Photography: Emily Chalk.
It’s the greatest gift Kerry-Marie Callander has ever been given: the ability to communicate with the spirit world. And nothing brings the Kiwi psychic medium more joy than sharing it with others, especially at this time of year.
“Christmas can be a really hard time for people who are mourning,” says Kerry-Marie.
“Some of my customers don’t celebrate it because it’s just too sad. So I love it when I can give them a message from spirit, and they know it’s authentic because I use language that person would have used, and I tell them things nobody else would know. “When you can give them evidence that their loved one still remains, just in a different place, it gives them faith and joy. They start believing and they start experiencing it for themselves, and that’s a wonderful thing. “Spirit wants you to celebrate Christmas – they want you to be happy, they want you to live your life. It’s a good time to think about those special memories and have a toast to them.”
To Kerry-Marie, 64, using her abilities to bring comfort to others who are grieving is not just a gift, it’s a responsibility. But it took her many years to feel comfortable enough to be open about what she could do.
Facing the gift, she tried to hide
“I was a closet medium for a very long time,” she admits.
“I was in my thirties before I started accepting that I could do this. It was scary, but I had to be true to myself. It’s who I am.”
She has been able to see, hear and feel spirit since she was a small child.
The spirits who visited
“I used to be terrified at night because all these people were around me,” she recalls.
“They’d be standing at the end of my bed. I would go into my dad’s bed because I was so scared and he would say I was imagining it. I came from a very strict Catholic family who didn’t believe you could sense spirit. My mother told me mediums were evil.”
A young girl named Elizabeth began appearing to her regularly in spirit, and unlike the scary people in her room, the child brought a sense of comfort and peace.
Learning to trust what she saw
“She felt like my guardian and protector,” explains Kerry-Marie.
However, whenever she mentioned Elizabeth to her family, she was dismissed as “Kerry’s imaginary friend”.
When Kerry-Marie was 10, she woke up shortly after midnight to see her cousin standing in the room.
“He told me he had passed in a car crash,” she says.
“I got up and told my parents, and they said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous – go back to bed.’ They got a phone call at three in the morning – he had died in a car crash, just like I said.”
Moments that tested her faith
Her parents never spoke about what she’d told them. Not being believed led to Kerry-Marie doubting herself. She got on with life, training to be a nurse after leaving school, getting married and having three children. She went through plenty of ups and downs, including the break-up of both her first marriage and a subsequent relationship.
After the death of her father, to whom she was very close, she went for readings with mediums, even though that went against her family’s beliefs. One medium told her she had the ability to communicate with those who had passed over. Invited to attend a class of people developing their skills and expecting “alternative hippie types” to attend, she turned up in “very weird clothes”.
“Everyone else was dressed very normally,” she remembers with a laugh.
Sharing her gift with the nation
After her mother died, she felt free to pursue her passion for spiritual development. Now married to her second husband, John, she trained at a spiritual college in the UK and got qualifications from the Spiritualist National Union.
Along with doing private readings, she has done public shows, appeared on radio and was one of the mediums on TV’s Sensing Murder in 2018. She also trains others to become mediums and hosts her own podcast, Spiritual Truths.
Kerry-Marie is doing her first national tour, Bridging the 2 Worlds, in February and March next year. Passing on messages to a crowd of people takes a huge amount of energy and can be tiring work.
The energy it takes to connect with spirit
“I pick up on the emotion, the sadness,” she tells.
“If spirit gets upset, I feel it and that’s hard.”
But it’s also incredibly rewarding.
“I still get blown away when I get amazing evidence from spirit. It’s a miracle and something I will never take for granted. It’s definitely a life-changing gift.”
Visit kerrymarie.co.nz for more information.
