It’s a little scary to think you could hear from your Great Aunt Brunhilda whose been dead for 15 years.
But with the help of Bill Philipps, it could happen.
Doubt all you want. But Philipps, a psychic medium who has appeared on “Dr. Phil” and has done readings for thousands of people in faraway places like Barcelona and London, books a year out. His fees: $250 for a half hour; $350 for an hour.
The only way you’re getting an appointment is by landing on a special cancelation list.
And even then you’ll wait awhile.
Now he’s out with a book – Expected The Unexpected: Bringing Peace, Healing and Hope from the Other Side – a memoir that keeps you on the edge of your seat with a smattering of anecdotes from ordinary people who’ve heard from their deceased loved ones.
The Mirror can attest that Philipps just knows things. He has made this clear to me personally every time we’ve spoken.
Philipps has a sense of humor about communicating with the dead, a career path that budded around 15 when his mother died from a drug addiction and appeared to him in his bedroom in a beautiful silhouette. He had a wreck of a childhood – two drug addicted parents, sporadic homelessness, and a bout of parental kidnapping. He went on to become a trained opera singer while giving readings on the side.
He knows how this sounds and gets that not everyone will be a believer in his gift – he’s okay with that and accepts that his grandmother and father are among the naysayers. Still, among his fans is Tanya Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, whose ex-husband, O.J. Simpson, was acquitted of murder charges.
Of course I had to ask. Did he do it?
“Can I ask that?” I ask sheepishly. I didn’t want to pry into his private relationship with Brown, a vocal supporter of his work. It’s also not smart to fuck with the dead.
He lets out a big laugh before replying.
“You don’t have to be psychic to know that he did it,” he says.
Let’s move on to white butterflies. These are the insects that flitter around when Philipps asks his mother to let him know she is there.
The author, who resides in Costa Mesa, Calif., isn’t exactly a badass medium. He doesn’t want to see forms or ghosts — that would even scare him at this point. In one chapter of the book, he goes into a house that was haunted, we’re talking spontaneous slamming doors that would ordinarily make a person run screaming. He met up with evil spirits and decided early on that he’s not ever doing that shit again. But if you want to know, yes, he got those assholes out of there (no offense if they’re reading).
But he has and will help police with missing person’s cases. And yes, he tells me, he has helped with the location of dead bodies.
Philipps, a gentle person who wants the experience to be positive for people, sometimes has to break bad news: cancer, an upcoming car accident. But he does so with great care. He has no real way to know exact timing and there is the matter of free will. For instance, six months can be six weeks or six years.
Early on, he told a woman that her husband was going to have a stroke. He was off by two days and the woman was furious.
Now his warnings come gently and he tries to avoid any certainty or meaning around specific dates – in one instance, he tells a woman a spirit is really stressing that she get a checkup. In another, he tells someone to be very careful driving. In yet another, a woman’s late father came through and said his daughter may have cancer.
“Have you been sick?” he asked the woman, who replied with a strong “no.”
Philipps casually pressed her: “Okay, but you should probably have yourself checked out. You father says there may be an issue you need to address.”
He gave her the numbers “four” and “forty-four.”
The woman later had an emergency hysterectomy – doctors pulled out fourty-four lymph nodes, four of which were cancerous.
Health issues aside, Philipps is not big on offering romantic advice. For two reasons: 1) Spirits like to play matchmaker and giving someone a warning could have them waiting at a Starbucks for years; and 2) Spirits stop communicating if the person appears too desperate.
“While most of the time I do give them details I receive, such as initials or names or physical descriptions, I will stop if the person appears desperate and continues to push for more information,” he wrote.
Philipps has a steadfast philosophy on conveying information.
He writes, “If the person I’m reading for thinks I’m an authoritative jackass, she is not going to feel a connect to me. That could cause her to dismiss anything I tell her.”
Philipps sees his role as sacred – “Yes, I am just the messenger,” he writes, “but I’m the messenger for a reason: my job is to responsibly convey to you what the spirits on the other side want you to know.”
Phone Interview with The Mirror
The Mirror: You explain in your book that a necessity of your job is meditating before a reading and later before you sleep. How do you raise your vibrational energy?
Philipps: Meditation. That for me is a really big element of a higher vibration, speaking positively, thinking positively, detaching from anyone around you who is negative. Being in a flow state. Being open to life and positive possibilities. I let all my thoughts wash away. I detach from them and I try to visualize the light of God clearing my energy and clearing my mind and letting spirits come through to communicate.
The Mirror: What’s happening with your father now?
Philipps: My father was initially not happy about this book because he saw the Barnes & Noble tagline about drug addicted parents. He has trouble acknowledging his past. There is some denial going on there. There has been a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ philosophy around him when I interact with him which isn’t too often. I omitted quite a bit from the book. I thought it would make things worse. He’s been clean for over 10 years. He has gained quite a bit of weight, but no drugs, alcohol, or smoking.
The Mirror: And your grandmother?
Philipps: She has her beliefs. She doesn’t believe in what I do. She believes it’s the work of the devil.
The Mirror: Can you laugh about that?
Philipps: (Laughing) I laugh about it all the time. If it wasn’t for her I probably wouldn’t be alive today. She’s on her religious bandwagon and won’t let other thoughts come into her head. That’s okay. I think we can happily disagree. We’re not as close as we used to be, but I still love her and will always consider her a bright light in my life.
The Mirror: What if you knew things about them that you thought they needed to know … would you tell them? Would they believe you?
Philipps: I have before. My grandmother had a health concern recently, for the past year. There was something I kept telling her to do. A year later, she switched doctors and the new doctor told her what I had told her. She won’t attribute my gift to that. She just says thank you Billy for that advice. With my father, I don’t talk about it with him. He’s very explosive still as a person. I do avoid him like the great plague.
The Mirror: In Chapter 17 you talk about clients recognizing signs from the spirits. Can you talk about that? How do you recognize a sign versus what a person may want to see?
Philipps: I feel like the spirit world around us can basically get our attention. For me, my mom’s sign has been a white butterfly. There is specifically one butterfly that will fly around me. That’s my mom – it’s amazing. What I feel is the best way is the sign is to check in with your intuition. You’ll know. A lot of times people will get the chills or will get emotional when they have an experience. You will know it’s divinely created. Yesterday during a reading I brought up feathers…the person had been finding feathers everywhere and they didn’t know where they were coming from. I find that you don’t need to see a medium to have that connection. You can ask. They always deliver. It might be as trivial as a license plate. It could be hummingbirds. Ultimately, if you are open to receiving, they will open to you so you can have your aha moment.
The Mirror: Do you ever fear that your gift will leave you?
Philipps: No, because I use it with positive pure intentions. I’m not using it for evil or bad. So in that sense, I’m repaying a good karma debt back to the universe. If I was using it and scamming people…I’ve seen that a lot. That is a dark side of my reality of my work. I feel like I was born with it and I will die with it and I will come back and do it again.
The Mirror: So you believe in reincarnation?
Philipps: Oh yeah, absolutely. As someone else. I don’t believe I’m coming back in 80 years as a grasshopper. Dogs come back as dogs. People as people. This is where soulmates and soulgroups come into the picture. You’re playing out different roles. We’ve all been here many times before.
The Mirror: Oh yeah?
Philipps: Through my own experiences in reading for people. I would tap into things like that. I would be reading…I would see a slash where they were on the Titanic…in this life they are afraid of water. We come back to make peace with it in the physical form.
The Mirror: Why hasn’t the physical form of your mother returned do you think?
Philipps: It was apparition-like. For a second I thought am I crazy? I blinked again. This is real. There is a silhouette here of my mom. I feel like she knew I needed to have that dramatic experience. As time evolved, I understood how my gifts worked, tuning into my own thoughts and feelings. So now I know how to make that connection without having the dramatic episode of spirits flashing themselves at me – that would probably scare me actually. I have to be in a happy good space to do this work. It all goes hand in hand. I have to take care of myself and be in a good space.
The Mirror: How do skeptics explain your gift?
Philipps: You want to know that who you are going to is legitimate. You don’t want to be closed off as to what comes through. Sometimes things come through and it’s not an exact science. With the skeptics, they usually leave my office not being skeptical anymore. It’s irrefutable. There are always very personal things.
The Mirror: Why isn’t Tanya Brown in your book. Was she not open to it?
Philipps: She was very open to it, but I feel like I had so many other stories to use that were so touching that I didn’t want to sensationalize the O.J. Simpson murder again. I decided there were other things to focus on. In her reading, what was most touching to her was that it wasn’t just Nicole who came through, it was people who were never mentioned in the media that I could not have known about. She has her healing with her sister and she’s a strong person. She’s now a life coach who travels around and helps people with her gift of healing people’s hearts.
The Mirror: How come you don’t help solve crimes, missing children, etc…have you tried?
Philipps: I actually worked with a detective agency a few months ago on a missing person’s case. About 5years ago I did several of them. I definitely got crazy information that was very accurate.
The Mirror: Did they find the children alive?
Philipps: They found them dead. With my ability I’m able to give …there’s information, but it can’t always be validated because the person is missing. It’s kind of like playing Clue. I never charged a family who was trying to find a missing person. It’s my way of giving back to the world.
The Mirror: Are you able to sleep? Do the spirits let you?
Philipps: I am able to sleep. When I was first understanding my ability, I kept hearing my name over and over and over in my head at night. Once I realized what it was, I would say ‘Leave me alone, I want to sleep.’ They are respectful of my time. I do have sleepless nights sometimes. I really have to tune out of that world and live in the physical body. That is why, for me, meditation is crucial.
Find a schedule of Philipps’s upcoming events here.