Thursday, November 12, 2026
By Paul Archipley
Ask a medium what it’s like to communicate with the dead, and the answer may be less dramatic than Hollywood’s version.
There may be no ghost standing in the corner. No disembodied voice delivering complete sentences. No crystal ball.
Instead, the people I interviewed described something considerably more subtle: a physical sensation. An emotion that seemingly comes out of nowhere. A picture appearing in the mind. A name, a phrase, a symbol. A sudden sense of knowing something they couldn’t have possibly known otherwise.
Then comes the hard part: interpreting what the heck it means.
I approached the subject as a skeptic – but a curious one. I have friends I respect who are convinced they’ve communicated with the dead. Rather than trying to prove or disprove their experiences, I wanted to know what people who describe themselves as mediums, psychics, intuitives or healers believe is actually happening.
I interviewed Mukilteo evidential medium Jeffrey Marks, intuitive Amanda Gail of Edmonds and Picnic Point healer Jeff Maple. I also talked with Mukilteo resident Brodie Stowell, who consulted mediums following his parents’ deaths. He said the experiences profoundly affected him.
Finally, I sat in on a Zoom gathering conducted by Seattle psychic David Zarza, watching him respond in real time to questions about relationships, careers, health, children and the future.
Their beliefs and methods differ, sometimes substantially. Nevertheless, certain themes surfaced repeatedly.
For Marks, it began with fear.
He traces his experiences to age 3, when his family briefly lived in a house in White Salmon that he says was haunted. One night, Marks said, he saw what appeared to be someone walking across his bedroom. The figure stopped, looked at him and then charged toward him.
“I never knew fear until 3 years old,” he said. The experience frightened him enough that he slept with the covers over his head for years.
At 15, Marks was listening to music in bed, deeply relaxed. But when he opened his eyes, seven people were standing around him.
Initially terrified – who wouldn’t be! – he managed to recreate his relaxed state. And the figures returned. Marks said one touched his hand, producing an electrical sensation, and communicated mentally that they were there to help rather than hurt him.
He came to regard them as spirit guides.
Marks said becoming a medium wasn’t a career he would have picked. Eventually, however, he began deliberately developing what he believed he had experienced since childhood.
Maple’s beginnings were almost the opposite.
He grew up in a family where dreams, spirits and past lives were normal conversation. He recalls playing a guessing game with his sister in which he believes they communicated telepathically.
Later, Maple spent nearly 15 years in the Army, including three combat tours. He said he suppressed his spiritual sensitivity to better function in the military’s culture.
War hit him hard. After leaving the service, he struggled with depression and PTSD symptoms. Reading about empaths led to what he calls a spiritual awakening and, eventually, to a psychic fair in Mill Creek.
There, a medium noticed him walking around trying to “sense” which practitioner felt right. “I saw what you were doing,” Maple recalled her saying. “You were reading people.” She told him his abilities ran in his family, and described him as having “healing hands.” Maple subsequently trained with her and began practicing.
Gail’s journey was less dramatic. She described her development primarily as learning to stop suppressing herself.
“The only time that this part of my life took off was when I finally decided I need to know what I am, who I am,” she said. A former hairdresser, she knew she had some innate ability; while clients sat in her chair at the salon, she could sense their emotions, knew when they were struggling or suffering. Interestingly, after Gail had been reading people for about four months, the first medium she went to see was Marks.
His approach was far more analytical than hers.
“I am all heart, and he is very mental,” Gail said.
Three practitioners, three paths: fear and eventual acceptance for Marks; early familiarity followed by suppression and rediscovery for Maple; and a process of self-exploration for Gail.
Despite those different beginnings, their descriptions of how information arrives are remarkably similar.
Marks calls himself an “evidential medium.” He believes a reading should provide specific information identifying a deceased person rather than vague assurances.
But that information, he said, doesn’t generally arrive in complete sentences. Marks described moving his ordinary consciousness aside – from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat – and receiving physical sensations, emotions, mental pictures, names and phrases that he must then interpret.
Gail also describes an internal process. She may perceive a hazy image, clothing, an approximate age or another visual reference that helps her interpret what she believes she’s receiving.
Maple said he initially scanned people’s bodies with his hands, and experienced heat or a magnetic-like sensation near areas he associated with pain or emotional issues. Later came mental pictures, followed eventually by words and directions.
Stowell, describing readings from the client’s side, independently characterized mediums as communicating through “symbology, pictures and interpretation.” Whatever the source, their descriptions share an important characteristic: They aren’t simply hearing dead people talk. They say they receive impressions and then interpret them.
Another unexpected point of agreement is that practitioners generally don’t think they’re special. They don’t consider themselves uniquely chosen. Marks says everybody potentially can develop mediumship. Maple emphasizes practice, and compares intuitive ability to other human talents: People may have different levels of natural aptitude, but skills can be developed.
Zarza made much the same point during his Zoom session while discussing remote viewing, the purported ability to perceive people, places or events from a distance. “It’s something that we all can do,” he told the group, adding that people may already experience it but dismiss it as imagination.
Maple’s teacher put the lesson more bluntly: Practice means getting things wrong, falling on your face and gradually building confidence.
Here their approaches diverge.
Marks’ answer is evidence.
Anybody can say someone’s grandmother is present and loves them, he said. He wants to discover details specific enough that the client recognizes the purported communicator – information he believes he couldn’t otherwise know.
Gail isn’t interested in science validating her experiences, but that doesn’t mean she wants clients to abandon critical thinking. She tells them to keep their “wise mind” engaged, and criticizes readings so vague that clients simply agree with whatever is said.
“I think that there does need to be proof,” she said.
Zarza’s Zoom session demonstrated a more interactive approach.
Participants frequently supplied information before or during readings, and Zarza sometimes asked for a small detail about their day before consulting what he calls “the universe.”
That raises a legitimate question: How much information originates with the psychic, and how much develops through interaction with the client?
The interviews didn’t answer that question. They did demonstrate that practitioners themselves have different standards for evidence.
And for the skeptic, that raises an obvious question: How much information originates with the psychic, and how much develops through the interaction? For believers, the question may be different: Does the exchange help the psychic refine what he or she is receiving?
Again, the interviews didn’t settle that question. They showed that even practitioners have different standards for what constitutes convincing evidence.
I began this project expecting to hear mostly about communicating with dead people. Instead, much of the conversation concerned the living.
Grief. Guilt. Relationships. Fear. Work. Regret. Trauma. Purpose.
Marks acknowledged similarities between mediumship and grief counseling. Some clients want reassurance that a loved one is OK. Others carry guilt about relationships that were never repaired.
Stowell said reassurance was precisely what he sought after his parents’ deaths. “For me, it was a big healing process reaching out to both my father and my mother because I felt I didn’t have any way of grieving,” he said.
He believes society does a poor job of teaching people – especially men – how to grieve.
Zarza’s Zoom session pushed the counseling aspect further.
Participants asked about marriage, employment, romance, parenting and an international move. Zarza responded as much like a life coach as a psychic, sometimes making predictions, but often encouraging participants to examine fear, relationships and their own behavior.
Whether those insights came from “the universe,” as Zarza believes, or from an observant human being is a question each listener may answer differently.
But people clearly were seeking guidance.
The practitioners also differ over prediction.
Gail said she doesn’t really do it.
Marks will discuss possible futures but stresses free will. Predictions, he said, represent probabilities rather than events written in stone.
Zarza is more comfortable with specifics. During the Zoom session, he predicted when one participant might leave her job, estimated when another might enter a serious relationship, and gave Stowell a time frame for a planned overseas move.
Those differences are a reminder that “psychic,” “medium,” “intuitive” and “healer” don’t describe a single belief system or method.
That makes ethics particularly important.
Marks’ rule is “do no harm.” He believes mediums should provide evidence rather than exploit clients emotionally or financially. He also discourages readings immediately after a death because people in acute grief may be particularly vulnerable.
Gail and Maple raised another boundary: permission. Both said practitioners should obtain consent before deliberately attempting to read someone.
Health presents an even more complicated boundary.
During Zarza’s gathering, a woman undergoing cancer treatment asked about recurring pain. Zarza said he wasn’t a physician and wasn’t offering medical advice, but he provided impressions about possible causes while also encouraging her to consult her doctors.
The exchange illustrated how quickly spiritual guidance can overlap with areas that might be better addressed by medical, mental health, financial or other trained professionals.
For Stowell, the ultimate question isn’t whether mediumship is real. He’s convinced it is. Instead, what matters is what believing it has done to his understanding of death.
He wanted to know his parents were OK. He says his readings provided that reassurance. But they also affected how he thinks about his own life. “I realize life is finite,” Stowell said.
Maple arrives at much the same place – from another direction.
He sometimes asks older clients to imagine themselves on their deathbeds. They probably won’t wish they had worked harder, he tells them. They may wish they had spent more time doing what they loved, laughed more or appreciated what they had.
His advice is decidedly earthly: Don’t wait until the end.
Toward the end of Zarza’s Zoom session, Stowell returned to the same theme. Recently retired, he said he felt as though his life had been given back to him. He spoke about a message he believes came from his deceased father: Spend as much time in nature as possible.
Stowell said he now notices beautiful things he once overlooked.
I began these interviews wondering whether people really can communicate with the dead. I can’t say these conversations answered that question for me. But they did change the question.
Perhaps the mystery isn’t confined to whether consciousness survives death, whether a picture appearing in someone’s mind came from a deceased relative or whether a sudden intuition originated somewhere outside ourselves.
There is another question underneath all of those:
If our time here really is finite – something skeptics and believers can agree on – what are we going to do with it?
For a story that started out being about talking to the dead, I found myself spending an unexpected amount of time thinking about how to live.
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