by John Edward
“Really?” said the man’s wife. “Never.”
“Oh, yeah. Who comes from Europe? Whose family did not come from here?”
“My father came from Europe,” the man said.
“Any ties to Brazil or Portugal?
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure.”
I was getting frustrated, trying so hard to make this connection—but I wasn’t angry or annoyed, as I have been known to get. On the tape, you can hear me make a deep groaning sound, like I was trying to force these two pieces together. “Okay, they’re not stopping. I refer to this as a hostage crisis. Me being the hostage. Okay, I gotta go up.” I climbed the steps of the gallery and got right in front of the couple.
At that point, another energy pushed in. It was a woman who had been in a coma, which the man’s wife acknowledged as her mother. And then they were back: “Who the heck is from Portugal?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said, to giggles from a few of her gallery-mates.
“Well, your mom’s hanging out with somebody who’s from Portugal.”
“No kidding.”
“Did she have a friend who’s from Portugal? Somebody’s telling me, ‘Fala Portugues?’ which means ‘Do you speak Portuguese?’ ” There was a name that sounded like Fernando or Ferdinand, and somebody was involved in politics or government—two governments, actually. Somebody had a weird name that started with “B.” And somebody’s arm was either missing or deformed. He was making me feel like the arm wasn’t there.
“I don’t know,” the man said to everything.
“Are you guys sure you have no Brazil or Portuguese connection?”
“Honestly,” the woman said. “That’s the truth.”
“Not even like somebody just came back from vacation there? Where’s your family from?”
“My father was from Germany, my mother was from Hungary,” the man said.
I went back down the steps to the disk, and as soon as I hit the middle, I spun around back to them. “Who has the ‘H’ name?”
“My mother, Helen,” said the woman.
“Okay, this is all connected for you. You guys have some type of Brazilian or Portuguese connection here. I have no idea what it is, but it’s coming through around you guys. So it’s probably something you’re overlooking. It’s something you’re not even realizing. But it’s directly connected to you. They’re giving me all kinds of specific symbols. So if you get out of here and somebody starts talking to you about their father Ferdinand or Fernando who passed, it’s going to be connected there. Then call us back and let us know. Okay? Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Cool.”
THE MAN’S NAME was John Shauder. In the post-analysis interview, he said that his father, Hans, had been deported to Germany in 1946—that might have been the connection to the two governments—and he and his mother never saw him again. John was two years old when his father left. That may have been why he couldn’t validate any of the information I gave him. “We have no information as to where he may have ended up,” John said. “It could very well be that from Germany he went on to Portugal or to Brazil. I’m certainly going to check that out more thoroughly.”
John Shauder was in the gallery that day for the same reason you might expect a fifty-six-year-old man who runs a construction supply business to be there: His wife dragged him with her. He wasn’t afraid, just not that interested. The last thing he expected was to be sitting there getting badgered by this guy trying to get him to acknowledge something Portuguese. And being told that he was connecting with the very person whose absence had left a deep scar. “It was a tremendous void, not having a father to look up to, to give me advice,” he said. “As a young boy, playing Little League baseball. Having my friends going on vacations with their mother and their dads. I never felt fulfilled. I always felt like there was something missing in my life, and there was. I was certain that he had passed away in the war. But only years later did I discover that he wasn’t killed in the war. He was sent back to Germany.” John tried to get help from several federal agencies, but came up empty. At one point, he found a man named Hans Shauder in Munich, but it wasn’t his father. It was another Hans Shauder. He told John he was sorry that he couldn’t help him.
Leaving the studio that day, John was determined to try again, and as he promised, he called us back to tell us about the developments. When he said he would check all this stuff out, it was music to my ears. Neither John nor I knew it, but he was about to become a model of the Delayed Validation. And from this day forward, follow-ups would be the element that would seal the deal we’d made. To deliver closure.
As it happened—and I don’t believe in coincidences—John Shauder had a close friend who had a visitor from Germany who was a lawyer. John told him his story and gave him whatever paperwork he had. When the lawyer got home, he called John and said he had some bad news. John’s father had passed away in 1985. But there was also some good news: The lawyer had found that John had two younger half-sisters in Germany. He gave him their phone numbers, and John called them immediately. Soon after that, he was flying to Hamburg. When he landed at the airport, they were holding up a sign that said “Welcome, Big Brother John,” in English.
The first thing John asked, of course, was about the Brazil and Portugese references. His sisters told him their father had worked in Brazil. He had learned Portuguese there. And he spent time on an island off the coast of Brazil called Fernando Island. His father had a brother Bruno—the “weird ‘B’ name.” And his father had a stroke before he passed away that took away the use of his right arm. Before he left, his sisters gave John a ring that had been on their father’s finger. He put it on and looked at it, and he cried.
“When I look at the photographs of my father, I try to look into his eyes and try to feel what he may have been feeling,” he told our follow-up producer, Lauren Bright, during a visit she made to the Shauders’ home in New Jersey. “I have his ring now. I put this on the day they gave it to me, and I will never take it off. I would like to think that he knows I have it on. Maybe he sees it, also. I’m convinced that what happened to me in the studio that day was his tremendous energy trying to find me. He was able to communicate and say to me, ‘I’m here,’ and even though I may not be on this earth now, I’m here and I’m looking for you. And I’m waiting for you, and we’ll meet someday. Never to part again.”
There was even more to the story, and we invited the Shauders to come back to the studio and share the best—though most bittersweet—part. In Germany, his sisters told him that their dad always told people that he had a son in America, and he was looking for him. They gave him a letter he had written in 1983 and sent to an address where John and his mother had once lived. “Dear Helen and John,” it said. “I wrote and wrote, and all the letters came back. Maybe I have better luck this time.” But this one had come back to Germany like all the others. John finally received it seventeen years later.
In the letter, John’s father said that he had met a man in a beer garden in Munich, and they had introduced themselves and toasted each other. “My name is Hans Shauder,” the man said to John’s father, to which John’s father replied: “My name is Hans Shauder.” And then the other Hans Shauder said that he had gotten a call a few years back from a man from America who was looking for his father: Hans Shauder. “I told him I couldn’t help him.”
So John’s father knew in 1983, two years before he died, that his son was looking for him. He hoped that this letter would be the one to make it through so that John would know that his father was looking for him. Now, finally, he did know. For John, the confirmation was in a videotape he brought back from Germany and showed to us. He had gone with his sisters to the same spot on the harbor in Hamburg where they had taken a picture of their father years ago. “I found you, Dad,” John said quietly, too softly for the video camera to pick it up. “I don’t know if you know I�
�m here, but I’m here and I found you.” The next day, before leaving to return home, they stopped at the cemetery where their father was buried, and John stood over the grave and said a prayer. He wanted his father to know he was there.
When he got home and watched the videotape, John was astounded. Both segments—at the harbor and at the cemetery—were totally distorted. All the colors were mixed, and there was a kind of pulsing glow through the frames. The rest of the video was perfectly normal. “He knew I was there, and there’s no question his spirit was there,” John told me. “He was telling me, ‘I know you’re here, and I’m going to show you I’m here.’ To know that he searched for me is bittersweet. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity when he was alive to sit there and talk with him and hold him and look into his eyes and hear what he had to say. And yet it’s very fulfilling.”
When I thought about this story, I marveled once again at how powerful the spirit world is. The soul doesn’t just have consciousness, it has will. When I looked back on the tape of the Shauders’ original appearance in the gallery, I was struck by my last words to them: “Call us back and let us know. Okay? Promise?” I pass on information every day that doesn’t seem to connect. But I don’t think I’ve ever made someone promise to call us back and let us know if they figured it out. But that’s how strongly Hans was pushing the Portuguese connection—how much he wanted his son to pursue the mystery that he knew would finally give him some peace.
“It’s really been a life-altering experience,” John’s wife Brenda said. “He’s totally changed. There’s no void in his life.”
When I think about John Shauder, this man who lived with a hole in his heart for half a century, I understand why I’m here in this ghostly old theater with its gallery of portraits, talking to Camera One. There is, of course, nothing like a personal experience, especially one so rare and special as John’s. But it’s not necessary to run out and find a medium to have a revelation about the unbroken bonds we can have with those we’ve lost. We can all take heart and learn through John’s experience.
After we wrapped the last day of taping of our first season, Bonnie Hammer came down to the studio and gathered everyone around the set. Congratulations, she said. You’re coming back. The news was even better a few months later. Studios USA had decided we were ready for syndication. Sci Fi would remain our home, but the parent company would begin talking to broadcast channels around the country about adding the show to their daily lineups. By the winter of 2001, stations in more than 90 percent of the country’s major markets had signed on. Whoever made the decisions about whether to do the show or not a year earlier, however they made them, I now knew that this was the way it was meant to be. The worst thing you can tell someone in television is that something is out of their control. But sometimes it’s the only thing I know for sure.
I remembered that rock on my desk. Trust.
— CHAPTER 10 —
The Medium
and the Media
Gotcha
“Reality TV is the buzz word now. But that’s really what this is,” Paul Shavelson, who by this point was sharing the title of Executive Producer with me, was saying one night in early March of 2001. We were sitting in the green room at CNN in New York, where I was waiting to go on with Larry King. I had plenty of company. Besides Paul, Dana, my collaborator Rick, and Jean Guerin, the Sci Fi Channel’s publicist, there was Angela Mancuso, then the executive vice president of USA Cable. She just happened to be in town during what some deemed a Crossing Over crisis. The emergency? It had something to do with Paul’s observations about the authenticity of the show Crossing Over. “I made documentaries for years and years, and that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “You can’t use that word because it won’t make money. But we’re showing exactly what John does. This is exactly how these people feel. This is exactly how it’s affected their lives.”
The five people with me at CNN were a virtual entourage, but still not as big a crowd as the one gathering on two continents to talk about Crossing Over and whether other mediums and I were legitimate. “Tonight: On his hit show, he claims that he can talk to the other side,” Larry announced as the show went on the air. “But are psychics for real?” This was my fourth time on Larry King Live, but it was the first time I would be asked if I was perpetrating a hoax. The week before, no less prestigious a publication than Time magazine had printed an article claiming just that. It caused a fury in our production office and got the network’s attention, to put it mildly. But somehow—and this never would have happened a couple of years earlier—I was relatively unruffled by it. Partly because I wasn’t surprised. I knew this day would come. I didn’t know it as a psychic. I knew it as a psychic who has been dealing with perceptions of his work on a daily basis for fifteen years. And now I had a national TV show that was getting ready to go into syndication. The bigger the stage, the bigger the target.
I learned a long time ago that it’s impossible to do this work in any kind of public way without taking hits, fair or not, intelligent or inane. So I’ve tried to limit the kinds of things that I will let get me worked up. I never lose sight of this reality: I am a member of the only profession in which the work will always be questioned and can never be proven. As Bonnie Hammer says, people either believe it or they don’t. Everyone in the public eye—politicians, actors, athletes—is subject to scrutiny. But all those guys have to worry about is being gossiped about or criticized for their performance. At worst, they might be accused of being dishonest politicians, greedy athletes, or lousy actors. But nobody will claim that their entire life is an illusion.
My attitude is this: You want to attack my profession, go ahead. You want to say mediums are doing cold readings and playing guessing games, fine. People are going to say that because they can’t wrap their brains around what we do. It’s futile for me to try to convince them otherwise. But what does get me upset is when people try to define my motivations or attack my personal character. Saying I’m in it for the money or that I’m taking advantage of people or that I’m a phony—those things bother me. I know it’s hard for some people to separate their opinions about the field from what they imagine to be the motivations of its practitioners, but there are limits to how strong my emotional armor is. Call me silly, but I don’t appreciate being called a fraud.
One approach I’ve taken is to pay attention to how journalists and professional skeptics work so I understand how they think. It’s not enough to be wary, and it’s counterproductive to be antagonistic or unapproachable. Sometimes it’s a good idea to just step back, appreciate other people’s perspectives, and acknowledge that their motivations might actually be honorable. When I was taking my first baby steps into the media in the mid-1990s, a radio host named Steve Harper asked me to go on his morning show on WBLI, a station in my home area of Long Island. The only thing I had done to that point was a radio show in Miami arranged by my cousin and Naomi DiClemente’s early-Sunday-morning show on WPLJ in New York. When I got to the WBLI studio, Steve Harper told me that he felt a great responsibility to his listeners, and while he took what I claimed to do seriously, he didn’t know me and hadn’t seen me work. So before going on the air, I would have to prove myself. We took calls, and he taped the readings without putting them on the air. And when Steve felt satisfied that what I was doing was credible and helpful to his audience—and that it made great radio—he put me on live. To me, he was doing the responsible thing. Along with Naomi and Todd Pettengill, Steve became a great supporter and friend, and I still go on his show.
The first time I was attacked in the press was in New York’s Village Voice, after I did the Andy Warhol séance. At least I thought it was an attack at the time. It was actually just a lighthearted tease by a gossip columnist that looks quaint now. I wasn’t that well known then, and maybe I was offended, and maybe I also thought it was kind of cool to be mentioned in the Village Voice. I guess you could say that, and a few other little stories about the Andy Warhol th
ing buried in a few newspapers, was my first brush with celebrity.
I’ve never gotten completely comfortable with being well known. I have a hard time even saying the word “famous.” My initial instincts about liking radio because it meant nobody had to see my face have never really gone away. I realize that’s a weird thing for someone with a TV show to say, but unlike most people on TV, being on TV was never my goal. It’s just the best vehicle I have to teach and help legitimize spirit communication.
I was walking through an airport once with some colleagues, and one of them was muttering, “Recognize me. Recognize me.” I’m sort of the opposite. I hope they don’t. I can always feel the energy when I am being recognized, even if the person is not even within eyesight or isn’t being obvious about it.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate people saying hello to me, especially if they have kind and encouraging words, but sometimes I wish I could take a break. It’s nice to have fans, I guess, but seeing serious, endless discussions on the Internet about what my motivations are, that Sandra is pregnant when she wasn’t, what my real name is, is kind of creepy. Some of this transcends celebrity. Even among my friends and relatives, I can feel like The Medium. What’s he going to come up with next? It’s not their fault—that’s how it is being around someone who, at any given moment, might say, “Who’s the ‘R’-sounding name with the heart problem?” I appreciate my ability and its potential for helping people, but sometimes I wish I could just unzip the skin I’m in and be like everyone else for a while.
In 1999, I began talking to a producer from Dateline NBC named Deborah Trueman about a story she was wanted to do about mediums and spirit communication. It had become a hot topic for the network news magazine shows, and the publicist for my Learning Annex tour was negotiating with several that were interested in doing segments with me. But it was Dateline that I was most interested in working with. I liked Deborah Trueman, and after several meetings with her, I decided to go with it. “I want to be clear with you,” she said. “If we do a piece—and I don’t know if it’s going to be approved—but if we do a piece on this, it will be done with journalistic integrity. It will show both sides.” I asked her if that meant there would be skeptics on the show, and she said yes. I told her I respected that and appreciated her honesty. Just as long as the story was balanced and didn’t attack me personally. I had just done the HBO documentary, which I considered a good experience, and I liked Deborah Trueman, as I liked Lisa Jackson, the producer of Life After Life. I also thought that Deborah’s last name was a good sign.