This column is part of a series exploring topics that provide new insights into the boundaries of established science. 

By Adam Stone

Anyone who might already be familiar with Matt Fraser’s origin story knows he often discusses how he was seeing and hearing the departed from the time he was a child, as young as three years old.

He was somewhat confused and scared about it all the time, but later learned both his mother and grandmother possessed their own unique psychic talents, and he ultimately came to understand the nature of his extrasensory abilities.

Now the 32-year-old Rhode Island native and former emergency medical technician is billed as “America’s Top Psychic Medium,” preparing to play the Paramount Hudson Valley in Peekskill on Apr. 5 as part of a tour of live events in the United States and Canada, with the United Kingdom possibly on deck.

Bursting with an endearingly outrageous personality, Fraser’s fame grew in 2020 from his E! Entertainment series “Meet the Frasers,” a reality show about him and his boisterous family, later writing a New York Times bestselling book, 2022’s “We Never Die.”

When I interviewed Fraser two weeks ago, I wanted to better understand when in life he came to truly grasp how he could use his mediumship – communicating with spirits – to transform people’s lives.

It turns out there was indeed a specific moment for Fraser, when he was 18, having recently graduated from Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree, Mass.

He had been doing readings for friends, just as a sort of casual amusement.

But then he was introduced to a family who had lost their loved one to suicide. Emotionally unprepared for what he’d see, Fraser cried with the family when the visions came.

“That was the first time that I had ever experienced pain like that,” explained Fraser, now the father of an 18-month-old son with wife Alexa Papigiotis, a former Rhode Island beauty pageant winner. “I gave them the messages and told them why their son did what he did. More importantly, showing them that their son was happy, seeing the joy on their face and seeing the healing that came and the comfort that came at that moment was the a-ha moment that I realized I can do this for so many.”

‘I’m a Believer…Now’

In recent months, when going down a variety of YouTube rabbit holes, I’d stumble upon Fraser’s videos.

I was blown away by the incredibly specific, nuanced, private detail he would summon, converting hardcore skeptics into total believers in an instant.

Beyond his formal events, Fraser has also gone viral for wowing doubtful broadcasters.

One memorable example from 2016 features former Buccaneers receiver Michael Clayton, who co-hosted “Studio 10 Live” in Tampa Bay, a daytime show.

Check it out online.

The broadcaster’s hardened worldview melts away before your eyes.

“He did not want me on the show,” Fraser told me. “He did not believe in psychics or mediums. Anyway, the producer convinced him just to have me on.”

In the video, Fraser notes several pieces of minutia about Clayton’s late friend’s life experience and untimely death.

“I’m a believer…now,” Clayton says at the conclusion of the nine-minute segment where his co-host also received a powerful reading, their eyes both wet. “This is so phenomenal and what a great experience. I’m shaking right now because it’s kind of surreal.”

‘Who’s Wearing His T-shirts?’

I wanted to speak to someone who had benefited from Fraser’s live events.

When I heard about Carlos Rivera’s story, I knew he’d be the perfect person to call.

The Bronx resident had been a debunker before Fraser essentially helped save his soul at a pair of shows.

Back in the fall of 2017, Rivera was grieving the loss of his 37-year-old son, Kristian, to an overdose. Someone had laced his son’s marijuana joint with fentanyl.

After his son died, Rivera helped absorb the parenting responsibilities of his grandchildren, but was feeling broken.

Accompanied by his wife and the mother of his son’s children, Rivera somewhat reluctantly attended one of Fraser’s events in New Jersey, about a month after his son died.

At the time, Rivera’s wife Millie had been honoring Kristian’s spirit by wearing his t-shirts every day, and no one else knew that fact.

“Well, Matt came over and he said to me, ‘Your son just died recently, right?” Rivera recounted to me in a phone interview last week. “‘He’s standing behind you.’ He always says that they stand behind you.”

Then Fraser approached Rivera’s wife.

“Matt says, ‘Who’s wearing his t-shirts? Which one of you is wearing his t-shirts?’ And my wife raised her hand. Right then and there, I knew this guy was for real.”

‘Miracle Worker’

Captivated by the experience, Rivera decided to attend another of Fraser’s events about a year later in Connecticut.

Rivera said Fraser appeared to recognize him at the event, and referenced the fact that his son’s spirit was again in the room.

But then Fraser also noted how Rivera’s late mother was also making an appearance, and she was taking sassy credit for her son’s commitment to tend to his grandchildren.

“Matt goes, ‘Your son’s here, and he’s telling me to tell you that you’re doing a good job with his kids,’” Rivera recalled. “He then said, ‘There’s a woman that died, your mother, she passed away.’ I said, ‘Yes, she did.’ Matt then says, ‘Well, she’s telling me, this is funny, because she’s saying,’ ‘I taught him all of that.’ Now, that’s my mother talking. You know what I’m saying? Exactly how my mother talks.”

I asked Rivera how the experiences changed him, going from a complete denier into an unflinching believer.

“He has brought an everlasting peace into my heart and in many other people who have lost their loved ones,” Rivera replied in a subsequent e-mail. “He is truly a miracle worker that God has given this very special gift.”

First Person

Unfortunately, when I connected with Fraser two weeks ago for a Zoom audio interview, he was recovering from an illness, and couldn’t deliver a reading. (We have a session tentatively planned for the coming months for a possible future piece.)

However, late last summer, a few months after Examiner Digital Editor Robert Schorkdied of cardiac arrest at just 51, I connected with a psychic medium, around the time I was reporting on the true nature of near-death experiences, a global phenomenon transcending race, culture, class, religion and era.

I wasn’t explicitly searching for Robert at the time but it’s easy to surmise that the notion of communicating with my late friend was flitting prominently through my subconscious.

The results of the reading – still the only one I’ve had to date – were extraordinary.

I hadn’t given the medium any information about myself.

All she knew was my first name, and the reading was conducted over the phone.

‘Wonder Twins’

Some family members of mine are skeptics themselves about any existence of psychic abilities (I used to be, generally speaking, if I’d given it any thought at all) and I was sure to e-mail them immediately after the reading so I’d have contemporaneous notes to reference at a later date.

Shortly before the session started, I thought to myself what evidence of Robert’s presence at the reading could theoretically look like. If the psychic was able to identify an obscure inside joke of ours, that would serve as an impressive piece of data.

For instance, if the medium noted the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Wonder Twins,” a pair of random superhero characters Robert used to joke was our joint nickname, given some of our similarities.

Don’t forget: the Connecticut psychic only knew my first name.

She didn’t know what I do for a living, or absolutely anything about the anonymous voice on the other end of the call.

“She asked if the name Robert meant anything to me,” I e-mailed my family last Aug. 24 just after the reading. “She said he died young of a heart attack. She said she got a brother vibe between him and I. She said we had an inside joke where there’s two characters dressed in a funny way, like the 1970s.”

Even though she also shared some information that I didn’t connect with during the reading (radio signals can be less than crystal clear when communicating with another dimension), the medium produced a laundry list of other mind-blowing details: about Schork’s laugh, about a certain phrase I overuse, about my coughing at the time, about a loved one’s gastrointestinal issues, about a late acquaintance of mine named Jon, about my mother’s passing, about the way my late paternal grandfather died of pancreatic cancer and about someone in my orbit’s excessive drinking.

I gave the medium no verbal cues, even when I was desperate to elaborate on her commentary, given how on track she was with most of the narrative.

For whatever reason, and for better or worse, I absorbed the encounter more as clinical reporting evidence than an emotional experience.

“She said I’ve been coughing and have had some breathing issues and mid-back issues recently,” I wrote in my August e-mail to my family. “All true. She said to get a more ergonomically correct workspace and to consult a doctor about the back and breathing.”

There’s a fascinating common thread stitched throughout a variety of columns I’ve recently prepared, exploring an array of alternative topics from near-death experiences to eastern medicine, astrology, terminal lucidity, and claims of extraterrestrial encounters.

For me, the connection is this: robust anecdotal evidence exposes the folly and inadequate logic in insisting we exist exclusively in a material world.

We reside in a mysterious scientific universe, defined by invisible energy, where only word salad explains away the divine.

Healthy skepticism needs to be turned on its head, stress testing conventional western explanations – that approach appears to be growing, as a Pew Research Center survey conducted last summer showed that a whopping 70 percent of U.S. adults identify as spiritual.

Remote Viewing

It’s worth noting that declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reveal our government’s serious investment in psychic abilities in the 1970s during the Cold War, through initiatives like the Stargate Project.

For instance, Joseph McMoneagle, a former Army officer recruited into Stargate, claimed to “see” inside a Soviet submarine facility in 1979 using provided coordinates, with detailed descriptions reportedly verified by satellite imagery.

Although some emphasize how the efforts failed to consistently generate actionable intelligence, what I find much more remarkable is the fact that controlled scientific testing helped illustrate the power of what the CIA called “remote viewing.”

“A statistically significant laboratory effort has been demonstrated in the sense that hits occur more than chance,” asserts an analysis, declassified in 2002 and available on the CIA’s website.

If you start doing a deep dive on psychics, you begin to understand the framework of potential future science that could eventually better explain the phenomenon.

While it remains murky to me, as a layman, I am starting to understand how the abilities reside from expanded consciousness, a heightened sensitivity to energies beyond typical human perception.

Magical? No. Spiritual? Yes.

Some might be born with more natural abilities in this space – like a piano prodigy such as Mozart – but it’s a skill anyone can theoretically learn.

Fraser was born with a natural genetic aptitude for mediumship, which was then nurtured in his home life.

But we all have intuitive abilities we can hone, and there are tons of books from well-credentialed authors on how everyday people can do just that.

In other words, you can be a psychic too.

Profound Moment

While every reading is special to Fraser, some undoubtedly resonate with him more than others.

One such recent experience involved a mourning mother who lost her two- and three-year-old sons a dozen years ago.

You must watch the video online to understand the potency of the moment.

“[I see] two children that were lost as well,” Fraser says in the video. “Were there two souls that died?”

“They’re my boys,” the woman confirms.

“You lost both children?” Fraser asks.

“Yes,” she affirms.

Shortly after, Fraser notes how he “just saw a vision here.”

“First of all, did they drown here in the physical [world]?” he asks.

“Yes,” the sobbing woman replies.

“I saw what happened because one of the boys let the other boy out,” Fraser reveals. “And that’s how I see them dying, because one followed the other. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” the woman cries back, accompanied by her similarly emotional sister.

Fraser then elaborates on how the woman needs to transcend the feelings of guilt she’d punished herself with over the past 12 years.

He notes that the souls of the woman’s sons know how their mother often drives around in her car, pretending like the boys are physically present.

“So know that anytime that you’re riding in the car and sometimes you just think or you feel like your two kids are back there with you, know that they truly are and that they are not holding you accountable on the other side,” Fraser emphasized. “The only one that’s causing that guilt is you.”

“Thank you so much,” the teary woman musters.

(When Fraser discussed this encounter in our Zoom interview, he said it’s a reading he “thinks about every single day,” and the exchange actually led him to add greater child safety measures at the pool he’s building at his home.)

Skeptics

When Fraser told me about the a-ha moment from when he was 18, involving the young man who committed suicide, I wondered what it taught him about the mission-based work he was about to embark on in his life.

“So, all of a sudden, that’s when I realized, oh, my God, this is something that actually I can use to heal people,” said Fraser, who performs regularly at The Venetian resort in Las Vegas. “This goes beyond just telling people about their life. People need this to put back the missing piece of their heart that they’ve been missing.”

In an infinite universe marked by profound mysteries, learning about the eternal nature of the soul provides Fraser’s fans with life-changing perspective and otherworldly evidence.

While some dismiss mediumship as mere quackery (and yes, there are charlatans too, like in any field) Fraser loves wary participants the most.

“Those are my favorite, favorite, favorite readings to do because so many people walk in and they’re skeptics, or maybe they’re dragged in by their wives or whatever it may be,” Fraser said. “They’re shunning everything out. And then something happens during that reading that just makes them come around. And it’s just incredible.”

See for yourself on Apr. 5 in Peekskill.

Especially if you’re a debunker.