James Van Praagh’s Trip to the Other Sidephotograph

James Van Praagh promises us one hell of a heaven. It’s a place with forests and flowers and lakes and boats, and beautiful mansions, too. It’s a place where the aged return to their prime and where the young, struck down too soon, can grow into theirs. It’s a place where amputees find their limbs restored and those blown to bits in a plane crash become whole again. OK, heavy smokers may still be battling their addiction and the mentally ill may need some counseling. But you can go to the races, hold a job, take art classes or walk your dog. You also, apparently, can get cable.

“Could you watch this show where they are?” CNN’s talk show czar, Larry King, asked him one time. To which Van Praagh replied, “Sure.”

The spirits not only watch the tube, they can gaze down--or stand at our sides--while we place flowers on their graves, put their pictures on the piano or even while we shop for wallpaper. Yet they turn away when we go potty.

We get that reassuring news when Saheeb, a first-time questioner, posts a query through the James Van Praagh Home Page on the Internet. “Do our spirit Gods know our every thought?” Saheeb asks. “Do we have any private moments or are they there too?”

As the question blips on his computer screen in the West Hollywood headquarters of his business, Spiritual Horizons, Inc., Van Praagh gives one of his trademark pixieish smiles. “Everyone asks that question at every lecture I do,” he says. “They want to know if they can see us having sex or in the bathroom.”

His stubby fingers fly over the keyboard to answer Saheeb and other subscribers hooked up through cyberspace for a Wednesday evening Q&A.; “Yes they do respect our privacy. You have nothing to worry about.”

Nothing to worry about is the mantra of James Van Praagh. We could call it Death Made Easy, except that it’s hard to say we ever die under his scenario.

“When you realize there’s no death, there’s nothing to be heavy about,” he says. “It’s a joyous thing.”

That’s what he has been selling the world in every way imaginable over the past year as he’s become society’s medium of the moment: as a marquee attraction in Body & Soul and Whole Life Expos that have filled hotel ballrooms from San Diego to Boston (headlined up there with Deepak Chopra); on Voyage of Enlightenment cruises through the Mediterranean or--just this week--the Caribbean ($3,450 for a “grand ocean view suite”); through his cyberspace network of chat rooms and merchandising (a “James Store” selling psychic development videotapes); and, of course, on TV’s bottomless pit of talk and magazine shows, which relish the theater he provides by hooking up the host, or audience members, or callers--over the phone--with kin in the world beyond. The night before the online Q&A;, “Hard Copy” showed him stunning a Lancaster woman by telling her that her departed husband, who drowned in a boating accident, noticed how she now slept on his side of the bed.

Oh, and between the talk shows, chat rooms, cruises and expos, he squeezed out time on his laptop to complete a sequel to “Talking to Heaven,” last year’s “major phenomenon” of the book world, as his surprised publisher termed it. Dutton is releasing the follow-up next month and this time won’t make the mistake of sending out only 6,000 copies, then having to scramble to get 600,000 more to the stores when the customer demand “exceeded expectations.”

With Van Praagh’s new book, “Reaching to Heaven,” they’re starting with a printing of 300,000, plenty to get him his second straight No. 1 bestseller.

Who’s going to quibble when it lands, again, on the nonfiction list?

*

Understand, please, that Van Praagh is the first one to attribute his success to telling people what they’d like to hear. We need not rack our craniums over this, or seek out theologians for explanations, or dredge up Karl Marx talking about opiates of the masses.

“We all want to live forever,” Larry King noted when he had Van Praagh back for a second appearance. “Everybody watching this show tonight wants you to be right . . . . You tap into that.”

“You bet,” said the guest.

Or listen to actress Cindy Williams, of “Laverne & Shirley” fame, who was a client long before the spotlight found him: “Everyone wants to have that faith that there’s a life after this life,” she says. “That we do go on. There might be some people who think, ‘No I want this to be the end.’ Those people shouldn’t go to James.

“He is proof to me,” she adds. “Therein lies the phenomenon.”

Yet we must not go too far in this direction, attributing his success merely to the crowd-pleasing nature of his message. That does not do justice to what the man has accomplished. For if it was so easy to sell Everlasting Life, wouldn’t the churches all be packed on Sunday? Wouldn’t there be more mediums getting calls from Cher and moving to ocean-view homes in Laguna, as Van Praagh recently did?

Go some Saturday night to a group seance at the modest San Fernando Valley home of the medium who taught Van Praagh the ropes, the very proper English-born Brian Hurst. He even gave Van Praagh his incantation to begin sessions, “Spirit friends draw near to me/Spirit friends speak clear to me . . . .” Hurst is still slogging away, at 60, doing readings one by one, or at monthly groups where he serves punch and cookies, all the while trying to find an agent for his book, a “New Age mystery thriller.”

Hurst is careful to say he’s pleased for his pupil. But “it’s very important to know that James is not unique,” he adds.

What special skill does Van Praagh have? “He’s great in front of the camera,” says his teacher.

That’s certainly part of it, for Van Praagh may be the first medium or psychic whose renown came initially from TV. From the start, he was relaxed on the tube, wowing audiences with his “hits” while disarming them with how he shrugged off misses. He might ask a man on one show, “Who is Charlie?” and get a blank stare. But you’d never see panic in his eyes. After all, what’s the problem? A woman sitting nearby knew a dead Charlie--her “family dog.” Bingo, Van Praagh is off and running, offering a vision of the pooch taking strolls in heaven.

You think that’s easy? It only got harder with success. For that drew out the professional debunkers, the Amazing Randi and his crowd, folks all too eager to spoil the good news of Death Made Easy by branding it as pap and the messenger as a fraud, or worse, a circus act.

If truth be told, Van Praagh sometimes felt like a circus act on those TV shots, as each tried to top the last. “They want to see what’s good TV, and good TV is James performing,” he noted. One producer put him with a group of strangers who turned out to be MURDERERS and RELATIVES OF MURDER VICTIMS! You think that’s easy, being up there, cameras rolling, with all that dark energy? But he did it.

Yes, he’s a phenomenon. By accepting him that way, we don’t need to get bogged down in the sticky question of whether he actually talks to the dead. For even if that part’s fiddle-faddle, you only need gaze out the window of his Santa Monica Boulevard office--at an acting school across the street, its lobby decorated with the head shots of hopefuls--to be reminded that the raison d’etre of this town is, first and foremost, to “make it.”

It doesn’t take a medium to get the message that James Van Praagh, at 40, has done that.

*

The show-biz blood goes back nearly a century in his family. Van Praagh’s grandfather came over from England in 1912 and worked the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, putting up the tents, then at the Winter Garten Theater in New York. After World War II, his son, Allan, hooked up with the theatrical union as a stagehand and got jobs in early live TV, helping arrange stunts for quiz shows such as “Beat the Clock.” Allan Van Praagh became chief carpenter for the Shubert Corp., working at Broadway’s Royale Theater on productions from “West Side Story” to “Grease.” In the best union tradition, his eldest son, Mike, followed him into the carpenter’s job.

Childhood was no musical comedy, however, for the youngest of the four Van Praagh kids. For while James’ father was putting in long hours in the city, his mother--though a devout Roman Cathlic--was fighting the bottle. One neighbor recalls how a drawn Regina Van Praagh sometimes roamed the streets of Bayside, in Queens, to collect cans she could redeem for cash, to pay for her drinking. Equally wrenching was the sight of “Jamie,” basically on his own, a small, sensitive boy who wore glasses. “Froggy,” the other kids called him. Is it any wonder that, years later, he constantly envisions parents in the beyond asking for forgiveness from their children--and reassuring them, yes, we loved you.

His lifeline was a family around the corner, the Leifs, who often took him in. The father, Jack, a speech pathologist for handicapped youths, recalls Jamie as a sweet and honest boy “looking to find a place to belong.” Van Praagh dedicated his first book to his surrogate mother, Connie Leif, “the very first angel I met on earth.”

From the earliest age, he was fascinated with death. He created a backyard cemetery in which to bury his pet gerbils and dead squirrels off the street. He’d give them a headstone made from a matchbook and a cross of popsicle sticks. He liked to visit a real graveyard too, old Lawrence Cemetery, and the local haunted house, the Bell House, a dilapidated mansion that once was the home of Gentleman Jim Corbett, the boxer. He was intrigued by funerals as well--and “there were a lot,” he recalls, in his mother’s Irish family. But whereas most kids are confused, or terrified, when first taken to one, Van Praagh describes himself as almost nonchalant, at age 8, before the open coffin of his aunt, a nun. “The people were crying and I was wondering why they were upset. The person in the box was not my aunt. It looked like her, but . . . it really wasn’t.”

At about the same age, he says, a “glowing white hand” appeared in his room while he was praying.

But any thoughts of the priesthood were shortlived. He went to public Bayside High School, then four colleges, eyeing a career more in line with the family trade, entertainment, though not the blue-collar side of it. He participated in school plays and singing groups, and worked at the Royale Theater with his father and brother while attending Hunter College in Manhattan--interested far more in the actors onstage than his backstage chore pulling ropes to lift scenery. Then he transferred to San Francisco State, having researched “the best colleges for broadcasting.”

Finally getting his degree, he moved to L.A. to begin his climb, literally from the basement. That’s where he was placed in the William Morris agency, yanking staples out of contracts so they could be microfilmed.

His goal was to write sitcoms, and he worked on spec scripts in his spare time, including one for “Cheers.” But other worlds were opened up by his boss, contracts administrator Carol Shoemaker. She had a side interest: “mediumship.”

Shoemaker says the talent “ran in my family.” The women would get together and tune in to their kin, like a grandmother who appeared in the garden. Shoemaker also consulted Brian Hurst, then operating out of a house in Manhattan Beach. One time, she took Van Praagh. He was 24. It was two days before his mother, 62, died of a stroke.

Then, as now, Hurst’s home was a center for aficionados of the paranormal, a place where everything from psychic surgery to reincarnation is believed, not scoffed at. He keeps a library of books by famous practitioners and has photos of “physical mediums” such as Leslie Flint, showing clouds of ectoplasm coming out of their heads, forming ornate angels or a voicebox through which the spirits would speak. Hurst plays tapes said to be William Randolph Hearst talking from the beyond, and visiting mediums stop by to give old-style demonstrations, making tables turn and lights fly about the garage. It’s stuff the public today--accustomed to seeing magicians perform “illusions” in Las Vegas showrooms--might shrug off as good entertainment. In Hurst’s home, it lives on as part of a great heritage.

Hurst performs no such feats. He describes himself as a mental medium, a clairaudient, who picks up only sensations, and snippets of dialogue, from the departed. As such, a session becomes an interactive process--the skeptics would say a game of 20 Questions--to find a hit.

“Was one of your grandparents involved with a farm?”

“No.”

“Or places where there were horses?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You went on ponies or horses when you were younger?”

“Very young.”

“Are there some photographs taken of you sitting on a horse or a pony?”

“I think there were at some time.”

“Yes, I think so . . . “

Many names are offered up. To a subject whose ancestry may be German: “I’m getting things like Ursula . . . Otto . . . Hans . . . .”

As groping as it seems, Van Praagh says it was just such an exercise that converted him from a skeptic who didn’t buy “any of it.”

“[Hurst] goes, ‘There’s another James in the spirit world.’ I said, ‘No, there isn’t.’ He goes, ‘Yes, you have an uncle over there.’ . . . . I found later on there’s a great-uncle I have named James.”

It’s part of Van Praagh lore how Hurst also saw a light around the young man and said something like, “I think you can do it yourself, James” and “your mother says you’re going to be before the public.”

Van Praagh formed a “development circle” at his apartment to hone his skills. For three hours on Tuesday nights, he’d sit with others, silently meditating in the dark, trying to open up his senses and feel the vibrations of the spirits, sometimes letting his astral body--the emotional body--fly away on adventures. Shoemaker recalls that Van Praagh would call her, excited, saying, “‘I told this person this and that and it came through!”’ He kept the circle going for seven years.

His career progressed in steps. He started doing readings for a fee. Another medium got sick and referred her clientele. The Hollywood crowd got wind of him. Cindy Williams had “no doubt” her dad, who died when she was 22, was talking through Van Praagh. Williams became so fond of Van Praagh that when he decided to marry a woman he’d known from college, she hosted the ceremony. The marriage lasted less than two years, but the June, 20, 1992 wedding was something for a Bayside boy: on an oceanside bluff in Malibu, candles floating in the actress’s pool, the sun setting, a harp playing.

He had advanced from the temp job at William Morris to a permanent one in the contracts department at Paramount. He gave that up to work full time as a medium.

“Then,” recalls Shoemaker, “he was on ‘The Other Side.’ ”

*

The NBC show was inspired by a Roper poll that found a striking number of Americans believed in flying saucers and other such phenomena--16% reported having had personal contact with aliens. So the show booked the full range of paranormal personalities: people who insisted they’d been abducted by spacemen, people who had goblins in their attics, people who claimed miraculous cures for diseases, people who survived near-death experiences, and so on.

One of the producers, Annie Azzariti, recalls how Van Praagh came on the radar screen: He called. In fact, he’d called before, after she did a segment on another show, “Unsolved Mysteries,” showcasing medium George Anderson, who had written a book called “We Don’t Die.” Van Praagh said that if she ever needed someone else for a spot like that . . . .

“I told him, ‘I don’t think we’re going to do another,’ ” Azzariti said. But when “The Other Side” was in development, he “somehow heard . . . and tracked me down.” Though she got calls from “a lot of nuts,” instinct told her to give this guy a tryout--a personal reading with her. He then began talking about how “my grandmother really liked that painting of the flower next to the bathroom.” Boom--he was on the air.

No guest drew a response anything like Van Praagh’s. From the moment he was put on in November 1994, “our phones were completely blocked there were so many calls,” Azzariti said. “Thousands of calls from all over the country.”

“They were desperate to try to contact this man,” said Ron Ziskin, head of the Four Point Entertainment production company.

On his debut show, Van Praagh reassured a Cal State Long Beach professor, Barbara Matthews, that her dead son had found a playmate from the cemetery and that he was saying something about a train. The grieving mother understood right away--that must be the toy train she sent East!--and soon there were tears in her eyes, tears of joy and relief that her boy’s spirit lived on. “I felt a great deal of healing and peace,” she said later. “It enabled me to move forward.”

Van Praagh was on a dozen of the 209 episodes of “The Other Side” before it was cancelled in the summer of 1995 because there weren’t enough, well, guests like him. No problem. Other shows found him. He was a TV natural, an impish everyman in khakis and loafers, a medium who wasn’t “woo-woo,” as his publicist observed, but a down-to-earth teddy bear, a gushy little guy with an open smile and swirling, dimpled chin. Though women especially took to him, testimonials poured forth from men as well. Peter Redgrove, who had lost his life partner to AIDS, was “living like a victim” until Van Praagh passed on messages from his partner and “a brother about whom I knew nothing.” Redgrave began working with dying AIDS patients to ease their fear of death.

Van Praagh relished such endorsements because, for all his impishness, there was something of the missionary about him. “I have a sense that I came back on this earth to do this work,” he said. He turned down appearances sure to be a goof, like on Howard Stern. None of this wink-wink stuff--we did our act and now let’s have a drink. And while he couldn’t resist Cher when she wanted to contact Sonny, he wasn’t the one to blab and land them in the tabloids. Cher herself disclosed on TV how Van Praagh had passed on messages from her former singing partner--who saw that she was having trouble finding shoes for the Oscars.

But there were consequences to sticking your head up as the man who “provides proof of life after death.”

*

The skeptics society took notice. The San Gabriel Valley-based organization offers lectures at Caltech, puts out Skeptics magazine and has a board of scientists, professors and others who study paranormal claims while having “a hoot about some of the goofy things people believe,” in the words of its director, Michael Shermer. Leading members include magicians Penn Jilette and James “The Amazing” Randi, who blew spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller out of the water some years back. Shermer, the author of “Why People Believe Weird Things,” made Van Praagh his personal cause celebre, becoming the medium’s pursuer, his Javert. Van Praagh, Shermer says, is “a fake, a fraud.”

Shermer understands that Van Praagh’s preachings follow a long tradition. His elaborate vision of the afterlife borrows openly from theosophy, an occult-oriented movement that gained adherents such as Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes tales. But theosophy had its heyday a century ago. Shermer worries about a society still so desperate to find tangible answers to life’s mysteries that crowds line up to see the face of Jesus in a tortilla, others embrace computer programs that find secret codes in the Bible and legions are convinced they’re hearing from heaven when they’re only witnessing techniques right out of a Magic Castle mind-reading act.

To Shermer, Van Praagh’s performances speak for themselves, with a profusion of misses “so bad it is embarassing.” The hits? How hard is it to guess that a daughter will wear jewelry from her dead mother?

More difficult to explain are the hits “that startle everybody.” Shermer compares them to the occasional jackpots that keep gamblers pouring money into slot machines. One came on Van Praagh’s first “The Other Side,” when a father asked him the nickname of his dead son, Josh. The man had consulted Van Praagh before, but swore he’d never shared this detail. Van Praagh strained. “Joshie, what did Daddy call you, please?” Then to the audience: “It’s hard to get stuff like this, but I’ll try.” More struggle: “C’mon.” Then: “ ‘Daddy called me Doctor!’ ” There were gasps as the father confirmed it.

Another such moment came on “20/20.” Barbara Walters was amazed when Van Praagh “knew that my father had a glass eye.”

Then the segment’s reporter, Bill Ritter, did some research and disclosed that he found a book “that said he was blind in one eye--an accidental incident when he was a child--and he had a glass eye. If I found that out . . . .”

It also was during the taping of “20/20” that cameras kept rolling through a break and recorded Van Praagh casually asking a woman, “Did your mother pass on?” followed by her reply, “Grandmother.” An hour later, on the air, Van Praagh told the same woman, “There is a lady sitting behind you. It feels like a grandmother.”

Confronted afterward, Van Praagh said, “I don’t cheat. I don’t cheat.”

But it was the sort of unpleasantry that he had to worry about as he got big. For just as a tearful “hit” makes for good drama, so does a clever trap. On a radio show in St. Louis, a caller wanted to know about a dead brother, so Van Praagh envisioned a hospital setting and how “the cancer came quickly over his body.” Then the caller asked, “Do you charge people to give them these readings?” and revealed there was no dead brother. The debunkers even tried to spoil his appearances on Larry King, which helped rocket his first book to the top of the charts, with 375,000 copies sold in six weeks. The nitpickers went over his every word: How could he tell one caller there’s no eating in the afterlife, then tell another her grandma was baking pies for fellow spirits?

To Shermer, the only issue is whether Van Praagh is a self-conscious fake, who knows exactly what he’s doing, or a self-deceiver, who somehow has become convinced--like many gurus--that he’s really connected with the beyond.

The chief skeptic agrees that Van Praagh seems likeable, hugging everyone, laughing at himself, always saying, “I have enough trouble talking with the living; why do I want to talk to the dead?” Then Shermer says: No way--Van Praagh has to know.

“He’s an actor in search of a role and he’s found one, a psychic,” Shermer declares. “I won’t let him get away with his act.”

*

“Skeptics don’t matter,” Van Praagh announces. “The hell with them!”

There don’t seem to be any here at the Body & Soul conference in Denver. Some 2,200 people have paid up to $400, or more, for a weekend of workshops and about 835--virtually all women--crowd a ballroom to hear Van Praagh and Dr. Brian L. Weiss, a Yale-educated psychiatrist from Miami who specializes in past life regression. The two met on Maury Povich’s show and often appear together, on cruises and at New Age fairs, exploring these two routes to everlasting life, the spirit world and reincarnation.

From the center of a stage that has two chairs and a small table covered in black, holding a water pitcher, glasses and bouquet of flowers, Van Praagh tells the assembled, “We can fully live our lives without fear.” He jokes about his early fascination with death (“I was a sick child”) but reassures the audience there will be “no pea soup out of my mouth.” There will be plenty of spirits--he sees them all around. “It’s REALLY crowded,” he reports. “There are bleacher seats behind me.”

He consults these spirits like someone speaking into the telephone. “Hold on. Uh huh, right, I understand.”

He announces, “I’m getting rolls of wallpaper--does this mean anything to anyone?”

A woman stands and says she was looking at wallpaper . . . yesterday. Van Praagh reports that her mother was there and liked the design with tiny prints of flowers. “That’s the one I chose!” she says.

The spirits apparently are attuned to wall coverings. In his new book, Van Praagh recalls another reading at which he told a client her dead sister “has seen you picking out wallpaper. She liked the yellow one with the small flowers.” The client exclaims, “Oh, my God. I was just looking at it.”

At the conference, Van Praagh soon has to break up a dispute between two women, each convinced that the images he’s throwing out are from their departed kin. No question--he’s cookin’. From the spirit world, a group of deceased sisters says, “Hi” and forms a conga line. “You’re a bunch of coconuts!” he teases. A spirit who had breast cancer reports, “I got my boobs back!” And a man who committed suicide wants to make amends, telling his stepdaughter--who is standing trembling, hands over her face--that he loves her and that “he is sorry for poisoning your life.”

It’s another great day in heaven--and for the man who delivers its messages.

Still, even as they both ride the high of adulation, Weiss, the reincarnation psychiatrist, worries about his friend.

Weiss is less literal than Van Praagh, giving himself wiggle room--at least in private--confiding later that maybe, just maybe, what’s going on is “metaphor or symbol, as in dreams.” In his case, maybe the folks only experience the feeling of having lived before, so “let’s put ‘past lives’ in quotes.” In Van Praagh’s case, maybe “they really want to believe it’s communicating with dead people--and it may be--but there are other explanations.”

Weiss’ concern? That Van Praagh may be pushing too hard, finding it difficult to resist all the opportunities, while pressure builds from two sides: from devotees who think he should be “the spiritual ascetic . . . some sort of priest,” and who might want him to eschew material perks like the Laguna home, and from the identifiable enemies, like Shermer. “I want to help him to not get burned out or depressed or overwhelmed by the critics,” Weiss says. “My concern is that he paces himself because he’s in it for the long haul. He doesn’t have anything to prove in the short term. He could be vulnerable to burnout if he doesn’t.”

Weiss also knows the pressure of high-profile TV appearances, in which Van Praagh is expected to come up with jaw-dropping hits. Van Praagh will go through it again after next month’s publication of “Reaching to Heaven,” which details the transition to the Other Side--an elaborate cosmology of colored auras, a God Force, spirit guides and an etheric council--and sets out “a course for living as spiritual beings.” To promote the book, he is scheduled again on “Larry King,” “Good Morning America” and “Povich,” with many other appearances in the works. Weiss can understand if his friend might at times be tempted to seek help somewhere other than heaven.

“Anyone who does performances looks for a shortcut,” Weiss said. “Maybe he did a little research or talk[ed] to people on a break . . . . Everyone does that sort of thing. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a gift.”

*

James Van Praagh says he has shed Judeo-Christian notions of a deity because they are “too limiting.” Still, he might consider why the Chicago archbishop, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, touched so many hearts when he was dying of cancer. Though a potentate of the Roman Catholic Church, Bernardin fessed up to fighting “human emotions.” While his faith told him to view death as a friend, “there have been times when I wake up in the middle of the night,” he said, “and I find myself in tears.” Asked what the world hereafter would be like, he said, “It’s part of life’s mystery . . . . I’ve never talked to anybody who has died and come back.”

Or as German theologian Paul Tillich noted--now might be the time to consult a theologian--faith seems to have a partner it can’t do without: doubt. Faith is an achievement because it’s what its name suggests--belief despite the lack of proof.

Van Praagh wants to run around the hurdle most everyone else must leap.

I was curious whether his father could do the same.

The thought came to me when Van Praagh’s publicist rebuffed my efforts to meet 76-year-old Allan Van Praagh when I was in New York, saying, “You can’t talk to Dad. He’s in bad shape.” If that was the case, I couldn’t help but wonder--did the old stagehand intend to talk to his son from the beyond? That was highly personal, sure, but didn’t Van Praagh inject himself daily into other families’ most private affairs?

A month later, I simply dropped by the home in Bayside. The old man was resting in an easy chair--his problem had been only a broken hip. Allan Van Praagh was watching a TV quiz show, prompting him to recall how he’d worked the early ones, setting up zany stunts. He called James’ older brother, who lives nearby, to join us at the house.

“He’s some piece of work, this kid,” Michael Van Praagh says with a laugh, leading me around the side of the house to where “Jamie” kept his cemetery. Mike shows how it had been named after him--you could still see the faint lettering on the brick: “St. Michael’s Animal Grave Yard.”

The good news for America’s most famous medium: His father and brother do not doubt for a moment that he believes. Why else would he pass them messages from heaven?

“He calls up from L.A. ‘You were looking at Mom’s Bible last night,’ ” Michael relates.

“Yeah.”

“You had her rosary beads in your hands, the gray ones.”

“Yeah, Jamie.”

“Mom was right there. She told me.”

Mike Van Praagh says he started off thinking this was a hoax, but episodes like that began making him wonder. By the time Jamie called another time and said, “I know how Dad’s gonna die, Mike. He’s gonna fall down the basement steps.” Mike was taking no chances. He padlocked the door .

It seems that most of the conversations James passes on to his family are with his dead mother, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. In the end, the appeal of Death Made Easy may not be what Larry King had in mind--”We all want to live forever”--but simply the time it buys for some on earth to make peace with those who have left them.

Van Praagh dedicates his new book to his real mother, “To Regina . . . . Whose eyes have shown me the beauty of heaven . . . . And whose love has brought me closer to the face of God.”

Dad? Well, he’s not quite bought into all this yet. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Those ghost stories have “been goin’ on for hundreds of years,” Allan Van Praagh points out, in Shakespeare and Dickens and through all sorts of English characters offering to hook you up with some dead uncle.

“He’s always tellin’ me, ‘Mom is keepin’ an eye on you’. . . . I take that with a grain of salt. I’m not into it.”

He is not eager, in other words, to test his son’s claims.

“I want to be alive as long as I can. I want to be alive here physically. I don’t want to be a spirit.”

Of course, Allan Van Praagh is still proud of his boy.

“He’s in that spirit world,” James Van Praagh’s father says. “And if he’s happy, and making a few dollars, it’s OK with me.”