Signs from the Other Side. Bill Philipps

on Long Island, I was awakened by a natural light in the far corner of the room. Actually, a supernatural light.

      It was my mom.

      She was young, beautiful, healthy, and happy — not the sickly, beaten-down woman I had just seen die in the hospital. When I realized that it was her and acknowledged her, she smiled. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but I knew this was not a dream. I was awake, and she was there, like an apparition. She appeared to be more alive than I was at that hour.

      “Billy, I want you to know that I’m okay,” she said in a soft, soothing voice. “Also, know that I will take care of you.”

      And then she vanished.

      I stayed awake for a while in case she returned, but she didn’t. I continued to sleep in that room for the next couple of nights, hoping . . . but to no avail.

      Within a few weeks after I returned home to Southern California, my dad suddenly began a yearlong journey toward quitting his drug habit. I know it was fueled by my mom’s death, which bothered him a lot. He cried when I called from New York to tell him she had passed. They’d had some serious differences, but I always knew they loved each other, even when they didn’t outwardly show it. Since the end of that year, my dad has been clean. I believe that when Mom said she would take care of me, this is what she meant. She helped my dad sober up, which was a very big deal for me considering I was only fifteen years old at that time and had just lost her. She couldn’t take care of me in her earthly form because of her own drug addiction, but she made up for it when she entered her next life and helped Dad kick his addiction.

       2 An Unlikely Path

      Toward the end of the summer after my mom’s death, I was walking through a strip mall in Southern California with some friends when we passed a psychic shop. The psychic came out and stopped me.

      “Wow!” she said. “You have an amazing gift.” She was moving her hands in the space around me, like she felt some sort of energy. I watched her as if she was out of her mind. “You should be doing what I’m doing. But the thing is . . . it’s going to take you about three years to understand what I’m saying.”

      Was she serious? My friends and I had a good laugh and moved on.

      But right on cue, three years later, just after my eighteenth birthday in October 2002, a weird thing began happening to me: I would go to bed each night with chills and a feeling that someone was in the room with me. I shared my experiences with my friend’s mom, Rachel, who believed in the spirit world and was someone I had often turned to for advice. She was fascinated by my story and suggested that I visit a metaphysical shop nearby. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea because I didn’t put much stock in places like that. I initially resisted going, but since the strange feelings hadn’t subsided, I decided to give it a shot.

      On the night I went, the store happened to be holding a two-hour class on how to develop mediumship skills, or how to communicate with the deceased. The teachers immediately tagged me as someone with “an aura,” something I shrugged off as nothing but a setup for a future sales pitch. As the youngest person there and one of the few not dressed like a gypsy, I was most concerned with where the exits were and how I could get the heck out of there.

      But I reluctantly stuck with it, and two hours later, I could not deny that the aura existed. I went through two tests, one that measured my extrasensory perception, or ESP, and one that tested my ability to connect with someone or something through the energy of an object. Not only did I pass both with tremendous ease, but I boggled the minds of the instructors and every other person in the room. I even brought one woman to tears because I was able to connect her with her close friend who had died.

      When I reported to Rachel what had happened, she was ecstatic. She tested me further by having me give a reading to her. The spirit that came through to me during that reading meant nothing to her, but she told me to be patient. About a week later, Rachel met with one of her business clients. Through casual conversation, she figured out that the spirit that had come through during my reading with her the previous week was connected to this client, so she eagerly set up a meeting between us.

      That client’s son had recently died. During my reading with her, I found I was able to tell her specific things about him that nobody else knew, as well as give her direct messages from this spirit, who I felt was actually inside my mind telling me what to say. So, a reading I had given to Rachel had been meant for someone she knew, which taught me that those on the other side had the power to orchestrate meetings between two complete strangers — her client and me — in order to communicate their messages to their loved ones.

      As intriguing and exciting as this was, I didn’t drop everything and instantly become the channel that the spirit world obviously wanted me to become. As a recent high school graduate, I was about to start taking classes at the local community college, and I was going to continue voice lessons. I loved to sing, and I had been blessed with a rare operatic tenor voice. I was also working up to forty hours a week as a barista at a café. I decided to stick with the classes, lessons, and job while giving readings when I could. I figured, still being young, I had plenty of time to determine what I should — or was destined to — do with my life.

      I worked on my psychic medium skills at the café by trying to determine the names of customers. I would pick them out of the line, ask the spirits for their names, and then ask the customers their names when they would come up to place their order. I listened for that inner voice from within, and nearly every time I was able to correctly name them or come awfully close. If I were completely wrong, I would usually discover that the name I had heard was that of someone else standing close by, such as next in line. Or I would learn that the name I had received wasn’t that of the customer in line but rather of the actual spirit tied to that person.

      I eventually took my gift to another café on my off days, not as an employee but as a customer. I would sit at a table and try to figure out names of other customers and of the staff. I tried to be discreet in these self-tests, but the times I did tell people what I was doing, my efforts were met with unbridled enthusiasm. I thought they would freak out and call me crazy, but instead they wanted more, and word of my gift quickly spread. Customers would try to time their visits to the café with mine and sit by me. Sometimes they would bring their friends in to “show me off.” Servers would argue over who got to wait on me, with the hope that they could get a reading. I then began doing readings outside the café for many of the people there, meeting them in parks or in their homes, and they paid me for my time. This gift was taking on a life of its own, and it was taking over mine.

      As a result, in January 2003, I left my job at the café. I enjoyed working there, but I was spread too thin and needed to give up something. With the readings providing me money for college and voice lessons, I made mediumship my job instead.

      Every reading I gave increased my knowledge of the extent of my capabilities. Like anything else in life, the more I practiced this skill, the more I mastered it.

      I learned that when I did a reading, I had to enter a trance-like state. Those on the other side were throwing information at me nonstop. Therefore, I needed to be laser-focused and share it immediately with my client as it came in. The message from the spirit was like the sound waves of music passing through a radio (me) to a listener (the client). I then had to help the client interpret it. When we were finished, it was necessary to completely disconnect myself from it so that I could psychologically prepare for the next reading. Each time, I expended an enormous amount of energy. If I hadn’t consistently “discarded” each reading when it was finished, my brain would have crashed from the overload of information.

      I also learned early on that those on the other side were often fighting for position in my mind so that I would hear their messages. If I was reading for a group, it was as if their deceased