Do Dead People Watch You Shower? by Concetta Bertoldi Page A

that go with that letter—just to jog the client’s mind I might say, “It’s a J —is it Jerry? John? Jack?—because I find so often that the client is in a state of mild shock to have this connection, even if they have come to me expressly to have it. Names are something that I’m less than perfect on—and for that I can only apologize. The spirit on the Other Side will tell me the name and I do try and frequently will get it dead on. But I’m not God. If I tell someone, it’s a D —David, Donald, Dominick…I hope they won’t be surprised if it’s Donahue—but usually I can give enough other details about the person so that there is no doubt in the client’s mind. Often to verify who is speaking I’ll ask how they crossed over and they’ll show me how they died. I might see that they were horizontal and often this means that they were in bed—whether they had a lingering illness or died in their sleep. Or I might feel a sensation in my chest and ask the client, “Did she have something the matter with her lungs?” I get all different sorts of feelings, like I’m being hit, or a sensation of having water in my lungs, or like having the wind knocked out of me, depending on what they are trying to tell me. It’s never the same. Or I might see something going through the whole body and ask the client, “Was it cancer?” Or I might actually see blood and know that it was an accident or something worse. But I do this only so the client can know that the person I’m talking with is who they want to be in touch with. Sometimes they will actually name a specific illness, like diabetes, for instance. Sometimes dead people don’t want to tell me how they died—it’s still upsetting to them (often this is in the case of an overdose or some other thing that they are “ashamed” of or haven’t yet healed from) or they don’t want to upset the person here by talking about it.
    I hear them much more than I see them. They speak to me in soft whispers. I do get images, though, if there’s something specific they want me to describe. Or I might smell smoke—cigar, cigarette, or pipe smoke—or alcohol or a particular cologne that will be recognizable to the person I’m doing the reading for. I can say, “Was your uncle Louie a smoker? Because I can smell it on him.” Sometimes I’ll hear a melody, which is a bit of a problem for me because I’m not much of a singer, but if I recognize it, I do my best to convey it to the client and often he’ll know what it means.
    It can be that they come for only a few fleeting seconds, which happens quite often. The dead are an energy source and they have only a certain amount of energy, so they rarely stay too long. As soon as they come to me, they try to give me the most important messages that they want me to pass along, and most of the time they leave pretty quickly after that. If they come to me collectively, with several friends and family members, the meeting will last longer since they feed off one another’s energy.

How long does the typical reading last?
     
    This is something that many people find surprising because they are used to the notion of going to a card reader and having what is really a consultation. A reader will lay out the cards in a particular spread and go over them one by one, which can take quite a while and the client might be asking questions along the way. It’s not unusual for this kind of reading to last half an hour or an hour. What I do is shorter but much more intense. The client is in direct contact with a spirit he recognizes and can validate, and a lot of information will be given in maybe just ten minutes. Then the spirit is gone. If multiple spirits show up, it can go to fifteen minutes, but longer than that would be very unusual.

When a medium is requested to speak with a particular spirit, does that spirit get pulled away from whatever it was doing on the Other Side to come through?
     
    No, of course not. Nobody is