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I tell people about themselves for a living. I use the term “spiritual intuitive” rather than “psychic” because the word psychic has such negative connotations that even I cringe when I hear people say, “I’m psychic!” An 800 number, I am not. I have had various abilities since I was a toddler but I was never able to accept what I am until my early 20s.

I used to get hurt when people would say I was a freak or a fraud or whatever but in recent years I have come to not care. People will say what they will. I could look at the most hard-nosed skeptic and tell him what color, brand and size his underwear is and he would still say I went through his dresser to pull the wool over his eyes. That’s just how skeptical people are wired. They don’t have any desire to be open-minded and very rarely are they open to admitting the possibility that they might be wrong. I can’t waste my time worrying about people like that because for every one skeptic, there are ten or twenty people that I have helped and who do understand what I do. Faith and skepticism is part of the balance in the universe. It’s the same for any job. We would all like to be recognized and appreciated for our work but not everybody is going to think we’re doing a good job. There are always critics no matter what we do.

Sometimes, though, a moment of validation comes that tells me in a loud, clear voice that I am doing good work and I am helping people. I know I am but the validation helps. A client came to me a few months ago looking for guidance about where she was supposed to live. There were several places and nobody was telling her anything, which was why she asked me what I thought. I told her the circumstances of my intuitive impressions and I told her that if she didn’t like the end result of what I saw, there were steps that she could take to change her future path, as we all can do. I sent her the reading and never heard much from her after that, which is fairly common when intuitives complete work for clients. Tonight she came to me out of the blue again and told me that what I had told her in her reading was just how it turned out. She told me that I was right in my predictions and thanked me for the help I gave her. Rarely do I second-guess the readings I give people but sometimes it’s nice to hear positive feedback that makes an impact on the course of people’s lives.

One soul I have not been able to help though. I live in Atlanta, which is one of the most actively haunted cities in the country. During the Civil War, almost every Confederate soldier passed through this city one way or another and there was a lot of fighting in this area as my ancestor, General Sherman, brought the war to the doorstep of the South. A lot of soldiers were killed around here and just about every block has some kind of legend or whispers among the residents about the “other” residents. It’s common. The history of Georgia still very much permeates the atmosphere here even if some choose to deny it, ignore it or label it with archaic terms like “demonic activity.”

The cul-de-sac where I live is on the edge of a wooded area and a creek runs behind my house just inside the treeline. We have a Confederate soldier who seems to occupy the area around the creek and sometimes wanders up into our cul-de-sac, in our houses, and so on. I have lived in this house on and off for three years and I have known about our resident soldier from day one. I keep wanting to call him Tommy, as did my friend when she was here, but I don’t know if that’s really his name or not. He wears a butternut frock coat (long tan coat to you non-reenactors) and he has an extremely empty, hollow, blank, shell-shocked expression on his face. He fades out from the knees down so the few times we do see him, we never see his feet.

Everybody in this house is aware of Tommy. My uncle and his partner are generally non-believers and my uncle is very phobic of death in general, so for him to admit that he knows we have the spirit of a soldier around here lends credibility to it. We have all seen Tommy at one point or another. My grandmother saw him walk by the bedroom window outside and she doesn’t understand the Civil War, so all she could tell me was, “like Sherlock Holmes.” I have seen Tommy from the living room as I was looking up at the third floor landing and he ducked from one room to the other.

Tommy knocks on doors and windows and when we look, nobody is there. Just the other night, he knocked on a wall while we were eating dinner and we all heard it. It wasn’t an interior sound like pipes banging inside the wall or animals. It was exterior, just like somebody was standing there going knock, knock, knock, knock, etc., on the wall. I live in the basement apartment and there have been several times when there is nobody home upstairs but the sound of a man walking around will happen so clear that my mother will go upstairs to see if anybody came home early. The other day we were all standing around talking about installing new windows and the television turned on by itself. You have to turn on the television and cable separately and they both came on as if someone had done it with the remote control. My uncle looked at the television and said, “I’m out of here,” and he went upstairs right away. The television doesn’t do that and the electricity has been checked in the last month because of the flood and there were no problems.

I can’t reach Tommy. I don’t know what’s holding him here or why he won’t acknowledge people in any way besides knocking, walking and manipulating electronics. Normally when I come across a soldier still stuck here, I can get him to let go and move on, but I’m going on four years here with Tommy and I haven’t made any direct contact. He’s lost. He probably doesn’t understand what happened to him or even what year it is. My heart hurts for him.