Librarian by day, psychic by night
Memorial Day is typically a day for the living to visit the deceased. But for one USU librarian, on May 31, the dead came to her.
Three years ago, Jan Alm said her deceased mother tried to send her a message through various images and feelings. Before the encounter, she said she began experiencing a “jiggly sensation.”
“I felt like you would feel if you’d drunk a full pot of coffee,” Alm said. “I knew that the message came from my mom.”
The message contained several images that Alm tried to decipher, she said.
“At first, I thought my mom wanted me to quit my job and open up a pizza parlor,” she said.
Later, she said she discovered that initial encounter to be just a getting-back-in-touch message sent by her deceased mother.
A short time later another message came: go and heal your father.
Alm’s father had suffered various wounds from his service in World War II, several of which still caused him significant pain. She hesitated at first, afraid of what her father might think.
“When I talk to other people, I understand that it sounds wacky,” Alm said. “It sounds wacky to me.”
But she continued to receive the message. Soon thereafter she went to visit her father to ask him if she could perform the healing.
“My father is the least critical person in the world. He didn’t say, ‘Are you nuts?'”
He consented to her request and Alm laid her hands on her father’s left knee and foot. The pain hasn’t been back since, she said.
“I could feel my hands humming and buzzing like crazy,” she said.
In addition to such healing powers, Alm also performs psychic readings, spiritual channeling and communication with animals. What began as a brief communication with her dog, Jock, has led to other communication with cats, birds, horses and other dogs.
“I have no investment in convincing people that what I do is true,” she said. “I’m on no crusade to convert people to the reality of spirit contact.”
But others have been converted thanks to Alm. One such person, Mary Ann Hubbell, first met Alm at the Farmers Market held just off Logan’s Main Street. Alm would perform various psychic and healing sessions for interested Cache Valley residents. Hubbell had considerable pain in her knee at the time and decided to let Alm try to fix it.
“I decided who cares; it can’t hurt,” Hubbell said. She described a heat sensation that followed soon thereafter. She said her knee has never been the same. “I don’t care what anyone says. I know how my leg felt.”
She has since been back to visit Alm for various other psychic readings, specifically to communicate with deceased family members.
“No one has ever said, ‘Do this or do that. The money’s hidden here,'” Hubbell said. But she said they have exchanged positive communication with her, which has made Hubbell a firm believer in Alm’s work.
USU student Darlene Allsop agrees. She asked Alm to connect her with a deceased uncle.
“I’m not sure how much I believed before, but what she did confirmed to me that it is real,” said Allsop, a senior majoring in social work. “It was incredible. I was blown away.”
Alm said the reaction was not unique.
“Every person who I have ever done work for has said they had a positive experience,” she said. Some things might not make sense during a reading, but it’s not uncommon to get a call back several days later from clients confirming the images and counsel, she said.
Alm does two to three readings a week on average. Her clientele is relatively evenly split between local customers and those who learn about her online and call for a reading. She has done readings for people from as far away as Germany and South Africa.
Healings can be done long distance. Alm said she envisions each person as if they were on the massage table. Then, she puts her hands where the pain would be. The most common feeling clients feel is a heat sensation, Alm said, accompanied by a decrease in pain.
In seeking to communicate with the deceased, Alm said she asks for only the first name of the person whom she is trying to contact. Then she asks them to send out an identifier to prove that a spiritual communication is really taking place.
“It takes a little while at the beginning to establish a connection,” she said. “It’s not uncommon for several things to come through at first that don’t make much sense.”
But skeptics might see such difficulties as reason to doubt the validity of Alm’s work.
“If people are skeptics, they won’t want to go,” Hubbell said. “Especially here. They’ll think it’s just evil and stay away.”
Alm said she rarely has difficulty establishing a connection with the other side. She can only remember one time when she felt disappointed with herself after a reading. But even then, she said it wasn’t because of a lack of spiritual contact, just some hesitation on her own part.
“Most of us go back just to see what she can come up with next,” Hubbell said. “Sometimes it’s kind of embarrassing. You didn’t want people to know some stuff.”
Alm said she believes all people have psychic and healing abilities, though not everyone is in tune with the messages they receive.
“We tend not to recognize the communication when we get it,” Alm said. “It looks and feels and sounds like it’s just your imagination, so we write it off. You have to suspend disbelief.”
In the end, Alm said she recognizes how strange a librarian-by-day, psychic-by-night story might appear.
“All I can do is tell people what my experiences have been,” she said. “If it resonates with them, great. If not, that’s fine too.”
-jcox@cc.usu.edu