The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers

by Karen Zimmerman

  Despite familial disapproval, Tiffany’s psychic abilities grew as time went on. She tells me that she feels God wanted her to explore her abilities as a way to help people. And so she backed away from the church in order to pursue further psychic development. She joined a Spiritualist group, but didn’t feel like she belonged there, either.

  She feels she doesn’t fit into just one belief system, because she thinks we should not limit ourselves by feeling pressured to select only one path to God. Today, she belongs to no particular religion. She believes in the principle of karma, and says she tries to love and respect everyone.

  Learning she was psychic

  Tiffany’s first psychic experience happened when she was only two and a half years old. She has no memory of it, but it has become a family legend. “My grandfather became ill and was admitted into the hospital,” she recalls. “He was not so ill that the family was expecting him to die at this time; this was just a routine trip to the hospital for an elderly person. Because I was so young, I was not allowed to visit, but my uncle decided he would sneak me into the hospital.

  “While we were visiting, and my grandfather was sharing his ice cream with me, I announced to everyone that Papa was going to die. Apparently, this stunned my mother and she was trying to recall if anyone had mentioned this possibility to me, but since no one admitted they had said any such thing, the subject was dropped. Keep in mind that no one was thinking this would be anywhere near the last days of his life. Sadly, about three days later, my grandfather did pass away.”

  Tiffany’s next experience came at age five, when she looked out of her bedroom window and saw a little girl looking back at her. She was frightened, and for a long time, she didn’t like to look out of that window. Tiffany remembered that the girl was not wearing modern clothing, and looked like someone from the television show Little House on the Prairie. Around this time, Tiffany says she would clearly hear someone in the house calling her name. She thought it was her mother, but after asking, found it was not. It was a woman’s voice, but whose it was remains a mystery — she and her mother were the only ones home at the time.

  While some psychics have rapid-fire experiences and their abilities seem to bloom in an instant, others have a string of randomly spaced events that culminate in a deeper understanding and realization of what is happening to them.

  “We moved from that house, and I cannot remember much happening until I was 10 years old,” Tiffany says. “My grandmother had a very old Chihuahua named Poncho that had passed over several years before. I do not think this dog liked me much, since he was old and I was very young and always wanted to play with him. He always growled at me and I cannot remember a time when he actually enjoyed my company. Several years had passed, and we had since moved to our new home, which my parents built. One night I awoke to see Poncho sitting in my room next to my bed. I remember looking at him and blinking and thinking he is no longer living, but here he is looking at me. I decided to call out to him and he disappeared before my eyes.”

  She told her mother and grandmother about her visit from Poncho, and for the first time, she learned that both women also had seen spirits. “We have always, from that time onward, spoken freely about any dreams and premonitions we had, or spirits that we experienced.”

  Her mother and grandmother did not seem to fear the ghosts they saw, which Tiffany says were full body apparitions. Thinking her grandmother might be teasing her, she asked her again and again about her experiences, but her stories were always the same. Her mother also always told the same stories. Over the years, as the three women would talk of these experiences, “they just seemed normal to me until it came up in a conversation with someone else, and I would see their reaction,” Tiffany says. “This is when I realized that not everyone has seen a spirit.”

  Her mother and grandmother were not the only family members to dabble in the other side. Tiffany’s great-aunt, her grandmother’s sister, held “dumb suppers” that were rarely discussed.

  “From what I can understand, my aunt would cook a meal for the dead or in her case a daughter and husband who had passed away,” Tiffany says. “The meal was prepared in a certain way and you could not speak while preparing or eating the meal, and places were set at the table for the ‘guests.’ I heard from family members that these dinners did bring about spirits.”

  My own reference for the dumb supper was a short story by science fiction writer Kris Ottman Neville, writing under the pseudonym Henderson Starke. Teenage girls hold a dumb supper to find out which boy one of them will marry. One girl cooks a meal, with all the ingredients added in backward order, stirred with the opposite hand usually used, all walking backward. Two places were set — one for the girl, and one for her phantom groom.

  All is done in complete silence. Wait…wait…and at midnight...

  The dumb supper is an old pagan tradition, tweaked to fit the purposes of the participants. The short story illustrates what can happen when rituals are used in a frivolous manner. Most who hold a dumb supper hold it in reverence of the dead, hoping for a short visit in a homey setting.

  Given this family story, Tiffany thinks this is why it was not so strange to talk about spirits — experiences with them ran in the family. “I was also told that my great-grandmother would visit psychics, including a very well-known psychic that would travel about during that time, which would have been around and before the 1950s. My grandmother also mentioned on several occasions sensing my grandfather and smelling his cologne in the kitchen years after he had passed.”

  While her grandmother gave her little guidance in using her abilities, she was supportive and never treated Tiffany as though she were odd, or as though she just had a vivid imagination. Tiffany says her mother is more of an observer. She likes to hear what the family has experienced, but she thinks her mother fears being teased by others. “I will share my experiences with her, but not in the way of looking for guidance. I think with grandma, our conversations on this subject seem more equal and we can talk and explore the idea of spirits.”

  Psychic Development

  Tiffany’s psychic experiences seemed to slow down as she matured, she says, happening intermittently during her teen and young adult years. When she started having children in her late twenties, her sixth sense became more active.

  “I have thought about this often — why did I have those experiences and then nothing much? The only thing that comes to mind is that somehow I rejected my abilities.”

  She heard about the psychic world from a classmate who read tarot at their Christian-based private high school. She also was brought by a friend to a roadside psychic for a reading, but neither experience piqued her interest or made her think about what she had experienced with spirits previously, or about her abilities.

  “I think these might have been tests for me to determine if I was ready to take the journey or not. I don’t think I ever realized that people actually prepare for this by working with a teacher or through reading books. I guess too, that at that time in my life I was more interested in being popular and pretty and most of all — having fun!”

  Tiffany says that after she was married and became more involved in church, she was less restless. She began thinking about her spiritual side. “I was open to learning about God, and curious about how my life was going to be different with having children. I think the fact that I had become ‘open’ was key.”

  At the time of the 9/11 attacks, she had two small children, and was active in a moms’ group at her church. She remembers feeling a few days before that something awful was going to happen, and told a couple of friends in the group, explaining how she experienced a “huge feeling of sorrow,” but did not know why. They simply told her to stop thinking like that, rather than being interested in her feelings and what they might mean. Afterward, she says, she started to see the group differently, wondering how she would continue to fit in with them, and recognizing that she was a little different from other people. She also star
ted to reexamine her belief system and to reconnect with her gifts.

  Her Specific Abilities

  Tiffany says her abilities include being empathic, clairsentient, clairvoyant, clairaudient, and mediumistic.

  She explains her powers thusly: “Empathy is the ability to tune in intuitively or psychically to the moods and characteristics of a person, animal, or thing. This is one that I have always known from a young child. I just seem to know the moods of people, and also if someone didn’t like me very much. I also seem to draw people to me who wanted to share personal information, such as sexual abuse that they had experienced as a child. This occurred several times — and since I was NOT a child of sexual abuse — I just thought of myself as a ‘cosmic garbage can’ where people could dump their problems and I would see that it disappeared into a ’cosmic dump.’ It always seemed to make each person feel somewhat healed once they told me of their abuse.

  “Mediums serve as a channel for communication between the living and the dead. My first experience would probably be that little girl in the window, but I would rather count Poncho, my grandmother’s dog. I later had a dream of meeting an Aunt Nora. I asked my grandmother if I had an Aunt Nora. She told me that I did, but when I asked to meet her, she told me that Aunt Nora was no longer alive and had been dead for many, many years. As the years progressed, I was able to communicate with the spirits, but I do not claim this to be one of my strongest abilities.

  “Clairaudience is the ability to receive psychic impressions of sounds, music, and voices that are not audible to normal hearing. I was in my early twenties when I had a mole removed. I wasn’t so worried about it until I heard a voice (in my mind) plainly tell me it was cancer. It came back to be malignant melanoma.

  “Clairvoyance is known as ’clear seeing,’ and refers to the ability to see an event or image in the past, present, or future. This first happened while in high school and seemed a little like déjà vu at first but I remember seeing a guy who was my boyfriend at the time, and someone that I really liked, meeting up with a friend of mine at a party. It later happened the way I saw it in my mind.”

  Like Claire, Tiffany has spirit guides who help her with her work. Her newest is Father Samuel. “It was very interesting meeting him,” she says. “My husband and I were in Florida and we were walking together. We started talking about religion and God, when out of the corner of my eye I see a Franciscan monk walking next to me, wanting to join in on the conversation!

  “I have another guide that I call Inara, and she is from somewhere else that I cannot pronounce but she is a purple mass with sparkles, kind of in an S formation. I also have a Native American woman guide named White Feather, and each time I see her she has more and more white feathers in a basket and in her hairpiece. I think the feathers represent the people I have helped, because when I first met her, she only had one white feather.

  “I have a guardian angel, Ariel, and she seems to be more of a protector, along with Sabra, who is my animal spirit guide, and is a saber-toothed tiger. I also have noticed my cat, Maggie, who passed away two years ago, around Sabra. They seem to hang out together, which is funny and odd, but since Maggie has been around so much, I guess she is in the group, too.”

  Tarot

  Tiffany told me that she bought her first deck of tarot cards in 1994. She ordered the Mythic Tarot from the back of a magazine. “I felt compelled to order these cards, and so I did. I knew nothing about tarot at the time.”

  The Mythic Tarot offers an imaginative approach to classic Tarot. Each suit depicts archetypal characters from Greek mythology, and every card tells a story about that character. These mythical legends illustrate wisdom and insight for personal growth.

  Tiffany says she has owned other decks, including the Rider-Waite, Thoth, and Morgan-Greer, but gave them away because they just did not “speak” to her.

  “I sometimes will use my Osho Zen tarot deck — this deck drew me in after I saw the cards at a metaphysical store. I just could not stop thinking about them, and so I had to have them. But, it took me about a month of thinking about them before I finally did buy them!”

  She will occasionally use an angel or oracle card to bring clarity to a reading, but sticks with her two favorites. “It sounds strange, but sometimes my Mythic Tarot cards do not want me to read them and the Osho Zen cards do. I have found it best to just go with it, because if I try to read the deck that does not want to be read, the cards become blank to me.

  “I did once buy a deck called the Dance of Life Tarot. I found them intriguing and love the folk art type of artwork, but still to this day I cannot read those cards. I have no idea why, but every once in a while I will pull them out and try to read them and get nothing. Maybe I am not ready for them at this time.”

  As Tiffany has become more connected with her cards, her accuracy has increased, and she has sometimes been astounded. “When the first reading I gave myself actually happened — which involved a move to another state – I was blown away. I had recorded my readings on paper and didn’t refer to it for months, forgot about it, even.”

  She first read for someone other than herself around the year 2000, when she read for her husband and her mother, neither of whom had much belief in the power of the cards. Her husband has since become her biggest supporter, once he saw how accurate she can be.

  In 2002, Tiffany and her husband began hosting a weekly tarot night with two friends. Her readings seemed to be more accurate than the other participants, to the point that it made her friends uncomfortable. She documented her readings, and would check back in with her friends to confirm if and when things happened.

  She received more calls confirming her predictions than not, which boosted her confidence. She started doing more and more readings, and her husband suggested she start charging for them. She had problems with this at first, and sometimes still struggles with whether she should take money for them.

  Clients started to come to her home for readings, and Tiffany eventually found that with four children, it would be easier to do them over the Internet. She began by doing online readings for friends and quizzing them to test her accuracy. She received a lot of positive responses and launched her website, with her husband’s help, in January 2010. She now exercises her powers by giving readings to friends in person and via http://www.tarotempress.biz. She also does whimsical portraits of spirit guides.

  Despite her online presence, Tiffany says most of her neighbors and the parents of her children’s friends don’t know about her special abilities. “I share my experiences in a guarded manner, checking people’s responses and gradually revealing more and more.”

  Readings and Reactions

  People visit psychics to get clarity on situations they are having trouble understanding or acting upon. They want to know about love, money, sex, parents, friends, lovers, and even their pets.

  Tiffany believes her abilities are best used to help people who are lost or stuck in life to move forward. “I seem to do well with finding the hang-ups people have, but avoid getting to the root cause,” she says. “My readings are about empowerment for the individual. I offer counseling with my readings as well, since it is important to me that the client understand their messages and what areas they need to work on in order to move forward. I often encourage my clients to do affirmations and vision boards to find out what they really want out of life. So many times we go through life looking for something, but are not really sure what we are looking for. An example would be going shopping for an unknown event. How can you know where to look if you have no clue what you need to buy? I find this to be true with how many go through life — not knowing what they want and missing that special someone when they come along because they were unable to recognize Mr. or Mrs. Right.”

  A vision board is a visualization tool used to attract things you want in your life. Using items cut from magazines, drawings, and writings, the theory is that by studying these items, you will be able to become who you want to bec
ome and your dreams will become reality.

  From a societal perspective, she feels her abilities are used to help people learn to recognize happiness and be okay with their struggles, knowing they won’t last forever. “I work on changing their attitudes as well,” she says. “Happy thoughts bring happy things and we should not fuel the fire of negativity.”

  However, she says she does sometimes tune into the darker side of people, and that can be uncomfortable. A friend confessed many months after such a reading that she had been in a very bad place and did not want Tiffany to know, but that it had helped her look at her life differently and begin to make positive changes.

  Tiffany says she has come to learn that reading tarot is not “one size fits all,” and that sometimes she has read for people and did not connect with them, and so she was unable to get accurate information from the cards.

  Some readings stand out in her mind. “When I was first coming out of the ‘psychic closet’ to friends, I gave a reading to a neighbor. I told him he would meet a woman and they would have a relationship. About six months later, he called to tell me he had met someone special and they did have a relationship for several years.”

  Another early reading involved one of her husband’s co-workers, who was having relationship problems. “We were able to uncover a lot of good and bad things going on in her life, and one of the bad things was the current relationship, which just was not right for her. The cards told me that she would meet a man in six months who would be unlike anyone she had dated before. She did meet this man six months to the day. We got together for another reading and I told her she would marry this man in the summer. She married him in June. She has been very happy in this relationship, and her life has blossomed in many other ways as well.”

  Sometimes readings present difficulties — how much information is too much information? How do you know what to say and not say?

  This question came into play when one friend came to her for a reading. Tiffany pulled her cards and read in them that she was having marital problems — the love was falling away. “I allowed reason to come into play here, disregarded my intuition and the messages I was getting, and told myself that this could not be true and I couldn’t tell this woman such a thing. I have no idea why I allowed this to happen, but I did, and I told her that her husband was very supportive of her going back to school, which he was. But the key to the reading was the card telling of marital problems.