Recently, we asked people in the BuzzFeed Community who identify as psychics or mediums to tell us the story of how they first learned they were ~clairvoyant~. Here are some of the wildest, most compelling, and haunting submissions!!!
1. The Car Accident
"My first and most intense experience was when I was 14. My stepmom was driving me and my sister back home at about 2 a.m. when all of a sudden, I saw an accident in the middle of the road. I saw the two cars, an ambulance, cops, a fire truck — I even saw a woman and a child wrapped in a blanket on the side of the fire truck. It looked kind of hazy and off-colored. As my stepmom drove closer, I couldn't force myself to yell 'SLOW DOWN!' or 'STOP!' Instead, as she drove through it, it disappeared and I screamed. Well, not even 10 minutes later, we saw the EXACT accident that I'd seen minutes before. It freaked us ALL out."
2. The River
"My mother has an uncanny ability to have psychic-type dreams, but they're almost always bad dreams about the future. She once had a dream that her father was drinking from a river, when all of a sudden, a dark cloud rolled in and engulfed him. The following morning, about two to three hours after my mom told us her dream, she got a phone call from her sister that her father had died."
3. The Understudy
"I first experienced having some sort of foresight when I was a freshman in high school. I was the understudy for the lead in the fall musical, and the night before the show opened, I dreamed that the girl I was understudying got too sick to perform, and I had to go on for her. The next day, several hours before the curtain rose, the stage manager told me that the girl was in the hospital for appendicitis — I actually ended up having to fill in for her. What's more, I remember running lines with my dad and him asking why I was even bothering to learn them — I told him I just had this inexplicable feeling that I was going to have to go on."
4. The Man in the Photograph
"I saw my first spirit when I was a kid. I told my parents about it, and they listened as I picked a recently deceased family member I'd never met out of a picture as the gentleman I'd seen. They never told me he was dead. I finally realized what was going on in late elementary school."
5. The Bad Sign
"My ability is fairly useless, but I can feel when something terrible is going to happen usually minutes before it does. I have what feels like a panic attack when nothing is happening, and then something like a car accident happens right in front of me seconds to minutes later. I have been like this since I was little. I don't know what is about to happen, all I know is that someone is going to get hurt."
6. The Card Game
"When I was a kid, I'd hear random whispers quite often and could sense the energy in a space, or of a person, although I didn't really understand it at the time. Then one night, my brother, his friend, and I were playing a game where I would spread out a deck of cards, hover my hand over a card, and would guess the suit, color, and number. After being right every single time for over half an hour, we all started to get freaked out."
7. The Little Medium in the Pantry
"I first realized I could see and speak with the dead when I was around 5 years old and my sister and I were playing and she locked me in the pantry closet. I remember it was pitch black and I started screaming for her or my mom to let me out. Just then, the image of a woman instantly appeared next to me, and it felt like she was 10 feet tall. She glowed a bright white and illuminated the pantry. She wrapped her arms around me and said not to worry, my mom would be there soon. Seconds after she said that, my mom whipped open the door and found me. I know a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts or being able to see/speak with the dead, but it’s always been a thing in my life I can’t turn off. They’re always there asking for help or helping me, sometimes to the point of being annoying or inconvenient, but that’s just always been a normal thing for me."
8. Calling Out to Ian
"The first moment my mother knew something was different about her was when she was 2 years old. She remembers standing in the middle of the living room screaming 'Ian! Ian! Ian!' Just as she began screaming this, unbeknownst to her, her grandfather, named Ian, passed away. She couldn't have known. Many other encounters followed, but this was the beginning."
9. The Dream House
"I work as a model, and I had a dream that I was doing a photo shoot in a dress designer’s house, and the house looked like Hearst Castle. A few months later, I showed up for a photo shoot at a dress designer’s house, and as soon as I stepped inside, I knew it was the house from my dream. As we were getting ready, the designer casually mentioned that the architect of the house was the same one who had designed Hearst Castle. I’ve probably had about five dreams like this in the past few years where exact details about the location and situation came true."
10. Anesthesia Visions
"When I was about 8 years old, I started getting pretty sick and ended up on my death bed at the age of 15. I'd always weird out my parents by knowing little things to come and things that happened in the past that there was no way of me knowing. I have surgery every two months now, and I swear going under anesthesia gives me more clarity. I can look at someone and get glimpses into their life. I can walk into a house and hear what’s happened in the past. It’s very overwhelming, but I'm glad for the gift of still being alive, and knowing a little bit when it comes to my third eye."
11. The Baby Whisperer
"I have an oddly specific gift, it seems: I've never guessed the biological sex and due date for a baby wrong. Once, a coworker announced that after three years of trying, she was finally pregnant and eight weeks in. I immediately imagined a boy born on Halloween. Not hard to imagine, right? You can obviously count out the weeks, a holiday is easy to get in your mind anyway, and guessing a biological sex is all but 50/50. But the thing is, I miscounted and her doctor said she was due at the end of SEPTEMBER, not October. I didn't think any more of it. Also, a few months later she got a sonogram and said it was a girl. Welp, September ends and no baby. Turns out it was her doctor that miscalculated the date by a month, and on Halloween morning, she had a boy. I thought it was just luck until I did something similar for my best friend. I said I was imagining a girl on December 5, when it was still dark out. She had her daughter at 2:17 a.m. on December 5. I've since tried it randomly with celebrities and I guess accurately every damn time. It's such a weird thing I can do!"
12. Intrusive Thought or Not?
"I’ve always known about things before they were going to happen. I’m not always right, but when I am, it’s scary. I’ve predicted earthquakes down to the minute one struck, the asteroid over Russia, and deaths. My grandma died three days ago — I had a feeling something was wrong the night before. It’s weird. It’s like a passing but intrusive thought. I don’t like it at all."
13. "Mundane, Yet Specific"
"It sounds silly, but the first time I realized I was different was when I was a kid and I could constantly correctly guess what song was going to come on the radio. Now I've realized that I dream situations that are pretty mundane, but specific — like a pencil rolling off a book while I am eating a chocolate chip cookie at work. I'd have that dream when I was a kid, only for it to happen in real life 20 years later. Also, I tend to get this hollow, starving sensation when I'm around people who are about to go through the death of someone close. I don't talk about this often because it's not super fantastical, but it's not normal either."
14. The Pregnancy Predictor
"Since about six years ago, I’ve been able to predict pregnancies, and when I've called said person, they hadn’t told anyone yet. They typically come in dreams."
15. The "Perfect Marriage"
"I dreamed that my aunt and uncle’s 'perfect marriage' was in trouble. A month later, they announced their divorce. No one expected it — except for me."
16. Sixth Sensory Overload
"I used to see spirits as a child and then started seeing them again in my adult life. I've had some very eerie coincidences, like knowing who was going to call me before the phone rang — and these were people who I did not speak to often. I used to fear these abilities, especially when I would see spirits because they would wake me up out of my sleep and be staring at me. I also get woken up by strange smells, like coffee brewing and no one is brewing it. I just feel something is trying to get my attention whenever this happens."
