Mrs. Kellerman, Yucaipa Psychic

When I was in high school in Whittier, California, our psychology class teacher offered projects we could do. I chose to go, with my two best friends, to have a session with famous psychic Josephine Kellerman.

To get a reading, you had to park in front of her house in Yucaipa, California, in the early hours of the morning. She’d take the first 20 people in line and have them wait in her screened-in porch with many cats. There was a framed, signed photo of Ronald Reagan on top of her television — she may have given him psychic readings at the behest of Nancy Reagan after he was shot.

When it was my turn, she took me into a room with a small round table with something round (a crystal ball, I assumed) on top of it, covered by a cloth, so she could see in, but I couldn’t. To get into a trance, she tapped her fingers repeatedly and kind of snorted.

Among other things, she told me that there were five people named William in my family (correct), and that there was someone I used to know from somewhere else who was in a nearby church, was wearing a uniform, had red hair, and was in trouble.

This made no sense to me until a few days later, when I talked on the phone with my older brother who was up at Berkeley. He said that a red-headed friend of his, who had been on the football team with him in the midwest town we had lived in a couple of years before, was AWOL from the Navy and seeking sanctuary at a church in Pasadena (which was near me, in Whittier, California).