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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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
