Her father, Bert, also had an experience— he saw the ghost of a dead nun when he was a boy. “And, he would get a sense of things,” Claire says. “He was very accepting of mom and my grandmother and eventually, me, of our having this ability.”
Life in a Psychic Family
Claire continues with more stories of her family’s psychic prowess
“One time, my grandmother was sitting on the porch with me and our neighbor, Mrs. Byrd. A card drove by and my grandmother says, ‘He is going to kill his wife.’ Just like that. And it wasn’t even her voice. It was a terribly different voice. I never heard her speak like that. She always spoke with an accent. This voice had no accent – I don’t know who it was.”
Such was Rosa’s reputation that Mrs. Byrd told Claire to stay with her grandmother and ran into the house to call her husband. “Next thing we know, Mr. Byrd is running like mad down the street to another house. He arrived just in time to keep the man from murdering his wife.”
Claire says her grandmother went into a somewhat of a trance. The same thing happened to her mother sometimes. She recalls one instance when her parents were in the car.
“A similar thing happened with my mother,” Claire continues. “She was with my father in the car and a motorcyclist flew by them. My mother says, in this odd voice, ‘Go, go kill yourself.’ And a bit up ahead, the motorcyclist did crash and was killed.”
It happens to Claire, too, but not too often — which she’s happy about, because it freaks out her longtime boyfriend, David. She describes it as a semi-trance. She’s aware of where she is, but everything looks different.
Claire and David have been together since 1993. She has told me about high school, but what of friends and romance before she met David? Claire says that she isn’t always so psychic when it comes to her own life.
“I didn’t date all that much,” she says. “Word got around about me, you know — Alameda in many ways is a small town. And so, the guys I dated weren’t all that high on the food chain, if you know what I mean — not really boyfriend material.”
She was married once, to Lloyd. “If two people should not have married each other, it was Lloyd and me,” she says. “I was 20 and I was feeling pressure, especially from my older peers at work, and my mother and dad were worried. It was hard to find a guy who I felt was my financial equal, with a good job, and no kids.”
She wondered why her guides had not tried to talk her out of marrying Lloyd. She says she realized later, when she asked her gatekeeper Madame Woo, that her early marriage was something she had to go through and learn from, for her own personal growth. It lasted two years.
She did get engaged again, to Bud, at age 35, but behind her back he married another woman.
Claire sees these failed romances as learning experiences. “I had to go through those two relationships to understand relationships, to be able to help other people. Similarly, she says losing her child helped her too. “The fact that I did get pregnant, and lost the child, helped to figure out if I had what it takes to be a mother and I discovered that I did not have that,” she says.
“In a way, things worked out. I ended up being a caregiver for my mother, and if I hadn’t been her caregiver, she would have ended up in a convalescent hospital, which I would have felt so guilty about, it probably would have preyed on me the rest of my days.” And, life experience adds up to life wisdom, which helps her in her psychic work.
As for friends, her current friends know who she is and about her special abilities. But what about co-workers — and do her abilities affect her job?
Claire responds with a laugh. “Not really. Let’s put it this way —– it took years before I would even allow myself to be ‘out’ with my co-workers.” They didn’t know she was psychic, but they knew there was something different about Claire — she had a lot of arcane knowledge about tarot, palmistry, the paranormal, and the occult. In the case of one library patron, this proved fortuitous.
“The reference librarian got a call about tarot cards. Because I was the person who knew ‘weird stuff,’ the call got transferred to me. I talked to the person and asked them to come in over my lunch hour.
The patron was a frightened teenage girl. She and her friend had been reading tarot cards. “The friend pointed to the death card and said, ‘You are going to kill your parents.’” The girl was really scared, because she thought it was going to come true.” Claire was able to reassure her. “I was able to let her know that the death card just means change — it was about her growing up. The little girl is gone and the young woman is coming into place, and given the surrounding cards, it was hard for her parents to accept this.”
Claire says it wasn’t until her current boss arrived that she felt really accepted. “We actually talked the other night about exorcising the current library,” she says. “He’s convinced the building is haunted. We’d had strange things happen the last few weeks. It started just before we had an earthquake close by, and then these electrical storms,” both of which, she says, can release spirit energy. “
“I asked him if it was because someone (a spirit) was bugging him in his office. He wanted to know how I knew that!”
Claire explained that she often sees spirits walking around the library. “The library is built on the site of an old hotel,” she says. “I know there were at least a couple of suicides, some ODs, bodies had been found there, etc. And, before WWII, this is where the Chinese and Japanese communities resided. There were houses here.”
She has done readings for her boss’s wife, and he doesn’t mind when she occasionally gives readings in the library’s café. Sometimes she uses cards, sometimes an object; sometimes she just holds someone’s hand.
For a few years, Claire gave readings every other Sunday in my bookstore. She feels the responsibilities of doing readings keenly. “I like when I can give positive feedback about what someone is doing,” she says. “Telling people negative news is another thing altogether. I try to give things a positive spin. Sometimes, people can change things that are going to happen. Sometimes, there’s no help for it.
“In one case, I did see a car accident approaching a woman, and I didn’t want her to be frightened about it. I told her my guides wanted me to give her a warning, and that she had the power to change things. I told her she needed to check out her vehicle, and told her if she didn’t, she would have a big problem. If she did have it checked out, the accident will still happen, but it won’t be as bad.” The woman got her car checked out, and called Claire to tell her that what she predicted did indeed happen.
I got some feedback from another of Claire’s clients regarding a more mundane matter — wood rot in her house. “Claire told me exactly where my contractor was going to find the rot – it was incredibly accurate,” the woman told me.
She tries to turn a reading around from a negative to a positive — it gives people a more hopeful mind-set. “It’s like the girl and the tarot reading,” she says. “It’s how you approach it. I never, ever predict death. I never say that someone is going to die, unless it’s someone I know very well. But, sometimes, I have to prepare them for something bad and give some guidance.”
Some people she cannot read for at all, she says, and it’s usually because they have put up psychic “walls” to try to keep her from finding out about their lives. “I remember doing a reading for one woman. I could get things about her son, but she kept denying it and I told her to just file it away, because my guides will not let go of it. But, trying to do a reading for her was all but impossible. I kept seeing these opaque glass bricks that were covered with dark slime and fungus. I simply could not see her at all. I felt bad and told her I would not take her money.”
Several weeks later, Claire ran into the woman at the supermarket. The woman apologized and told Claire that a number of things she had mentioned about her son were correct, but she didn’t known that until she had a chance to talk to him, and hadn’t wanted to believe them at the time. The woma
n also told her that what Claire she saw was accurate, in a way, since she has had Lupus, but she didn’t want to discuss it — the bricks with the slime symbolized her illness.
Sometimes, people try to trick Claire. Once, she was doing readings at a party. “I was giving a demonstration of psychometric ability,” she says. Psychometry is the ability to psychically read an object and make associations with someone’s life.
“The daughter of the hostess deliberately tried to trip me up and gave me an earring she had borrowed that very evening before the party from a friend of hers, who also was at the party. So, I as giving the reading, she kept saying, ‘No, no, that’s not right.’ Finally, I looked at her and something had me say, “Well, of course it’s not right for you, because it feels like these are not your earrings.’ Her friend’s mouth dropped open and she says, ‘those are really my earrings, and everything you said was right.’”
Other Influences
I asked Claire where, besides from her grandmother, she got her vast body of knowledge about the psychic and occult. “Through the ladies of my Granny’s group,” she says. “They would find someone who could come over and give a talk about something dealing with the paranormal — one of them was a Satanist long before Anton LaVey was any kind of household word, and thanks to him I learned how to not be open, how to protect myself, and how to recognize hidden evil. Not that he did anything bad to me — he didn’t, but he explained what evil was and is, and how easy it is to control people, how easy it is to manipulate them. I won’t mention his name because I think there are some of his family members still alive.” Claire also had a much older cousin who was a nun; they exchanged long letters.
She even met psychic Sylvia Browne. “That was a very interesting, if altogether too brief meeting,” she recalls. “She brought in a friend of mine who had passed over — got his name, and even described his tattoos. She says that eventually I’ll write my own book, but I’ll be afraid to publish it. I think she’s right; I just don’t have the drive to pursue getting a book published. And writing one? I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Now about books. What haven’t I read? In ghost hunting I’d have to credit Hans Holzer of course.” She also was influenced by the famous witch Sybil Leek, “But as I look back on her works, they seem so naive, like she was still holding back things.” And, works by Sylvia Browne, because, “What she describes comes very close to what I’ve experienced as well. But if there’s any one work that just struck me as having a serious influence, I’d have to say Ghost Hunter by Hans Holzer — if anything he confirmed and re-affirmed that all the psychic experiences that I’ve gone through were real and not imagination; that there really is a spirit world out there.”
But what about everyone else — can anyone develop psychic powers? Claire is doubtful. She believes it is something you are born with; you have abilities of one sort or another or none at all. “There are some people who have abilities as healers. So, if they are in the medical profession, they are using their ability. There are other people who are the dog whisperers. And there are people who make others feel very, very good. They are mood elevators. And, there are empaths, who can channel and dissect the emotions of others.”
People use many methods for doing readings — it’s all like some sort of radio to help elevate the harmonics, Claire says, and tune things in. And objects like Ouija boards are not inherently evil, despite popular belief. They hold no innate power in any of these things — it’s all about intent.
“It’s the person handling these things,” Claire says. “You get a bunch of teenagers playing around with a Ouija board, you have to stop and think of all that poltergeist energy they are releasing,” she says. “It’s like that book, Conjuring Up Philip (An Adventure in Psychokinesis), where a group of kids got together and literally conjured up a spirit via their collective consciousness. And that’s what they are doing – they are releasing all this energy and they are creating those spirits.
“You are courting a problem. And then they say (in the book) they called up demons, etc., and they are feeding it with their fear. In that case, they need to get rid of the board and allow that energy to dissipate — it is a creation of their fear.”
Claire feels her abilities came from God. “I’m using ‘God’ as a generic term. I was given these abilities, I was giving given the responsibility of them, and I accept that and I try to use them for the greatest good.
“But, I have to protect myself, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing readings for people.”
Claire doesn’t do many readings these days, because she has to have a place where she can feel safe and mentally set up a sacred space. She does this by centering herself and praying to keep out negative entities and influences. During a reading, she says she calls her guides in and tells them “We’ve got an appointment,” and they will tell her they are present. She doesn’t advertise, and so those seeking readings are usually people who have heard about her from a friend.
She isn’t sure how much longer she’ll be giving readings. “I am aware that as I get older and develop illnesses that, in time, my abilities will diminish. When and how that will happen I don’t know,” she says. “My Granny used to say that, ‘As one begins to get older, one wants to be more with the living than with the dead. And then there comes a time when the dead become the few visitors that you have, when you get closer to the other side, only you’re not aware of it because it’s like a dream, a dream that you want to live in forever.’”
Those interested in a reading from Claire should
email [email protected]
Chapter 2
Tiffany Burch-Vaz
Not all tarot readers are psychic. Some are great interpreters of symbols and have an affinity for the cards. But, there are others who have abilities beyond mere interpretation, who “see” future events along the seeker’s current path. This was the type of person I was interested in for this book. I knew several and I had some referrals, but wanted more subjects.
I met Tiffany through a Facebook psychic’s group. On the surface, we couldn’t be more different. She’s a stay-at-home mom of four in the South. I’m a single woman living with my boyfriend and two lovely cats in the San Francisco Bay Area, and go to an off-site job every day. But through our email correspondence and question upon answer upon question, we found those common threads that weave us all together, further proof that psychics aren’t that much different from me. Or you.
Tiffany is from Georgia, but currently lives in Portugal.
Tiffany Burch-Vaz is an unlikely psychic from an unlikely state — Georgia. A little research tells me that the predominant religion there is Baptist, the members of which share a belief that the only ghosts are either angels or demons. Her family was no exception.
Her mother and grandmother both had experiences, Tiffany learned, but calling them psychic made it seem dirty in the religious household. “It took a while to convince my parents, after I dropped the ‘psychic bomb,’ that I was not working for the Devil!”
When her father became a born-again Christian a few years ago, he decided she had become a Devil worshiper and suggested she get back to church. Luckily, she spent a summer with a psychic some time earlier, who warned her about this sort of family reaction, because it had happened to her.
“She showed me a quote from the Bible to use when someone starts to speak of how ‘evil’ this is, and that I needed to be saved,” Tiffany relates. “I think they have finally started to come to accept the idea of me being psychic, or at least having abilities out of the norm and turning it into my career outside of being a stay-at-home mom; but I do not think they would ever announce it to their friends or members of their church. If someone should ask them about my abilities, I don’t think they would acknowledge them, either for fear of being labeled, or rejected by their church and community.
“It really is disappointing when someone hears a term and automatically puts you into some imaginary group, and more so
when it’s your own family,” Tiffany says. She understands that this happens because it is what they have been taught to believe, either through their religious belief system, or through the stereotype society has of psychics. She thinks that people are reacting out of fear, since much of society really does not understand what psychics do. And, in her experience, few people ask about her gift with an open mind. Much of what psychics do cannot be seen or scientifically proven — or at least not enough for many skeptics. She wonders how many truly believe in a God source, too. “Think about it: If you really believe in a God, then you have to believe in things that you cannot physically see or even prove,” she says.
“My first thought was, if my own family was thinking these thoughts, then what would other people say and do? I felt that if I could not convince my own family that this was not some dark and evil thing then I had no chance of ever convincing other people.”
Tiffany believes that her powers come from God. She believes in a universal God. “A God for everyone; that, not only if you believe a certain way can you have access to this God, but a God that loves every single one of us no matter what we believe or practice as our religion.”
Tiffany was raised in Macon, Georgia, and was exposed to the Baptist faith, but her family did not attend church when she was growing up. In her early twenties, she became interested in Catholicism, but was wary of visiting a church alone because she had been told that “Catholics worshiped statues and were all drunks.”
She met her husband Tony, a non-practicing Catholic who had been visiting Baptist churches in the area. Tiffany still wanted to experience the Catholic faith, so they eventually started going to Mass together and she joined the Catholic Church in 2005.
The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers Page 3