The woman with a bushy ponytail and a strong Boston accent who I have paid $40 to see suddenly puts her hands around her throat and rushes to where I’m sitting in a row of folding chairs alongside 20 other women.
“I’m seeing someone behind you. A man with dark hair. Did someone close to you hang himself?” she asks, winded from her frenzied approach.
She is a medium, a woman who claims that she can channel “Spirit” (yes, singular ― she never refers to them as “spirits”) and up until that very second, with only 10 minutes left in a two-hour group reading, I wholeheartedly believed that she and everyone else who claims to speak to the dead are nothing but con artists.
Like most people, I’d seen video clips of world-famous channelers whose “talents” made people crumble to their knees in fits of happy sobs. I’ve always been suspicious of exactly what was happening in those moments and was convinced that these individuals were merely preying on the vulnerable ― people who were desperate to know that their loved ones are at peace in the afterlife. I’ve heard that these psychics wore earpieces that allowed producers to feed them information about particular audience members — details gathered by a member of the medium’s staff before the reading that could then be spun into the act. So, when a highly intelligent woman who I absolutely adore bought me a ticket to a reading ― even though everything within me told me this medium with a soft-focus glamor shot on her website was a fraud ― I agreed to go.
There were seven of us in our social group who attended the reading and all of us were, in one way or another, directly affected by the current opioid crisis