November 07, 2016
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice
Once Durham has made a connection with present spirits in the room, she frantically scribbles words and symbols on paper. This is how sights, sounds, and feelings that Durham experiences are translated into a tangible form.
South Jersey psychic medium Kym Durham has convinced plenty of skeptics about her extrasensory gifts.
So I decided to see those gifts at work for myself, and see if she could convince me.
Recently, I met Durham at her Collingswood, New Jersey, office for a reading: low lights, a few candles, quiet, calming and with enough client demand to require an assistant.
Vivacious and animated, Durham explained before beginning that she never knows why the spirits – she refers to them as “angels in the outfield" – might "step up to the mic.”
As for me, I’m a paid professional skeptic – a journalist. I was not sure what to expect, though open-minded.
On the phone, she had asked me if I had been on the roof of my garage that day.
Well, not quite, but close.
And close enough to make me ease up a bit, but not abandon my skepticism: While I have a garage, I’d been mucking around earlier that day removing leaf litter from my home’s roof gutters. Not a clear bullseye for Durham, but certainly intriguingly within the scoring ring, it seemed.
Durham breaths deeply, sighing, smiling, frowning, looking out to the middle distance, sometimes pacing in a room that resembles a therapist's office.
We began with the past, with me holding a vintage WWII black and white photo of my dad at his shipboard post.
We discuss my daughter briefly. Durham predicts a fender-bender accident while in a blue car near Thanksgiving – “but not serious” – and a trip to the Pacific Northwest.
She nailed quite a few things, though there seemed some odd omissions.
She correctly referred to my dad as “a thirsty man” – she draws a glass – whose lifelong dependence on beer and whiskey began while stationed in Scotland during the war.
She asked why the number 17 was significant. I explained my dad was allowed to enlist at the age of 17. That was his age when he had his first drink.
She asked if my dad traversed a canal. He had indeed steamed through the Panama Canal, but that’s true of thousands of Navy vets. He also crossed the Arctic Circle, passed the equator, and traveled over the international date line, but those similar life events were not mentioned by Durham.
She plausibly described a three-way chattering conversation involving my dad and two women – a reasonable description of my father, my mother and my mother's sister, my maternal aunt.
Then she asked what the significance of St. Patrick’s Day was to me. I broke into a smile. Both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were born on that day.
Next she asked about a man formally attired in a vest and tie, with a bushy mustache whom she said may have to do somehow with my dad and drinking.
I’m stumped for a moment. But then the stuffy picture of my maternal great-grandfather, William Hartzell, comes to mind. The description fits him, at least in a generic way.
But linkage to my dad and drinking? Well, the photo of my great-grandfather that I am thinking of is on display with his 1896 liquor license. He’d owned a hotel and bar.
Durham lights up. She suggested Grandpa Hartzell is now setting them up and Ray Shelly is knocking them down, wherever they are hanging out.
Hard to say yes or no to this one, but the image is amusing.
I ask if she got anything else from the photo of my dad, a gunner’s mate, crouching low and to the left of the gun emplacement he ran.
She had trouble placing him in the photo, so I pointed him out after she twice mistook him.
Then I asked if anything else came across. But Durham, who described the “vibrations” she gets from spirits as feeling like “dissipating fireworks,” picks up nothing else.
She doesn’t ask, so I didn’t tell her that every man to the right of my dad in the photo was killed all at once in a single incident, my father surviving by being two feet out of harm’s way.
We discuss my daughter briefly.
Durham predicts a fender-bender accident while in a blue car near Thanksgiving – “but not serious” – and a trip to the Pacific Northwest.
My daughter’s car isn’t blue. Neither are her roommate's cars. She has no plans to go anywhere anytime soon. She is in Florida until at least January on an internship and seldom has two days off in a row.
According to Durham, the accident and the trip just haven’t happened yet.
So, on the medium side, Durham did rather well.
On the psychic side? We'll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, stay out of blue cars, Katie.
