Linda Greba is a wax-reading psychic medium.
Got your attention?
Good, because she'll be in Humboldt this weekend, working out of ATP Integrated Health and Wellness.
Now for the skeptics who will roll their eyes or scoff at the notion of psychic mediums, it must be clarified that Greba's background is quite interesting - and scientific.
Born in Saskatchewan and raised splitting her time between the Prairies and California, as her parents worked in Orange County during the summer, Greba was studying towards a degree in psychiatry at the University of Calgary when she switched over to pre-law in the late 1970s.
A pretty pragmatic career choice compared to the abstract, often controversial career of a psychic.
But Greba says her background in psychiatry and law gives her a grounded perspective when doing readings.
"I take all the magic and mysticism out of it," she laughs.
Greba's baba (Ukrainian for grandmother) had a profound impact on her life growing up as well.
She practiced the ancient Ukrainian hobby of wax reading, with a focus on the mind and body. It was thought that the wax could help people with psychological problems, and also point out areas of the body that needed healing.
"Babas were authoritative. They're thought of as healers," Greba says.
It used to be that babas would pour melted beeswax over a person's head to do a reading.
Nowadays, Greba melts down candlewax and pours it into water to see what formations it takes.
"If I was ever ill, my parents would take me to my baba before they'd let me see a doctor. This was in the days before tons of pills and medications," Greba explains. The biggest, and most significant, success story Greba recounts of her baba's healing powers was when she was nine years old.
It was her near death experience that would later shape her into the psychic medium she is today.
Greba was leaving the house to go see a friend when she slipped and hit her head.
It was a severe blow and, according to Greba, didn't just leave her unconscious.
"I was dead," she says.
Her parents took her to her baba's house, which nowadays, in the world of emergency rooms, paramedics and on-site physicians sounds like a bizarre and delusional reaction to such a serious occurrence.
"It was different back then. They completely trusted my baba could address this."
And, according to Greba, she did.
Not only was she revived but she "came back with a gift," Greba says.
That gift was the ability to help people by seeing into their future; the wax reading part would come later.
It wasn't until 1976, years after her near death experience, when Greba realized the impact her ability can have.
"I was in Calgary and noticed these kids playing in a gravel pit on a construction site. I knew something bad was going to happen to them, that they were going to die if they'd be allowed to play there," Greba says.
Greba warned the construction workers of the impending accident but, according to Greba, they brushed it off. Same with the police, who Greba contacted after the indifferent construction workers.
"They also ignored me," she says.
"Back then, it seemed fine to let kids play on a construction site. Nowadays, you'd never see that but in those days, it was fine," Greba says.
For the next few days, Greba skipped some of her university classes in order to warn the children. Finally, her professor got fed up and told her if she wanted a passing grade, she best pass in her paper soon. She hopped on the bus to get to class; the kids died when the gravel pit caved in on them.
"That's when I knew I could help people, or at least help guide them," she says. "I'm not meant to change lives."
For years afterwards, Greba would do psychic readings in her spare time, only as a hobby. She was a postmaster for Canada Post for 30 years, as well as a mother, and despite her gift, it was only something she did on the side.
Marissa, her 12-year-old granddaughter, changed all that.
She was born with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), a genetic disorder that causes abnormal blood vessel formations in the body and leads to ailments such as nosebleeds, organ lesions and severe digestive tract bleeding, among other things.
Marissa's case, says Greba, is the third worst in North America, and raising funds to keep her alive, especially when treatment for HHT is symptomatic, is costly.
In order to increase the funds needed for Marissa's treatment, Greba began doing odd jobs like flipping houses, but soon realized she could use her psychic abilities as well, harkening back to her childhood spent with her baba.
"I decided to start wax readings."
At first, the melted wax would just sit like a giant glob in the water, with no images to discern, Greba says.
"I was so frustrated. I kept trying numerous things and nothing was working. It wouldn't take shape at all."
After talking to clients of another renowned wax reader, one recalled that she used to recite scripture from the Orthodox Prayer Book while pouring the wax into the water.
It was Greba's ah-ha moment. She adopted the same ritual and images began forming in the wax, she says.
"I could finally work off of it."
Since then, Greba has lent her abilities to everyone from friends, clients, police forces and even families looking for missing loved ones.
According to Greba, she's been successful almost every time in determining the whereabouts of missing persons, but it's just a matter of if the police want to heed her advice.
She also says she's able to speak with the dead involved in the accidents she investigates.
For those snickering, Greba insists it's not a far-fetched claim.
"In psychiatry, you're taught that an afterlife doesn't exist. Death is just the death of your brain in synapsis. And that's true. But what about your energy?" Greba asks.
She uses the analogy of a snake to prove her point.
"If you came across a snake skin while walking along a path, would you expect to find a dead snake nearby or an alive one? Of course, there'd be a live one close by. So in life, we shed this skin and move on to the next phase. We're still here, just not in our bodies."
Still, Greba spends most of her time focused on her wax readings, which she says allows her to not only predict someone's future events but mostly, any health ailments they may be experiencing or will in the future.
She's also an accomplished handwriting analyst, a technique she learned while studying for her degree in psychiatry.
When analyzing my handwriting, which she got me to do with my eyes closed, she was able to pick out a bunch of things she could never have known: that I'm the youngest of my siblings, that my mother has four children, that she had some of her kids earlier in life and the rest (me) later on. She determined I went to university away from home because I wanted adventure (true), that I have two degrees (yep) and am someone who adapts to change well (I think so).
When doing my wax reading, she claims she could see I have a history of heart disease in my family, which is true: my dad died from a sudden heart attack two years ago and his grandfather before that. She could see I have good lungs (thank God) but severe inflammation in my shoulder/neck area (very true, I spend my life hunched over my desk hammering out newspaper articles like this one). In fact, I made a run to Shoppers Drug Mart yesterday to pick up some Robaxacet. However, there's always room for error, which Greba admits to.
"The messages are never wrong but sometimes I may interpret them incorrectly," she says.
Case in point: from my wax reading, she determined I've had broken ribs. Not true. She also pointed out that my liver isn't in the best shape, which made no sense to me since I don't drink alcohol, eat pretty healthy, work out regularly and drink copious amounts of water.
But those blunders were made up for with the readings she did get correct. And, bonus points to the prediction that I'll live a long life, to at least 80 years old.
I'll take it.
