By Mary Therese Biebel – mbiebel@timesleader.com
PUBLISHED : January 16th, 2019 – Features – Times Leader
WILKES-BARRE —When MaryJo Engleman, of Pittston, realized the Mountain Top Medium might help her connect with a departed loved one, she hesitated.
It wasn’t that she was a skeptic.
“I believe people have that gift,” she said earnestly.
The reason Engleman didn’t immediately tell clairvoyant Nikki Velasquez she hoped to hear from Harvey, who had recently passed away, was that he was her beloved, 120-pound German Shepherd/husky mix.
“Everyone else wanted to talk to a husband, a wife, a person,” Engleman said, remembering an event during which she was one of several individuals chosen by lottery for a reading.
Finally, Engleman admitted she wanted to hear from her dog — and Velasquez’s response made her cry tears of joy.
“She said ‘he wants you to know he really likes where you put his ashes, and the picture you put on top,” Engleman recalled, ready to cry again. “ ‘He wants you to know he’s with his little brother’ … I didn’t know what that meant until I realized it was T-bone, my smaller beagle mix. They died 22 days apart.”
What really got to Engleman was the moment the Mountain Top Medium relayed that Harvey, who holds a special place in her animal-loving heart, “wants you to know he’s still your Mama’s Boy.”
“She couldn’t have known that’s what I called him,” Engleman said, explaining the experience gave her a feeling of comfort about Harvey, a sense “that he’s all right.”
Engleman and her friend Michelle Demich, of West Pittston, suspect other animal lovers might be equally pleased to hear from departed pets, and they invite them to a fund-raiser that will benefit Rescue Warriors, a program they established last April to shelter cats until they are adopted.
Titled “A Glimpse Beyond the Rainbow with Nikki Velasquez,” the event is set for Feb. 2 at the Mary Stegmaier Mansion, 156 South Franklin St.
While the Mountain Top Medium won’t be able to give individual readings to each attendee, she will give readings to people whose numbers are pulled from a bowl.
“It’s not unusual for animals to come through,” said Velasquez, who has worked as a full-time medium for five years. “It could be an animal you lost recently, or one you lost in childhood. I’ve had people in their 70s sit with me and a dog or cat they had decades ago will come through.”
“They (the animals) show me the color, the breed, they show me what hurt in their body,” Velasquez said in a telephone interview. “It’s not just cats and dogs. I’ve heard from llamas and goats.”
It’s possible someone having a reading at the Feb. 2 event might hear from a departed human, the medium said, but “I’m going to focus on animals as much as I can because I think the people who are going to be there would be interested to hear from them. “
“I can’t control who comes through,” Velasquez added.
Velasquez, a Chicago native who earned a master’s degree in clinical social work and previously worked as a grief counselor and in hospice care, now devotes herself to her medium practice.
“This is what I’m called to do,” she said. “I wouldn’t have left my clinical career if I didn’t know this works. I see intrinsic therapeutic value. I don’t just believe it; I know it.”
Describing herself as “a medium since I was born,” Velasquez, 46, said as a child she resisted her ability to “hear and feel and see things other people didn’t,” because “I wanted to be more ‘normal,’ not less.”
Now she embraces her ability to sense what seem to be messages from the afterlife.
In some of her experiences with human spirits, she said, a man who died of a cardiac problem in his 50s wanted his loved ones to know “he now has more time to fish” and a man whose relatives were fighting over their inheritance wanted them “to cut that … out. He wanted them to settle it equitably.”
At times, Velasquez said, it can feel as if the spirit is “shouting in my ear.”
In the case of animals, the medium said, she has sensed that a cat or dog that was the alpha animal in a household was letting her know “they still consider it their house and they still feel as if they’re in charge, loving and protecting their owner. They might let me know they still snuggle on the bed, up to their owner’s legs or hands. People have said they feel them.”
If you want to attend the fund-raiser, call Maureen at 570-332-4250 for reservations. Doors open at 5 p.m. Feb. 2 at the Mary Stegmaier Mansion, 156 S. Franklin St., Wilkes-Barre, and dinner begins at 6 p.m. The gallery reading will begin while dessert is being served. Cost is $59.50 plus tax. Proceeds will help alleviate the significant veterinary bills incurred by the homeless cats and kittens that the Rescue Warriors shelter in their homes.
Mary Therese Biebel – mbiebel@timesleader.com
Reach Mary Therese Biebel at 570-991-6109 or on Twitter @BiebelMT