The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers

by Karen Zimmerman

  Deborah’s business partner, Chris Hotz, who plays Abraham Lincoln, Buster Brown, and most recently Wyatt Earp, is a skeptic.

  When Deborah met Chris, he constantly teased her about being a “witch” or a “voodoo queen.” Then, during their first season of historic walking tours, a ghostly visitor would not leave Deborah alone during one particular tour. Apparently “Al” had a relative on the tour and he wanted to give a message. Chris had noticed that she wasn’t “quite right,” and did most of the talking until the tour came to a rest spot. “Al” was so friendly and persistent, Deborah knew she had to share his message.

  Deborah interrupted Chris. “There is a gentleman here who calls himself Al, and he has recently passed. He said he walked with a temporary limp at the end of his life and he just wanted his children to know he is doing fine and Heaven is wonderful.”

  Chris looked at her and rolled his eyes, she says. No one on the tour said anything until after it was moving again, when a man approached Deborah and told her that Al was his father. At the end of the tour he shared his story. He had lost his father a few months before, and Al told his son and daughter he would find a way to let them know that he had made it to Heaven and his opinion of the afterlife. Chris was amazed, but not ready to believe.

  But he knows of the intense research Deborah does for all of the tours and presentations, especially the Lincolns, including retracing the Lincolns’ life in the south. He has witnessed numerous channeling sessions during ghost investigations, and he does believe she has a connection with Mary Lincoln. After each of these events, Chris respected her mediumship more, the impressions from which he witnessed firsthand. As Chris says, “He may not believe so much in my mediumship...But he does believe in me.”

  Ghost Hunting

  Deborah credits Janice Oberding (mentioned above) for her interest in paranormal investigations. She began attending conferences and investigations in Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas until she was able to develop her own business in Illinois. “I was hooked,” she confesses. “I love working and living among the dead.”

  “Each investigation is its own unique experience,” Deborah says. “Channeling has increased my fascination with ghost hunting. I have been pushed out of a cemetery (Virginia City), punched in the stomach (out West) and I have been kissed, hugged and touched; so physically those experiences are special.

  “However my favorite investigations are the raw ones. I walk in, unfamiliar with the property, receive the medium impressions, confirm it with history and then go full circle as new information is found and confirmed. Our beloved hotel, The Phoenix-Mid-City Hotel, is a prime example, and the spirits just keep coming.”

  This hotel figures in one of Deborah’s favorite stories on her Ghost Walk tour. When she and Chris first started the business in Bloomington, they had a storefront on Main Street. On the same block was a men’s clothing store owned by Bill Fike. Bill told them about his great-uncle Ben Fike, who had been convicted of white slavery and kidnapping across state lines — he persuaded two women from Hannibal, Missouri, to follow him back to Bloomington for “hotel work.” They were kept as hostages until one escaped, which eventually led to his conviction.

  “The second year of our business, we added the hotel to the tour. It is deemed haunted by (paranormal researcher) John Zaffis. One evening, a group was communicating with pendulums and the name Ben came through. I then asked, ’Is this you, Ben Fike?’ The pendulums went crazy and we all got cold, cold chills. My husband, Tom, immediately went through the hotel ledgers (we have most) and found his name! Yes, Ben Fike is still alive and ‘operating’ at our beloved historic hotel!”

  She also loves working with newbies — first-timers — and loves to show them the ropes. She is thrilled when they get it. Deborah sees ghost hunting as an awesome tool to connect history and mediumship. “Janice Oberding recently coined the term, ‘historic ghost-investigator,’ and that is exactly how I see my role in a paranormal investigation.”

  Séances, Protection and Spirit Guides

  Deborah does conduct séances. “During a séance I do enter a trance-like state,” Deborah says. “Proper energy and keeping the channel open for communication is the key. I enjoy séances and realize through experience that energy balance is very important. Each séance is different, and the energy of the group determines my own actions. If I am in a ‘safe’ séance where there are people very close to me that I can trust, I am able to go into a deeper trance. However, if I am unfamiliar with the group members I am more cautious in my trance-like state.”

  She does not use a “control,” but believes protection is necessary. A prayer of protection is a must prior to her entering the room, she says, and also before the séance begins. She says she then can surrender to the energy and allow the messages to flow direct from God’s light through her. A control is a spirit that is well known to the medium, sometimes a relative, other times a spirit guide. This control acts as an intermediary between the medium and the spirit, and might convey their messages, thereby protecting the medium from direct contact with a spirit who might attempt to possess the medium.

  Sometimes spirits channeled during a séance work through other attendees, rather than the medium. At a ghost conference in Virginia City, where part of the weekend included a séance, Deborah received many messages including hearing from her step-grandmother Juanita (Nita).

  Her cousin, Paula (also a medium) was there when Nita came was channeled through Janice Oberding and Butterfinger candy bars were flying around the room. Deborah says that later, through a private hypnosis session, Nita’s face appeared over Janice’s face and smiled her special smile.

  Janice’s husband Bill was present and swore Nita, and not Janice, was present in the room. He was convinced that Janice was indeed taken over by this spirit.

  Like the other psychics in this book, Deborah has her own spirit guides, but she has a different take on the subject than most.

  “I was touched by Rosemary Altea’s books and her channeling through her chief Native American (named Gray Eagle). As I read her book, I kept thinking, ‘It’s Jesus!’ That night, I dreamed the chief’s profile was being shown to me and as he turned his head towards me, his profile morphed into Jesus. He spoke to me and told me that all spirit guides are him. Each spirit guide has a purpose — short or long— to allow us to achieve our higher self and Jesus morphs himself to be that spirit to us. I have been blessed by many, for whatever purpose is upon me.”

  For Deborah’s, her spirit guides include “Z,” a large and hilarious African American man from New Orleans, who reminds her through his antics not to take herself so seriously. He is also instrumental when dealing with missing people she is asked to find. She also has a Native American woman guide, who has grown up with her. Deborah first met her when they were both children. “When I first met her,” she says, “she was a child and has grown with me. I actually met her once a few years back in Nevada. She continues to guide me and often appears in her 30’s in my meditations. This represents the age I was when I became quite serious about developing my mediumship.”

  Family

  Deborah says her husband, when they met, knew she was a little different. “Messages about business decisions and personal messages about family and my son are a part of my own personal decision making. My husband has always respected my ‘opinions.’ There were only a few times during our marriage that Tom went against my intuition.”

  “Well, let’s just say, my love and respect for him is more important! But I think, when I say no, he tends to think twice about a decision.”

  Deborah says that Tom doesn’t necessarily believe in all that she “sees,” but as she states lovingly, “He believes in me. He has met people as they leave a reading or a class and witnessed the change in their attitude and seen how my work fixed, encouraged, and enhanced their mental and physical state. Sometimes, he wished I would follow my own advice,” she says, laughing.

  Her son, Andrew, and his wife, Ela
yne, are aware of her abilities, but simply love her as “Oma” to their children, Sage and Brenna. “It is me they love and not my psychic abilities.”

  Deborah wants people to know that she is very human. “I am not reading your mind all the time, and, I am not the answer. God created the answers within each of us when we were created. Everyone is ‘people like me’— God speaks to each of us.”

  Deborah can be reached by phone at 309-846-4306 or by

  email at ic_beyond@yahoo.com. Private readings, classes, workshops and séances are available by appointment only.

  For locals, and those who wish to write, she also has an office:

  1100 N. Beech St., Suite 12A

  Normal, IL 61761

  Chapter 8

  Mair MacKinnon

  I met Mair MacKinnon when my massage therapist went on maternity leave. Jessica thought Mair and I would hit it off, and she was right. Mair and I became fast friends. She contributed a few stories to my ghost story book, lives in a haunted house, and employs the wisdom of those who have passed on to help her in her work as a massage therapist, naturopath, and homeopath.

  Mair MacKinnon considers herself both a psychic and a sensitive, and feels the work she does requires those abilities. As a child she became interested in all things psychic and otherworldly. “I bought witchcraft books and hid them under my bed, and would look for other things and order them through the mail, including a deck of Gypsy Fortune-Telling Cards when I was eleven,” she says. “I then graduated to tarot cards. I never felt there was any thing woo-woo or weird about it. I always knew that I was getting the information from the universe — I didn’t ever doubt that. I was getting what I was asking for.” In addition to her therapeutic work, she also reads tarot cards.

  Her strongest ability — which makes sense, given her job — is empathy. She has always believed in past lives, and is certain that what she does for a living is something she has done before and has carried over to this lifetime. She finds it odd when people don’t believe in psychic phenomena and things they can’t see. “To me, the information is there for us; we have guides that are helping us. I have so many fabulous guides that are helping me, and I’ve always known it,” she says.

  Encounters with Spirits

  The first time Mair saw a spirit was at her grandmother’s house. Now, she laughs at her grandmother’s reaction, but at the time, she was terrified. “It was the master bedroom at her house,” she recalls. “I was probably eleven or twelve, and the room had been occupied by this old man that my grandmother had taken care of.

  “My grandfather had died, and then she took in this old man. I don’t know where he came from. It’s so odd, now that I think back on it. Maybe she needed the money or something.” She usually slept on the couch when she stayed over, but on this visit, her grandmother told her to take that bedroom. Mair didn’t think anything of it.

  “I’m in the bed and the door was closed,” she continues. “My uncle, who lived in the house, was at work, and my grandmother was in another bedroom. I turned the light off to sleep, and I hear footsteps at the end of the bed! I turned the light on, and there’s nothing there. So I shut the light back off, and footsteps again. I turn the light back on and I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is that?’ I shut off the light again, and somebody sat on the end of the bed! I turned the light back on and was thinking, ‘This is really weird,’ and I’m getting scared …

  Mair saw that the bedroom door she had previously closed was open, because she could see the night light in the hall. She thought this was odd, but an even odder thing was about to happen: A big, tall figure emerged from behind the door, which opened against the wall. It stood in the doorway, looked at her, and then closed the door.

  Mair turned the light on and yelled for her grandmother. “She’s deaf as a post, and I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ and I lie there with the light on all night because I was afraid to get out of bed!

  “As soon as it was light out, I got out of bed and ran into my grandmother’s room. I’m hysterical and I wake her up. She puts her hearing aid in, and I tell her my story, and she said, “Oh, I know, honey. I’ve woken up in the morning and found black footprints across that bed!’”

  These days, Mair has lost her fear of spirits. She lives in a Craftsman home in Alameda, Calif., which she shares with Henry, a ghost. And she’s very happy he’s around.

  The first day she moved in, she saw him — a flash out of the corner of her eye — a person standing in the left-back corner of the living room. “I could feel him around,” she says. “I didn’t know his name at that point, so I started calling him George. I didn’t see him for a while, but I knew he was there — I could still feel him.”

  She soon started working from home, and she could tell that “George” liked having her around. One day, she said, she heard a voice in her head say, “My name is Henry.”

  “It was weird,” Mair relates. “I didn’t hear an actual man’s voice in the room, but I knew he had spoken, and his name is really Henry.”

  Others have seen Henry, including her friend Mary Lou, who described him as an older man, not very tall. “I would describe him as kind-looking,” Mair says. “Not scary at all. No one has ever been scared by him. The feeling I have from just looking at him is that he is from the 1930s. Sandra, a psychic who was a client of mine, saw Henry and told me some things about him. She said that there was a ghost from the house behind us who was trying to invade this house, and Henry was protecting the house against this guy. She said this was good, because the guy was really creepy. I felt good hearing that.”

  Some time ago, her landlady was thinking of selling the house. Mair told her, “Oh, no, I can’t do that, because Henry wouldn’t like that,” and told her about the ghost. The landlady said, “Oh, I know about him.” Her daughter had lived in the house before Mair did. Mair says that Henry liked her and wouldn’t like it if she moved, so that was that.

  “Sometimes, Henry will open the doors,” she says. “I think it was him who woke me up in the night once, when I might have been in danger. On that night, I was in bed asleep, and I’m kind of a light sleeper. The closet door has stuff in front of it so it won’t open on its own. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, I heard the creak, creak, creak of the hinges on the closet door trying to open. I sat up in bed, turned on the light, and looked. Nothing was there, of course. So, I thought, okay, and turned off the light. Creak, creak, creak started again right away, and I turned the light back on and I thought, ‘All right, I got the message!’

  “After that, I left the bedroom light on, turned on the kitchen light as well as some others, and stayed up about an hour. I think that there was someone prowling around the house, and Henry wanted me to turn the lights on. I heard no more creaking that night after I went back to bed. I think Henry was protecting me. I feel protected by him. Anyway, that’s Henry. Good old Henry.”

  A psychic Mair sometimes visits told her she is surrounded by ghosts: “I see people who have ghosts around them, but the ghosts are usually of people who are related to them,” the psychic said. “These spirits are not related to you. It is like you help them pass over.”

  Mair’s Work, Her Guides, and Lessons Learned Through Reincarnation

  Mair says she feels the spirits are helping her. “I know I’m not doing this work alone. I can feel them when I’m giving a massage, and also when I’m doing cranial and hypnosis work where I get into people’s emotional states. I get a lot of help with that. I ask for help. And I’m very appreciative of it.”

  She is a doctor of naturopathic medicine, which uses complementary and alternative therapies to improve the body’s ability to heal and maintain itself. There’s an emphasis on a holistic approach, and natural methods are preferred to drugs.

  Mair is also a homeopath. Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine where patients are treated using highly diluted preparations of substances believed to cause healthy people to show symptoms of a di
sease or disorder, so it can be treated or cured, or are already proven herbal medicine.

  In addition to examining the symptoms, homeopaths look at aspects of a patient’s physical and psychological state and select a remedy based on all of the symptoms. Homeopathic medicine has a long history of curing chronic and acute health issues. It fell out of favor in the early 20th century, but there is a movement to bring it back to its former significance as a healing method.

  While homeopathy is often regarded as controversial, I can attest that I’ve used it for pain of various kinds, allergies, stress, and menopausal symptoms, and found it to work as well or better than conventional medicine and with fewer side effects.

  As Mair describes her practice, “I use all forms of natural medicine to educate and enhance the quality of the lives of my clients.” She has worked in this field for more than 24 years, and offers a variety of healing methods that include craniosacral therapy, therapeutic massage full-spectrum and laser light therapy, clinical hypnotherapy, homeopathy, and nutritional counseling.

  Mair’s patients speak often of how intuitively she deals with their problems. Some of that is part of who she is. But who Mair is she became in large part to her guides. And what she does, she owes in part to them, her own intuition, a bizarre series of circumstances, and to a psychic named Anna Franz.

  “I went to this psychic when I was 18, and it was this little old lady just sitting in her kitchen,” Mair told me. “Her name was Anna Franz. I’ll never forget her. I can’t remember where I heard about her, but my friend Kathy and I called her and made an appointment, and you went to her house. She didn’t charge you — you could just give her a donation.

  “When she started talking to me, and when she talked to Kathy, she was really right on. But the thing she really emphasized with me were the guides.. She said, ‘You know, you really have very strong guides around you, and you are going to be doing healing work, and they are going to help you.’