Soul Searchers 

The dead are talking. They speak freely in movies such as Ghost and The Sixth Sense. TV shows like Crossing Over With John Edward and Ghost Whisperer seem to indicate that talking to the dead and communicating with spirits is quite possible. Clairvoyants who claim to receive messages from the dead—and warnings not to listen to them—go back at least as far as biblical times. Psychics and other practitioners of otherworldly communication continue to flourish across the United States and, yes, here in Utah.

The Gift
Spiritual medium Barbara Ljord is one of several Utahns who feel that “dead” is hardly the right word for people who have passed beyond this life. They’re still here, she says—just not in their bodies.

“We don’t die. Our souls are life everlasting,” says Ljord. “The body we are in is just a vehicle for who we are—a car has all the components to be driven, but cannot drive itself.”

Ljord says she has had the gift of talking to the dead since childhood. As a psychic medium, she regularly gives readings at Golden Braid Books in Salt Lake City. A native Australian, Ljord was in Cura'ao in a pantry at her daughter’s home when ghosts appeared to her. She says that a little ghost girl, wearing a dress from the 1800s, watched as Ljord prepared a bottle for her grandchild’s 1:30 a.m. feeding.

“A few moments later, her mother came out of the pantry, looked at the baby on my shoulder and stood behind her daughter,” Ljord recalls. She says that the ghost woman explained that her husband had not come back from being at sea, and, meanwhile, their house—which was on the property where the three currently stood in the kitchen—had burned down. “They were landlocked into the time when their house burned while they waited for her husband to come back.”

Ljord says ghosts don’t always appear in the body. “I am often aware of spirit presences—such as a breeze that rushes past when there is no wind.” Ljord feels that ghostly presences are almost always comforting and are most often the spirits of family and friends of family members who have passed on.

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“My daughter-in-law passed away with cancer four years ago, and we were aware of her presence around us,” says Ljord. “Our little dog, Miss Rickey, died before my daughter did. When the girls would make their beds and smooth the covers, paw prints appeared within minutes.”

She describes earthly life as “a big stage production where we immerse ourselves into this role we are playing. Our body is like our car in that, when it gets old, broken down and rusted out, we scrap it and keep on coming back into new lives. We don’t just have one lifetime. We couldn’t experience everything on Earth in just one life.”

The Shaman
Elena Radford is an Inca shaman in Park City who says that she has always had the gift of talking to the dead, along with animals, plants, mountains and “any frequency or any energy.”

She feels she has inherited and developed sacred language used by her people—the ancient Inca culture—from thousands of years ago, and that the tools accompanying these skills are multidimensional in quality and allow her to tap into the DNA and ancestral heritage of her clients on every level, reaching their spirit and soul and eliminating any and all negative energy.

During her childhood, she says this connection existed with other children and would come to her in a wave of emotion through which she felt their story, background and home. Trusting this feeling and sensing it was a gift, Elena cultivated such qualities through her college years until she moved to the United States. She describes talking to the spirit of a person who has died as a very pleasant experience.

Most people who want to talk to their dead relatives “want to complete experiences that they didn’t have the chance to complete in life.” The conversation is a “heart to heart,” Radford says. The most common questions are “How is my father (or other relative) doing? Where are they now?”

Why do people typically wish to contact someone who has died? Kym Couture, a licensed clinical social worker, explains that when someone loses a loved one, he faces his own death right up front.

“There is a mystery of why we are here and they are there,” Couture says. “We feel it’s impossible that they are gone.” Within such grief comes a longing for connection. “We think that if we can just validate that our loved one is OK, we would be OK, too,” she explains.

Martin Tanner, chairman of the nonprofit International Association of Near Death Studies of Utah (IANDS) has spoken to a number of people who say they have seen their dead relatives during the dying process. He recalls a 15-year-old girl who had a contest with friends as to who could drink the most and take the most drugs. “She won, and she died on the couch,” he says. “Her near-death experience included what she described as a courtroom setting, where her relatives told her she didn’t deserve to be there. She said they tried to scare her and told her to change her life.”

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The Grief Counselor
When Rosalind Fretz told Susan Krantz that her daughter, who’d died from cancer, had fought off death with all her strength, Krantz realized that the grief counselor could communicate with the dead. Earlier that night, Krantz attended her first grief support group with no specific expectations. Partly because the meeting was held at a mortuary, she asked Fretz, “Do you feel people here who have passed?”

Fretz replied that she couldn’t be in this business without encountering energies from the deceased. Krantz asked if Fretz felt her daughter’s presence. Fretz responded that the 24-year-old was there right then. She said, “Heather is a real fighter. When she was dying, her spirit guides had a hard time convincing her that it was time to go. She actually got in a tiff with them. And she didn’t leave one minute sooner or later than she was supposed to.”

“Rosalind’s statements that Heather put up a fight, had to go on her own terms and be in control of the situation really validated that she was talking with Heather. It was a happy validation, even though Heather was a difficult personality,” Krantz says.

In 20 years as a grief counselor who also sees private clients, Fretz has discovered that the spirit-world dimension is not very far away.

“People think that heaven is way up high when, in reality, it almost overlaps our world, although the dimension resonates at a higher frequency,” she says.

Fretz says that her ability to convey messages from the dead is very comforting. It’s not only that a message is relayed, but that her words and the spirit confirm to the grieving person on a verbal, physical and spiritual level if her insight is true. As Fretz puts it, “It isn’t just about hearing something you want to hear; it’s about hearing something that you know is true.”

She describes her clients as seeking resolution in an effort to come to terms with unresolved issues at the time of death. Sometimes, she adds, a person will have a generational issue that can be better understood. “If someone had a fear of water, but never had any experience that would account for that, I would go back into the generations and find that they had a great grandfather who drowned. Once an issue is recognized, it can often be resolved without any further work on that issue.”

She adds that grief is a natural consequence of a desire to want to continue a relationship with a loved one. “When the loved one is dead, the only way to continue the relationship is to access them in that space.” She adds that while she believes that people don’t need a facilitator to access their dead relatives, “most people will probably seek a facilitator, especially if the death is shocking or unexpected. It disempowers people to realize their lack of control over that.” She adds that knowing a loved one is all right helps a person define their own fear about death and what happens after this life.

One of Fretz’s clients was a woman whose daughter died a slow death from an illness. “The mother was very concerned that she looked so uncomfortable. It haunted her mother that she had suffered in the transition.” Traversing between this dimension and the next, Fretz says she discovered that the woman’s daughter wasn’t in pain. “She had a very strong personality and a sufficiently strong will to go back and forth between the dimensions to make sure her concerns were handled until she was ready. What appeared to be a lot of struggle was, in reality, just her exercising her agency.” She says that often people who have died try to come back and comfort those over the loss.

Though she still feels that her daughter’s spirit makes contact occasionally, Krantz feels that constantly continuing to seek that comfort is probably inappropriate.

“You can’t depend on that and get hooked on it and keep involving your loved one who has passed. It would be easy to get addicted to going in every week to try to talk to your person who has passed away. You also need to respect the boundaries of the spirit world and have faith that it is what it is.”

She adds that one way to tell whether the comforting is complete is when the grieving person begins to feel that it is time to move on.

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The Psychic
While she has always had clairvoyant abilities, psychic Pepper Gregory says she began to see and hear the dead after experiencing two serious concussions in her 40s.

“I wasn’t really happy about it,” she says. “I didn’t want to hear and see them. It’s distracting. But my favorite aspect is that it confirms and reassures me that there really is another level of existence.”

Shortly after taking a fall that led to the concussions, Gregory traveled to St. George to attend the funeral of her mother’s friend.

“I walked past this lady’s casket, and she started talking to me in my mind. It weirded me out. She said, ‘Tell your Mom about the cookie sheets.’ ” Later, her mother explained that while the friend had money, she often drove older cars. When there were holes in the floorboards, she covered them with cookie sheets. “There’s no way you could have known that,” Gregory’s mother told her. The dead woman also told Gregory that she would soon be singing at the funeral. Gregory had no such plans, but about five minutes later, a woman approached her to say, ‘We have had two women drop out, will you sing?’ ”

That day was her first experience with the other side. “Later on, I became aware that there were figures around me. A deceased person’s spirit is pure white, like an old photo negative.”

During her psychic readings, “Clients don’t come in alone, spirits walk in with them. Sometimes there are too many and I have to read them one at a time. They all want to talk,” she says.

While she usually declines to predict impending death, she felt compelled to tell one client that her father needed to see a doctor. “I told her to check his will, to see who his business partners were, and hopefully she wouldn’t have to worry further about it. He died a couple of weeks later from an undetected hole in his heart.”

On a stormy day two weeks later, the daughter returned to tell Gregory she wanted to talk to her father. Gregory said she would try to see if he was there. The lights flickered. “I guess your dad is here,” said Gregory. “I thought he would tell his daughter that he loved her, but he started telling her what she was doing wrong. It was only a few phrases, but she totally got it.

“Deceased spirits don’t tell you things you would tell yourself. They really are there to help you. Sometimes the dead will just send you an image or one word or a phrase. At first I think ‘Maybe this isn’t right,’ but it is always right.” When Gregory reads an obituary, she hears a voice that says, “graduated.” “I get the feeling that this life is like a school. When you leave the planet, you graduate.”

The Mortician
When a family who was planning a funeral brought out their mother’s journal to choose a verse to be read at her funeral, Shayneh Starks, mortician and owner of Salt Lake City’s Starks Funeral Parlor, smelled a strong waft of gardenias.

“Did your mother wear gardenia perfume?” she asked.

“No, but she loved gardenias,” the family said, taking it as a sign that they needed to add gardenias to the funeral flowers.

“Whether that was coincidental, I don’t know, but as a professional, I know that there are very powerful and comforting signs that people get that their loved one is still in their lives, but in a different form,” she says. In her 15 years in the funeral business, “It’s just crazy the number of times that I’ve heard people say that their loved one’s room has filled with everyone who died before, to help escort them over. I’ve been in rooms where the person who is dying will look right past their family and start talking to their husband or wife who died 20 years ago.”

The Skeptic
Rev. Tom Goldsmith of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City looks at it another way.

“We have a whole congregation full of skeptics, but the truth is, when it comes to death, nobody is an expert. All the experts are dead, and they haven’t come back. Since nobody is an expert, that leaves us all vulnerable to figuring out what is on the other side.”

He says reaching out to spirits may not be impossible. “I’m not going to put it past the realm of possibility that mediums can get in touch with the spirits of the dead. I harbor my doubts, but I leave the door of possibility narrowly open.”

Goldsmith taught a theology course at the Unitarian Church that discussed immortality. “The Unitarians all have an interesting point of view. None of them have that traditional blueprint that there is an ‘up there’ and a ‘down here,’ but there is a sense of something that lingers in some metaphoric, poetic sense that is immortal. If you don’t believe in the Pearly Gates of Heaven and St. Peter holding his slate to admit you, it doesn’t mean you don’t believe in an afterlife.”

The Ghost Chasers
In 2007, Derek VonHatten was visiting a ghost town when he heard a woman singing, the volume of her voice steadily increasing.

“It scared us. We took off and drove away,” he recalls. Since then, VonHatten has tried to prove to others that he actually heard a voice from beyond the grave. As the founder of Untitled Paranormal Investigators, his Website lists 16 Utah locations, mainly in the Price and Helper area, where he feels he has actually captured dead people’s voices. Such sites include a mix of houses, cemeteries, industrial buildings and ghost towns.

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The UPI database includes electronic voices captured on tape (EVPs) that VonHatten feels are voices of spirits attempting to communicate with living persons. Such manifestations are particularly plentiful in sites with colorful histories.

On May 1, 1900, the Winter Quarters Mine near Scofield exploded, leaving a death toll of 246 people, both rescue and mine workers. At that time, the Scofield School was utilized as a temporary morgue and hospital. VonHatten and his team captured EVPs that included a voice saying, “Try here,” and a woman’s voice saying, “Hi.” Another voice “that seemed to go right along with our being in the hospital was a man yelling out loud, which we caught clearly. When we gather the EVPs, we make sure that they can’t be anything else,” he says.

In the Lighthouse School, which was built in 1900 and once housed delinquent children, VonHatten captured a woman’s voice saying, “He raped me.” And a man’s voice saying, “Oh, baby.” Eighty percent of the time, the voices are not heard until playback, but VonHatten clearly recalls hearing, in real time, “an almost hissing, growl-like breath” in a Scofield School classroom. “Something didn’t like us standing there,” he says “When I heard that voice, the skeptic in me came out and I wondered if it could be a four-wheeler outside. I ran to the window. There was no one there.”

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After the woman’s voice said “Hi” to VonHatten and his investigators, they said, “Please come out and show us that you are here.” They then heard a sound like a metal folding chair being dragged across the floor. “We put the video camera there, trying to figure out what happened. The team tipped another chair over, tried knocking some over and sat on one to put weight on it. We realized it was not just one of the chairs that fell.

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“Through the things that we have seen and captured, I can guarantee that there is behavior from the dead after they have passed,” VonHatten says. “I could not possibly change my mind.” He feels, though, that his experiences have confirmed to him and co-founder Kristina Niles that there is no heaven or hell.

“We had never really believed there is room in our time for religion, and finding this variety of spiritual beings in our realm has shown us that they simply stay on Earth,” VonHatten says. “We seem to grow in the afterlife, some quicker than others, to realize and accept our death.”