Conversing with spirits

The spirits communicate for many reasons — but please don’t ask for lottery numbers.

By JEANNE STARMACK

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

BOARDMAN — The small room at JoAnn Radovich’s house had been her son’s.

He’d used it for a bedroom because, tucked away in there, he wouldn’t bother sleeping family members while watching TV at night.

It had been a laundry room at one time. But there was just enough room for a single bed along one wall and, of course, his TV.

After he no longer needed the room, 19-year-old Andy Radovich Coyne told his mother to redo it, she said. The room now holds two couches and a bookcase, and looks pretty unremarkable.

What she does in the room though, is anything but.

It is, really, a place for reunions. It’s just that some of the family members and friends who visit there are dead.

It’s now her reading room, where she practices her mediumship.

Andy, who died of an accidental drug overdose in February 2002, didn’t tell her to change the room while he was still alive.

“In one of my messages from him, he told me to do something else with the room,” she said. “I liked to come in here and just lay on his bed.”

He encouraged her, she said, to get on with her life.

“He was the reason I became a medium,” she said, explaining that after his death, her son did everything he could from the spirit world to assure his grief-stricken mother that he was OK.

Hard to believe

Radovich’s field is notorious for fakery and fraud, so if you don’t believe she really spoke with her dead son, that would be understandable.

Neither did she, at first.

She had no belief in contact with spirits before his death, she said. She thought “that it was baloney, I guess.”

“But my son was very determined to let me know he was OK. I would hear him in my mind.” At that point, she didn’t realize it was really him, she said. “I thought I was crazy with grief.”

Then, she said, his attempts at communication got physical.

Lights in her home would blink. “I would check wiring and bulbs. That wasn’t it.”

The safety light on her smoke alarm in the hallway would go on, but the alarm would not go off. She changed the battery. Still, the light went on.

And in her kitchen, she’d hear the click, click, click of buttons being pushed. Then, the microwave would start.

Phone calls came three times a day, and she would answer to dead air. You can tell the difference between dead air, she said, and when someone is on the line and just won’t speak. The phone company could not trace the calls.

“I began to research. People had stories like this. Also, the more open I became to my son’s essence still being here, the more I heard.”

Helping others

Then, she said, she started to get messages from others’ loved ones who’d died.

She belongs to a support group for people who’ve lost children, and when she told other members she’d gotten messages for them, they were “stunned.”

“But they would believe, because I had information I couldn’t have gotten elsewhere.”

Radovich, who has studied under other mediums, got more comfortable with her developing skills.

“The more you work at it, the better you get,” she said, adding that anyone can hone those skills. Some are better at being a medium than others, she said, in the same way that some people sing better than others.

Some spirits, she said, are quieter. Some have something funny to say.

“Sometimes, they’ll tell me why they died,” she said. “They come to try to help the family.

“Sometimes, they ask us for forgiveness. They see mistakes they made. They come because they love us, and love is eternal.

“They may show me something going on in a person’s life now, to show they’re still around and they see what we do,” she said.

“Some go to family picnics and weddings like anyone else.”

Her experiences

Radovich said that what she experiences isn’t like the show “Ghost Whisperer,” in which the main character will see a dead person standing next to someone.

“I don’t see spirits in physical form,” she said. “You can feel them.”

She said she’ll catch “bits of thoughts” from spirits that may or may not become sentences, and that she doesn’t get messages all the time. She has to be concentrating, she said.

All those jokes, like, “you’re psychic, you know everything,” are just that — jokes that trivialize communications with the spirits, she said. “The spirits aren’t coming here to give you the next day’s lottery numbers — they don’t care,” she said.

Radovich isn’t trying, with $40 a visit from clients who are “sporadic,” to make a living as a medium. She said frauds in the business will try to lure clients back, but she does the opposite by encouraging clients to work out their problems themselves.

“Anybody who pushes you to come back, or tells you you have a curse on you and you need to come back and need to buy a stone or crystal — they don’t have your best interests at heart,” she said.

She is a spiritualist, she said, because she enjoys helping people feel better. “There’s no greater joy I can have than to give a mom a smile on her face when she leaves here — to know her child is OK,” she said.

It also helps her. “It’s reaffirming to me that my son is really somewhere.”