Visits From Heaven. Josie Varga

instructed to get the holy water and sprinkle it throughout Lia's and Erica's rooms as we both prayed. He told me to picture Amanda in a bell jar in my backyard. This suggestion made no sense to me, but I wasn't about to argue; I wanted this spirit out of my home.

      My heart was racing the entire time, but, after about ten minutes, Anthony said, “Josie, she is no longer in your house. She's in your backyard. I will now help to guide her to the Light.”

      This was all very hard for me to believe. So there was a ghost in my house named Amanda who was very fond of my daughter. And my friend, an amazing medium, was able to ask her to leave and to guide her to the Light, all while speaking over the phone?

      Of course, the true test would come later when my daughter went to bed. Would she complain about things moving in her room as she had done for over a month? Would she continue to refuse to sleep claiming that a ghost was in her room?

      Astonishingly, Lia stopped complaining completely from that day forward. She has not complained about sleeping in her room since. She has stopped running into my room crying and asking to sleep with my husband and me. She stopped just like that. Was this outcome just a coincidence? No, I don't believe it was.

      Remember the clock that Anthony said was stuck between 8:45-10:45? Initially, my husband and I could not find this now infamous clock. Truthfully, I did not want to find it.

      But one week later, I was reaching for something in the back of a cabinet in my living room. In its back corner my eyes caught sight of an old clock that belonged to my parents. My heart began to race once again. I stared in utter disbelief. There, before my eyes, was the clock that Anthony (through Amanda) had told me about, and it was indeed stuck between 8:45-10:45.

      Shortly afterwards, I ran into my neighbor and asked her if she knew whether a woman named Amanda had ever lived in my house. This lady has lived in my neighborhood her entire life, so if anyone would know the answer, she would be the one. No, there had been no Amanda at my house, but she said, “There had been an Andrea, though, who lived in your house back when it was first built.”

      So her name was really Andrea, a kind spirit who had watched over my daughter Lia and was now home in the Light. This unwelcomed and unknown guest in my own home helped give me one of the most incredible validations that I have ever received.

       Two for Two

       Suzane Northrop

      New York

       www.theseance.com

      I have had the honor of working as a trans-medium for over thirty years and have experienced countless connections with dead people (DPs) along the way. In turn, these connections create some great stories for people to share. But here is a story I would like to share of my own special happening. It involves what transpired during the testing done by Dr. Gary Schwartz for the 2000 HBO documentary “Life Afterlife,” which later formed the basis for his book The Afterlife Experiments.

      There were a number of mediums involved in the testing, including John Edward, George Anderson, Anne Gehman, Laurie Campbell, and me. The tests were to be conducted at the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

      We landed in Tucson and went directly to the lab for the taping of the documentary. It was there that for the first time I met Dr. Schwartz and his team. Although we weren't fully familiar with the ground rules, we did know generally that each medium would be asked to do what he or she does so well.

      We weren't told specifically what would happen until the next day. We would each meet with the same “sitter” (that is the person being read by the medium) whom we had never met. Each of us would be wired up to monitors as was the sitter (whose name I learned later was Patricia Price), and all information collected would go into the computer as data. From that data Dr. Schwartz would be able to ascertain percentages of “hits” or accurate information. The electrical impulses would be analyzed to see if any of the mediums were reading the sitter's mind. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy but hey…I was just the guinea pig! You can read all about this as it's been documented in Dr. Schwartz's book The Afterlife Experiments. However, here I would like to talk about a back-story that didn't make it into the book.

      On the day of taping we all arrived at the lab which was appropriately named “The Living Energy Center.” I remember noticing a large man in the waiting room. I assumed he was one of the grips or guys who work with all of the film equipment and crew. I honestly didn't really think much of it until later that night when all the filming was finished, at least as far as the testing of the mediums was concerned.

      As it turned out, the sitter had lost her son who, along with his dog, had dominated the information coming through to each medium. After sixteen hours of taping, we would finally meet with Dr. Schwartz to discuss what had transpired. It was then that I learned the guy I had taken special notice of—Michael whom I thought was a grip—was actually the husband of the sitter whose son (also named Michael) had dominated the readings.

      Michael (the father), who was not into all this medium stuff, had stood outside the testing room listening to all the information coming through from his son. Included was validating information that Michael had never told his wife of almost thirty years. The information was so strong that Michael went from being a total nonbeliever to feeling, for the first time since his son's death, a sense of connection, a sense of his son wanting his parents to know that he was alright.

      Later I would learn that Michael actually went to his local biker bar in the mountains and shared with everyone all the information from his dead son. This was very out of character for Michael, and he was running the risk of having all his biker friends think he surely must have gone off the deep end. But he just told it as it was.

      After performing the initial afterlife experiment, one of Dr. Schwartz's main concerns was that people would say this study wasn't perfect. He asked if we would come back to Arizona to do additional studies in a more demanding environment. This time we would have more than one sitter, and we would not be able to see or hear the sitters, so we didn't know if they were male or female, young or old, etc.

      So, six months later, we were again coming back to Tucson, Arizona at Miraval, a luxury resort, where this time the testing would be even more intensive. The night before this second round of experiments, John Edward and I were sitting around talking and came up with the idea of doing our own little study. We decided to ask for his mother and my father to show up from the Other Side. We left it at that and returned to our own rooms until the next day.

      Right before leaving to go to Miraval where all the testing was taking place, Laurie Campbell came into the room where John and I were getting ready to leave. Out of the blue she asked John, “Did you by chance sit on your mother's curler box or something like that?” John turned several shades of red. It seems that when he was very young in order to see out the car window, his mother had him sit on her curler box. We looked at each other not saying anything but knew, “Hmmmmmmm. That's one out of two!”

      We left for Miraval where at this time there were only four mediums left from original five—John, Laurie, Anne, and me. We were scattered all over the facility away from each other. When the sitters arrived, as noted, we couldn't see or hear them.

      This was a two-day affair. After seeing at least seven or eight people that day, it was towards the very end of the testing session when the next-to-last sitter walked in. I started giving the information I was getting. I sensed something familiar about this particular sitter and continued to read getting a wealth of clear information from her deceased husband such as how he died, his name, etc. When I was all done and the session was over, I was allowed to turn around and see who the sitter was—it was none other than Patricia Price, the original sitter from the original experiment!