Sometimes I feel like an opening sequence to a popular television show. I just want to look at people when I introduce myself and paraphrase that popular beginning to fit myself, because I feel like it’s the only way people will see me and understand me for who I am. I would smile, extend my hand, and then I would say:

“My name is Cassadee Willows. I might be just like you, except that from the time I was a little girl, I knew I could talk to the dead. They’re stuck here because they have unfinished business with the living, and they come to me for help. In order to tell you my story, I have to tell you theirs.”

That way, people could know up front who I am; what I am. They would have the chance to run then, instead of figuring it out later, and then struggle to figure me out. But I don’t do that, because it’s not who I am. I spent years trying to figure out who that girl was and why she had this gift, and in those years, I hid what I did from mostly everyone, and, for a long time, even from my family. As much as I hate to admit this, it’s shows like this that made what I do easier, more mainstream, and gave me the platform to talk about it and help others without people running away in terror, hands in the air, trying to find the first priest that would exorcise me or asylum that would commit me.

I was that little girl who would lie awake in my bed at night and watch the old lady knit her way until dawn in a rocking chair that I knew wasn’t really there. But no matter how much I knew that, every night she would appear with her rocking chair in the very same corner and knit. I never told anyone until we moved, because I thought I was crazy. I would sleep with my mom or refuse to sleep without the television on.

One of my first memories of the paranormal is being a very small child and having two black figures in cloaks peer over the bed at me. I don’t remember anything else but that, and I also never talked about it. Since then, I’ve been plagued with every imaginable kind of paranormal entity, from spirits who need help, to ones who have been there to help me, and also demons. I’ve seen the good and the bad side of humanity through them, and, at times, I’ve seen no humanity present at all.

When my gift first made itself known, I would just see things that came with our house. As it grew, I began to have dreams, ones that I always remembered and always came true further down the line. And then my grandfather died, and he came to me just hours later in the car. I was sitting next to his shirt, the one we were going to dress him in for the funeral, when suddenly, I felt it come around me as if his arm were in it, and I felt him warmly envelope me. I knew then that this gift was bigger than just the things inside of our house, and bigger than I could understand, and sure enough, from there it grew. I’d like to think it was my grandfather who gave me the strength to open myself up to it, but it was that experience that allowed me to talk about it, to share what I had gone through, and from there my abilities rushed me like a flood, letting me know what I was capable of.

After that day, I was able to help spirits, instead of just exist in the world that fell between my reality and theirs. I had always been able to talk to them, and they talked back, but I had never realized I could help them before; give them the closure that they needed. Spirits would come to me from relatives, friends, and other people who I could easily pass messages on to with no problem. Other times the spirits had long been dead, as had any relatives they had personally known, and were just looking to me for some understanding, some sense of where they were supposed to go next. I was bombarded with spirits everywhere from home, to the grocery store, to my car, and back again, but I was fine with it. I was able to give them closure. I was content with where my gift had taken me and content with what I was doing, when it shifted again.

I had always known things before people had told me, pictured things happening and accepted things that had yet to happen before they were spoken of, but I always thought that was the norm, that everyone was that way. In October of 2008, my opinion on that changed. Having not seen a spirit, I was still able to know that person was gone, the circumstances surrounding their death, and exactly how they died and would be found without having any of way of knowing such. From there, my psychic experiences got stronger; I found I could tell people I didn’t even know their entire life story just by looking at a picture of them. The joke that I wasn’t psychic and had just seen dead people was no longer true, and as of the last six months, I find myself knowing more and more things about people I’ve never even talked to without ever wanting to know them or knowing how I do, but I do without a fraction of a doubt.

In October of 2009, I began to see a young woman around my age, strangled and beaten, belonging to no one I knew. She told me her name, and she told me she was murdered. A few days later, she was all over the television. She was missing, but I knew the truth, however, I didn’t know how to handle it. I panicked. I didn’t know how to call the police and tell them a now nationwide case of a missing young woman was really a murder without getting myself arrested, so I focused on her. I talked to her, I told her it was going to be alright, and she told me that she already knew that, and that there was a bigger purpose for her, but even though she was my first murder victim, she wouldn’t be the last. That was a promise that she kept even after she crossed over.

In February of 2010, I had not been feeling well one night and turned in earlier than normal. I fell asleep surprisingly fast, especially for an insomniac, but soon had an experience that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I hate to call it a dream, because I know now that it was more than that. I was me emotionally, but physically I was someone else. I remember pulling my blonde hair up in a ponytail, and I remember my outfit as a I jogged down a path. Then I was surprised by a man I didn’t know, and, without getting too graphic, I was left to die. I woke up and looked at the clock. It was just past midnight. It took awhile, but I eventually fell back to sleep.

I went on with my life over the next few days, not thinking much of what had happened and hoping it was a product of whatever it was in my life that was making me so tired. On a Thursday I had this dream, and by Sunday I wished I hadn’t flipped through the news, because there was the face of young girl splattered everywhere from the internet to the television set, and I knew without a fraction of a doubt before I had even heard her story that she was the girl I was in my vision. Then I heard the story. She had been murdered just that past Thursday, and her estimated time of death was around 8:30 PM west coast time, which would have been 11:30 PM my time, just as I was having the vision. I knew then that I was her, and the reason I was so tired that night was because I was meant to take her place as she died so that she didn’t have to suffer.

The sum of all of these events only existed to prepare me for what was to come. In my career as a psychic medium, I’ve seen angels and demons intermix with each other in the most unlikely ways. I’ve seen spirits come and go, some angry with their deaths, others accepting and just wanting someone else to know about their life so they will be remembered.

I’ve seen things I could have never imagined and ones that I can’t sometimes explain. I would never ask anyone to believe me, because everyone deserves the right to their own opinion about a world that most cannot see. All I know is these are my stories, and my truth.