Augh!
These days when one thinks of ghosts
it's something like this.
Or when one thinks of mediums
or channeling it's more like this.
Did he know someone by the name of Anna?
Consuelo?
Lucita?
But that was before James Van Praagh.
The lady standing over here,
I think it's your mom.
We'll find out more about it but she just appears.
There's also another lady behind her
which I believe would be her mother.
Right.
(eerie music)
This California channeler is the hottest thing
this side of the great beyond.
He's dazzling followers
and skeptics alike with what he calls
his ability to speak with the dead.
There is no such thing as death.
Love continues.
There are homes over there.
There were trees over there.
There are flowers and gardens.
To them we're the ghosts.
They come down to this lower vibrations,
denser Earth world.
And they can walk through walls
and they see us as forms.
They don't see a solid.
That's where you go,
when you pass over,
to a real solid world.
The 39 year old Van Praagh's best selling book,
Talking to Heaven: A Medium's Message of Life After Death,
has sold more than 600 thousand copies.
But before the book started climbing the charts
Van Praagh made his living selling video tapes
and delivering mass readings.
He says he learned he had a special gift in the first grade.
I said to my teacher Mrs. Wineleck,
I said,
I ran up to her and I said,
"It's okay.
Jon is fine.
Your son is fine.
He just broke his leg but he'll be fine."
And she said,
"What are you talking about?"
And I said,
"There was a car.
He was hit by a car."
About an hour later the principal came in,
she called out the teacher.
The teacher came in crying.
After school she said to me her son,
John,
was in a car accident
and he was hit by a car.
And she said,
"You were right,
his leg was broken."
But,
as they say,
seeing is believing
so I decided to give it a try.
Soon Van Praggh says he was talking with my mother
who passed away when I was in college.
Your mother's speaking very,
very strong,
very fast,
very quickly.
And she's strong.
I feel like her personality is a bit strong too.
Yep, that's mom.
Okay,
she said,
"I'm with her all the time."
And she said,
"Yes, she has flowers in her house.
There are flowers there in the house."
And I want to go to your living room
and there's something there with a pattern with flowers.
No, not in the living room.
Where is it?
The sitting room.
Yeah.
Because this is where your mother is with you.
Cool!
It is conceivable that everything Van Praagh said to me
could have been gleaned from news articles
on me over the years.
Even so,
he surprised me a bit.
When you're in the kitchen do you ever think like,
do you ever get a feeling when you're standing there
in the kitchen of your mom?
Because she said to me,
"I come to her in the kitchen."
And I don't know what it means.
'Cause that's usually where I am, probably.
Okay.
And one more thing.
Who's Kathy?
My sister.
Okay.
She wants to give love.
But until that day
Van Praagh had never heard of Norma Messing.
She wanted to contact her Aunt Ruth
whose 1991 murder has never been solved.
First though,
Van Praagh says,
some other relatives turned up.
Who's Helen?
My first husband's mother.
Okay.
She knows of you
and Helen wants to give you her love!
Van Praagh says he then saw Norma's aunt.
He had been told she was murdered but nothing else.
She was gasping for air.
I will tell you this,
I feel like they hit her.
They hit her first.
I feel she puts her hands up, which is weird.
I get putting hands up.
Was she killed with hands?
She was struck first,
beaten with a cane.
Struck.
She raised her arm probably.
Because her arm was broken.
And then she was strangled.
Okay.
That's the gasping.
Was she found in the bedroom?
Or right in the floor of the bedroom or something?
Yes!
Uh-huh.
She said that.
She sent me that thought, yeah?
There were two people involved with this, okay?
And she did not know these people.
So what do you think?
Norma feels something did happen here.
I could not believe some of the dead on stuff that he had.
Getting my first mother-in- law first,
getting the picture of my first husband.
When we do the successful communication
and the person realizes
they are communicating with their loved one
and there,
indeed,
is no death,
they can start to begin their life.
And the grief is eliminated.
The fear,
the fear of death is eliminated.
Van Praagh knows that he'll always face skeptics
but he believes he has a gift that needs to be shared .
Wouldn't it be a sin to keep it to myself,
not share it with people?
(eerie music)