
	He talks to ghosts (and feuds with Barbara Walters)

Release Date:

July 23, 2008

Press Release:

The Orange County Register

Ahh...okaaaaaay....

by Lori Basheda
of The Orange County Register

It had been years since he had seen a ghost, yet here one was standing right in front of him.

At his office, no less.

"Um, Jo," he called out to his co-worker. "There's a lady standing behind you."

He then told Jo that thoughts of Idaho, a yellow house, needlepoint and a stool were flashing in his head.

Slowly, with eyes wide, his co-worker told him she had a deceased grandma. Who she used to visit each summer. At a yellow house. In Idaho. And the last thing they ever did together was needlepoint a coverlet. For a stool.

"Is that wild?" James Van Praagh gushes, shivering like a wet dog. "Is that a wild story?"

Why, yes, it is.

Nearly as wild as the story of how a lowly temp job office boy turns into one of the most famous psychic mediums in the world, getting invitations to "Larry King Live" and "Oprah" and communicating with the spirit world on behalf of celebrities like Cher (she wanted to hear from Sonny), Ellen and Ted Danson.

But once you meet the man, it's a little easier to understand.

Sitting at a table outside a Peet's Coffee at Bella Terra in Huntington Beach the other day, Van Praagh is engaging, entertaining and excitable. He's a charismatic Teddy Bear of a man, a portly little guy with a bushy mustache and a gift for telling a story.

When he told me about how he once, during an audience "reading," saw the ghost of a German shepherd walk up the aisle toward a man who then confirmed that, yes, indeed, there was a special German shepherd in his past, I wanted to believe him.

Maybe because his overriding message is this: "There is no such thing as death."

When you leave your body, he says, your spirit goes to another dimension where the lakes are bluer, the houses cleaner, the sun warmer. Everyone you ever loved is there, kicking back. They even get cable TV.

Who wouldn't want to believe that? Apparently Barbara Walters.

Van Praagh was on the daytime talk show The View last week to promote his new book "Ghosts Among Us" and told Walters when the cameras weren't rolling that he was picking up on a high white blood cell count. On Friday, Walters told The View audience that although she thought Van Praagh's warning was "ridiculous," she went to get her blood checked and was told by her doctor she was fine. She then told the audience that she thought what Van Praagh did was "dangerous."

On Tuesday, Van Praagh went on Entertainment Tonight to defend himself, calling Walters a "nasty" host. "I think she's (mad) because my book did better than hers," he says. Nearly 100,000 copies of Ghosts Among Us have been sold since it hit stores in May.

Back in 1998, when Van Praagh, then a nobody, went on Larry King Live with his first book "Talking to Heaven," only 6,000 copies had been printed. King's phone lines were flooded and Van Praagh's publisher had to scramble to print 600,000 more books to meet the demand.

That book, as well as the next six Van Praagh wrote, wound up on one New York Times best-seller list or another in the 10 years since he became an overnight celebrity psychic.

Van Praagh wrote his latest book in Laguna Beach, where he lives alone (he was briefly married and divorced) in a bluff-top beach house overlooking the ocean near the luxury Montage Resort and Spa.

"Ghosts Among Us" is his attempt to set the record straight on ghosts. Van Praagh says he saw his first ghost, his grandfather, when he was still in a crib. Other ghosts made appearances now and again, but as adulthood set in, the New Yorker closed himself off to the spirit world and headed Los Angeles to write sitcoms.

It was there, as he monotonously pulled staples out of paperwork in an office temp job, that co-worker Carol Shoemaker asked him to accompany her to a séance at the home of British medium Brian Hurst, well-known in paranormal circles, then living in Manhattan Beach.

At the seance, Hurst told Van Praagh that within two years time the spirits would use him.

"I thought, 'Okay, I heard that California was the land of fruits and nuts. I just hit the jackpot," Van Praagh says. "I didn't believe that sort of thing. I'm Catholic."

Nevertheless, he says, he recalled the ghosts of his youth and began meditating to reconnect with the spirit world; It was then that he encountered the ghost of Jo's grandma.

By word of mouth, Van Praagh began getting requests to meet people after work and summon their dearly departed. For $10, they found solace hearing words from their dead mother, husband, friend. Now he charges $75 to sit in at one of his Spirit Circles, held each month at the Aliso Creek Inn in Laguna. People come from all over the world. The circles, which have a limit of 75 people, are booked months in advance (August and September are sold out on his website).

Van Praagh also holds workshops at a Costa Mesa hotel. Basic Mediumship Level 1 is set for October. Just as a radio must be turned on to let the music come through, intuitive people, he says, can be taught to tune in to the spirits around them. Even Van Praagh doesn't see souls whirling through the streets like in the movie "Ghostbusters." Instead, he must summon them.

He does, however, contend that there aresome places where spirits just naturally have a stronger presence; negative places, for instance, "like dental offices," and obviously, events such as funerals. He says he's seen women ghosts hovering over their coffins wondering what the heck their family was thinking putting them in thatdress. The ghost of his own dad, he says, expressed thanks that the mortician put his dentures back in his mouth before the viewing.

Based on his encounters with the spirit world, Van Praagh co-created Ghost Whisperer, the CBS hit drama now in its fourth season.

"Well, stupid me," he says. "Spirituality and Hollywood is like a train wreck."

Unlike Van Praagh's message of eternal spirit happiness, "Ghost Whisperer got dark and heavy," he says. In one show, a dog was left earthbound while its master made it through to the other side. "Do you know how disturbing that is?" he asks. "The dog never went to heaven! I got thousands of emails!"

Although he is still co-executive producer of the show, "they aren't being honest about ghosts," he says. That's why he wrote the book, which includes techniques on how to make contact with ghosts.

Not surprisingly, Barbara Walters isn't his only skeptic.

Van Praagh is not ruffled. "It's good to be a skeptic" he says.

Just keep an eye on those white blood cells.