Excerpted from The Trenton Times ~ May 13, 2003

The Sixth Sense: Princeton Township Medium Faces Skeptics and Believers in her ‘Message Services’
By Beth E. Fand, Staff Writer

When Lauren Thibodeau was three years old, her grandmother gave her some advice.  She shouldn't tell just anyone, the woman warned, about the visits she kept receiving from the dead.

“I saw things, sensed things that might have seemed abnormal to others,” Thibodeau recalls -- spirits who presented themselves not as ghosts but “just other people.”

Thibodeau do as well as anyone in her grandmother was right.  After all, she was already scaring away her neighborhood friends with the spooky episodes her mother referred to as "brownouts.”

That he ended Thibodeau says she was unable to resist the lower of her gift.  After spending years struggling to be like everyone else -- studying economics, working as a corporate communications expert and even earning a doctorate in counseling -- the Princeton Township psychic admitted she had a calling.

She knew she was on the right path the first time she did a reading for a client.

“It felt right, really resonant,” she remembers,  ‘like, "This is it.’”

More than a decade later, Thibodeau's abilities are being embraced in away her grandmother never could have imagined.

A regular guest on the WPST radio morning show, Thibodeau is a psychic to meets with clients in person, on the telephone and over the Internet, spends summers as part of a community of mediums in Lily Dale New York, and uses the rest of her time to travel the country giving seminars and teaching workshops on topics such as how to communicate with the dead.

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Intuitive to begin with, she says, her psychic abilities took a leap forward after an experience that almost killed her when she was 6.

It happened in the kitchen of her families Cleveland area home as she leaned against the refrigerator reaching out her toe to push the dishwasher door shut she became a conduit between the two and properly grounded appliances and got a harsh electric shock.  Her younger sister, trying to help her, texture and also got electrocuted.

Badly hurt, Thibodeau says, she and her sister shared a near-death experience.

"A lovely angel lady told us it would all be OK," she recalls.

That experience -- along with a visit from a  "band of Angels” 15 years later when she bled severely due to a medical problem -- brought out and even stronger psychic bent and Thibodeau, she says.

Once, she fainted in high school hallway after seeing a coffin floating in front of a classmate.  Two weeks later, Thibodeau says, the classmates mother died of cancer.

Such heightened psychic powers, she says, have been reported by Edie to 100% of the near-death survivors who have taken part in studies on the subject.

"Extra-strong psychic tendencies develop following a near-death experience, and they stay," says Thibodeau, who studied the issue as she worked on her dissertation.  "It's a realm that you can go to comfortably after a short visit.  It gives you prescience, foresight -- they just become stronger."

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Thibodeau is convinced that scientists tend to fall short when it comes to investigating psychic phenomena.

"There are still some things that can't be explained," she says.  "There could be a medical explanation, but it's highly unlikely that answers 100% of the cases."

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Understanding why some clients might be skeptical, Thibodeau goes out of her way to prove to them that their dead relatives are really in the room.

For clients to feel good about her work, she says, "there’d better be some evidence, supporting points -- descriptions of the persons personality and character, shared memories, information about how they died and who was there with them."

During a recent trip to Minnesota Thibodeau says, she gave one family just that.

While in contact with the couple killed by a drunken driver, she says, she kept receiving the image of a golf cart, an item that no one had mentioned in relation to the case.

It turned out, she says, that her clients -- the parents of the female victim -- had used the cart following the accident in an educational program that allowed teenagers to simulate the experience of driving drunk.

"Another time," Thibodeau says the dead man used her to impart "congratulations on his brother’s wife's pregnancy -- and the brother hadn't told anyone yet."

Watching Thibodeau channel the dead is absolutely eerie, says Chris Rollins, co-host of PST Wake-Up Crew, a morning show on radio station 94.5 FM that focuses the segment, "Intuitive Tuesday with Dr. Lauren" around the psychic.

When Thibodeau appears on the show, "the phone lines are just flooded" with callers -- mostly women -- seeking predictions about their love lives and careers, Rollins says.  And recently, she adds, listeners jumped at the chance to compete for free readings by the psychic at a special, after-hours event.

"It's pretty amazing," the radio personality says.  "People would come out of their readings crying, because the grandmother came to them."

Although Rollins hasn't had many run-ins with lost loved ones during the four years she's known Thibodeau, she has gotten some shockingly accurate readings, she says.

Thibodeau not only gave a perfect description of a house and accurately predicted when Rollins and her husband were going to buy it, but she also knew, after hearing that Rollins’ sister was engaged, the exact date on which the marriage would take place.

"She's not your typical boardwalk psychic," Rollins says.  "You wouldn't know she was a psychic if you pastor on the street."

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In Thibodeau's eyes, contact with the dead is no game of pretend.  She cites a study showing that, during their first year of grief, two-thirds of widows and widowers feel they've been contacted by their deceased spouses.

In addition, she says, the bereaved often have vivid dreams in which they are visited by someone who has passed on; some also see signs -- such as symbols or numbers -- that they think of as contact from the other side.

"They are not creating these memories," the psychic says.  "Why can't it be a real experience?"

During her seminars, Thibodeau uses meditation to teach her clients to make the most of their other-the worldly encounters.

"You can develop an ongoing connection with loved ones when you have decisions to make or need perspective," she says.  "The answer is often a feeling of inspiration."

"People say, ‘It's tough, because how I know it's not my own mind?,'" she continues.  "But it does not really matter, if it serves your life, where it comes from."

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