You enter a room and hand the person in front of you something that you wear or use, that has touched your skin. The longer the object has been in contact with your body, the stronger the vibe, the frequency, whatever it is that a psychometrist reads about you and your life in that object.
Psychometry is the most mysterious yet plausible kind of psychic ability, at least to me. In my worldview, it makes perfect sense that a piece of jewelry I wear, that a cell phone permanently pressed to my ear, carries something of me that a psychic might read.
Back in the 1970s,when I was still in my twenties and in graduate school, an impulse prompted me to drive from Tallahassee to Cassadaga for a reading. I’d read something about this Spiritualist town of psychics – probably a Halloween piece, when the mainstream media back then – and yes, even now – felt it was okay to write about things that go bump in the night.
The actual Spiritualist camp hasn’t changed much in all these decades. The streets remain narrow, the air strangely still, and if you listen closely to that stillness, you may hear the whispers of ghost, spirits, the deceased. Everyone who lives here supposedly believes that there is no such thing as death, that the soul simply moves on. We’ve written about Cassadaga before.
In spite of spirituality, humans are political creatures and politics in Cassadaga are very much alive. According to the camp board, the folks who live and work across the street from the Cassadaga Hotel are not genuine, and those inside the confines of the camp are the real McCoy. We’ve found both sides to be equally good. You just have to follow your hunches about where to get a reading.
That day in the 1970s, I knocked on the door of the first house that felt right to me, and had a reading from a man confined to his bed, a quadriplegic, a psychometrist. He asked for a personal object and I gave him a topaz ring that I’d worn for years. His hands still worked and his fingers closed over my ring and after a bit, he started to talk. I no longer remember the specifics, but I know he read me backward and forward, inside and out. I kind of staggered out of there.
Some years later, this man, Wilbur Hull, connected Rob and me to Hazel Burley, who had studied under Hull, but as a medium rather than a psychometrist. Years later, Cassadaga was where Rob and I discovered we were going to be creative partners, that we would marry and have a daughter. It’s where Megan learned her Disney internship will turn into a full-time job. And she learned this through Tracy, a psychometrist located in that part of Cassadaga deemed non-genuine. Ha.
After Megan emerged from her reading, her face was lit up like high noon. “She’s incredible. She held my cell phone and shut her eyes and for the first fifteen minutes, I never said a word. But it was like she knew me.” Megan then read from her hastily scribbled notes about what Tracy had predicted for her during the next two to three years, most of it positive and wondrous.
So I knocked on the door and asked for a reading. Tracy and I sat in her front office. She explained that she did her readings by holding a personal object, so I handed her my wedding ring. She shut her eyes and started talking. The first thing she picked up on was my dad – an older gentleman in spirit who is emotionally close to me. And then she mentioned a child in spirit, a boy, a brother, something many psychics have mentioned over the years. Two or three years after I was born and before my sister’s birth, my mother got pregnant and the baby, a boy, was stillborn.. This is when I knew the woman was genuine. “Your brother facilitates things for you, makes certain things easier. He’s always around you.”
She spoke for about fifteen minutes and, like Megan, I didn’t say anything and was surprised at how much she knew about me and the people around me. She had some terrific predictions about the next two to three years, so I hope she’s correct.
After the reading, I asked how the information came to her – in images? Words? Feelings? She explained it was a combination of things. Sometimes she hears whispers – names, for instance, often come to her that way. Other times, she seems images, places, people’s faces. In health matters, she often feels the client’s aches and pains.
I told her my first reading in Cassadaga years ago was with another psychometrist, Wilbur Hull. She remembered him. “The parapelegic,” she said. “He used to do his readings from his bed.”
“That’s how he read for me. You’re every bit as good as he was.”
With that, she handed me her card, I paid her, and ducked back out into the cool evening air, feeling more upbeat and optimistic than I have in a long time.
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This photo is from inside the Cassadaga Hotel. Cell phone pic, but it gives you an idea of the quaintness of the lobby, like some place lost in time. That sign on the stand, by the way, is advertising a ghost tour.
