from tuberculosis in 1937. Alice had a defective heart valve, and died in 1938.

  It was Alice’s death, and Flora’s experience around it, that caused her to suppress her abilities. Alice had been married less than a year. Her husband, Cal, could not take care of her; he couldn’t stand to see the decline of his young wife, so left her with her family. The last two weeks of Alice’s’ life were extremely painful, Claire told me — it was like she was having constant heart attacks. The morphine prescribed by the doctor was of no help.

  Flora was exhausted from tending to her sister, so she went into the living room and sank into a chair. From there, she could see through the dining room to the bedroom. As Claire tells it, “She was sitting in this big oversized chair, just exhausted. She looked up and saw, walking from the kitchen into the dining room, the spirit of her sister Violet, who had died the year before.”

  “My mother said she asked Violet, ‘Can you make her well?’ And Violet just looked at her and shook her head and walked into the bedroom. She heard Alice cry out and her mother call, ‘Flora, come here,’ and my mother went into the bedroom and Alice had just died. Violet had come to get her sister and take her to the spirit world.”

  Flora was in shock. She was so exhausted that she was in what is called a “twilight state,” not quite sleeping, yet not quite awake. And this was the first time she had seen a spirit. To see her sister Violet, dead just the year, coming to get Alice was just too much. So, Flora shut down her psychic ability. “My grandmother did not argue with her, understanding that my mother needed to heal in her own way.”

  Claire remembers Rosa as someone who knew about a lot of things. She was firm, but gentle at the same time, and very practical, Claire told me. She wasn’t dramatic about anything. “It was always an acceptance of what happened and figuring out how to deal with it,” she says. “I think that is pretty much how my mother and I developed. But my mother always felt she would never have the strength her mother had. It wasn’t until years later that she did realize that she had it. I feel that the strength comes with age, with wisdom, with understanding things.”

  “My grandmother taught me by just guiding me through things, or she would see something and ask me what I was thinking. I could tell her things. I was never afraid of her. I was more afraid of my mother’s discipline if I misbehaved, than I was my grandmother’s. I could always tell my grandmother anything —– nothing would ever faze her.”

  Claire shares a story that illustrates her grandmother’s acceptance of the wonders of the psychic world, and how she learned how to accept the extraordinary.

  “I was about six years old, and we were in the garden planting things. My grandmother would dig holes and I would hand her the plants. In the garden was a rose bush that grew very thick, and I heard some rustling in the bush. I looked over, thinking it was a bird, and there was this little man about 12 inches tall, maybe a little less. He was wearing clothing that looked like they were made out of bark and leaves. He was just looking at me, tilting his head to one side and then the other. He was brown, like a little nut. And I remember he had a kind of beard.

  “I was a little scared, because it was like a doll had come to life. So I said, ‘Bobo (that was my nickname for my grandmother) — who’s that?’ And she slowly turned her head and looked and says, ‘Oh, that’s the Menehune. Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you.’ Menehune is a Hawaiian world for little people.”

  In Hawaiian mythology, the Menehune [pronounced meh-neh-HOO-neh] are said to be “little people,” similar to pixies or trolls, who live in the deep forests and hidden valleys of the Hawaiian Islands, far from the eyes of normal humans. It’s said they have lived in Hawaii before settlers arrived from Polynesia many centuries ago. They can be up to two feet high, but some are so small, they can fit in the palm of a hand. Often, when they are seen, they run to the shelter of the forest.

  Legends say the Menehune enjoy dancing, singing, and archery. They have been known to use magic arrows to pierce the heart of angry people to ignite feelings of love instead. Furthermore, their spirits are always changing; one could be malicious and dangerous one day, and harmless the next. They are described as cunning creatures, and should be avoided unless you need a special favor from them.

  “The Menehune are very protective of certain trees they would consider sacred or as their homes,” Claire says.

  I asked Claire why she thought this creature was in her yard and why she was allowed able to see him.

  “Maybe because I was working with my grandmother and we were planting things. My grandmother always saw the garden as a sacred space. Nothing is cut, nothing is removed, until she asks permission, and she gives an offering, whatever it might be. In this case, he deliberately wanted himself to be seen for possibly two reasons. One, to let me know that there are little people and to let my grandmother know, so that she could see he had taken up residency in her garden.”

  “Because, after that, my grandmother went out and bought a special doll-size tea set. And every Sunday, she would take a little bit of the food from dinner and mash things up; make it easy for a very small mouth to eat.” Claire would take the food and place it near the rose bush. She would do that every Sunday, and every Monday evening, she would get the dishes and everything would be empty.

  “I would bring the dishes in and grandmother would wash them. So, this little Menehune had Sunday supper,” she says, laughing. “I remember that summer, the flowers, the vegetables. Everything grew wonderfully,” a sign that the Menehune was taking care of the garden.

  Rosa died in 1971, when Claire was 30 years old. After that, Claire’s Uncle Manny kept up the garden and the Sunday supper ritual until he died in 1977. The house was to be sold, so Claire visited the rose bush one last time.

  “When we were clearing things out in the house, I found the tea set and made one last Sunday supper. I put it out and says ‘Menehune, this is going to be the last Sunday supper. My grandmother has died and my uncle has died, and the house is to be sold, so you’ll have to find another place to stay.’”

  She went back on Monday evening and washed the empty dishes as usual.

  Within a week, everything in the garden started to wilt and wither. “And my mom said to me, which I thought was a little strange, because I didn’t know she knew about it, ‘Did you tell the Menehune the house was sold?’ And I said yes. And she said, ‘Okay, well that explains this, because everything was just blooming and green and then we saw leaves dropping and everything dying the last two weeks we were there.’”

  But, it isn’t only the women of the family who have extraordinary experiences.

  The Men of the Family Share the Gift

  For some of the men in on Claire’s mother’s side of the family, psychic ability took on a different cast. When Uncle Manny, held a piece of wood, it was like he was communing with the wood, she says. He somehow knew what it wanted to be, and he would build it. He was the same way in the garden, where he had a green thumb.

  Her Uncle Henry had an odd experience in World War II that shaped his faith ever after. “He was a sharpshooter stationed in Italy,” Claire says. “What they called then a point man, which nowadays would be called a sniper.

  “That meant he had to go out way ahead, find a spot where he couldn’t be seen, and radio back what he saw,” Claire says. “And if there was the enemy
approaching, it was his job to take them out, especially if it was an enemy sharpshooter.”

  Henry holed up in the bell tower of a church, choosing that spot because there were no civilians or animals around. “So, he was up in this church, in the bell tower. And what happened is that evidently, the German sniper was probably a little bit better than he was, or Henry made a clumsy mistake — and he got shot. The shot knocked him out of the tower, and he rolled down the roof of the church. Telling the story later, he recalled his last conscious thought was, “Okay, I’m going to hit the ground, break my back, and I’m going to be dead.”

  It wasn’t until he was recovering in the hospital that some of the buddies in his unit told him what had happened. Apparently, when he rolled down the roof, he fell into a wagon filled with hay that had with a horse hitched to it. “He landed in the cart and the horse took him back to his unit,” Claire says. “The cart had no driver. It just came to the unit headquarters, and the men stopped the horse. It had gotten close to the hospital and they didn’t know how it had gotten that far without being stopped by sentries.

  “They found my uncle in the back, took him out of the wagon, then turned around to the wagon and horse — and they were gone.” Henry knew there had been nobody around when he chose the bell tower. “Now, my uncle knew quite clearly that when he went into that bell tower, he chose that spot because there were no civilians around, no carts, no animals. They had all been moved out.

  “That cart should not have been there.

  “The incident gave him a chance to get some R&R. He went to the Vatican and talked to a priest and told him, ‘I’m a sniper, I have to kill people,’ and told him about the incident with the roof, cart, and horse. He must have gotten hold of a good priest, because he helped Henry come to a peaceful resolution about his job. The priest said, ‘If God hated you, that cart would not have been there. So, it was meant to be, and God forgives you, even if you have to do something as ugly as that. God is letting you know he forgives you and he loves you.’ So, he had his own special experience.”