“You don't even need to open your mouth,” Barry assured me. “You can just sit there and observe.” His promise of no expectations and no pressure eased my fears. I was hooked.
On a Wednesday night at eight, there I sat on a green vinyl chair in a large conference room on the C-floor of the NPI. At age eighteen, I stared at five strangers sitting across from me, and to my surprise they were all cute men, and even friendly. This was an angle I'd never considered—that I might like the other members of the group, or that it would be fun. I still generally viewed others as “the enemy” during this period of my life, especially when it came to dealing with my psychic abilities, and I was slow to believe that I wouldn't be mocked or shot down.
These guys were paying a lot of attention to me. It felt good and I began to relax. Barry introduced them: Jim, an ex-cop, who looked more like a male model; Kerry, Barry's colleague, who was wearing a pooka shell necklace and flowered Hawaiian shirt; Steve, a television writer; Dick, an astronomer; and Peter, a chemist. They all knew one another. I was the new kid on the block and they were treating me like a queen. It was amazing how much confidence the attention helped me muster; my silence lasted all of about thirty seconds and they even convinced me to be the first “sender.”
Barry shut off the light to begin, and the room became so dark I could barely see the outline of my arm. Then we all held hands. In the center of the circle were a microphone and a tape recorder to document our responses. Barry was the first to speak, softly leading us through a visualization to help us relax. I must have dozed off, because after five minutes passed, I jumped at the sound of Barry's voice.
“Send a name, Judith,” he instructed. “Choose someone you know very well, and hold that person in your awareness.”
He went on to say that the others would spontaneously relate any impressions they received about the person, no matter how ridiculous.
I followed the directions and spoke aloud the name “Geordie,” a close family friend I'd known for years. Then I sat back and waited.
There was a long silence that seemed to last forever. Predictably, my first thought was that I was doing something wrong. Then there was an outbreak of laughter.
Barry giggled. “I can't believe what I'm picking up. I see a can of Bacobits sitting on a kitchen shelf. I can almost taste them. Food. Food. All I can think of is food.”
Everybody laughed. For a moment, I tensed up, afraid they were laughing at me.
“I see an image of a big house,” Steve continued. “It looks like the Palisades or Brentwood. Not bad. I wouldn't mind living there myself.”
I began to let go, feeling less self-conscious, already blown away by the accuracy of their comments.
Jim spoke next. “I keep hearing a word repeating over and over in my head. It sounds like ‘Hummel' or ‘Himmel,' but I have no idea what it means.”
“I can see a picture of Geordie,” Peter offered. “He's a thin man in his midforties with straight brown hair down to his waist.”
For ten minutes they took turns giving their impressions until everybody was finished. Then we went on to the next phase: feedback.
Barry turned to me. “Rewind the tape, Judith, and play it back so that everyone can hear it. Please stop it only when the statements are correct.” This was a method of positively reinforcing the “receivers” whenever they had an accurate “hit.”
It had been hard for me to keep quiet during the reading. I kept stopping the tape during the feedback phase, because I could hardly believe how many “hits” there had been. Peter had seen Geordie pretty much the way he was: in his forties, with a thin build and long, straight, brown hair he often tied back in a ponytail. Steve had described his estate, which was in fact located in the Pacific Palisades. The word Jim had been struggling with was “Hormel,” Geordie's last name. But the most striking hit of the session came from Barry. Although Geordie was an avid vegetarian, his family owned a well-known company named Hormel Meats. They were responsible for producing canned products like Spam and other prepackaged meats. The Bacobits Barry had seen were right on target!
After this evening, I continued to meet with the group. Each round, we would trade off: one person sending, the others receiving. Week after week, we came to the NPI to practice, and those of us who stuck with it noticed tremendous improvements in our psychic abilities. Initially, during my first times with the group, I'd draw a blank when we did readings, though everyone else was getting images and impressions. Perhaps it was performance anxiety, or the high expectations I had after the psychometry reading with Thelma. Nonetheless, I kept attending and finally the images started to come, perhaps one or two at each session, and I would share them with the group. Sometimes they were accurate, sometimes not, but the important thing for me was that I got them out and that the group was supportive.
Over the next few months, I was able to psychically read names that were sent in the group and received feedback when I was correct. Deep inside, I continued to worry I might self-destruct if the psychic part of me emerged. But as it did, and as I saw I was still in one piece, and even feeling better than before, the flow of impressions increased. Occasionally, though, I'd hold back if an image seemed too weird, like the strange plexiglass-figurine maker I once saw, which I later learned stood in the middle of a carnival location Steve was sending. Such specific and unusual images, I was finding, turned out to be the most accurate, the ones I shouldn't censor. During this period, I also started having psychic dreams, my readings in the group became more accurate, both Thelma and Barry asked me to do readings as part of my work in the lab, and I began to sense information about friends that they'd confirm was correct.
One day, a man carrying a leather suitcase joined us for about fifteen minutes of a session and then left. He slipped in when the lights were out and, although we knew he was there, nobody wanted to interrupt the reading. We hadn't been quick enough to find out how he'd gotten in or who he was, and then he was gone. Later, we discovered he was an escaped inpatient from one of the locked psychiatric wards upstairs. That same night, he jumped in front of a car. While he was in the emergency room, he told the psychiatric resident that what had happened in the group made him feel unbalanced, hence his suicide attempt.
In fact he was a paranoid schizophrenic, unbalanced to begin with. While we were all trying to listen more closely to the voices in our heads, he was being overwhelmed by his own voices. Focusing on what we were saying was the worst thing he could have done; it only fed into his psychosis. He wasn't stable enough emotionally to enter into this work. We learned a hard lesson from this event. From then on, we'd carefully screen all participants, and no one with serious psychiatric problems would be allowed to attend the sessions.
A regular member of the group further confirmed our stance. Dottie, an editor at a film-production company, made some stunning predictions: her mother's heart attack several weeks before it happened, a friend's car crash, a big Los Angeles earthquake. Unfortunately, she became seduced by her psychic powers, saw herself as someone uniquely gifted, even chosen. Then she became afraid, obsessed with needing to know where these abilities came from. She wanted answers, but didn't like the ones we gave her. Although we believed there was a spiritual component to our work, we also held to the idea that prescience was a human capacity that everyone had and could develop.
Dottie listened, but was still convinced that her abilities suggested a special relationship with God. She saw herself as being like the prophets in the Bible. After speaking with a priest, she became so convinced she was hearing the voice of God that she turned into a zealot. Seemingly overnight she gave up her job, renounced her earthly possessions, and became a nun. The last I heard of Dottie, she was living in a secluded nunnery on the New England coast.
All these experiences, positive and negative, opened my eyes to the world of the psychic. Like other worlds, this one was imperfect, with a variety of difficulties and rewards. The more deeply I became involved, the more I was forced to release my romantic illusions about being psychic. Only then could I see these abilities for what they really were: a gift as well as a responsibility that could complicate life. When I watched people go off the deep end—growing too enamored of themselves, emotionally unstable, or spiritually obsessed—it became clear which roads had to be avoided. Psychics, I was learning, weren't perfect: They had the same problems as everyone else, and maybe some extras, too. Trying to integrate the psychic into one's life and maintain balance was no mean feat. If when I first came to the lab I tended to idealize the psychics I met, making them larger than life, then I slowly learned to avoid those who had big egos. In fact, most of the psychics I met dealt with their abilities humbly and with respect. The gift itself demanded such respect. Knowing things about others gave you no right to misuse the knowledge. When properly applied, however, psychic ability added richness, color, depth, and new dimensions to life. It also allowed me to know myself better, to appreciate others by seeing them—seeing into them—with greater clarity.
As I proceeded, the hardest part was to practice continuously with a group and to have them witness my failures. I hated making mistakes in front of other people, but I did it along with everyone else. It was the only way I could expand my capacity. At least in the lab it was all done with laughter and love, which made it much easier. Our group setting was ideal. The real test, however, would be putting the psychic to use in the outside world.
The more I practiced, the more my childhood came into perspective. My confusion and unanswered questions surfaced from what felt like a murky brown sludge hidden within me. Little by little, I dealt with it all. In the end, it was as if I were bathing in warm healing waters and finally emerging, cleansed and purified from the inside out.
I'd never thought much about ghosts one way or the other except for bad horror movies on TV. Although I clearly felt that the spirit of my grandfather was sometimes with me, his spirit had no physical shape, no human aspect. Every once in a while I would wake up in the middle of the night sensing his presence, but I was never frightened. I felt only love for him. On the other hand, ghosts in my mind were something to be afraid of—or a cliché epitomized by Casper—if I believed in them at all. I had to get beyond this stereotype, especially since one of my first assignments in the lab was to work with Barry investigating calls from people reporting “ghosts” in their homes.
The lab would get anywhere from about thirty to sixty such calls a year. Typically, someone would phone, beat around the bush, and then say that strange things were happening around them. They would describe electronic machinery going on and off uncontrollably, objects flying around the room, or noises they were unable to account for—voices or footsteps—apparitions, and lights. Interesting…not like their grandfather at all. But what was this? I couldn't wait to see.
One day, we received a frantic call from a divorced mother in her midthirties. She swore she had been assaulted by a number of different spirits in her Culver City home. Her sixteen-year-old son, in fact, said he walked in one day and witnessed his mother being bounced around like a rag doll by a force he couldn't see. Afterward they both noticed extensive bruises on her body that hadn't been there before. They were at their wits' end. When we privately interviewed her daughter and other sons, each said they had seen two apparitions inside the house. The entire family emphatically insisted that the figures had been too vivid to be anything but real.
After Barry first described the case, I didn't believe a word of it. It seemed hokey; I thought these people were either hallucinating or lying. In my mind it wasn't even worth investigating; they obviously needed some professional help. I suggested that we give them a referral to a psychiatrist and be done with it. My reaction was so negative, in fact, that I finally had to ask myself just what was bothering me so much. After all, I had been in the tunnel and had felt my grandfather's presence. Try as I might I couldn't articulate my mistrust clearly, but I did know that at the heart of my experiences was a component of love. The utter absence of love in this family's account made it distasteful to me.
Barry, on the other hand, agreed that it all seemed far fetched, but he wanted to check it out. Though he and Kerry, another researcher at the lab, suspected that the mother was emotionally disturbed, they decided to pay one quick visit to her house in Culver City. When they went inside, they later told me, cabinet doors in the kitchen appeared to open and shut of their own accord. And although their visit was on an extremely hot autumn day, the bedroom where the alleged attacks had occurred was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator.
During a ten-week investigation, Barry and other members of the research team found cold spots in various places in the house and an overpowering stench in one of the bedrooms. On several occasions, as many as twenty separate observers from the lab saw whirling balls of bright light flying through the bedroom. To eliminate outside influences, they hung heavy quilts and bedspreads over the windows, but these precautions only increased the brilliance of the light show in the darkened surroundings. Simultaneously, the register on a Geiger counter, which previously had been constant, suddenly dropped to zero.
At one point, the lights actually began to take shape, forming a partial three-dimensional image of a man. Unfortunately, although a battery of cameras flashed pictures of the form, no images were picked up on film. At a later time, though, after a particularly elaborate display, Barry photographed one of the cold spots in the bedroom. When the film was developed, in the center of the photo he found a ball of light about a foot in diameter.
Midway into the investigations Barry invited Frank DeFelita, who had previously done a television special for NBC on ghosts, to visit the house. DeFelita brought in equipment for documentation, and was lucky enough to witness many of the phenomena. (He went on to write a novel about this extraordinary situation,
The Entity,
which was later made into a feature film.)