FARMINGTON — As a child, Spiritualist Rev. Sally Silver could see auras around people.

Items touched in the haunted home where she grew up in Farmington would tell their stories through her fingertips. She could hear voices, feel the icy-cold spots of unknown spirits and play with spirit friends in the attic of the house.

Psychics are highly sensitive to the energy and the world around them, she said.

The home on the Whittier Road was owned by a doctor and at one time was used as a hospital, she said. The doctor also served as a missionary in Africa.

The house was empty for several decades before her parents bought it around 1940. Plates were left on the table, medical bags in the attic. Everything was left as if someone just walked out, she said.

Those items had stories to tell.

When Silver was a child, her mother encouraged her gifts and made a game of it. When the phone rang, her mother would ask her who it was and what they wanted. She would name the caller and was usually “spot on,” she said.

But, at age 30, her husband’s unexpected death left her with a decision to make.

“I needed to decide whether to use that sensitivity in a selfish way or use it to help others,” she said.

For over 40 years, the Farmington medium, teacher, healer and clairvoyant has had one main focus: “healing people and helping them get their lives straight,” she said.

“It has been the most exciting, most rewarding, most challenging and most fulfilling career you could possibly have,” she said. “My life is geared toward helping others find their way.”

After that decision, she took Psychic Awareness courses with Kay Mora of Oquossoc at the University of Maine at Farmington.

“Kay grabbed hold of me and pushed me to work,” she said. “She taught me to teach.”

Mora taught her students to tune in to the energy of an item and to do a reading from it, Silver said.

Police have brought her items from cold-case investigations such as the Hot Wheels used by a 4-year-old who disappeared from a Chain of Ponds campground about 40 years ago.

She knew the child’s story and could see the people who took him but refrained from saying more because of the investigation.

“It is amazing how people deny psychic ability,” she said. “They don’t feel it. They don’t understand it, but it is a knowing.”

People can give her a name and state and their story starts rolling like a film through her mind, she said of work done over the phone.

“Sally is especially one of the best. She is spot-on,” Maryann Bohrer of Pennsylvania said. Bohrer is writing a book on psychics and has interviewed some of the best, most gifted, she said. “I get goose bumps thinking about what they have said.”

Kids often see the light easier, Silver said. In a grocery store, a 6-year-old came up to ask her what she was because “there are lights all over you,” the boy told her. When she told his mother he was clairvoyant, the mother already knew of his gift.

Silver went to nursing school at age 18. She didn’t finish but learned about anatomy, chemistry and nutrition. She also learned she was an X-ray clairvoyant, she said. She can see within the body and see what is going on, she said.

It helped her to become more confident in the healing arts, she said.

“Psychic healing is an art. It is done by energy from the Holy Spirit,” she said. “Prayer channels the energy.”

It can be done by laying on of hands but long distance phone calls are just as effective.

Silver became a Spiritualist Church reverend in Florida where laws require someone who heals or lays on hands to be a licensed minister, she said.

The Spiritualist Church is nondenominational, with churches all over the place, including several in Maine. They believe the Holy Spirit is in every place and everyone, she said.

She does not have a church but feels her role is more about helping and education. On Sundays, she teaches a psychic awareness class in her home.

She mentors and leads others to grow in their psychic abilities. Many around this area are sensitive but it depends on what you focus on.

“You create your own life, but you can focus on making it different,” she said. “Develop a new focus and what you focus on becomes your reality.”

While Silver’s website, www.reverendsallysilver.com, describes a long path of learning, she feels there is always something new to learn.

“I’ve done as much as I could in this life but I’m not done yet,” she said.

abryant@sunmediagroup.net