I still remember the heat of a summer night, looking out a window at New York City as he lay next to me, knowing it would be the last time I would touch him in the flesh. Over the years since then, I know he thought about me. Although I never saw him again, he called me at my office number when my first book came out. His voice was exactly the same. He told me, “I thought a lot about you over these years.” And certainly, I had thought about him. He said to me, “Next life is ours.” The heat of summer never changes. It’s always hot. I came across a poem by Wordsworth that had these lines which, for me, speak to this feeling of longing and yet acceptance, and then, beyond that, a certainty that what we shared was real and true and really will come around again in another life:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Once I became honest with myself in my twenties, I truly started to pay attention to spirits and energy around me. When Sam and I were no longer together, I felt I would never really love again. So I just floated around, wasting my time, all the while hearing spirits, but with no direction, no understanding of how to best use this ability. Even so, I know the spirits were looking out for me. I remember once, at around twenty-five years old, I went to a job interview in a warehouse. Immediately upon walking in, I felt the negative energy. I needed a job, it was close to my house, and the hours were perfect. I met the manager and I heard: “Run!” He seemed nice enough, he offered me the job, and I ran. On the surface there was no reason to be nervous of this guy, but I was placing more and more trust in what I was hearing from the other side.
On yet another occasion, some years later, I had to take my mother to the doctor’s. I dropped her off, and the plan was that she would call me when it was time to pick her up, because she didn’t want me to wait around for her. The doctor’s office was very close to my home in Nutley, New Jersey, so the round trip was about ten minutes. I was back home in no time. This house had only one entrance—it had no back door. Just as I touched the handle to open the front door, I heard the other side saying to me, “Don’t go in.” I had no idea what the problem was, but it was very clear to me, and I had learned to trust the spirits. I got back in my car and drove around the block a few times. Then I went back again, and this time, when I went to the door, I heard no warning. I actually was second-guessing myself, thinking that my first reaction had been strange—I didn’t know why I’d been so nervous. Everything was fine. A little later, my mother called, and I went and picked her up; it took me all of five minutes to bring her home. She went into her bedroom and I heard her gasp. I ran to see what could be the matter and was shocked to see that her whole bedroom was torn apart. We’d been robbed. I realized this meant that whoever did it had been in the house when I went to enter the first time. It really was one of the dead telling me not to go in. The robbers must have heard me and run off. They got away with $3,500, but I don’t like to think of what would have happened if I had gone in while they were still there. I don’t know who the soul was who gave me the warning, but they were certainly acting as my guardian angel.
Unfortunately, the other side can’t save us from making mistakes. This is the side of free will. We’re allowed to make our own choices here, no matter how much advice or strong suggestion we may be receiving.
I thought back to a few years earlier, when I worked at a municipal bonds place. The office manager, who I’ll call “Jerry,” asked me out for a drink. I was still broken inside from my breakup with Sam, and I just didn’t care. So I went. We ended up in a motel, during which time I heard a spirit telling me that Jerry’s wife was pregnant. He never mentioned that, of course. Apparently he did not even know it yet, and he already had three daughters.
He said, “Let’s do this again.”
I replied, “Go home, your wife is pregnant.” He looked at me like I had three heads, but then found out it was true.
I’ve made mistakes—lots of them. Some make me embarrassed to think of them, and some make me ashamed. And I made all of mine with angels at my side, trying to help me. If you learn to listen, you will know that they are always trying to help you, too. In this case, before I’d even done anything I would live to regret, they said, “Come on, Concetta, get out of here. You don’t belong here.” And I did not listen. When they said Jerry’s wife was expecting a baby, I could not bear another moment. The motel is still outside the Lincoln Tunnel, and, every time I see it, I’m reminded of that moment, that lesson. I was broken-hearted for years after Sam, I felt more alone than ever before in my life. When I look back on it today, I realize I was never alone. But I had lessons to learn.
A few years later, I worked as a front-desk receptionist for the second floor of a large company. (My husband, John, says I used to take calls for the second floor, now I take calls from the top floor—that is, God.) One day, a young man walked in and gave his name. I immediately heard the other side tell me that this was Sam’s brother! Now, understand, Sam only had two sisters that I knew of, raised by a single mom, but I heard, “This is Sam’s brother.”
I asked him, “Do you know you have a brother and two sisters?” It turned out I was right. I put them in touch with each other and neither knew about the others. It was amazing. All my life I’ve had experiences like this one, “knowing,” because I would hear from the dead what the real story was. As I got older, it only got more clear, and stronger. I was getting better at listening and reading the signs.
By the time I got to the age when I met John, who would become my husband, I was really aware. I knew he was an honest man and a good human being. Nothing is ever perfect on this side of the veil, so there was some baggage. But I knew he was the right one for me.
These days, I have a pretty good relationship with the other side—I know they only want to help. But sometimes I have to ask the spirits to give me a break. It’s not like they are yelling, but they do clamor for my attention if I don’t consciously turn it off. I could be pushing my cart through Shoprite, passing by another shopper, and I’ll hear, “Concetta! That’s my daughter there!”
I can’t just go up to someone in the store and say, “Excuse me, ma’am, but your dead mother would like to tell you something.” People are a lot more knowledgeable these days about the psychic, but there’s still a risk of having someone call the men in white coats!
I always say—and I’ll talk more about this throughout this book—that everyone has the ability to connect with the spirits of loved ones on the other side. When we sleep, our conscious mind rests and our subconscious mind becomes more heightened and aware. Over the years, I have trained my conscious mind to step back, so I can listen to my subconscious thoughts more easily, and that’s the frequency where I hear the dead. It’s just like any other human ability—some have it more as a natural gift, and it’s at a very high level without their having to use much effort, and some may have to really work at it and it still won’t be as strong as another person’s. Not every swimmer can even dream of being Michael Phelps. Not every person who tries to draw, even after many art classes, will be Leonardo da Vinci. I happen to have unusually focused concentration. I don’t really know how to explain it. I remember once I was having a minor surgery and the anesthesiologist told me to count while the drug took effect. I think most people would get to about “three” and—zonk!—they’re out. I don’t know how far along I was in the numbers, but I heard this guy saying to me, “Okay, you can stop counting now, Concetta. You’re asleep.” Even unconscious, there was a part of me that was aware and functioning!
I also have one ear that doesn’t have a hole in it, which may somehow increase my ability to focus inward, since I’m getting reduced input from the outside. This is exactly what it sounds like. No hole. That means no sound is going in on that side. It’s only a theory, but it makes sense to me since I know that I need to listen in a different way from other people, and without hearing on one side I’m getting half the distraction that others must get. In any case, over the years, the way I receive impressions—hearing, seeing, feeling the spirits—has changed somewhat. Everything has become clearer, more intense, and—I feel—deeper as well. I think it’s because I’ve been at it now professionally for twenty years. Like anything else you use or study, you get sharper.
That said, I don’t have a perfect batting average. I frequently tell my clients or my audiences that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And I mean that literally! The dead on the other side know who they are talking to, and they know things that their loved one will recognize. The way I most often get myself into trouble is trying to “interpret” what they are showing or telling me, instead of just passing it along for the person here to make sense of. In one example that comes to mind, my friend Debbie’s grandmother had passed. I knew her grandmother on this side and liked her a lot. But I wasn’t here when she died; my husband John and I were traveling. Some time later, I saw Debbie, and all of a sudden her Nonna shows up. Nonna kept showing me an American flag.
I said, “Debbie, was Nonna ever in the military?”
Debbie said, “No! Why would you think that?”
I said, “Well, she’s waving an American flag, so I thought that must be it.”
Debbie said, “No, Concetta. Nonna died on Memorial Day!”
Anyone who is psychic might be psychic in a different way. Some people hear things, which is called clairaudience; some see things, which is called clairvoyance. In my case, all my senses are involved—sight, sound, touch, smell. I might smell beer and know that the spirit on the other side was a beer drinker, or smell cigar or pipe smoke and be able to tell the person I’m reading for that their loved one was a smoker, but not cigarettes, which makes it more distinctive and gives them greater assurance that this really is their own loved one. Other times, I might hear sounds or music or singing, and that’s often tough for me to relay. I consider myself a pretty decent singer, but there’s no karaoke machine on the other side, and sometimes I don’t know the song. I just do my best. When Teresa Giudice, one of the stars of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, lost her mother, I was asked to help the family connect with her. I could hear a song, which fortunately I recognized and could convey to the group. It turned out it was a song her brother Joe had danced to with his mother at his wedding.
On occasion, the dead will make use of my own personal experiences in order to convey a message by association. They might show me my brother Harold, who died from AIDS, and if I then mention AIDS, lo and behold, the person I’m reading for will tell me that someone close to them passed from AIDS, and we’ll know who it is who is talking. I might feel a pain or pressure in one area of the body that suggests to me how the individual passed, or I might get an emotional sense, like happy, sad, worried, or fearful, during a reading. Emotions are our internal navigation system. We are literally steered, and sometimes pushed along, by our feelings to do something or understand something. These kinds of sensations are definitely useful to me in figuring out what the spirit wants to say, but going through a lot of emotional changes in a session—or particularly a two-hour show—is very hard on me, and one of the reasons why I always pray for protection and guidance. Prayer is invaluable in my work. I ask to be filled with the love and peace of God. It gives me strength and I know I am safe.
So that’s a bit about me and a bit about how I work. I’ve been pals with the dead a very long time now, and I hope as you read you’ll get comfortable with the idea that, even if you are not a psychic medium, everyone has their folks around them, keeping tabs on them, sending comfort and any kind of help they can. Along with my brother, both my parents now are on the other side—I think of them as my own personal God Squad. You have yours, too.
Chapter 2
I Thought You Looked Familiar
All of us here on earth are spiritual beings having a physical experience. We have been spirits for eons; in human terms, we’ve been spirits “forever,” and we have so many connections to others here, but our physical body tends to give us the illusion of separateness and keeps us from recognizing that we are all the same, all spirit, all one. I believe we have all lived before and come back to this earth many times, have lived many lives in many different places. In a sense, we are all time-travelers, even though we’re mostly unaware of it.
We all experience being different genders, races, social and economic classes, and religions. We will experience being both the innocent and the guilty, the accuser and the accused, the betrayer and the betrayed, the punisher and the rescuer, the “haves” and the “have-nots.” We will learn how it feels to be on the receiving end, and we’ll learn we have a choice to show kindness. We get to see how each of those things feels. There’s so much we need to learn, so much this plane of struggle has to teach us. How much could we experience and learn in just one single lifetime? If we care about improving ourselves, becoming better and more pure in spirit, growing ever closer to God, then reincarnation—that is, many chances to learn—just makes so much sense.
Everything is made of energy, and energy never dies. Everything in nature is recycled. Trees and plants die, go back to the earth, and sprout again. We recycle paper, plastic, glass, and all kinds of material goods. And souls, the spirits within each of us, are no exception; they get recycled too. Anything that is created by God goes back to God; no life is destroyed. This is the understanding in many, many religions and cultures all around the world. Even the Pope has said this!
In my early teens, I had memories of myself holding a microphone in my hand, singing. I felt the stage that I once stood on. In the introduction to this book, I told the story of a time when I was five and supposed to perform a rendition of “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window” with a group of other little girls, but instead did a diva turn, waiting until they were done to sing it on my own. A ham was born! I knew I was supposed to be there, because I had memories of being an entertainer. All my life, I struggled to understand what I was supposed to do. How do I get there? Who do I call? Throughout my school years, I settled for being the class clown and putting on kiddie shows in the neighborhood, and later I put on holiday shows at office parties. I even got up at family weddings to tell jokes—at eleven years old, that is really brave!
When I was in my twenties, I worked as a receptionist for Givaudan, a company that makes fragrances and flavors. I loved working there—it was such a fancy place that my reception desk was as big as a Bentley! Every day, they would bring a huge new arrangement of fresh-cut flowers; I really felt in my element. Beyond my desk, a couple of steps down, was a beautifully appointed salon, like an atrium with windows, high ceilings, and fancy couches and chairs where visitors would wait for their appointments. At Christmastime, they would bring in a tree that seemed to me to rival the one at Rockefeller Center—enormous, with unbelievable decorations and different every year. One day around the holidays, they had just finished decorating the tree, and I hadn’t yet had a chance to check it out. I was waiting for another girl to relieve me so I could go to lunch with a couple of my friends. They were already there and had gone down to give the tree a closer look, oohing and ahhing over the decorations, going, “Oh my God, Concetta, you have got to see this!” So, as soon as the other girl got there, I left my desk and started down the couple steps toward them. The sun was shining very brightly through the high windows, and the tree glittered like it was on fire! As I was stepping down, I was momentarily blinded and stumbled before catching myself, but, in that split second, instead of seeing before me the tree and my
couple of girlfriends, I saw an audience full of people, all dressed in 1800s evening wear! I was on stage, the lights flickering around me—I could tell that the lights were candles, not electric—and, rather than stumbling down the steps of an office building waiting area, I was taking a deep curtsy in front of an adoring standing ovation! It was incredibly vivid and real to me, but as a twenty-six-year-old I didn’t want my friends to think I was a cuckoo-bird, so I never said a word about what I had seen. They were saying, “Are you all right?” and in my head I thought, What the hell just happened???
Years later, but still before I went public as a psychic medium, I visited a bookstore in Wayne, New Jersey, called Wise Man Books, where they used to have various metaphysical practitioners visit and do workshops or demonstrations or readings of different kinds. There was a fellow from England who was doing past-life regressions, and I did a session with him. During the regression, I talked about a life I had had as an actress in Chicago. I remembered having two husbands and I told the practitioner that both were deceased. Apparently, while under, my manner of speaking was pretty coarse and unpleasant, so my impression is that I was not the nicest person (in plain English, I seemed to be a miserable bitch), even if I got raves when I performed! I suspect my recalled standing ovation was from this same lifetime.
As a medium, many folks ask me about past lives. We’ve all had that experience of meeting someone and already knowing how we feel about them. We just click instantly, or the opposite. We know right away this person isn’t our cup of tea, even though we haven’t yet learned anything about them. Or sometimes it’s a matter of knowing you haven’t met them before, but something about them (their appearance or their mannerisms) is so familiar. Sometimes it’s something pretty magical.
I Kissed a Ghost (and I Liked It) Page 2
