What a Decades-Long Friendship with Psychic Medium John Edward Has Taught Me, According to a Former PEOPLE Staffer (Exclusive) By Natasha Stoynoff

Former PEOPLE reporter Natasha Stoynoff opens up about her decades-long friendship with psychic medium John Edward in an exclusive first-person piece.

“I’m connecting with your mother,” the psychic told the woman on the phone, “and she’s telling me to mention the chocolate.”

It was early 2003, and I was on a three-way conference call for a book I was co-writing —After Life: Answers from the Other Side — with psychic John Edward, whose Syfy show, Crossing Over with John Edward, was the first-of-its-kind back then.

After spending an intense three months following the famous medium around the tri-state area and across the Australian outback, watching him give readings in packed-to-the-rafters mega-arenas and private one-on-one sessions in hotel rooms, we were doing one last “reading” for the book, then sending the manuscript off to the publisher.

A “reading,” for those of you not fluent in psychic-speak, is what you get when a psychic connects with the energy of your departed loved ones on the Other Side and provides you with the specific details they are shown. You heard me, the other side. As in … an afterlife (hence, the title of our book).

I was a dogged news reporter, a trained fact-checker, a healthy skeptic, a science-devoted humanist and a confirmed agnostic. My cynical friends — especially the hard-nosed journalists — wanted to know: Did I actually believe in this hocus pocus?

I first interviewed John for a 1999 PEOPLE cover story, as the blockbuster film, The Sixth Sense (“I see dead people”) mesmerized audiences. At that time and in the years to follow, I’ve seen him give some wild, otherwise unexplainable readings.

He provided unique nicknames, revealed family secrets, knew people’s last words before they died. I also did my due diligence as a skeptic and reporter, checking for microphones and plants in audiences and pulling people aside to interview after the events. Everything was kosher.

So … did I believe?

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A tipping point for this question would come during the phone call that night. Right around the time I first interviewed John, FBI agent Robert “Bob” Hilland, Edward’s co-author of the new, crime-memoir, Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice, was grappling with that same question. (I am also a co-writer.)

“I heard him on the radio and thought he was a fraud,” Bob told me, as we sifted through boxes of dusty files, diaries, photos, hand-scrawled notes and news clippings at his home in 2022 — research to help me co-write the book.

Hilland was working on a dead-end cold case that stretched back to the 70s involving a man, John Smith, whose two wives went mysteriously missing. After hearing John on the radio, he set up a meeting with him at his Long Island office. “I was going to either bust him … or get help on the case,” said Bob.

Spoiler alert: He didn’t bust him.

Instead, John gave Bob details that rocked his world — specifics about the murder case that would help the agent put Smith behind bars, and the clincher: a secret about Bob’s family, courtesy of his departed grandfather, who “came through” to John, that Bob verified later with his parents.

“I arrived at John’s office that day a cynic,” Bob said, “and left in a daze with my belief system shaken.” And soon, yes, a believer.

For the next two decades, the unlikely duo secretly sleuthed together on an array of front-page crimes happening in real time — missing Yale student Annie Le; newlywed George Smith murdered on a cruise ship; missing 5-year-old Noah Thomas, who disappeared in a rural town in Appalachian Virginia.

Each time, John doled out clues from the other side to steer Bob in the right direction like an otherworldly GPS: a child’s toy, a soccer ball emblem, a newspaper headline, a name, a space by the door behind the little fridge.

I say “unlikely” duo because it’s not like you’d expect a ballroom-dancing, pop culture nerd who talks to dead people to team up with a 6’8” former football playing, no-nonsense lawman who thrived in a black-and-white, just-the-facts Dragnet world.

John will be the first to say that, on the surface, they made an odd couple. “Think: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins,” he’d say, with a laugh.

The laugh was because we three knew it was Bob who got to be Arnie in that scenario. And yet, underneath at their core, the sameness of these two men resonated. Both are wicked smart brainiacs on a tireless quest to do good in the world.

Since he was a teen, John has tried to help people by reminding us we are all connected and that love doesn’t die. (After taking my oncologist brother to a John event, he then gave several patients in the final stages of cancer comfort, describing what he saw.)

Since he was a teen, Bob has been on a relentless pursuit for justice. He reminds me of Gary Cooper’s honorable Sheriff in High Noon.

They are also two alpha-males who get teary when talking about missing little Noah, and how they felt his sweet innocence as Bob searched for him in the dark, after midnight.

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During our Zoom interviews for the book, it was difficult not to get swept away by their determination to find truth, a body, some peace. I got so riled up by one unsolved case, I wanted us three to grab shovels, hop on a plane, and dig for one victim’s body in a faraway location not yet tried.

“Calm down, Natasha,” said John.

I said, “But it would be a great ending for the book!”

“Natasha has a point, John,” said Bob.

“Yeah. Um. Let it go for now, you guys,” said John.

Our very tight deadline was looming, that was true. No time for digging. Besides, that was one of the big lessons Bob learned during their partnership, says John—to let go when it was time and trust the universe’s mysterious ways.

Their story is not only about crime-solving, they will both tell you, but something deeper and personal — it’s about their brotherhood bond, what they learned from each other and how they evolved.

Which leads me back to that phone call in 2003. The woman on the other line getting a reading was my friend, Norris Church Mailer — wife of literary lion, Norman Mailer — calling in from Provincetown, Mass.

The reading was going swimmingly, as John connected with Norris’s deceased father and gave her a list of specific details that awed her, until … we hit a glitch.

“It’s your mom,” John said, “she’s showing me the chocolate.”

But Norris’s mother was alive and well, she informed him. Still, John insisted. “She’s saying, ‘Mom’s here!’” said John. “She’s saying, ‘mention the chocolate.’”

What John didn’t know was that my mother had passed a decade earlier. He didn’t know that I pitched that first Sixth Sense interview with him to my PEOPLE editors in the hopes he’d connect with her. He also didn’t know that a few days before the phone call with Norris, I stood at my mother’s grave in Toronto and had a stern talk with her.

“Mom, this is getting ridiculous,” I said. “I’ve known John for four years now and I’ve been working side-by-side with him on this book for the last three months. If it’s real, if he can do what he says he can do, then …”

I fished out a Coffee Crisp, her favorite Canadian chocolate bar, from my pocket and broke it in two. Popping one half in my mouth, I placed the other on top of her gravestone. Sharing chocolate was one of our beloved mother-daughter rituals.

“Before this book is done,” I said, spitting chocolate, “come through to John and mention the chocolate.”

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Like FBI Bob, I’m all about the facts.

Does an afterlife exist in some energetic form, and if so, can we connect with those energies? The only indisputable evidence I’ve seen so far that makes me think yes is what I’ve seen John Edward do.