Messages from beyond?: Local psychics ‘channeling the truth’ and spirits of the dead

By ELISE LINSCOTT
For the Advocate

‘The first thing I felt was cancer … she said ‘I was tired and there was no way back,’ which is pretty common for cancer,” South Hadley-based psychic medium and fiction writer Lisa Lanno said to a room of about 50 people one recent Thursday night at the Granby Free Public Library.

She looked down at her brown leather notebook, filled with a handful of messages she’d received the night before from the spirits of loved ones who were attending the gallery-style reading that day.

“The message she gave me was very clear: she said she smiled and she kept her dignity until the end … and she said, ‘I know you think you should have done more, but I’m the one that should have done more. You never hold a grudge, thank you.’” Lanno paused and waited to see if that message resonated with anyone in the audience.

A woman in the front row spoke up and said her mom died of cancer a few weeks ago.

“That message seems rather personal, but does it make sense to you?” Lanno asked.

“Very much so,” the woman replied. “We had seen her like two weeks prior, and she didn’t look like herself.”

Lanno said the spirit wanted her daughter to let go of the guilt that she couldn’t be there more. “She didn’t want you there all the time, first of all,” Lanno said.

“She lived in North Carolina, so it was difficult to help with anything,” the woman replied.

“So it would’ve been impossible,” Lanno continued. “I just feel like she smiled a lot. Her dignity was important to her. She said she didn’t look like herself anymore.”

Before the readings began, Lanno instructed the audience to listen to the description of the people whose spirits had spoken to her; if the physical description didn’t fit but the personality style did, they should raise their hand so they could identify the person and bring the spirit into the room. “One spirit brings in another,” she kept repeating.

It didn’t seem to matter to the audience whether or not the details she gave were spot on. If a detail didn’t fit — “I’m smelling baked goods, I don’t know why?” she asked a young man during a reading, to which he replied he didn’t either because his late auntie didn’t bake much — Lanno pivoted to another question until something resonated. In those instances, the images or smells she was getting could have been intended for someone else, she said.

The audience members who participated in the readings all seemed to have suffered a recent loss, or one that had not fully healed. They tearfully opened up about a late parent, spouse, or friend, and hearing the message from Lanno that the spirit said they were okay seemed to put them at ease.

And who hasn’t lost someone they knew — to cancer, an overdose, or an overseas battle while deployed — and wanted to know that their spirit was at peace, in whatever afterlife they ended up in?

Lanno defined “psychic” as intuition. “We all have psychic capabilities,” although some people don’t know how to tune into them, she said.

But what does a psychic do? What’s their process?

“You take that intuition that everyone has and then you just reach out more — you send that intention further out, into the energy field of someone else, and that makes you psychic,” said Sharon D’Angelo, a psychic medium based in Chicopee. A medium is a psychic who can channel the spirits of those who’ve died. “Every medium is a psychic, but not every psychic is a medium,” she said.

D’Angelo said that during a psychic reading, she taps into another person’s energy field and tells the client what images she receives. Often, people coming in for a psychic reading are looking for guidance, while those requesting her medium services want to know that their deceased loved one is okay. In a tarot or oracle reading, she’ll get a bigger picture of the person’s story in motion and different potential outcomes.

“(The cards are) a tool, just like a flashlight,” she said. “It’s guidance.”

And they’re a tool that everyone can use — psychic medium or not — although working with a psychic can offer a different perspective. And some psychics are better than others, just like some guitar players are better than others, she said.

“We’re human, we’re psychic. We’re not just these physical beings …  it’s all energy,” said Mark Summa, a Northampton-based medium and life coach (formerly known as Psychic Mark) who goes by the business name Mark Charters Medium/Life Coach. Summa used to teach a class in psychic abilities, but said he doesn’t anymore since he’s too busy.

“My gift is to help you see your gifts,” he said of his psychic medium and life coach work. “Say you come in and you want to deal with marriage. You don’t even tell me, I listen. I’ll say, ‘Someone taught you you don’t have a voice. Something about your dad taught you this.’ And all of a sudden, you start challenging your man. I’ve had people go from deep, sad marriages, to divorce, to deep strong relationships, to marriage, and see them through that whole period in a matter of five years.”

Summa said his client base ranges from top banking executives to former heroin addicts who’ve been beaten up by every boyfriend they’ve had.

“They’re all just humans looking for love,” he said.

Summa seems to have lived multiple lives already. Forty years ago, he was a homeless amphetamine addict eating out of dumpsters. He then cleaned up his act and got sober after a near-death experience of being held at gunpoint. From there, he became a pastry chef, then a massage therapist to celebrity clients in New York and Los Angeles — Michael J. Fox was once a client, he said.

He’s been psychic since he was a kid — he inherited it from his mom and grandma, he said — but after the death of his daughter, he decided to pursue it as a career path.

“After my daughter died, she came back to me and said that she died because I didn’t love her mother enough. My heart was too closed off,” he said. And she encouraged him to help people using his psychic abilities, so he made the change.

Summa doesn’t need much sleep — he goes to bed around midnight and wakes up at 3:30 every morning to bake for his clients. His daughter’s spirit often comes to him in the morning and tells him what to bake, he said. He gives the pastries to all his clients for free, including those he sees in-person for individual readings and in gallery-style readings he holds in his studio every Thursday. He also mails them to clients across the world who he sees via Zoom.

He has a book coming out this month, titled “Become the Light Again: A Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss and the Light,” in which he details his life journey and path to becoming a psychic medium.

While all three psychics said that people are in charge of their own free will, Summa said he’s made some specific predictions that were later right, including that a 46-year-old woman he met with would become pregnant with triplets, and that a client’s daughter would have a baby girl named Charlotte on Oct. 9. (These claims could not be verified for this article.)

While working on this article, my family and I decided to take a trip to MASS MoCA in the Berkshires and happened upon an exhibition titled “Like Magic.”

“In times of chaos, threat, and uncertainty, people often turn towards technologies of magic — like astrology, tarot, spells, and charms — for solace, coping, healing, and strength,” the exhibition description read. “These technologies are not the props used for stage magic … but rather are tools created by humans to help them survive and thrive in a chaotic world.”

Perhaps the draw of the unknowability and seemingly mystical qualities of a psychic, for a reading with intuitive guidance or a message from the spirit world about a deceased loved one, could explain why there are so many; I’ve often noticed buildings advertising psychic readings throughout the area, many of which have been in business for years. A quick Google search for “psychic near me” yielded nearly 80 results in western Massachusetts alone.

Summa said he doesn’t care whether or not people believe him.

“It’s not me,” he said. “I’m just channeling the truth.”