Shortly after Kim Pratt’s 26-year-old son, Tyler Carter, died of a drug overdose in 2016, the idea of seeing a psychic or a medium popped into her head. She had never considered it before. She didn’t know a thing about them. But she and her sister learned the name of a medium in Milton, and Pratt, reeling from her son’s death, asked her sister to go for her.
Even now, Pratt can’t say exactly what she was seeking. “I just wanted my son,” she said in a recent interview.
The medium told Pratt’s sister that he saw Tyler repeatedly hold up his hand, palm forward, fingers splayed. A handprint Tyler had made in elementary school had hung in a corner in his family’s living room for years. That morning, Pratt recalled, “I had gone up to it and laid my hand over it, just missing him.”
“Knowing that my son is still around, still near me, I can connect with him, helped me survive.” Kim Pratt
The medium’s message, Pratt said, was the first of “hundreds” of validations she has received from mediums telling her that Tyler lives on. “I’ve always believed in God, always believed that there was an afterlife,” said Pratt, who lives in the town of Georgia. She watched Tyler fight addiction for 10 years and when he died, she said, “I knew he was OK.” Still, she grieved, and mediums have provided comfort.
“I feel like it helped me more than a psychiatrist, more than therapy, more than anything,” Pratt said. “Knowing that my son is still around, still near me — I can connect with him — helped me survive.”
Bridging the gap between the living and the dead is an intrinsic human desire. For centuries, mediums have claimed the ability to communicate with the deceased, while other practitioners have purported to predict the future, channel spirits and read the energy of those who sit before them. For just as long, skeptics have doubted, criticized and condemned — whether on religious grounds, charges of exploitation or both.
Vermont’s colorful history with psychics includes a 19th-century set of brothers whose reputation for conjuring full-body manifestations in their Chittenden farmhouse earned their hometown the moniker “Spirit Capital of the Universe.” (See sidebar on page 27.)
Present-day Vermonters seeking supernatural solace and guidance still turn to mediums and psychics who claim to tap into the metaphysical world in order to transmit messages from deceased loved ones and offer insights into clients’ true selves. Seers of all stripes will gather at the third annual Vermont Psychic Expo at the Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction next month.
Psychics and mediums are not licensed or regulated by the state, and there is no easy way to determine how many of them practice here. Although the Vermont Consumer Assistance Program has not received any complaints about such practitioners for at least six years, some people are quick to call them charlatans.
“There are some that are, just like there are bad doctors and there are bad lawyers,” said Shivan Sarna, an author who produces health-education courses and is a longtime client of psychics, including one in Vermont. “There are also good ones.” She has consulted psychics for 40 years, she said.
Vermont psychics researched for this article charge between $95 and $222 for an hourlong session. “If any psychic or medium asks you to give them money to lift a curse — run,” Sarna said. “That is not how this works.”
Sarna and others who seek metaphysical connections say it has helped them to access the wisdom of their spiritual guides, navigate relationships and career decisions, understand what’s going on with their children, affirm their own intuition, and, yes, connect with deceased friends and relatives. Vermont practitioners range from those who read palms, auras and tarot cards to Ava Orah, a Royalton trance channeler who says she allows beings who reside in the Pleiades star cluster to speak through her, offering guidance and wisdom.
Lincoln psychic medium Rebecca Freedner senses the energy of her clients and their close associates, living and dead. “I don’t know how it works,” Freedner said. “It took me many years to learn or understand that I receive and perceive a lot more information than the average person.” It’s like being an antenna, she said, and she has honed an ability to tune in to and understand the energy radiating on both sides of the veil. “I just know how to interpret the information in this ‘field of infinite potential,’ as I call it.”
Anyone can do this, she said, though not everyone is meant to. “It’s kind of like we all, as human beings, have muscles in our bodies,” she said. “Some of us are athletes, and some of us are couch potatoes. Most of us are somewhere in between. And I find it’s the same with intuition. We all have it. Some of us are really obtuse to it. Some of us work in it, like I do, and most of us are somewhere in between.”
Sitting under the sloped roof of the second-floor guest room in her 200-year-old farmhouse, Freedner, 49, rests her left forearm on a long, rectangular crystal as she works. She sees clients almost exclusively on Zoom and prefers to know nothing beforehand about them or their reason for calling. She doesn’t know how a session will unfold, she said, and tells her clients, “I trust whatever is going to come through is what you’re needing right now.”
During an opening meditation with a client a couple of months ago, Freedner said, “I was so overwhelmed by the presence of this woman’s mother that I could almost not complete the meditation.” She asked her client if her mother had died recently. Last week, her client replied.
“The presence of her mother was so profoundly joyful, and we both felt it,” Freedner said. “We almost just laughed the whole time.” Connecting with dead people has never been frightening or unpleasant, she said.
Williston psychic medium Maya Liotard traces her ability to her childhood in Oakland, Calif., when she could tell her mother that the phone was about to ring. She had started taking classes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute when, in 2005, her 16-year-old daughter, Tara, was killed in a gang-related shooting. “I really thought that was the end of my life, the end of my world,” Liotard said. Desperate to know that Tara was OK, she went to mediums. “I wanted to test them,” she said.
At the time, she and her older daughter had recently moved, but Liotard was too depressed to set up house. They lived amid unpacked boxes, with Liotard’s mattress on the floor.
She consulted a medium she had never met. “All I told her was that my daughter passed. I didn’t tell her how. I didn’t tell her her age, nothing. And I just said, ‘I just want to connect with her.'”
The medium told her that Tara wanted to ask her a question: “Why are you still sleeping on the floor?”
“I just fell apart,” Liotard said. “I just started weeping because I thought, There’s no way she knew that.”
Liotard tested other mediums. “And every time, it was just like they brought through her personality. They brought through how she looked.” And, Liotard recalled, they brought messages from Tara: “‘Mom, I’m fine, really. I’m not in pain. I’m not suffering anymore … There’s no reason for you to live in that past.'”
It got to the point, Liotard said, where “I would get done with these readings, I would be laughing and just feeling like she was sitting right in the room, just like her old self. She was a character.”
After Tara died, Liotard joined the Compassionate Friends support group for people who have lost a child. “You pass the pillow, and you give your story, and it’s a hard hour and a half,” Liotard said. “After going to meeting after meeting and listening to all these parents, I thought, Wow, if I could just tell one of them that their kid is still alive, innocence is back, all of their innocence, their joy, their peace, and that they’re not blaming their parents. I just feel like that would be worth giving my whole life to doing that.”
Kim Pratt, the Georgia mother who lost her son, is grateful for people like Liotard. She shared a tight bond with Tyler, who was born when she was 20 years old. She raised him as a single mom for five years, until she remarried and had a second son. Tyler was brave and adventurous, Pratt said. He liked to snowboard, fish and do archery. He was a kid who helped new students acclimate to school.
When he was 14 or 15, he and his friends started experimenting with OxyContin, Pratt said. Tyler progressed to heroin. He got clean, then relapsed multiple times, but he always talked with Pratt. “Mom,” he told her one time, “you don’t ever see any old drug addicts.”
“Doesn’t that scare you?” she asked him.
“Not in the moment.”
After treatment in California, he returned to Vermont in December 2015. A year later, he died of a fentanyl overdose in his grandmother’s bathroom in Essex. Pratt did not see his body after he died, a fact she struggled with later.
The day she sent her sister to the medium, Pratt made macaroni and cheese from scratch. When her sister returned, Pratt offered her lunch, with chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Tyler, through the medium, had mentioned homemade mac and cheese and cookies, her sister told Pratt. He also said something about Pepsi. His aunt had one in her purse. He talked about a flamingo, which meant nothing at first until his aunt remembered that they had visited Las Vegas together and stayed at the Flamingo.
Pratt didn’t get as many validations when she visited the same medium but felt compelled to consult a second Milton medium, Michele Nappi. On a Monday morning, she set out for Nappi’s shop, but she was scared and so went grocery shopping, she said, “and then something made me go back to her shop.” She went in to ask Nappi about making an appointment, “and she’s like, ‘Well, there’s a young man with you right now, and he’s laughing because he dragged you in here.'”
Messages continued to pile up. Pratt and her sister had tickets to see Theresa Caputo, star of the TV show “Long Island Medium,” at the Flynn in 2017. Pratt tried to give away her ticket but was unsuccessful. “OK, Tyler, you better come through,” she said aloud before they left for the theater. And she directed her deceased, boisterous grandmother to bring him.
When Caputo said someone in the audience had lost a son, Pratt said nothing, figuring several people had lost a son. Then Caputo said there was a young man there with his grandmother and that someone in the audience was wearing his ashes. Tyler’s ashes were in the pendant of the necklace his aunt was wearing. Caputo told Pratt that she didn’t see Tyler’s body after he died and then relayed Tyler’s message: “You weren’t supposed to see me when I passed. You would never get that image out of your mind.”
Secure in the knowledge that Tyler remains with her, Pratt doesn’t consult mediums as often anymore, she said. Sometimes, though, she treats herself to a reading for her birthday.
Meet a few historic Vermont psychics
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday for American psychics and spiritualists. Several spiritualist societies incorporated in Vermont during that time. They include the Vermont State Spiritualist Association, which bought 50 acres to use for summer camp meetings in what is now South Burlington’s Queen City Park. Active for decades, the association even had its own post office for a time, former state archivist Sally Blanchard-O’Brien wrote in a 2017 article for the Burlington Free Press. Fire destroyed 13 buildings in the park in 1939, and the group dissolved in 1951.
Elsewhere around the state, Vermonters dabbled in the metaphysical world. Here, courtesy of research provided by Blanchard-O’Brien and writer Joseph Citro, are a few of those practicing in the 19th century:
Calais-born Lucy Ainsworth Cooke, known as “Sleeping Lucy,” diagnosed diseases and prescribed treatment while in a trance. Directories listed her as a “clairvoyant physician.”
Plymouth Notch’s Achsa Sprague drew and painted while blindfolded and delivered trance lectures on topics she had never studied.
Thomas Power James attended a séance in 1873, where he learned that the late Charles Dickens had selected him to complete his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Night after night, James, a printshop worker from Brattleboro, scribbled furiously while in a trance and completed the book in time for Christmas. A copy of Part Second of The Mystery of Edwin Drood “by the spirit-pen of Charles Dickens, through a medium,” is in the local history room at Brattleboro’s Brooks Memorial Library.
Brothers William and Horatio Eddy became world-famous when they conjured full-body materializations of the deceased from the “spirit cabinet” in their Chittenden farmhouse. Their Rutland County town became known as the “Spirit Capital of the Universe.”
State law required “fortune tellers” to be licensed for a time. Act 34, passed in 1937, mandated that seers of any kind pay an annual $5 “privilege tax,” no proof of powers required. The law was enacted primarily for tax purposes, Blanchard-O’Brien wrote. It was repealed in 1978.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Above and Beyond | Seeking your higher self? A chat with the dead? Vermont’s psychics offer otherworldly connections.”
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