Psychic Medium NANCY GARBER 

Boston’s City Journal – Boston Magazine



It's only natural to be distrustful of third-hand stories. The power of a psychic experience—if you believe in such a thing—lies in the pertinent, personal details that ring true to someone. So in the course of researching Best of Boston, this magazine sent out an intrepid reporter (not the author of this piece) to become that someone.

She met Garber [psychic medium Nancy Garber] in the basement of a local New Age bookstore, and waited while the medium tuned in. After a while, Garber said she felt the presence of an older woman who the reporter came to feel was her grandmother. The image of the elderly woman who was holding up pearls, Garber said "…pearls she'd given to her granddaughter. The old woman wished her granddaughter would wear them more often."

A score on the pearls.

Then Garber tuned in a young man. He had shaggy blond hair that fell in bangs over his eyes, and he looked about eighteen. Did the reporter know someone who had looked like that?

Score! The reporter again agreed.

Garber said that he had died tragically. He was showing her a beer can; he was gesturing as if he were throwing it (out of a window), over and over again.

Our reporter, it turns out, had known a guy in high school who had died after getting drunk and falling out a window. Garber had a message for those close to the young man: "He was sorry but he was all right." The reporter said that it would be difficult to convey that message as she rarely saw people from nigh school anymore. Later that week walking down the street, the reporter did run into two former classmates, and heard from another on the phone.

At the same time, the room was growing noticeably colder—a phenomenon Garber attributes to an energy change when a spirit is present—and the reporter felt a breeze around her legs.

Then a curious thing happened. Garber said she was getting a message that the reporter had had difficulty sleeping; that she'd seen visions of people in her room when she was in a half-sleep state. In fact, the reporter had seen some unexplained things while she was in college and would sometimes wake up to the sight of figures that frightened her, sometimes standing near her bed. Her doctor had told her that the phenomenon had biological origins; that it was just and overlap of mental images from sleep superimposed on waking ones. Worlds colliding as it were.

But the reporter certainly hadn't discussed this with Garber. Nevertheless, the medium 's message was this: "Those things you see sometimes, those times you've felt a presence and thought you were dreaming…you weren't."

Nancy Garber won Best of Boston the following month. And the intrepid reporter is a little more trepid than before.