I Kissed a Ghost (and I Liked It)

by Concetta Bertoldi

  Frankly, with them, I don’t have a clue. I love to say (it always gets a laugh) that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and that’s the truth. The only thing I can tell you is that when I hear something, I’m sure. It is very frustrating when someone I’m doing a reading for tells me they can’t validate something that I’ve told them, but I still know it’s true. I’ll say, “Write it down,” “Ask your wife,” or, “Ask your mother.” Someone in the family is going to know what I’m talking about, even if I don’t! I cannot tell you how many times a client has left me, shaking their head or racking their brain, only to call me or write me a short time later to say, “You. Were. Right.”

  I did a reading for one of the hosts on a radio show in Chicago. I told her that her mother was showing me some kind of linens that she would recognize. Right away, the host told me that her mother used to do embroidery, and she had one of her mother’s linen pieces with the image of a cross on her bedside table. But there were other things I mentioned, like that her mother was showing her the number three, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. So even though I knew she wanted to believe what I was saying, there was likely a little doubt. I get that. If you can’t confirm something, then how can you really be sure? Later I got an email from her saying that, while we were on the air, her sister was listening and going nuts because she had been seeing the number three all the time. It’s not a perfect science, I knew her mother was showing me the number three, but I did not know that this was aimed at her other daughter, the host’s sister! I think you get the picture and can understand why I hope folks will keep their minds open, if and when they have a reading, and share any information they are given that they don’t understand in the moment.

  At one of my big shows, I was doing a reading for a woman in the audience who was sitting with a younger woman. The younger woman had a look on her face like she wasn’t quite sure all of this was real. In the course of the reading, I learned that the younger woman was the daughter of the woman I was reading for. In any case, as soon as I went up to the first woman, her husband came through right away. He kept talking about their life together, and she was validating the recollections I was able to share with her. But then he told me that he had died on a special occasion. At first I thought he was referring to his wedding anniversary, and I said to her, “Did your husband cross on your wedding anniversary? Why am I seeing the symbol for a wedding?”

  And she said, “He died at my daughter’s wedding.” I felt so bad to have brought this up! Then she said that her daughter had felt terrible about it because her father had died on the day she got married.

  But then the man said, “Show her this.” And I saw doves, white doves, which I conveyed to the mother and daughter. It turns out that they had turned loose white doves at the wedding celebration. At this, the daughter started to cry.

  She came up to me after the show and said, “Now I know that my father is in heaven, and that he’s okay, because you would never have known about the doves. That tells me he’s really here with us.” That made me very happy, to have been able to convince her that “dead” is not dead, and that our loved ones are with us always.

  At the same show, I spoke with a skeptical older gentleman sitting right in the front row. As soon as I started to talk to him, I knew his wife had crossed. She was showing me a vase—it sparkled with glitter or something. When I described it, he was shocked. He told me it was the last gift he had given her, and that she had picked the vase out for herself. He wanted to get her jewelry, but she had told him she really wanted the vase. I also mentioned to him that she was standing with three people she wanted me to know were very important to him. It turned out that, in the last six months before she’d died, he’d had three other great losses. One was a very dear friend of hers, one was a dear cousin of theirs, and sadly, one was a mother of theirs. He wept uncontrollably, but was extremely grateful. He came up to me at the book signing after the event to say how much the night had meant to him. He had been on the fence about coming at all, but felt strongly that, if there were anything he heard that he could verify, he would know that I was the real deal. More importantly, he’d know that his loved ones were still around him. He was extremely grateful. He wanted to give me a gift. He had an expensive pen in his pocket that he offered to me, but I would not accept it. Instead, I asked him to remember that his wife had told him that she remembered all the beautiful things he used to write to her in the cards he gave her. And again he started crying. It was very sweet, very emotional.

  When I hear the spirits tell me something, I know I can rely on it. It could be something quite ordinary, but the fact that they are able to accurately convey memories, describe situations or events, or, in some cases, predict what will happen at some point to come is what makes it extraordinary to us here.

  When I do readings at a big show, I will usually cut to the chase and ask people whom they are hoping to hear from, because I want to be able to get to as many as possible in the short time we’re all together. But when I do a reading in my office, we have more time, so I often just let things unfold with whoever shows up, unless the client specifically asks to hear from a particular person. Recently I did a reading for a woman whose father had passed, but she had said that he was not who she had hoped to hear from. I said to her, “There’s a man standing next to you, and I can’t tell who he is to you. I only know that’s who you are looking for.”

  She said, “Yes, that’s true.” Apparently it was a sad situation where this individual had taken his own life. It wasn’t a love interest; my client was happily married. But she was thrilled to hear from this man (I’ll call him “Joe”), and told me she was very close to his family. Joe gave her a lot of information that was personal, some she could validate and some she said she would have to look into, as others might know more about certain things than she did.

  Joe wanted me to tell her that he was with the dog. My client explained that, after Joe died, the family dog died, too. Joe had adored the dog. They’d had a real bond, and family members had said that the dog had probably died because he missed Joe. I told my client that Joe said the family was getting another dog. But there was something specific he was trying to say about the old dog and the new dog that I couldn’t understand.

  My client had no clue about another dog—she hadn’t heard anything about it. But after she left my office, she called Joe’s wife to tell her about the reading. The wife told her that she had gotten a call from the people their dog had originally come from. The mother of that dog had another litter, and they were going to be getting another puppy from the mother of the original dog. She was freaking out because she realized that’s what Joe had been trying to tell her. The whole thing brought her a lot of happiness because the family had another dog they could give love to like the one they missed, and they also knew that Joe was close by, keeping tabs on all the people he cared about and the pets in their lives.

  A woman came to me—I knew her husband had died because he came through right away. He kept saying something about a wedding. He told me, and she confirmed, that he had died at his own son’s wedding. It was very sad. He told me that there was a photograph taken of the three of them—him, his wife, and their son. She said, no, there really was no such photo that she was aware of. He went on to give a mountain of information about a dog they’d had when they were young that they’d loved very much. It had been a rescue dog and had been hit by a car. He was happy to tell her that the dog was there with him, and that made her happy, too. And that was that.

  Maybe a week after her reading, the woman called me. She wanted to let me know that an old friend of the family had sent her a letter and in it was a photo of her, her deceased husband, and their son, taken on the son’s wedding day. The letter her friend had sent said that she’d been going through some old things and had come across a picture they had taken that day, and thought she would want to have it.

  A lovely girl came t
o my house. She was young—in her thirties, I guess—and she was very upset. Her grandmother had died, and she wanted desperately to hear from her. Apparently, her grandmother had raised her because her own mother had a drug addiction. She was happy when her grandmother came through and told her many things that she was able to validate. One thing she mentioned, or rather she showed to me, were these really sweet cups that my client had taken out of her grandmother’s house. There wasn’t a lot of stuff, but there were these teacups. The grandmother was saying to me that the granddaughter had the tea set. And the young woman said to me, “No, that’s not right. I don’t have the tea set, just the tea cups.” So I got that wrong, right?

  Nope.

  A short time later, my client got back in touch. It turned out that there was a relative who lived somewhere else, and they had the other pieces of the set. Lo and behold, the relative had called this girl and said, “We want to know if you’d like to have the rest of the set. It’s only fair—we know that you loved your grandmother and we know you have the cups, but you’d probably love to have the whole set.”

  Here’s another one that happened very recently…

  Only a couple weeks ago, as I was working on this book, I had a client come to me to hear from her mother who had passed away. During the reading, I smelled the fragrance Evening in Paris, and she confirmed, “Oh yes, that’s what my mother wore.”

  I said, “Your mother is showing me the bottle and saying that you have it.”

  She said, “No, I don’t have the bottle, but that is the perfume my mother always wore.” I mentioned some other things, including a beautiful necklace that came from Paris, which she had gotten from one of her relatives, and she validated that. But the great thing was that, about a week later, the woman called and told me that her sister, who lives in California, had come to visit her.

  She said, “Oh I have something for you,” and went to her suitcase, coming back with an Evening in Paris perfume bottle. She said, “I got it at a flea market. When I saw it, I thought it might remind you of Mommy.” My client was completely blown away, since she had never told her sister about the reading and what her mother had said about the bottle.

  I never like giving anyone bad news, but if there is something I feel they need to know, I don’t want to withhold helpful information. I will always be careful about how I word things if I need to offer a warning, and cushion any less-than-ideal news as best I can. One such situation was with a doctor who had come to me for a reading. There was nothing in particular on his radar, no special reason he had come. I believe he just wanted to see what would happen, and who might come through.

  There were a number of messages he could validate, but one thing I heard, and told him, was that his son was not well, and that he would be diagnosed with something. I didn’t know what it was—I was just reporting what I had heard from the spirits. But I also heard that eventually his son would be all right, and I let him know this, too. The doctor got a little ruffled, not very happy with that message because, he told me, his son was fine. But he left somewhat satisfied, taking all the other information that he was happy with.

  A good while later, he called my assistant Elena to make another appointment. He wanted to tell her that I’d been right. His son had gotten very, very ill and they didn’t know what was wrong with him. The boy was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease and it took a long time for him to get well. He had gone through some kind of light therapy and was doing much better. I know it wasn’t easy to hear that there was a problem, but I hope he was comforted while they were all going through his son’s illness by knowing the other side had said all would be well in the end.

  One of my favorite “I told you so” stories is from a good friend I first met when she came to me as a client. We only got to be friends over time. She was a lawyer, and while she was good at her job and loved it, her real dream was to become a judge.

  In our reading, her father came through, and he showed me the judge’s robes and said that this would happen. I was very happy to tell her that she would get her wish. Yes, she would be a judge.

  Well, as I may have mentioned before, the other side is not great about predicting timing. Their sense of time is eternal—on the other side there really is no “time” as we know it here. Sometimes I will get indications of a time of year or a particular month or date. They might show me a number or a letter to indicate a month, or maybe something that symbolizes a season. But as far as an exact date, I’ve never yet found a reliable means to predict. So, for a year my friend was anticipating news of her promotion, but it didn’t happen. In the second year, she was anticipating it, and it didn’t happen. In the third year, she was no longer anticipating it, so maybe she was less disappointed than she’d been the first two years. In the fourth year, she decided the wait was really too long and she was now seriously doubting it would happen. In the fifth year, she said to me, “You’re a nice lady, Concetta, and I think what you do helps people. But I think you are wrong on this one.”

  I said to her, “I’m so sorry, because timing is something that I cannot predict. But I stand by what I heard and saw.”

  She said, “Well, I love ya anyway.”

  In the seventh year, she became Judge Suzy Q. Smith. (I’ve changed her name here to avoid being found guilty and thrown in the slammer for contempt of court!) I must say I could not have been more pleased to prove that the judge had misjudged. But I can’t take the credit—her father had told me it would happen, so I knew it would.

  Besides someone I’m reading for not being able to confirm information until later, I also love the moments I call “deer in the headlights.” There’s something about a psychic medium telling you what a dead loved one is saying that just stuns people. It really isn’t a thing that happens every day for most people, and so, even when they want to hear the messages (that’s what they came for, after all), they sometimes can’t absorb them or make sense of them. One that makes me laugh every time I think about it is when I was reading for a woman and I told her about a bar where she and her friends hung out when they were younger. I said to her, “He’s saying the name, ‘Mike.’ Can you tell me who that is?” and she shook her head, looking puzzled, like she hadn’t got a clue.

  She said, “No, no, I don’t know.”

  And her girlfriend next to her jabbed her with her elbow and said, “That’s your husband, stupid!”

  In another case, I got a letter from a woman who had attended one of my shows last year. I had mentioned at the show that I love to hear about things that someone can’t make sense of in the moment but later figures out. In her letter, the woman told me that her husband had come through and was saying something about living by the water. She shook her head, not understanding what he meant. Later that day, in a calmer state of mind, she realized that they had lived by the water together three separate times. They’d had, she said, three homes, right next to the water. And yet, when she was getting the reading, this did not compute!

  Sometimes even I doubt what I’m hearing, even though I should know better. A woman came to see me at my office. Her husband had had a heart attack at home and, quick as lightning, he was gone. When I asked for him, he came through right away. He told me that today was their wedding anniversary, which she confirmed, and he showed me that the two of them had gotten tattoos. She said, “Yes, we got matching tattoos.” And then he told me that she had gotten clothes from him recently. I thought that couldn’t be right. How would he have given her clothes when he was already on the other side? With a little trepidation, I repeated to his wife what he had told me.

  To my surprise, she said, “Concetta, it’s so funny. He passed away a year ago. I finally moved and got rid of all his clothes and everything.” She said in her smaller home it was just too difficult to keep the things. But afterward, she was sorry she hadn’t kept anything.

  Lo and behold, the dry cleaners called her—a year after his
death—to tell her they still had clothes her husband had dropped off. She was blown away by this—and so was I.

  Chapter 12

  The Proof Is in the Nanny Cam

  My head is spinning. Is yours? Can you believe how much technology has changed our lives in just the last couple of decades? Forget decades, even, how about the last few years? Yes, this is our reality show, and we can post all of it on our very own YouTube channel.

  Some of this stuff has been coming for a long time. Back in elementary school, we used to get a newsletter called The Weekly Reader. It was full of articles that young children would find interesting. One story I remember clearly was about how, in the future, we would have something like a TV screen so we could see each other when we were talking on the phone. When I was eight, this seemed like a very fun and exciting thing. Now I’m in my sixties and we’ve got it, and strangely, it’s not all that fun and exciting. Have you ever accidentally butt-dialed someone before you were out of your pajamas and discovered that you also accidentally hit “Facetime”? Yikes!

  As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, the dead are great with tech. Maybe once I’m on the other side I’ll understand it, too. One can only hope. But tech has given them more ways to tell us they are around and looking after us. A good number of my clients have told me about phone calls they’ve received from the beyond. There’s no other way to explain a call coming from a loved one’s old uncharged cell phone after that person has passed. The way things are going, John may have the last laugh. I may actually be taking calls from the top floor; the phone lines are definitely open.