Chip Coffey: Rare Medium

WFP - Chip Coffey was on his riding mower in the yard of his Atlanta-area home a couple of years ago when he came around the side of the house and saw his mother standing there, grinning at him.

Although he'd been praying for that moment for years, his initial reaction wasn't exactly joy.

"My first thought was, 'I've just had a freakin' stroke,'" Coffey, 55, recalled during a phone interview. "But I reached up and felt my mouth and it wasn't drooping. And it wasn't hot enough for me to have had a heat stroke...

His mother, you see, died in the late '90s.

In retrospect, Coffey admits his reaction to seeing her -- "the most wonderful four or five seconds of my existence" -- may have been overly dramatic, considering he'd already been communicating with the dead for years at that point.

In fact, the bespectacled former travel agent quit his day job to work as a psychic and medium full time back in 2001, the year he began receiving messages from the deceased brother of a co-worker. Coffey considers that his first experience with "true interdimensional communication."

He's had many more encounters with the supernatural since, as witnessed by TV viewers during his regular appearances on two recent A&E Network series, Paranormal State and Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal.

"I remain skeptical," says Coffey, who, in addition to giving psychic and "crossing over" readings out of his home, is also a "certified" ghost hunter and paranormal investigator. TV audiences have watched him assist with exorcisms, investigate haunted houses and help children understand their psychic abilities.

"I always try to find explanations that are outside the realm of the paranormal because I don't want to completely give in to that part of myself," he says. "I urge everyone to exhaust, and I mean thoroughly exhaust, potential real-world causes for anything strange that happens."

So it was probably a coincidence when, in the middle of an Edmonton show last year, alarms rang out and the theatre filled with smoke (and had to be evacuated) just as Coffey and his Paranormal State co-star were showing a video on demonic possession?

"I found the timing to be a bit eerie," he says, laughing, "but I can't make everything a woo-woo experience."

Compared with the kid in The Sixth Sense, Coffey was a late bloomer. As a toddler, he would tell his parents when the phone was going to ring and who was on the other end, but he didn't see his first full-bodied apparition until he was an adult. Rather than see dead people, he feels the energies of spirits around him.

The difference between a ghost and a spirit, Coffey says, is that the latter has completed the journey between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Ghosts, on the other hand, are souls that, for whatever reason, have chosen to stick around. They may not know they're dead, he says, or they may fear judgment on the other side. Or sometimes it's the living who need to let go. "If the grief of our loved ones is immense, we might feel obligated to stay and comfort them," says Coffey, who InStyle magazine described as a cross between John Edward and Dr. Phil.

Unlike Edward and other celebrity mediums like Sylvia Browne, Coffey doesn't do open-channel readings where random spirits communicate through him spontaneously. So whether or not you get a message from beyond or an answer to a big life question at Monday's show will depend on whether Coffey's spirit guides lead him to you.

Coffey says he has no idea how he receives information during a psychic reading. "It's almost as though it's an afterthought, like the information completely bypasses my five senses and gets implanted in my brain," Coffey says. "Other times, it'll fly out of my mouth before I even get a chance to think about what I'm saying."

All he knows is that when he's not working, he can flip the psychic switch to "off."

"I don't want to be like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and have Patrick Swayze -- bless his heart -- singing to me at three in the morning," says Coffey. "I'm not running Western Union for the dead."

NOTE: I have a lot of respect for Chip and his abilities. 'Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal', IMO, is a remarkable production and really gets to the heart of how children and young adults react to their gifts. I can relate to the stories since I went through many of the same feelings, though I never allowed my parents or friends (and ex-wife) share the emotional roller coaster of my personal psychic encounters...Lon

Chip Coffey: Rare Medium