The Family Curse — Or So We Thought

The First Time I Sensed Spirit

In the summer of 1975, my aunt Jane began unraveling — or so everyone said. She heard voices, answered them, predicted things that later came true, and spoke of things no one else could see. Fear swallowed her life. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia; and admitted to a psychiatric hospital in her early twenties.

I was thirteen when she went away. Back then, mental illness was whispered about, a secret folded into holiday dinners and hushed phone calls. No one explained anything to the kids.

What no one knew was that I had already begun to glimpse the same edges of another world. My earliest memory is from a two-bedroom apartment where my parents, two younger sisters, and I lived. I was four. In the bedroom I shared with them, I would see a little girl — pale, four or five years old, long black hair with bangs, wearing a simple slip. She sat against the closet wall, knees to her chest, quietly sniffling. She never spoke. I never asked. I saw her repeatedly, always in the same place. I never told my parents. When we moved, she vanished, but the seeing did not.

When the Past Confirmed What I Saw

The experiences multiplied: visions of events before they happened, voices, sudden knowing. At thirteen, I overheard my mother and a neighbor talk about how they’d once lived in that same apartment complex in 1967. “Why did you move?” the neighbor asked. “They murdered a little girl in that unit,” my mother said. My heart stopped. I ran to the balcony and finally told her what I’d seen as a child. That confirmation dissolved any remaining doubt: I hadn’t been imagining things.

From then on, sensing people’s emotions was effortless — grief, joy, fear flooded me like someone else’s weather. I saw colors around people before I knew the word aura. I absorbed moods, predicted moments. My parents didn’t understand, but they never shut me down. Still, I felt different and alone. I wanted it to stop.

Searching for Answers — and Rejection

At fifteen, I turned to religion, desperate for a cure. The Catholic Church felt safe at first; a priest mentioned Rosicrucianism and left me with a clue but no map. I visited other churches searching for understanding. At an evangelical service, they surrounded me and shouted that I needed to repent. The pastor pressed his palm to my forehead as the congregation called me toward damnation. They said I was on the devil’s path. I left, terrified and ashamed.

At one point, still searching for solace, I visited a Baptist church. Instead of comfort, someone pronounced me possessed by the devil. The pastor’s wardens watched me like a threat. Their certainty felt violent. I left more afraid than when I came in, convinced that whatever I was could be weaponized against me by piety and fear.

Later, without telling my parents, I saw a psychologist and spilled everything — the visions, the voices, even a message about his dead parents. He referred me to a psychiatrist with the probable diagnosis: schizophrenia — the same label my aunt had been given. My parents urged me not to go, so I walked away. At the time I didn’t know whether I’d been brave or foolish. In retrospect, it may have been the decision that saved me from a similar fate.

The Turning Point

Life moved forward. I married a man who believed in me, a blessing. The gifts continued, sometimes with a crushing intensity. Once, while stopped at a red light, a vision came to me. I saw my cousin crawling from an overturned car, blood on her face. The honk of a horn brought me back to reality. Two weeks later, my cousin was in a severe car accident. She lived, but the vision shook me to the core; I wondered if my warnings could harm as much as help.

I worked at a church, and one day at work, I confided in the pastor. Pastor Bryce didn’t recoil. He listened and offered perspective instead of condemnation. He reminded me of Noah, laughed gently at the world’s tendency to mock the messenger, and then said, “It’s not a curse. It’s a gift.” Those words landed like sunlight through a storm cloud. For the first time, relief eclipsed fear.

Finding My Community

After the death of my son, grief pushed me deeper into questions. I prayed: If this is from You, teach me to use it for good; if not, take it away. Weeks later I found a Spiritualist church where people already had the language I needed: mediumship. There were meditation circles, development classes, energy healing, and others who’d been frightened and labeled, too. I learned the terms — clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairsentience, claircognizance, clairsalience — and the difference between being overwhelmed and being untrained.

The fear that had shadowed me for decades began to lift. I was not broken. I had been called.

Living the Gift

Today I don’t use this gift for profit. I serve as a conduit of comfort, helping people grieving find evidence that their loved ones continue in spirit. My aunt Jane still struggles, often overwhelmed rather than mad. Once she described sensing a female presence in a room at my mother's house — the same woman I’d seen. Our matching memories were a quiet confirmation that we shared perception, not pathology.

Society will keep naming what it doesn’t understand. I’m not asking you to agree with my interpretation. But I ask you to remain open to another possibility: sometimes what we brand as madness is simply a different way of being — a difficult, lonely birth of a healer waiting for guidance, not judgment.