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By Tony Lystra, Times Herald-Record
November 7, 2005

Town of Wallkill – Lisa Ann drifted around the room like a leaf on a breeze. She leaned her slender frame against a chair in the hotel’s conference room, bowed her head, closed her eyes. “Did you ever work in health care?” she asked one woman. “You have a really strong health-care feeling around you.”

To another man, she said, “You have this huge Native American guy behind you.”  And to yet another woman, Lisa Ann, who is known simply by her first and middle names, said she saw a male presence, a father or perhaps a grandfather, nearby.  “I do feel like he needs me to acknowledge you, your hurt,” Lisa Ann said. “Whatever they couldn’t give you here, they’re giving you on the other side.”

The woman began to cry. This is Lisa Ann’s life of voices. She is the soccer mom who talks to dead people – and makes a living out of it. Sometimes, she simply converses with spirits, she said. Other times, the dead deliver messages in short movies or still images in her head. In each case, Lisa Ann said, the spirits are usually trying to talk with their living friends and relatives. “I’m OK. Don’t worry.” “Look in the dresser.” “Watch out for your right knee.”

Lisa Ann, 38, has built her Slate Hill business around these voices. Anyone can talk to the dead, she said. They just have to learn to listen. From the Spiritquest Healing Center, in a strip mall on Route 6, Lisa Ann conducts Tarot readings, meditation training, and sessions aimed at helping people explore their past lives. She sees roughly 150 clients each month, charging them between $50 and $100 per session. She is writing two books, she said, one an autobiography, the other a self-empowerment mantra called, “God is busy. Help yourself.” And she sells two meditation CDs, during which synthesized music plays in the background while her voice guides people through breathing and mental exercises.

On a recent Sunday, Lisa Ann hosted a workshop at the Courtyard Marriott in the Town of Wallkill called, “Contact the Other Side.” The goal, she told an audience of about a dozen people, is to “make you aware of the spirits around you.” She balances this work with a busy personal life, coaching her daughter’s soccer team and attending her teenage son’s go-cart races. “There are some really flaky psychics – your image of what a psychic would be,” said Ann Bell, a Middletown massage therapist who works out of the Slate Hill shop. But Lisa Ann “balances it out with real life. She has her talent, but she makes you feel at ease.” As a child, Lisa Ann said, she got messages from the dead, but she didn’t understand them. There were “feelings” about houses and places. She had vivid dreams that later proved true.

In the 1990s, her finances tanked and took her marriage with them. Her grandmother died. She was in a car wreck. “I was in a major depression,” Lisa Ann said. “When there’s nowhere to look around you, we tend to look up.”

She took a class in spirituality, then taught herself to read Tarot cards. During an early reading, she asked a client, “Who is Ethel, and why is she talking about your bathroom?” Lisa Ann’s client became hysterical, she said. Ethel was her grandmother, the woman said. Weirder still, the woman said she was about to remodel her house, including the bathroom. Where do these voices come from?

“I think my therapist will assure you that I’m sane,” she said. Could this be her subconscious? She doubts it. Lisa Ann insists she does not ask her clients anything about themselves before she reads for them. “I’m reading for people that I’ve never met,” she said. “There’s no way I could know the things that I know.”

Yes, there are skeptics, but Lisa Ann said they typically call her after their sessions and acknowledge that what she told them turned out to be true.

For others, the reality that they might be talking with a lost loved one is more immediate. Dalen Espie, 38, of Sparrow Bush, said he came to Lisa Ann after his fiancee died in a January car wreck. During a reading, Lisa Ann described the nature of the wreck and Espie’s fiancee’s injuries.

“She was exactly right,” he said.