Sandra's account:

After the spring of 2009, I feel like I am walking around like the Verizon Network guy. Not the old commercials where he was always asking "can you hear me now?" though I used to feel that way. I now see myself backed up by that huge crowd that never ever leaves...and I’m okay with that. I don’t think I would have been even a year before, but I am now.

I made the decision to become a professional psychic medium in the spring of 2009, intending to use the ability to create art and music, and write and teach, rather than do any readings. When I get impressions, I don’t hear or see things as much as feel them. I read energy, I recognize essential energy signatures (a unique feeling about each of our energies that remains pretty constant) and I feel the positive or negative state of an energy when in contact with it.

As an empath, I feel the emotions first. As a singer, who has long done a type of improvisational music called freesong, I finally realized that I could help people recognize the states of their own energy by singing freesongs that reflect the energies that I feel. I absolutely love doing this! I have found that people enjoy having this done for them.

Yet I also found out that I can do the usual psychic things - that I can hear, see, and get the messages more than I used to. It’s all becoming clearer the more I use the abilities.

This ability to connect with conscious energy has become stronger every day. That clarity came home to me through a number of events in 2009: some of them I will leave private, but one, in particular, will not stay private at all, because it happened in public, and I had people to share the experience with me.

I attended a paranormal/metaphysical conference called Through The Veil held in my hometown Atlanta, Georgia, on the weekend of June 5 - 7 2009. Organized by Michelle Barbiarz and counting among its speakers the wonderful Chip Coffey, whose personal discussion board I have been moderating, it was a nice sized, intimate gathering of practitioners and fans.

Early on the first evening I was talking with the astrologer Maxine Taylor when an attendee named Mimi was testing her new EMF detector nearby. An EMF detector measures the electro-magnetic field in an area, and is used as a fairly effective way of detecting unusual energy fields, sometimes revealing whether an energy field is conscious. We know this is possible when the detector begins to react to questions and requests.

We didn’t realize we were about to do that very thing.

The detector went off when it pointed my way. I suggested Mimi hold it up to the lights and towards the wall to see if the electric wiring in the area was responsible, but the signal picked up around me. I asked if there was anyone in the area, if they could step away from me.

The signal stopped.. I asked them to come back. The signal started up again.

We got to a point where I asked the entity to sing - to make the signal rise and fall in strength, like singing a song.

The meter rose and fell, paused, and sang again...

At this point, the activity was just "cool!" and the three of us went our separate ways. I told a TTV staff member about what happened and she asked why I hadn’t videotaped it? I then realized my camera was around my neck! Shoot!

Earlier I had met with a member of the Chip Coffey board, Catherine, who had come to the conference with members of her paranormal research group, Ghost P.R.O. which operates in South Carolina. I told them what had happened, and they said they had come with equipment in tow - so we agreed to meet in the entry hall at 11:30, and see what we could pick up. Janet handled the EMF detector, Mariel handled a still camera and a digital, Katie took still pictures, and I had my video running from my point of view, so we had all angles covered. Catherine was the observer, and paid close attention to everything going on.

I will leave the description of what was happening up to the different videos and cameras we had operating. Unfortunately, of the approximately 8-10 minutes of video I took, only about a half minute made it through the night - I think because someone wanted to slap my hand for getting cocky! Short version is, the signal reacted to requests I made, continued to follow me around, and once again did "sing for the lady " though, by that time, I think my request sounded patronizing to the entity.

I was feeling the essential energy, and to me it seemed so strong I felt it was a male, and said so.

We finally stopped and took a look at the photos: Katie had photos full of orbs, and Mariel had pictures with an odd rectangular shadow falling across me. She tried shots to see if she had accidentally gotten the video camera into the range of the still camera lens, but the camera looked of a different size and shape to the shadow that kept showing up, always across my image.

We did not check the videos then. I saw how much of my memory card had been taken up, and it seemed like I had a lot. I said good night, and took a taxi home for the evening, so I could load the images on my computer and free my diskspace for the rest of the conference.

Those of you who use digital cameras know that the files have labels such as DSC001, or MOV002, when the images are created. These file names stay on the images until you save new filenames. I always load new images into my Dell’s pictures folder and leave the re-labelling until I’ve photoshopped the pictures, so I keep the original file as it is, and re-save the processed image as something else. I was in a hurry that night to get the images on the computer and get to bed. I just plugged in, zapped them on the computer, and was preparing to turn in when I realized something.

The files on the computer were all named LIZZIE.

I plugged the camera back in and looked at the files which were all still on the camera, through the Windows Explorer. The file names on the memory disk were NORMAL - DSC001, etc.

I made a contact sheet of the images on the camera’s disk, then made a contact sheet of the images on the computer. Not only were they named differently - the numbers were randomly changed! Some of the file numbers the same, many of them completely different. For example: a picture I took of Chip was DSC0015 AND lizzie0009!!!!

How could this happen?

I made disk copies of what was on the computer before I looked at the files. Then I discovered that almost all the video I had taken - I had made sure the camera was recording each time I videoed - was just gone, on both the camera and the computer. The only video left was the CENTER of a long clip I had taken, showing me asking the entity to "Sing for the lady -" and the worst of all the videos! It was the one time I had not paid attention to how I was holding the camera as I moved from place to place.

And it was the one thing I think was pointedly left so I would get the message of two complaints:

I had made it seem like I was asking her to perform like a circus monkey. And I had thought she was a man.

Lizzie. I went back early in the morning and alone in the hall apologized for how I had behaved.

The next day I told the Ghost P.R.O. team some of what happened, but not the name - that I kept secret until later, showing each of the team later in the day and before the scheduled late night seance, but making sure no one else heard about it. I had hoped Lizzie would come through at the seance and get someone to say her name, but she was having none of it. She did enjoy that I became a psychic aerial - I was overfull of energy for the entire session, energies bouncing through me to other people. I felt my Dad’s energy in me, wrapped around my heart, as he spoke through a woman across from me and told me how proud he was of me. When another woman thought the message was for her, another woman said, "his name is Charles." That was Dad’s name.

There were messages both clear and unclear, but Lizzie said no. I wanted to get to know who she was, but how?

I crashed with the Ghost P.R.O.s (thank you!) for the rest of the night, and in the morning remembered I had something with me that might help - my pendulum. I got up, took a long walk, then settled down in the hall for a pendulum session, just not bothering about what other people passing by might think.

Through a series of yes and no questions, I learned Lizzie knew she and I were of different times, but she was emphatic that she belonged "here-" the word I used in the question. She didn’t know what I meant by the Hilton, Atlanta, other buildings I knew used to stand at that location, or anything that connected her to that spot, yet she insisted she belonged "here." Hmm.

By that point I was ready for the end of the conference. I enjoyed the rest of the talks, but I was ready to go and find out what was going on.

I went home, took a nap, then steeled myself for loading the photos on the computer again, including new photos and video taken Sunday. I looked at the menu for the disk before I loaded the pictures - everything normal. I created a new file for the images on the computer so I could load everything again. I did.

Lizzie 001, lizzie002...wait a minute.

Some of the numbers, again, changed.

Only on my computer?

I took the camera to work Monday and did the same routine on my work Mac. Everything was normal, on the camera, on the computer. I pulled out a copy of the disk I made of the lizzie files. They showed up as lizzie, still. Thank God, or I would have passed out. When I got home, I searched my computer to see if there were any files named lizzie that could have accidentally given their name to the new files. I don't have any other files named lizzie.

Sometime during those two days, I now forget when, something occurred to me. When Lizzie responded "yes" to "are you attached to here?" what here did she mean? The area - or me? I took out the pendulum again, and asked if anyone was in the house. Yes. Are you Lizzie? No. Is Lizzie around? Yes. Can I speak to her? Yes.

There was something that had not occurred to me, other than noting the name was the same. My mother had been adopted when she was a small girl, but her birth mother, who I never could meet and who did not know about me, was Lizzie Perkins O’Brien. She was the last person in my family I would ever consider coming through to me. But I already knew from experience, that if my spirit guides want to throw me for a loop, the last person is exactly who they would use to be a messenger.

I asked if she were my grandmother. Yes.

I won’t go through all the questions. Some of them were painful and personal. Her personality was very uneven, quiet one moment, firm the next, in the way she moved the pendulum. She knew my guides, but wasn’t quite sure how she had come to me. She had not been with me for long. She liked me a little, and wasn’t sure what to think about what I was doing with the psychic stuff. She did NOT like the crowd at the conference - she was just there for me. She didn’t want to follow me around there, but stayed waiting where she knew I’d come the most times, the hall and conference room A. Those were okay. (And those were the areas others said they saw shadows or felt the energy.)

I finally thanked her and let her go. Later I would try to load the files again. They still rename themselves Lizzie and change some of the numbers. Lizzie may be here to stay. That’s okay.