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When news broke that Tristan Thompson had allegedly cheated on Khloé Kardashian with none other than fam friend Jordyn Woods, there was one person who saw something like this coming: Hollywood Medium’s Tyler Henry.
Kardashian and little sis Kylie Jenner appeared on the show back in 2017, and Henry got worked up and embarrassed while trying to prepare them for a situation involving a guy who was with one sister but trying to get with another.
Sure, Woods isn’t actually a born member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, but she had been Jenner’s BFF since the summer before high school, and the two frequently referred to each other as family. So yeah, close enough.
Kardashian and Jenner aren’t the only celebs who’ve sat in a psychic hot seat. In addition to the other stars who have appeared on Hollywood Medium (Sofia Vergara, Rebel Wilson, and Karamo Brown, to name a few), rumors abound about who else has sought offscreen guidance from the beyond. A few A-list stars have allegedly seen psychics to communicate with dead pets. Lili Reinhart tweeted about wanting a refund after a psychic told her it would get better, but in fact, it got worse (she never clarified what “it” was). So, who are the psychics giving celebs these readings? Surely they’re not just pulling off the highway at the first neon sign, right? The whisper network is strong in Hollywood.
At just 23 years old, Henry is already the biggest name in this category. He started doing readings while still in high school and went pro shortly after graduating early at age 16. He snagged his first celebrity client—American Horror Story actress Sarah Paulson—at just 17, and word spread quickly from there. He got his own show after blowing a skeptical producer’s mind with an eerily accurate reading.
There’s also Thomas John, who has advised celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Jenna Dewan, and Sam Smith and starred in his own Lifetime series called Seatbelt Psychic, which had him posing as a ride-share driver to give readings to unsuspecting passengers. Another is Jayne Wallace, who has read for Kate Hudson, Leslie Mann, and Kim Kardashian West and has three shops, including one in a Culver City mall, called Psychic Sisters.
Henry says he communicates with spirits and enters a “daydream-like state” during readings. “I sometimes will get a smell,” he says. “I might hear a noise. I might have a vision. Sometimes, I’ll even get a physical sensation that corresponds with how someone died.”
You don’t have to be a celebrity to tap the services of a celebrity psychic, but you do have to have a lot of patience and a lot of cash. The waiting list for John’s $800 one-hour phone sessions is several years long. If you need immediate guidance, he does do emergency sessions at $375 for 15 minutes or $1,275 for an hour. Henry still does private readings, but prices are on request and he has a staggering waiting list of more than 175,000 names. In comparison, Wallace is downright accessible—her waiting list ranges from one to four months long, depending on the location, and she charges just $250 for a half-hour reading in L.A.
But what do you really get from a reading with a celebrity psychic? Do famous psychics even deign to do readings for non-famous people? Like, um, me? Turns out, yes.
.When it comes to fortune-telling, I am far from a skeptic. I’ve had my tarot cards, palms, and birth chart read. I’ve laid on a table, covered in crystals, while a woman chanted over me and connected with my spirit plant (it was a living stone, that type of succulent that looks like a rock, and I’m still not sure what that says about me). I’ve had a healer beat me with herb bundles and give me a handful of birdseed and sequins in front of a church in Mexico, and I’ve shaken Magic 8-Balls so hard that I thought they might crack.
But when I first get on the phone with John, I can’t tell how things are going. “Do you have any connection with Boston?” he asks. I’ve been there once, on the Chinatown bus from New York, but I wouldn’t call that a connection.
“No,” I say.
“Okay, that’s weird, because I saw Boston,” he says, and for a split second, I start to wonder if maybe this isn’t legit.
Then he moves on. “By the way, they have another thing coming through,” he says, speaking of the spirit guides he’s communicating with. “You have a book that is going to be turned into a movie. Are you trying to take a book and turn it into a movie?”
Actually, I am.
“I get this really strongly,” John continues. “And what I’m feeling is, this would be a movie more for children and teenagers and young adults. Like, adults may see it too, but I just want to tell you it feels like it’s for, like, 18-year-olds.”
I had written a young-adult novel and started working with a film agent just a couple of weeks before. I’m so happy, I burst into tears. John then goes on to share the names of my paternal grandfather and my mother and the first initial of my sister’s name, and he delivers some seemingly random details and thoughts, which actually meant a lot to me, about a close friend who had recently passed away.
Anyone can call themselves a psychic or medium, and there are no tests to pass or licenses required to go into business as one. There are certain unofficial organizations, like the Forever Family Foundation, that offer certifications, but the credentials aren’t uniform. Google Henry, John, or Wallace, and the search results will be split: For every person singing their praises, there’s another one calling BS. Like, did it really take paranormal abilities to divine that Thompson was a cheater?
But none of them seem too bothered by it. Hell, they sometimes enjoy the challenge. “A lot of people I read start off as skeptics or nonbelievers,” Henry says. “There comes a point in every reading when you see their worldview being changed.”
“I think it’s quite good when someone’s skeptical,” says Wallace, who fit in a reading for me while she was at the hairdresser, “because you can tap into certain things and it can help people break free of bad stuff. The way the world is at the moment, it gives people a lot of empowerment to say, ‘All right, from now on it’s a good life.’”
I didn’t pay for my readings, so I can’t say whether it was money well spent, but I think the same rule that applies to any major purchase—diamonds, stilettos, balayage—applies here: If you have to choose between a psychic reading or paying your rent, pay your damn rent. And I have to point out that some of the stuff John and Wallace told me could have been found through online research. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it was possible.
But my readings felt like a little brush with magic, and why not believe in magic if magic is what gets you through? Maybe working with a psychic, celebrity or otherwise, is one of those things where what matters most isn’t that it’s factual but rather that it’s meaningful. I wonder if the Kardashian-Jenners would agree?