A Letter from Dad?

Spirit mediums, who claim to connect people with the spirits of their dead loved ones, are enjoying a vogue for their services unrivalled since the nineteenth century. Books like "Life on the Other Side" by self-proclaimed psychic and medium Sylvia Browne hit the bestseller list regularly. John Edward, the hunky host of the SciFi Channel's "Crossing Over," has attracted a cult following.

I confess that I've watched a few episodes of "Crossing Over," in which he relays messages and eerily accurate memories from what he says are departed spirits to audience members, and I've thumbed through a few of the books. Despite a moderately skeptical nature, I was intrigued enough to try a session with a medium myself.

Unfortunately, John Edward is no longer scheduling individual readings, and Sylvia Browne is not only also booked solid but charges $750 for a reading. So I asked around for a recommendation, and was told that a woman named Sunni Welles had a good reputation as a "Christian medium" (she says her powers are given to her by "angels of God"). I went to her

, and though the site was disconcertingly commercial in tone, she is somewhat more affordable than the big names: $150 for a half-hour phone session. Sunni's method involves the spiritualist method called automatic handwriting. She says the spirits take over her hand to write what they want to say to the living. Sunni reads out over the phone what she is scribbling down, and then mails you the paper transcript later. I emailed her to make an appointment.

My first real misgivings came when she emailed me back to request that before our phone date, I send her the full name of the dead person I wanted to talk to and their date of death, plus the name of an alternate dead person, in case my first choice was otherwise engaged and couldn't make it ("Spirits are very busy," her website explains). I was immediately suspicious: If you know a person's full name and exact date of death, you can get an awful lot of information about them online. When I inquired about this possibility in an email, Sunni told me--sounding a bit defensive--that she never seeks out information about the dead person aside from what her clients provide her.

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