don’t have a Web site. I don’t even answer the phone. And ...… · den secrets, an angel or...

No matter where I move or how many times I change my name or what color I dye my hair, people fi nd me. I don’t advertise. I don’t have a Web site. I don’t even answer the phone. And still when I arrive at my used- clothing store in town, there are people lurking in the parking lot hoping to get a reading with me. “It’s urgent,” they tell me. “I’m desperate,” they plead. “I’ve heard what you can do.”

Th ey show up with photographs, locks of hair, bloody shirts ripped apart by bullets, and so many questions, hundreds of questions, about the other side.

And it’s not just the living who are insistent. Th e dead pursue me, too. Th ey always have. Even before the living knew what I could do, the dead were getting in line, crowding close, and de-manding that I carry their messages across the veil. “I’m sorry.” “I love you.” “Why did you buy that car?” “Tell Bobby he’s a piece of shit.” “Don’t throw away my stuff !”

Th e other day a couple came to me because they were worried about their kid who had been sick for months with some myste-rious illness. I ushered them into my reading room, a little al-cove near the Victorian dresses I sell to the steampunk crowd. I sat them down on stools opposite a table with Tarot cards and crystals.

I don’t need anything special to communicate with the other side. But it calms people down to have something to touch or do when I’m giving them a reading, sort of like teddy bears to hold in a therapist’s offi ce. But before I could even ask these people to pick

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2 suzan victoria saxman

a card, the spirit of a tall, thin man with a scraggly beard had staggered into the room. He looked incredibly uncomfortable, em-barrassed even.

“Who’s Paul?” I asked.“Paul?”“Paul?”Th e couple exchanged glances, confused. Th e name didn’t ring

a bell.But now I was seeing more about this man. “Paul tells me he

lives in a cardboard box in your living room.”Th e woman gasped and clutched her husband’s hand. Th e

man’s face had gone white.“Why does he live in a cardboard box in your living room?” I

asked. It’s often hard to make sense of what I see. “Oh,” I realized all at once. “He’s dead.”

It turned out that almost a year earlier the woman had agreed to hold on to the ashes of her sister’s ex- husband, a terrible drunk who had died indigent and utterly alone. “I didn’t really know what to do with him,” she said. “I put the urn, it’s in a cardboard box, behind the bookcase and I guess we kind of forgot about it.”

“Well, Paul wants to be out of your house, that’s for sure,” I told them. “He hates it. He knows you always disapproved of him. He feels very ashamed. He doesn’t care where you bury his ashes, though; just get rid of them. He needs to move on. He re-ally does.”

“Is that why our daughter’s sick?” asked the man, concerned.“Oh no,” I said, remembering why they’d come in the fi rst

place. “Th at’s something else. Something small. A tick.” I could see it crawling up a young girl’s leg. “Lyme disease?”

“I knew it!” said the woman. “I told the doctor that’s what it was, but he wouldn’t believe me.”


the reluctant psychic 3

“Th ere’s a test,” I told the woman. “Not the one the doctor gave her, but another one. Ask him for the other test.”

“How do you know that?” asked the man. “What are you any-way? An intuitive? A medium? A clairvoyant? A psychic?”

I shrugged. I don’t really know what I am. I never have. But I’ve always been like this. I see the things no one else seems to see— bits and pieces of the future, past lives, forgotten stories, hid-den secrets, an angel or two, some demons, and the dead. Th e dead are everywhere. Now and then I can hide from the living, but I can never hide from the dead. What am I? I don’t know. But in between cleaning up after my pets and selling jewelry in my shop, I talk to the living, I talk to the dying, I talk to the dead.


As soon as I began speaking, I knew I couldn’t let anyone hear my real voice. How old was I? A little older than one? Maybe two? But I knew that I was not a child.

I felt like I was awakening from a dream and didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what life I was in. I didn’t even know who I was. Suzan? Was that my name? Really? I was an old woman, older than anyone in my family. What was I do-ing on Staten Island when I should be living in a cottage some-where in En gland or walking the streets of London? I was an old British woman. Th at’s what I sounded like to myself— the voice I heard in my own head. I certainly wasn’t a child.

Instinctively, I knew that if anyone discovered who and what I really was, I would be in danger. Even as a toddler I was on my guard. I knew I could not trust anyone, not even my parents, especially my parents. Especially my mother.

What would happen if she found me out? Would she put me up for adoption? Would she leave me in a basket on some-

1This Is What a Psychic’s

Invisible Friends Look Like



one’s doorstep? Would she report me to the authorities? Would she bring in the priests and the exorcists? Would she burn me at the stake?

All of these were barely understood possibilities, left over, I suppose, from lives I had lived where all of these things had happened. I was an old, melancholy baby right from the be-ginning. Who would possibly want me?

In my earliest memory, my mother walked into the living room and said, “Who left the radio on?”

I was clutching my favorite doll, a Casper the Friendly Ghost toy, and I had been talking to it. In my real voice. My old- lady En glish voice. I started babbling when my mother came into the room, because I knew I had to pretend to talk like a baby.

Th e radio wasn’t on. I pulled the string on my toy and made Casper talk. Th at seemed to get me off the hook. Th is time.

But I could not always hide the things I knew and saw. Th ey slipped out and they got me in trouble.

I was very young when I began telling my mother the things I knew about her. I saw her, in my mind, as a little girl pulling my aunt Mary, disabled from polio, in a child’s red wagon. Th ey were down by the train tracks with a group of other children, and my mother was wearing a red dress. Th ey were putting pennies on the tracks and waiting for a train to come and crush them fl at.

I told my mother what I had seen.“I never told you that,” she said. “How did you know I was

wearing a red dress?”“I saw it,” I said innocently. “In my head.”“What do you mean, in your head?”



“You were mean to Aunt Mary. I saw that, too.”“I was not. How can you say that? I had to help her go

everywhere because she couldn’t walk because of the polio. I’ve told you that. I did everything for my sister.”

I was beginning to feel anxious and frightened. My mother was angry at me and I didn’t understand why. I started to cry, but I couldn’t hold back from describing what I was seeing. It was too powerful. And I knew that it was true. “But you threw that big shell at her,” I said. “You made that scar on her fore-head.”

My mother stared at me in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

“I saw it,” I said, which was the truth.I had been in the room with my mother, and while my

eyes had focused on a single object, on a chair, the eye in-side my head had witnessed a scene unscrolling across my brain. Th e world around me had blurred, while the movie inside my head appeared before my inner eye with absolute clarity.

Th e children by the tracks, the blue of the sky, my moth-er’s red dress, the conch shell in her hand— I had seen them as if they were right before my eyes. Th e little girl scarcely resembled my forty- three- year- old mother, but I could feel that she was the same person. Every being has a unique vibra-tion, what ever its current physical appearance, and I can sense it in that place that opens up just below my heart.

My mother’s bossiness, her restlessness, and her rage— I’d recognized her essence at once. But I couldn’t articulate any of that as a child. “I saw it in my head,” was all that I could say.

I knew at once that I had said something wrong, that I wasn’t supposed to see these things. What I’d said terrifi ed



my mother in some way that I couldn’t understand. It made her angry at me. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

My mother wanted our family to look as normal as pos-sible. Th is was the 1960s, and we lived in a colonial suburban house on Staten Island. Daddy went to work every day to the hospital in New Jersey where he was the director of environ-mental ser vices. My mother plucked her eyebrows and put on makeup and a camel- hair coat to walk the dog. We didn’t have plastic covering on the furniture, but we might as well have. No one lived in the living room. No one ever came over.

My mother slept in my parents’ bedroom by herself. Daddy slept in the TV room on a pull- out bed. My sister, ten years older than me, slept in a blue room, and I was supposed to sleep in a room decorated all in pink. But I couldn’t.

Every night I would sleep for a few minutes— at the most an hour— and then startle awake. Looming over me was the giant dark shadow of a man. He had long white hair, a wide- brimmed black hat, and beneath it eye sockets that some-times were empty and sometimes blazed with fi re. Other than his eyes, he looked like the Quaker Oats man from the cereal box, which really isn’t that frightening when he’s on a cereal box, but when he’s at the end of your bed in the mid-dle of the night and he has holes where his eyes should be, it’s scary as hell.

My blood turned to ice in my veins when he appeared. Th at’s how frightening he was.

All my life, very little has frightened me. Most horror movies amuse me. I fi nd Stephen King’s novels fascinating, but they don’t give me goose bumps. But even the thought of the man in the black hat made me shudder for years. And as a child to actually see him? It was beyond terrifying.



I don’t remember the fi rst time I saw him, because I was always seeing him. I never had one night’s sleep when he wasn’t in the room. I’d clutch Casper the Ghost close and shut my eyes, immobilized with terror, but I knew I was being watched. I’d open my eyes, and there the man would be. He wanted something from me. I didn’t know what. He was no ephemeral, translucent being— he was as real as my mother and father. Still, I knew he was a spirit, that he came from somewhere else, that he was an intruder in our house.

How do I know someone is a spirit when they look as solid as a real person to me? It’s like those pictures where you have to spot the thing that does not belong. A spirit always has a tell, a way I know they don’t quite fi t into the picture of reality. Something is off - kilter. It could be very subtle, but the man in the black hat was not subtle at all. He had no eyes. He came from the world of death; his entire essence was of death.

“Th e man in the hat! Th e man in the hat!” I would fi nally scream, fi nding my voice. My mother, annoyed, would run into my room, sure I was being murdered. But no one was ever there. He was always gone by the time my parents arrived. My father would look for an intruder and check the doors. “It’s nothing,” they’d say. “Go back to bed.”

But I couldn’t. Because he’d come back as soon as they were gone.

Once I was alone again and the house was quiet, he would reappear like a vision from hell. Finally, when I couldn’t en-dure my terror any longer, I would crawl out of bed and run to my mother’s room.

She endured my arrival. She didn’t hold me or touch me or soothe me with caresses. She lay on one side of the bed, and I lay on the other. My mother had long blond hair that



she wore down at night, which made her look wraithlike and terrifying. She, too, scared me, but where else could I go? I couldn’t be alone, or the man with the black hat would ap-pear. I chose my mother’s coldness over the cold terror he awoke in me.

Children are alert to the spiritual world in a way that grown- ups have learned not to be. A woman whose daughter had an invisible friend came to see me for a reading. Th e child demanded the invisible boy be given a plate of food at dinner and room beside her in the car. Naturally, the boy wasn’t vis-ible to the mother and the whole thing had become exasper-ating. But he wasn’t invisible to me. He was the spirit of a boy from the girl’s neighborhood who’d died many years before and was lonely for a friend.

Th ere are spirits all around us, and children can see them. Children’s parents tell them the sprits aren’t real, that they don’t matter, and so slowly the kids learn to ignore them and fi nally they forget how to see them altogether.

Are there monsters under the bed? Sometimes there really are.

Surprisingly, I didn’t have an invisible friend who was an-other child, just my demonic Quaker Oats man. It fi gures.

My mother never tried to explain away his appearance as other mothers might have, nor did she acknowledge him and try to explore who he might be. Still, she would whisper to my aunts when she thought I wasn’t listening, “Suzan saw the man with the hat again.”

I knew my older sister wasn’t having these experiences. I knew my parents weren’t. I knew instinctively that if I tried to talk about what I saw, they would roll their eyes and shake their heads as if it were all silliness. But I could feel their fear



each night when I called to them. My fi rst lesson as a child was not to speak about what I was experiencing because it made my mother frightened, too.

One night I was feverish and I threw up in my mother’s bed. “You puked in the bed!” she screamed at me in disgust. “I was trying to sleep. What’s the matter with you anyway? You puked!”

I was ashamed and humiliated. I did everything wrong. But there was nowhere else I could go.

Perhaps it would have helped if my dog had been allowed to sleep in my room. But Muff et was permanently exiled to the basement. I used to go down there and sit beside her on the cement fl oor. I could feel her thoughts. She was furious and confused. She couldn’t understand why she’d been res-cued from the pound just to end up living in the cellar. I knew how she felt.

I also was a diff erent species. If my mother could have, she would have locked me away as well. I used to wrap my arm around my face and suck on my skin. I had mouth- shaped sores in the crook of each arm. I never had a bottle, a pacifi er, or even my thumb. My mother didn’t believe in thumb suck-ing. I never remember anyone holding me. I held myself like a bat. I was an upset animal worrying a hot spot, trying des-perately to comfort myself.

My heart raced all the time. I had so many secrets inside of me that wanted to come out. Sometimes I would just burst into tears with the frustration of it all.

“Oh, Suzan, just stop it,” my mother would say. “Stop it right now.”

My mother imagined herself pious, but she never prayed with me or even took me to church or off ered me any of the



solaces of religion. She’d been raised Catholic and in her room was a statue of the Virgin Mary. She was always going on and on about the Blessed Mother, how perfect she was, how chaste.

I resented the Virgin, all covered up in her blue and white robes like she was hiding something. Th ere was something false about her. Or maybe I had her confused with my own mother.

“Isn’t there another Mary?” I asked.“What are you talking about?”“I like the other Mary.”“Mary Magdalene?”“Th at’s her,” I said. “Th at one.”I recognized her name. I saw her in my mind, a woman

with long dark hair, naked and dancing in the woods. She was of the forest; she was part of nature; she was nature, the essence of nature. She was freedom and laughter and music. I didn’t see any of that when I looked at my mother’s statue. Th at Mary was bound beneath her chaste blue and white robes, controlled by men. She was what men wanted women to be. My heart yearned for the other Mary, the untamed one. But all of these sensations were trapped inside of me and I had no idea how I was supposed to express them. My thoughts were too big for my little head, and they were dark and deep and wild.

“Mary Magdalene wasn’t a very nice lady. How do you know about her?” My mother’s eyes narrowed.

“Th e TV,” I lied. I had no idea how I knew that there was another Mary, but I did.

“You don’t need to know anything at all about Mary Mag-dalene,” said my mother. I could tell she didn’t like her.



I also knew my mother didn’t like children. She told me so. Sometimes she remembered to add as an afterthought that she did like my sister and me, and sometimes she didn’t. She decorated our house with Hummel fi gurines of rosy- cheeked Alpine girls and boys. Th ey were frighteningly cheer-ful in their frozen state of happiness. I thought they were hideous. Was this who I was supposed to be? A von Trapp family singer?

She made me wear velvet dresses and gold shoes— outfi ts so fanciful that the other kindergartners called me Princess Suzan when I went to school— but I never remember her once telling me that she loved me.

In kindergarten, the teachers realized that I was practi-cally blind. I had always been used to the world being blurry and unfocused, but now I couldn’t see the blackboard. My mother took me to the optometrist, and he told us I needed thick corrective lenses.

My mother let me pick out pastel pink plastic frames that made me feel pretty. When we got home, however, she told me how ugly I looked in them. “Th ey don’t do anything for you. I hope you’re not going to let people see you in them.”

I immediately lost them, and everything became fuzzy again. I could read print, but the wider world didn’t exist for me. It’s amazing I never got hit by a car. I was that blind.

I could see the dead around me, though, with perfect clar-ity. Everything else was fuzzy, but the spirits had edges, de-tail, brilliance. I was seeing them with my third eye, and that eye, apparently, did not need glasses. Even today I like to do blind readings. My eyes are open, but I take out my contacts and let the real world blur so I can bring the spiritual realm into focus.



In bed with my mother at night, I’d often wake up to fi nd three spirits watching over me. Th ey were the hooded fi gures of men dressed in robes. I knew they were holy and wise; they radiated peace and made me feel perfectly serene. Th e man in the middle was tall, with a black beard. He would nod at me; I would nod back. He smiled when I acknowledged him, but we never spoke to each other. I would wake up and see them, usually around three o’clock: the witching hour, the hour of God.

All throughout the day I would look forward to that mo-ment when I would see my three men, and I would panic if for some reason I didn’t see them. But they came almost every night until I was ten years old, which is around the age when even ordinary kids stop seeing their invisible friends. My mother was always asleep when they arrived. I knew they wouldn’t come if she was awake. Even today I don’t know for certain exactly who they were. But I sensed I had known them for lifetimes, and somehow I knew that they were my guardians. Somehow I also knew that they had given me the gift of prophecy.

Later I would realize that these men were probably the keepers of the Akashic Rec ords. According to Hinduism every-thing that is destined to happen to us is contained within the Akashic Rec ords, and my sweet little monks were giving me access to them. What a blessing that turned out to be!

Given what my life has been like as a psychic, I probably should have been more frightened of the Th ree Amigos than the man in the black hat. Th anks, guys! What a gift. Th ey gave me an instrument to play and the skill to play it, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stuck it in the closet and tried to ignore it. But that’s the way it is for a lot of people,



not just me. You’ve got a destiny, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t run from it. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

I’m sure that’s why I got so sick when I was six years old. I came down with a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis— an old person’s disease invading a young person’s body. My fever soared and the family brought me to the hospital. Th e doc-tors were getting ready to immerse me in an ice bath when the fever miraculously broke. Still, they kept me in the hospi-tal for days.

My family behaved appropriately, arriving with a stuff ed rabbit for me to cuddle. But I knew that something was miss-ing from my mother when she looked at me— some kind of honest aff ection. She didn’t touch me, but just stared at me from the end of the bed. Hers was a masquerade of concern.

I knew I might die when I was in the hospital, but I wasn’t afraid. I thought about death all the time: not in any particu-larly morbid way, but with a simple, clear awareness that it might happen at any moment. I recognized the likelihood of death the way old people often do. It was right around the corner. It was no big deal.

I knew I might ascend to the next level. I can remember thinking about it just that way, ascend to the next level, and it certainly wasn’t something I’d heard talked about in Catholic kindergarten. It wasn’t the way most little girls thought; I knew that. Th e problem was, I didn’t feel connected to any-thing around me. I wasn’t of this time, of this country, of this family. Maybe I could die and come back and fi nd my true place. I was the thing in the picture that didn’t belong. What’s wrong with this picture? Me.

But I didn’t die.



I did get left back that year and had to do kindergarten all over again. I returned to school older than the other kids and unable to play at recess or run around in gym because my joints would swell and hurt. I couldn’t see the ball to play games any-way. I couldn’t see the kids.

I was embarrassed and I wanted to fi t in, and at the same time I knew that I wasn’t a kid anyway. When the other chil-dren teased me or ignored me, I accepted it as my lot in life. I was supposed to be separate and diff erent. Th at’s the way it had always been for me, right? I was a blind, crippled old lady. Th e child’s body was just a disguise. And it didn’t surprise me that it didn’t fool the other kids.

I continued to have high fevers, which I actually looked forward to and enjoyed. Dazed and delirious in bed, I would gaze up at the ceiling at tiny winged beings hovering in the corner of my room. Th ey had the ugly, pointed faces of ro-dents, a twitchy sweetness, and they gazed at me with aff ec-tion. Th ese Beatrix Potter characters gone wrong were my real friends. Even today, I keep pet rats in memory of them. Th ey were emissaries, but I didn’t understand yet the mes-sage that they were bringing to me.

I know now that people like me often have illnesses as children that separate them from the world. Many of the psy-chics I would meet later on had experienced debilitating vi-ruses and strange life- threatening infections. Lots of artists, musicians, and writers also got really sick when they were kids. Shamans almost always suff ered through some kind of disease before they were identifi ed. Perhaps there was some-thing about the fever that changed the workings of my brain, but I don’t think that’s really it. I was as open to the spirits before my illness as I was after it. What my rheumatism did



was make it impossible for me to participate in ordinary life. Like my blindness, it turned me in on myself, and that’s what enhanced my psychic powers. I’ve read that young race horses are confi ned to their stalls except when they’re training. Th ey’re not allowed to play in the fi elds with the other foals. Th ey might hurt themselves. Th ey might waste their energy. Th ey don’t get to play reindeer games. Th ey’re diff erent.

Even within my own family I was alone, and that loneliness left me to explore the only world I could really see, the world that was invisible to everyone else. If I had grown up in a nice family, an ordinary family with warmth and love, I might have forgotten who I was and become, well, if not ordinary, then more ordinary than I was. But that never happened. I was born knowing that these people were not my real family and theirs was not my home. Home was somewhere else— only it would be many, many years before I would fi gure out where that home really was.


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