The Hollywood Medium Group-Chatted Me and My Dead Granddad

In a glass-walled conference room at my office one morning, right after a project status meeting and right before lunchtime, my grandfather contacted me from beyond the grave. He wished to inform me, among other things, that he is doing fine in his afterlife, and to please, if I have time, look into the possibility of one of my relatives perhaps losing part of a finger, or a toe, and walking with a slight limp because of it?

My deceased Papa did not speak directly to me—that would be insane!—but through a blonde conduit named Tyler Henry Koelewyn, Hollywood-based medium and Hollywood Medium, as in the E! franchise. Henry communes between the spirit world and the one we are in, delivering messages from deceased loved ones to those they have left behind, like Khloe Kardashian and Lil’ Kim.

“They’re having me reference to a sister figure,” Henry says, staring forward at nothing. While he speaks, he scribbles on a sketchpad in cobalt blue ink, and sweats furiously. “I feel like I have to talk about a sister figure ... living ... and they give me a thumbs up around here, but they're putting an emphasis on her, so in the context with you how this would apply, do you have a sister at all?”

I do, and I tell him that, but I don’t tell him anything else. Henry often prefaces a personal question with the phrase, “Without giving anything away,” as if it is a game to piece together who I am by grasping around in the ether. Which is odd because, if you think about it, shouldn’t a medium openly request as much information from me as possible beforehand, in order to better access my dead relatives? The purpose of a medium isn’t to impress you by stating basic details about your life. The purpose is communion with The Other Side. And anyway, shouldn’t a clairvoyant medium (as Henry bills himself) have access to these details by default?

Regardless, this successful exchange makes Henry happy. He tells me that my grandfather would like to tell me that my sister is about to experience a personal crossroads, a seismic change in her life. “They’re putting a thumbs up around this,” he says, referencing a handful of unnamed spirits currently in the room who have gathered for the occasion. “Kind of encourage it, I would say.”

“Okay,” I say while thinking, this is exactly the kind of vague advice a charlatan would give.

Several days later, my sister, who has lived in my native Cleveland for almost 30 years, tells me she has decided she wants to move to New York within the year.

I am suddenly very confused and extremely spooked.

Henry’s origin story, told countless times to many publications and even more to his fans, who attend his live events and tune in to his cable TV show, begins when he foresaw his grandmother’s death. As he and his mother were leaving the house to visit her in the hospital, Henry got a premonition that she was about to pass. He told his mom. Just then, the phone rang. It was the hospital with unfortunate news.

For the next decade or so, Henry cultivated this ability. At 16, he finished high school early with the intention of studying to be a hospice nurse while performing readings on the side. The readings proved more emotionally gratifying—as well as more lucrative—so he dropped out of the program to be a full-time medium. Word of his ability spread. One day, Sarah Paulson called him, requesting a reading. The rest, as your dead relative might say, is history.

Henry and I are meeting on the occasion of a press tour he’s on for the upcoming season of Hollywood Medium, its fourth, the celebrity mix of which includes working actors (Sofia Vergara, Rebel Wilson), Real Housewives (Jill Zarin, Kenya Moore) and Mackelmore. Each episode adheres to a standard formula—Henry wows the guest (and viewer) by revealing specific information, like a childhood nickname or an inside joke, before ascending toward catharsis, when Henry reveals, without fail, that the deceased of the celebrity is at peace, urging them to move forward. Frequently, it gets emotional.

“My job is to provide validation, comfort, or closure,” says Henry. “My goal is validation-based.”

When we first meet, I am struck by the sheer tsunami-like force of Henry’s niceness. He is so kind, so gentle in his mannerisms, so happy to be here all of the time, wherever he is. The grayscale cubicle village where I work is the most beautiful place he has ever visited. “Wow!” he says, with genuine wonder, surveying a row of filing cabinets. “It smells really good in here,” he says, providing both validation and comfort to the open floor plan. “Does it always smell this good?”

During the reading, Henry informs me of a lot of neutral information—with select details to illustrate that he is not trying to bullshit me with a lot of neutral information. He establishes that I am from Cleveland, the greatest city in the world, and that my mother’s and sister’s names both begin with K, that my aunt works in medicine. It works and I am transfixed, forgetting that most of this information is available about me online, and that I radiate, quite obviously, with the unmistakable glow of a native Clevelander.

Then it’s the more emotional stuff: My grandfather wishes to ease the burden of his death upon my mother, she should care for herself first instead of depleting her valuable energy caring for everybody else, and how I can best support her. It’s tough to imagine my grandfather actually saying anything of this—would he really refer one of his beloved daughters as “the sister who works in medicine”?—but they’re generally positive themes.

The messages from my grandfather to my mother are familiar: I am OK, everything is fine over here in the afterlife, please move forward. And even though the sentiment is identical to those I have seen offered to minor Bravo celebrities, and even though my grandfather was not historically prone to the same kind of New Age sentimentality he now seems to be a fan of, I felt a pang of comfort for my mother, a small relief, that wrapped my heart up in a warm blanket, if only briefly.

The long-debated ethical question of exchanging catharsis for cash is predicated on one hard-to-disprove question: Can living people actually talk to dead ones?

Mediums have a long and storied history in western culture. The Witch of Endor, who appeared in the First Book of Samuel (on which the Old Testament was based), coordinated the meeting of King Saul and the deceased prophet Samuel. The very first celebrity medium in existence. (Many spiritual people continue to report encounters with deceased relatives, even in 2019.)

Hundreds of years later, Daniel Dunglas Home performed séances around the Victorian-era society circuit (Napoleon III, Thomas Huxley, and various Earls were guests) until he attempted to summon the poet Robert Browning’s infant son before him. Home dressed up his foot as the ghost of a baby. The only problem was that Browning never have an infant son. So the foot gimmick didn’t go over very well.

A sting operation, documented recently in the New York Times Magazine, was performed by a group of skeptics who created impressively rich Facebook personas in the hopes of seeding fake information to psychics doing research online before performances in front of live audiences. It worked: The psychics would bring up falsified details, and the actors would play along while recording the interactions. Then they’d post the evidence online to their growing database dedicated to revealing the fraud of mediumship.

My point is that I don’t actually know if communion with the dead is possible. My roommate once, after two glasses of white wine and a hot toddy, described a thought experiment to me about what it would be like to grapple with an unknowable spiritual force. “Imagine you’re living a two-dimensional life, and you can only move on one plane, forward and backward, side to side,” she explained, “and then somebody says you can move up and down. You wouldn’t know how to get there. You don’t even know what that looks like.” She takes a sip of wine. “That’s what it would be like if there was a fourth dimension.”

We were lightly wasted and talking about Donnie Darko, but for days after, the anecdote bounced off the walls of my brain. How could we possibly attempt to know what the supernatural looks like if it literally describes something beyond our comprehension?

My other point, which is maybe the same point as before but said differently, is that a lot of people believe in mediumship and a lot of people don’t. Even skeptics will sometimes admit that because grief is complicated anybody who can offer some relief is performing a Good Deed—even if they’re just performing. Beyond therapists offices, there are surprisingly few places in our society where a person can talk candidly about death. It’s an uncomfortable topic and often we’d prefer not to talk about it. Mediums at the very least give their clients space to wrestle with the implications of mortality—whether or not they have a direct line to the dearly departed.

The same wellness economy that is staffing spas with soul-cleansing shamans and importing reiki healers into hospital wings makes a bulk of its money on a single common denominator: Somebody who exchanges money for judgment-free listening. For thirty minutes I was the sun around which Henry orbited, and he was desperate to help me feel good. “My goal is to leave people better than I find them,” he told me before the reading. I think he would have made an excellent nurse.