In Other Worlds
By Susan Waller Lehmann
Recently I saw an advertisement for a series of astrology events to be held on Thursday evenings at a swanky downtown hotel in the Western state where we live. I held a quick internal debate about allowing a stranger to “read” me, but interest outweighed apprehension. I’m always up for an adventure. I texted the link to my good friend Kristin. We each had questions about our futures but hadn’t checked out any local resources. We took this as a sign.
“Astrology and tarot readings. Want to go?” I asked.
“Woohoo!” she responded.
That evening we exchanged our dog-haired leisure clothing for more sophisticated attire. I styled my hair and applied mascara and lipstick. Kristin wore a slinky black skirt and stiletto shoes, which I studied as she tottered up her driveway to my car. She’s a braver soul than I am, I thought. She exchanged the heels for sandals when we parked a block from the hotel. We entered the bar, ordered wine, and studied the sign-up sheets. There were two options for tarot readings that evening, a three-card spread for $15 or a twenty-card layout for $30.
“Twenty cards?” Kristin asked when we chose our bar table. “Is that right?”
I visualized the traditional Celtic Cross spread, a 10-card reading I do for myself several times a year, and when I get together with my close friend and restaurateur Krissann. This is the setup I’m most comfortable with, although I will do a five-card layout when I’m curious about a situation. Both spreads are suitable for standard past-present-future readings.
Kristin and I each chose the 20-card reading and puzzled over the layout as we sipped our wine, awaiting our turns. The reader called himself a psychic. Within a few minutes a young man, in his early 30s, dressed in a velvet jacket, headed to the bar. He ordered a drink, then studied the sign-up sheet. Within minutes, beverage in hand, he came to our table and introduced himself. I thought it odd he was drinking alcohol as most psychics I’d known were sober, at least during readings. I left my wine on the table and followed him into the quiet hotel dining room.
I have long been intrigued by tales of the arcane: mysterious stories of fortune-telling and spirit communication. My first “official” brush with a psychic came in 1979, with a man who had been involved with the Florida capture of notorious serial murderer Ted Bundy. But it wasn’t until a decade later that I began to explore the mysteries of the arcana.
One day in July 1989, in Gainesville, Florida, I made an appointment to see a woman named Irene. She called herself a psychic. I asked if she could read palms from photographs. She was surprised by my request but said she would try. I had been given a set of Bundy’s hand and fingerprints, a gift from George Brand, a former Leon County sheriff’s investigator. Brand and I had completed a round of interviews for a book I would eventually write.
I did not disclose the identity of the prints to Irene.
When I arrived at her home, she insisted on doing a card reading for me before I showed her the handprints. This was my first experience with having my fortune told. I was fascinated and scared. She pulled a deck of playing cards from a green velvet bag and handed them to me. I shuffled the cards and concentrated on my reason for guidance. When I felt the cards were sufficiently mixed, I put them on the table and cut them into three piles.
She picked up the piles and placed them one on top of the other. Then she laid out the cards in groups of three. She explained she learned fortunetelling from a Roma woman years earlier, when her husband was stationed at a joint US-UK air base in England.
Although I tried to keep my thoughts private and my mouth shut, she was able to glean information as she explained the meaning of each card in the layout. I recorded this session and replayed it often. She commented about my parents and sister, and my worries over a pending divorce, financial instability, and the safety of my young children.
It was an impressive reading. After a few minutes of conversation, Irene asked for the manila envelope that contained the photographs of the handprints. As soon as I handed her the letter-sized photos, her demeanor shifted from supportive and friendly to suspicious and wary. She held the envelope and closed her eyes.
“The energy here is very powerful,” she said. “Whose are these? They belong to a man?”
I nodded.
She laid them out on the table and studied them. “Is this someone close to you? Your husband?”
I assured her they did not belong to my husband, a brother, or a friend. She closed her eyes and concentrated for a while before continuing. “The person is dangerous, evil,” she said.
She talked about the hands, the fingers, the energy she was feeling. She used her index finger to trace the lifeline on the palm. “See this feathering,” she said. “His life will end quickly and violently.”
When I told her the prints belonged to Bundy—who had been executed several months earlier—she collapsed over the photos.
Over the next seven years, until her death, Irene and I forged a close friendship. She did many casual readings for me, over pots of coffee and packs of cigarettes. Irene was deeply intuitive, and I suspect she used numerology to divine the riddles of the readings. I wish I had asked her to teach me to read a deck of playing cards, as the Roma woman had taught her many years before.
We were sleuths drawn to unsolved mysteries and murders. We explored arcane outlets: automatic or spirit writing, séances, and meditation. We visited the resident mediums at the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in central Florida. We speculated over hidden messages in our dreams. But it was fieldwork that provided us with our biggest adventure.
One day, guided by a dark energy that neither of us could explain, Irene and I stumbled onto the empty lair of Danny Rolling, the killer of five University of Florida students–a strange and complicated story that I once wrote about in third person HERE. Irene took photographs of bloodied pants, a brand-new peach-colored towel, and a milk jug filled with what looked like blood. There was a knife. And a nearby tent. I turned these over to my contacts at the investigation task force, but Irene refused to discuss our discoveries with them. She was terrified the killer would find her.
A different psychic ended up working with two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers to help catch Rolling, the Gainesville killer. This psychic, a homemaker I call Rachel, received “clues” from beyond—from one of the slain students. Rachel and I were introduced by a mutual friend, and we also formed a bond of trust and respect that has lasted decades.
My move to Alabama in 1996 made it difficult to see my two psychic friends. I missed our conversations and the messages they imparted to me. Card readers and clairvoyants are difficult to find in evangelical communities, and it wasn’t until 2002 that I met another medium. She was a cheerful red-headed woman who visited Montgomery several times a year to conduct readings at a nondenominational church.
Her name was Sharon, and she was a vibrant woman who communicated with people who had passed on. Remember the television show “Crossing Over with John Edward”? He would get clues from beyond for members of his audience. Sharon did this too. During our first reading, she asked me about a cartoon character.
“There’s someone here,” she said. “It’s a man. He’s smiling. He’s happy to see you. He wants me to ask you about Pistol Pete.”
I was puzzled. Pistol Pete? I closed my eyes and thought.
And soon I visualized an old black-and-white photo of me, taken when I was 3 or 4 years old, wearing a cowboy hat. Aha. My arms prickled with goosebumps.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Pistol Pete. That’s what my dad called me when I was little! I had a toy holster and a gun.” Pistol Pete was a cartoon nemesis of the original Mickey Mouse.
“Got it. The balloon popped,” she said laughing. “I love hearing these stories.”
When she had a message, she paused until I acknowledged I understood the meaning. When I did, she said a balloon popped in her vision. There were several times when I had no idea what it meant, and she would work to clarify the message, and occasionally I couldn’t decode it. But later, as I replayed the recordings, the meaning would become clear. We had a handful of readings over the next 15 years, usually in early May, near my birthday. She often began by saying she had a man or woman there, with a bouquet of flowers for me.
These were amusing, and it was fun to solve the riddles she presented.
The most difficult reading we shared occurred in 2005. My mother was dying, and my son Danny, a U.S. Army infantryman, was soon headed to the Anbar Province of Iraq. Sharon confirmed my mother would soon pass and said my mother’s family and friends on the other side were awaiting her arrival.
“There’s a lot of activity, and they are excited she will join them,” Sharon said. My mother was in the end stages of dementia, a long, grueling dissolution of her mind, her motor skills, her essence. Once beautiful, vain, and sharp-tongued, after 11 years of disease she was a frail woman incapable of feeding herself.
“She’s almost ready to let go,” Sharon said. Two months later my mother was gone.
It was Danny’s situation that worried me the most. When I asked about him, Sharon concentrated deeply, then said his guides were with him.
“He is protected,” she said, to allay my fears. “They’re telling me he’ll come home.”
She said he wouldn’t return as the same person, because no one survived a war undamaged. She touched her forehead and one ear.
“Do you understand?”
I did. At the end of his tour of duty, Danny came home with a Purple Heart and a 100 percent disability due to traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and hearing loss. But he lived and still lives. Many of his battle buddies didn’t.
In late 2017 I edited a manuscript for an old friend. We had shared interests in metaphysics, journalism, politics, and true crime. She gifted me with a reading from a woman who lives in Ohio. I have a website promoting my books and PI work, so I suspected she might consult the internet to learn about me before the reading. When I called to schedule an appointment, I used my daughter’s name so she wouldn’t have any advance knowledge of me.
I don’t know who I thought I was fooling.
It was an amazing reading of sunshine and happiness. She described a house my husband and I would build in a bucolic setting with trees and a stream. She saw great professional and personal success.
But then she told me a little girl was waiting to join my family.
Wait. What?
I was well beyond child-bearing years and I realized she must have been talking about Michelle, not me. Michelle and her husband planned to have a second child, and she hoped for a daughter. I had goofed when I used Michelle’s name. I sent her a link to the recording because it was her fortune, not mine. A few months later she became pregnant and listened to the recording again. She waited until her baby was born to learn the gender.
A little girl joined her family. They built their house in the woods with a stream. Michelle and I still laugh about this.
In 2023 I learned of a woman named Laurel who did card readings from her home in the Northwest. I emailed her, and we arranged a Zoom meeting. She showed me an array of different cards, ranging from the standard Rider deck to unique ones. I chose the Gentle Tarot, a set designed by a wilderness Alaskan artist that features her hand-drawn whales and grizzly bears, salmon and birds, and flora unique to the Reese Bay area.
Laurel shuffled the deck while I meditated on my intention. She spread the cards with only the backs revealed, and I selected them by pointing at the cards, which she laid out in the Celtic Cross. Despite my inability to touch the cards, I was quite connected with this reading. Lauren was friendly and intuitive, and we spoke for over an hour. She asked that I donate to a local charity rather than pay her. Recently I returned to the reading link and analyzed her predictions.
“All direction is forward,” she told me. “There will be people to help you get the book to the next level” of marketing, publishing perhaps in a new format. “Don’t get too frustrated if the timeline seems to lag. This allows an opportunity for you to go inward, reset your focus, and be more effective. You have all the skills you need to search your contacts, stay open to new ones and release your work to a trusted, skilled entity to move your book forward. This is a very auspicious, supportive reading for you to go ahead. You are on the right path to meet your goals.”
Months later I garnered several important accolades for my manuscript, and earlier this year I signed with a publisher. My book, a collection of my PI and criminal defense stories, will be published in January.
I’d say that was a good reading.
So back to the guy at the swanky hotel. He shuffled the cards, a standard Rider deck. He was offended when I took the cards from him and shuffled them myself. He then laid the cards out in a pattern I’d not seen before.
Nothing in his reading made any sense to me.
Kristin had a similar experience. We felt swindled—$30 each for readings that made no sense, and $17 for a glass of wine. We decided to have our own tarot evenings with wine and snacks and lots of conversation.
The next morning, I shuffled my own cards and laid them out. I understood the meaning of the reading, because who can navigate my journey better than me?
Right now, I have obstacles standing between me and an ongoing issue, one that has spanned two seasons, spring and summer. But these will disappear. Patience was the message. And eventually I know the right psychic will appear. They always do.
Photo by Anneliese Cousineau
***
Susan Waller Lehmann is a licensed private investigator, capital murder mitigation specialist, freelance journalist, and award-winning author of two true crime books. Her newest book, Southern Lies and Homicides: Tales of Betrayal and Murder, a collection of true stories and essays, is scheduled for publication in January 2025 from Level Tru Books, a division of Level Best Books. Susan lives in the western U.S. with her husband and two golden retrievers. You can find out more about her at www.whiterhinopress.com, and on Facebook under “Susan Lehmann” and “Susan Lehmann Investigations.” You can also read more of Susan’s work on her Substack, The Weight of Words, at susanwaller.substack.com, where this essay first appeared.
