Media Coverage

Seeking solace in spirit world
Kin of Sept. 11 victims look to mediums for help

Psychic Teresa offers a glimpse into the future
Elmwood Park/ Saddle Brook
The Shopper NEWS
Wednesday, January 5, 2005

By Alex Woodson
Staff Writer

Elmwood Park – A year-and-a-half-ago, Marie Cilento was looking for answers. Her brother had died and she could not find closure.  The North Arlington resident needed to know that there was something more.

One day her chiropractor referred her to Teresa, a spiritual medium who communicates with angels and the deceased out of her home in Elmwood Park.  At first Cilento was skeptical, but Teresa soon won her over.

“There’s no way this woman could have known the thinks she was telling me,” said Cilento.  “She knew things that unless you have a video camera in my house, you don’t know.

She said Teresa communicated the unusual circumstances surrounding her brother’s death (because the matter is still under investigation, she decided to speak about it) and other topics ranging from her mother’s death to her deceased brother’s comments on her late-night eating habits.

“She just blows me away each and every time I go” said Cilento. “It’s an outrageous experience.”

Today, Cilento is one of Teresa’s many loyal customers.

For the last decade, Teresa, 42, has been a professional lecturer, medium and healer. She holds public forums throughout the tri-state area and performs individual healing and spiritual communication sessions.

“It’s like a telephone,” she said “I’m just a tool for the other side to assist and to deliver messages for healing, love and compassion.”

Teresa said she is able to see, hear and sense the deceased who have messages for living family members.  In addition, she is able to communicate with angels who she said are watching over all of us.

“They’re there to assist, enlighten and bring forth light,” she said. ”There are many different departments of angels.”

She wakes up many mornings and spirits of the deceased are waiting for her in her living room.  They appear almost like regular people but their features are little less distinguished; ‘kind of like Casper the Friendly Ghost,” she said.

Furthermore, she explained the spirits often appear as they looked between the ages of 20 and 33and are wearing clothes indicative of their time period and region.

Teresa first became aware of her gift when she was 4.  The Brooklyn born, Wayne-raised medium was at her family’s Fourth of July barbecue when deceased relatives she had never met appeared and started talking to her.

Her Catholic parents, though, were not impressed.

“They told me that this was not something to be spoken about,” said Teresa.

As a child, Teresa continued to communicate with the deceased.  Because she didn’t have many friends and couldn’t speak with her parents, she assumed everyone was able to do it.

“To me it’s always been normal,” she commented.  “I thought everybody saw what I saw.  It was only in college that I realized that most people couldn’t.”

At this time, Teresa was acting as a lay medium for friends. She took a corporate sales job out of college and worked in New York City.

A tragic car accident in 1994, though, changed her life. She was unable to go into work because of her injuries and it was at this time that she received a strong message from her angels.

‘The angels reconfirmed that being a medium and a healer was my path in life.” said Teresa. “The other side communicates with each and every one of us every day.  I believe I came here to help those who are in need of help and assistance.”

In 1995 she went to a Barnes & Noble in West Paterson and did a reading for the manager. The manager was convinced and for the next five years, she lectured monthly at Banes & Nobles around the area.

Today, she estimates she has communicated for more than 5,000 people.  More than 100 people attend her weekly lectures (she is currently taking a break because of the holidays) and she usually does a reading for 15 of the attendees. In addition, she has about 30 private sessions each week.

“All my clients come through word of mouth,” she said. “I don’t do any advertising.”

Teresa also acts as a spiritual healer for people who are very ill.  In these sessions, she will put her hands on the sick and pray for up to three hours.

In the future, Teresa plans to publish a book about her gifts to help autistic children. She also has a CD coming out in the spring that touches on her work with people with serious diseases.

Teresa firmly believes everyone can be helped by her communication. She said every skeptic that has come to her forums has left ”dumbfounded” after they received their own readings.

“We all have angels and loved ones that have passed over,” she said. “Communication through the other side is always possible through love and light.”

Teresa is appearing at the Radisson Inn in Paramus on Jan.14, the Prime Suites in Fairfield on Jan. 21 and the Ramada Inn in East Hanover on Jan. 27.  For more information, visit TeresaCommunicates.com.

Staff Writer Alex Woodson’s email address is woodson@northjersey.com

Seeking solace in spirit world
Kin of Sept. 11 victims look to mediums for help
Bergen Record
Thursday, December 13, 2001

By DANIEL SFORZA
Staff Writer

It's been three months since Sumay Chen heard from her brother Dennis, who worked in Building Four of the World Trade Center. The father of two small children is probably gone, but she has not given up hope.

"I really don't know if my brother is dead," the Wyckoff woman said. "I'm still hoping he's in a coma, or has amnesia. Maybe his name got crossed up.

"Until they call me and say we found his wallet or we found . . . " she said, her voice trailing off and finishing softly with "him."

That "desperation" as Chen put it, led her to seek the services of a spiritual medium -- a person who professes to see and speak with the dead.

Chen is not alone in seeking solace from the ethereal world. In New Jersey, family members of some World Trade Center victims are looking to unconventional means to make peace with the passing of loved ones ripped from their lives in the harshest of ways.

Spiritual mediums say they can provide the living with a conduit to the dead.

Two New Jersey mediums say their phones have been ringing off the hook since Sept. 11 and they have at least six new clients each, all families of World Trade Center victims. Those families, they say, have one thing in common: All are searching for a way to get a final message to or from their loved ones, discover how they died, and gain some peace of mind.

Whether or not those final messages are delivered is something that the state Division of Consumer Affairs doesn't concern itself with. There are religious undertones, said spokeswoman Beth Goldberg.

But she did urge people to be cautious. Communing with the dead "is not an exact science," she said. "It can lend itself to deception and false claims."

Teresa, a spiritual medium from Elmwood Park, says communicating with the dead helps her clients lead their lives "in a more peaceful way."

"It can be . . . a new beginning," said Teresa, who uses only her first name. "They start to grow again. They can now sleep again, they can eat again, they can continue life."

Teresa and others like her have been holding seminars every few weeks -- a normal practice in her profession -- and more and more families of World Trade Center victims have been showing up.

"I'm literally a phone," said Teresa, adding that she also is a mystic -- able to see the future -- and spiritual healer. "All you are doing is coming here and I am dialing over to the other side."

Mediums generally do not ask for much information from their clients -- often just a first name. That way, they seem more credible when they come up with facts they should not know, the two mediums said. Typically, private one-hour sessions cost about $150 and up.

But John Edward, who has raised the profile of mediums nationwide, gets $300 for personal readings. The Long Island medium has a syndicated television show, "Crossing Over," and has been inundated with requests for readings from families of World Trade Center victims, news reports say.

It's a touchy subject for the popular medium. After he was accused of exploiting victims' families, he canceled an episode of his show about contacting the dead of the World Trade Center attack.

Teresa recently held a seminar in Wayne -- about 90 participants paid $9 each at the sold-out event -- where she said she made contact with Susan Polio, the deceased sister of Joyce Oxley of Toms River. It was the first time Oxley and her family had sought the services of a medium.

"She wants to thank you," Teresa told Oxley and her family of her sister. "She sits with Mother Mary. She watches over you. She says stop picking over your food. She says thanks for the prayers. Thanks for the novena."

Indeed, Polio's mother said, she had said a novena -- a group of prayers -- for her lost daughter, and had been picking over her food. Still, that could easily be true of many grieving families. 

Then the reading became more specific.

"We couldn't find my sister's will and [Teresa] answered that question," Oxley said, unwilling to discuss details but indicating that the will had been found. "Teresa said she was seeing Tweety Bird. I realized [that] last year for Christmas, I had given [my sister] a Tweety Bird sweat shirt.

"It confirmed my belief," she said.

Teresa has had no formal training and said she has honed her skills through meditation and prayer. She said she discovered her gift at a family function when she was 4. There, she said, she saw ghosts of dead relatives and was able to talk to them. 

Now, years later (she won't give her age), she is able to communicate with the dead by flipping a mental "switch" and focusing on her subject. She dresses casually and works from a home office decorated with angels, crystals, and tarot cards.

But the readings are not treated as parlor tricks. They are usually highly emotional events from which clients often walk away with specific information about their loved ones, Teresa said. Sometimes the reading is painful, other times joyous, but always the truth as Teresa sees it.

"This is what I came here to do," Teresa said. "To help mankind know that life goes beyond this life. Continual life brings peace, love, and light."

Not everyone is satisfied with the experience of visiting a medium, however.
Chen went to Lauren Thibodeau, a spiritual medium who works out of Princeton and Manhattan. Chen had hoped not only to make contact with her brother, but possibly to find out that he did not "cross over."

"I didn't think it brought closure to me," said Chen, adding that it was her first trip to a medium. "I guess I was expecting for her to give me more of a confirmation that it is my brother I was talking to. She was giving me numbers and letters of 
the alphabet. I didn't see any related significance."

Thibodeau, who says she has a doctorate in counseling, said everyone's experience is different. 

"Most people come expecting, and it's fair to expect, that a medium is going to help them make a connection to a passed loved one," she said. "The trouble with people who have died in the World Trade Center, there is no way to confirm details [of what I tell them]."

Thibodeau said many family members of the terror victims hope that mediums will provide some indication that their loved ones are still alive. 

"I think people want me to say he's in a hospital somewhere and he's had amnesia," said Thibodeau, who has done readings for several people affected by the trade center attack. "I must represent it as I sense it. I don't want people to have false hope. Instead, I want them to have real healing."

Part of the reason Chen went to Thibodeau was to search for proof of her brother's death.

"When there's no body, it's a very difficult thing to come to terms with," Chen said. "Also, not knowing where he went, how he died. Was he injured?"
Chen said even though the reading wasn't especially helpful for her, she was willing to try another medium.

"I am a spiritual person," she said. "I believe in the spiritual world. I don't think you die and that's it. There's an energy that still exists."

Brian B., a Manhattan client of Thibodeau who declined to give his full last name, had a much different experience.

He first tried calling Edward, but was referred to Thibodeau after learning that Edward has a three-year waiting list.

"There wasn't a lot of guesswork," he said. "She hit a lot of home runs with me."

Brian lost his girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancee, Nina, on Sept. 11. She worked on the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Still, he went to Thibodeau hoping that Nina was still alive.

"I was hoping [Thibodeau] would maybe touch base with someone else, maybe my mom and dad, and they would tell me, you are barking up the wrong tree," Brian said. "Unfortunately, that wasn't the case."

During his reading, Brian was told very specific information he believes could have come only from someone speaking to Nina.

"We were always kind of running late in the mornings and there was just this kind of little thing we did," Brian said. "We would both hop in the shower, I would take the rag and wash her feet and she would wash my feet.

"You can't guess at that," he said. "It was significant to me." Another indication for Brian that Thibodeau was indeed in contact with Nina was a running joke about Nina being one-eighth French.

Thibodeau "mentioned [Nina] was saying a few words to her in French," Brian said. "There were just little things like that. Obscure things that she would pull out and just mention to me."

Brian said it helped him so much in dealing with Nina's death that he plans to take some of Nina's friends for a reading.

"I actually plan on doing a follow-up to it," he said. "I won't say it gave me closure, but it kind of helped me settle a few things."

Staff Writer Daniel Sforza's e-mail address is sforza@northjersey.com