Interviews
Good Witch Patti Negri Discusses Psychic Development and Finding Magic in Everyday Life [Interview]
Welcome back to DEAD Time. I hope you left a light on for me, because it’s the time of year when pumpkins are carved, and children dress up as ghosts, witches, and their favorite movie monsters to trick or treat. If you’re a fan of Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, you have most likely seen “Good Witch” and psychic medium Patti Negri, who has participated in numerous investigations of haunted locations with the team. In addition to being a psychic medium, Patti is an author, teacher, speaker and podcaster.
She is also a partner and educator at University Magickus, an online spirituality school, where students can learn about Psychic Development, Tarot, Werewolf Magick, and the Vampiric Arts. She has a best-selling book called Old World Magick for the Modern World: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques to Balance, Empower, and Create a Life You Love. Patti is also President and Chief Examiner of the American Federation of Certified Psychics and Mediums.
Bloody Disgusting was delighted to have the chance to chat with Patti Negri about her life as a medium, teaching others about psychic development, haunted locations, how she finds joy in life, and much more.
Photo Credit: Patti Negri
Bloody Disgusting: How old were you when you first realized that you were a medium and could communicate with the dead, and can you describe what your first paranormal experience was like?
Patti Negri: It was honestly as long as I can remember. I remember being a toddler in grade school and having these special friends I talked to. I just knew they weren’t imaginary friends; they were real spirits, and they would give me real information. I honestly think kids have the gift, but for most of us it gets taught out of us with our modern, Western, non-mystical, non-magical society. We’re missing a lot of this, but luckily it didn’t get taught out of me. My mom would say, “Yeah, grandma talked to them too.”
I had this literal, almost obsession for the dead. It wasn’t dark or morbid, most of it was good and they had things to say. So, I literally did my first séance, which is one of the things I’m known for, when I was seven or eight years old. I went in the hall in my little suburban Long Beach home where there were no windows and I stuffed towels under the door. My best friend Sherry Jones was there and then I realized, “I don’t really know any dead people.” So, I started naming off movie stars, that you know at seven or eight, like Marilyn Monroe and whoever you know. Literally, my windowless, lightless hall filled with orbs and shadows and sounds. We went screaming outside, but I was actually just jumping up and down going, “This is real, and this is controllable. I did this. I was able to do this.”
So, starting at about age thirteen I became a speaker. I started studying religion, philosophy, occult science, and metaphysics to try to put this gift that I had into different languaging. It’s all energy and we’re energy, so it doesn’t matter what kind of template or belief system you put on top; it’s just there.
BD: It’s interesting that you were so young, and you weren’t afraid.
PN: No, the only negative thing that gets me on a daily basis is that when you see all these spirits in your life sometimes it is scary. But I love scary movies and TV shows. I watch all the old scary ones; I’m just obsessed with them. So, I guess I liked being scared. The only bad thing is that when you see this stuff all the time, I didn’t know how to turn it off at that time. I learned pretty quickly about having an on and off switch. [laughs] I sleep face down on the pillow, which when you’re a woman of a certain age you’re not supposed to do that; you’re not supposed to squish your face into a pillow with your hands, but I still do that [laughs]. I cannot sleep on my back. It’s hard to even sleep on my side because I’m like, “They’re going to get me.” I just can’t do it. After a whole lifetime of squishing into a pillow, that’s the only drawback.
BD: You are a partner and educator at University Magickus, an online spirituality school. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
PN: Yeah! I have two partners; my friend Father Sebastiaan, who is a vampire; and this beautiful guy Nick, who is in Iceland. I’ve always been a teacher; I used to teach for House of Intuition, which is a metaphysical shop here in Los Angeles and I’m just kind of a teacher by nature. I’ve studied this my whole life, so I teach it, whether I’m sitting on a TV show teaching it or speaking to a group of college kids. So, Nick asked me, “Why don’t we do an Instagram live where you talk about something or teach something?” Out of that, he started this thing called Haunted Diary where we teach some classes. Then we were like, “Let’s turn it into a school.” And we did, about three or four years ago. We have about twenty teachers now and we’re international.
I teach Mediumship Development and Psychic Development, Spellcasting, Familiars, Past Life Regression, and Father Sebastiaan goes mostly into the vampiric arts. But we have teachers from every path. We have psychics, vampires, witches, and werewolves. We have Denny Sargent, who is actually a professor at Washington University, who teaches werewolf magick. He doesn’t put on a werewolf costume, but he does howl at the moon, so it’s a magical path in itself. We even have some New Age teachers and Brazilian magic. I look at all these schools and I’ve always been a learner, and I went, “Why do all these schools cost so much money? I shouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars to learn how to talk to the dead or to learn how to properly do a séance.” So, we wanted it to be really affordable and that’s exactly what we did.
It’s online, it’s on Zoom, it’s the best of all worlds. If people come on for the classes, for example I was teaching a Mediumship class, tonight I’m teaching a séance class, and next week I’m teaching a Tarot class, there might be forty or fifty people in the class. So, it’s $10 a month or the max price for a class is $10 or $20. If fifty people sign up for my class, maybe I’ll have twenty people there live, because in England it’s 2am, so they’re just going to watch it the next day. Everyone gets a video of the class. So, I’m really proud of it because it’s a labor or love. I want people who want to learn to be able to learn about many paths. My one rule for teachers is that you’re not allowed to say, “This is ‘the’ truth.” You can say, “This is my truth” or this is “a truth.” But there are so many truths out there, so we don’t want to say that we’re one specific belief system at all.
Photo Credit: Patti Negri
BD: You’ve appeared on Ghost Adventures several times. What is that like?
PN: Yeah, I’ve done it about twice a season for the last nine years. I love working with Zak and the guys. I absolutely love it. I like an adventure. I never know where I’m going; I never know what I’m doing, because they do really want it legit. I get on a plane, or I drive to an address and I’m like, “Okay, I know nothing.” I always get a little scared like, “What if I walk in and I get crickets? What if I don’t know?” But the places are so vetted that it’s like, “Okay, somebody died over here, somebody was decapitated. Oh, we’re at the Hotel Cecil.”
BD: How did the GAC team first reach out to you and what has it been like working with them in so many haunted locations? Do you have a favorite case you’ve investigated with them?
PN: My first time was in 2015 and literally every episode would have that local person who experienced something or a local medium or psychic or something like that. They were doing a haunted Hollywood episode, and I had just been at the American Legion Hall because I’m on the board of the Hollywood Arts Council, and we bring arts into the schools. We did ghost walks and my husband’s jazz band played and everybody dressed in old 1940s clothes. I literally had all these deep conversations with Charlie Chaplin on this one exact stool. Unknown to me, that is the exact stool he sat in every Friday night and the people at the American Legion told Zak Bagans, “Oh my God, this woman was just here, and she pointed out Charlie Chaplin’s stool.” So, they called me in and it normally would have been just one episode like people usually get, but we just hit it off and they found out my ability with seances. So, we did the Black Dahlia and they called me in to do a séance with the Black Dahlia and that went really good. Now they just call me in about twice a season. It’s fun! I can’t talk about it yet, but we just did a really great episode and it’s probably going to air around Halloween. It was fun [laughs]. It’s always an adventure.
BD: Tell me about your book Old World Magick for the Modern World: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques to Balance, Empower, and Create a Life You Love. I read it sold out in five countries.
PN: Yeah, it’s been a best seller in five countries. It was kind of a labor of love. I work with private clientele, and I see energy. I’m a busy girl and I don’t have an hour to meditate, I have thirty seconds to pull it together. And I’m an elemental witch, so I work with air and fire and water and earth, so I come up with these things. Everybody is out of balance; the world is out of balance. We know that, it’s crazy! So, I would tell people, “Look at the elements and you’re stressed out. Is this emotional stress? That’s water. Run your hands under water. Is your head foggy? That’s your air element. You just need thirty seconds worth of breathing exercises.” So, it’s literally super life hacks. You don’t have to be a psychic medium; you don’t have to be a witch. It’s why you put a little salt in your toilet when you go to the bathroom and what that releases. It’s simple, little life hacks to make your life magical from the second you get up until you go to bed. It’s why you put a glass of water beside your bed. Don’t drink it because it’s going to collect everything.
You can learn psychic development in your sleep. It’s giving the universe permission to download while you’re asleep. So, the whole book is that. It was just a labor of love. It’s self-published. I have a new book coming out on haunted dolls and poppets from Llewellyn. We just announced it, and I saw the cover. That will be out in 2025. I’m really proud of that. As I’m staring at my haunted doll who is giving me the evil eye right now [laughs].
BD: You give off this aura of positivity in everything I’ve seen about you, and I just think that’s really interesting because it seems kind of rare nowadays.
PN: Thank you! I’m still twelve on the inside. I still have that joy of life. I can’t wait to get up in the morning and see what’s going to happen and I hope I never lose that. So far, I haven’t. I love people. That’s part of why I like teaching, and I just think we are such an amazing, weird species. So flawed, so fucked up, but so amazing. I like people. I like life.
BD: You mentioned your new book that’s coming out next year. Are you working on anything else that you can tell me about?
PN: Yeah! But as always, there are a couple of TV projects that I can’t talk about yet. But they are in the works. We’ve been filming and it would be very different, and it would be very cool, so my fingers are crossed on that. I’m working with a really good production company, and we’ve been shooting. But I can’t talk about that yet. I just want to see what each day brings. I’ve got more TV stuff coming out and I’ve got that book. I’m part of another book that we just launched on intuition, which was pretty fun, but I’m just one chapter in it. They brought twenty women from all over the world to each write one chapter on intuition, like intuition leaders, and that’s what I teach. So, every day let’s see what happens.
To learn more about Patti Negri’s work or to book a service, you can check out Patti’s website. For information about classes at University Magickus, visit https://www.magicku.org.
Photo Credit: Patti Negri
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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