IRMA SLAGE was in her early 20s when she realized the people she had been communicating with in her mind were actually dead.
"You can go through your whole life without realizing you're hearing voices in your mind ... and others are not," said Slage, a self-described psychic counselor from Livermore.
Slage, who hosted a seance at the Pleasanton Hotel last week, has been sharing her "gift" with others for more than 30 years.
"I like the idea that people can get a message from the other world," she said.
The event, billed as a seance, was not what most imagine when they hear the word. People were not sitting in a dimly lit room, holding hands and asking thespirits to communicate with them.
Rather, the group of about 100 people, gathered in the hotel's Victorian Room, sipped wine and munched on cheese and crackers as Slage recounted her supernatural encounter with the spirits living in the hotel and answered personal questions from the audience.
With the aid of photos showing what Slage called "orbs," or balls of light energy, she spoke of the high level of spirit activity at the hotel, which was built in 1864.
Paranormal activity has been linked to the hotel's seedy past as a thriving brothel and has lured other spiritual investigators, including Gloria Young, a Northern California ghost hunter from the Ghost Trackers Paranormal Research Group who documented psychic phenomena.
"The room next to the bar — that's where all the action was," Slage said. "I felt a man standing next to me. He was grungy and his beard was full of stuff. I could smell him."
Slage has been commissioned to use her ability to communicate with spirits to help the police, as well as visit historic homes and grave sites.
Whether one believes Slage can communicate with the dead is really not her concern, she said.
"I don't push it; you can believe whatever you want to believe," she said. "Just sit with me for a while and we'll go over it."
To any of the people among her core group of believers, however, Slage is beyond reproach.
"Irma is not God, but she's got a gift to help people," said Oakdale resident Jan Rien, who said she has had several personal sessions with Slage since her father, Robert Fuchs, died in June 2005.
Rien and her family, who live in Livermore, located Slage through friends.
"We wanted to go talk to her and see if our dad wanted to get a message to us," Rien said.
Rien, her mother Mary Fuchs and her sisters have since developed a friendship with Slage, whom they praise for her compassion.
For the family, who said their father has passed on several messages from beyond, the true reward is knowing their father is still with them.
"I don't look at death like I used to," Rien said. "I feel like my dad is in a spiritual realm. He is still with us."
The idea of life after death has helped put mediums, and concepts like the spiritual realm, more into the mainstream consciousness. For instance, there is John Edward, the psychic medium who hosted the television show, "Crossing Over with John Edward."
This week, in East Contra Costa County, a group of paranormal investigators from Livescifi.tv visited Union Cemetery, where vandals had knocked over 64 headstones. One psychic from Pleasant Hill said she made contact with the spirits of a woman buried there and the former caretaker, both of whom were upset about the vandalism.
Since Livescifi.tv launched in May, the site has averaged 40,000 viewers per show.
And nationally 1.6 million viewers tuned in for the Friday night finale of Lifetime Television Network's "America's Psychic Challenge." The show pitted 16 self-proclaimed clairvoyants against one another to find the top psychic.
"More people are realizing that something is missing in their lives. They're searching for something spiritual," said Anne Pearce, a co-owner of Intuitive Way, a Walnut Creek-based school teaching how to sense your own spiritual reality, and how to read auras, heal and meditate.
"The people who come to our center are people who would not normally seek out a psychic ... It's not the kind of thing that is public," Pearce said.
"I think a lot more people are becoming more spiritual," Rein added. "Not necessarily religious, but with some higher power."
Staff writer Matthias Gafni contributed to this story. Meera Pal covers Pleasanton. Reach her at 925-847-2120 or mpal@bayareanewsgroup.com
