Like any good father and son, Philip Smith receives frequent visits from his father and receives life advice from him.
But there’s a problem: his father has been dead since 1981.
Lew Smith was an “interior designer to the stars” in Miami, with clients including silent-era comedy icon Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás, before becoming a psychic medium.
Philip, 72, believes Lew visits him in times of need. signaling your presence to your child through a tickling sensation in the ear.
Then Philip will say: ‘Is that you? What do you want to tell me?’
“The trick is to have faith that it’s not your own mind talking to yourself,” as he explained his process, “but that you’re actually receiving information.”
Philip Smith (above), now 72, says he is visited by his father, who died in the 1980s. He told DailyMail.com that his father is helping write a book.
Lew Smith died in 1981, but claimed to have been a healer and medium. He believed he could see dead people and predict the future.
Medical experts have suggested that such statements could be the result of grief, strong emotional ties to the deceased, or the need to bring closure to a difficult grieving period.
But Philip has never given up talking to his deceased father in the story.
Lew’s “powers” had begun to manifest themselves 60 years earlier, when he was working designing film sets for Charlie Chaplin.
Philip described his father’s transformation from interior decorator to “supernatural” healer as very strange, as his father would wake up at 4 a.m. to “take dictations” from the dead.
“In 1921, he was recording his dreams and noticed that he had premonitions,” Philip told DailyMail.com.
‘He was talking about picking up the newspaper the next day and reading about the events in his dreams.
‘For example, one entry describes a dream about a train accident in the desert, with screaming children and fire.
“The next day, the front page reported on a train accident in the Nevada desert where 13 children had died in the fire.”
Then, in 1968, Philip claimed that his father discovered that he could talk to the dead and heal the sick.
His father was well known as a medium and healer in the 1960s, and his story was published in newspapers.
Philip’s mother (center) supported her husband’s move toward healing
“And then our lives changed,” he said.
‘Our house became like Lourdes, with people coming in the middle of the night, banging on the door, crying, you know, her husband had a heart attack. His sister has leukemia.
‘When you’re 14 years old. It was a little difficult,” as Philip summed it up, “because he had an active relationship with the dead and he had psychic powers.”
The family went from having wealthy clients like Walt Disney and the president of Cuba to having nothing at all, as Philip recalled
“He never charged a cent for his cures,” he said.
“Then our lifestyle changed: my mother went to Havana on weekends to gamble, all of that stopped suddenly.”
Psychologists have suggested that people believe they are healers because they have a strong desire to help others or believe in their own intuition or spiritual abilities.
There is also the aspect that this person thrives on the power or control of others, but there are also “wounded healers” who have dealt with trauma and hope to find comfort in helping others.
Philip said his father continued to work as a healer until his death.
Then, some time after his father’s death, Philip noticed something strange.
‘One winter day, I noticed something humming around my ear. I assumed it was a mosquito and I kept killing it, but in winter we don’t have mosquitoes,” he said.
The first sense of his father’s psychic powers came while working for Charlie Chaplin: when he took what is believed to be the first photograph of Chaplin outside the studio.
After his father died, Philip noticed something strange and wrote a book about the experience.
“I finally realized it was him, I started asking questions and that’s how I started getting messages.”
Philip used a medium to speak to his father and each time the message was always the same: Lew wanted his son to write a book about the healing methods he had developed when he was alive.
“I recently said, ‘It would be nice if you could visit me.'” He (Lew) replied: ‘I am always with you; You just have to talk to me.’ That was a revelation,” Philip said.
“I thought I had to wait for him to show up.”
Philip explained that he feels like his father is “always present” and that this phenomenon corresponds with some of his father’s ideas about the afterlife.
His goal is to start working on the book next summer, based on “five or six hundred” audio tapes left behind by his father.
Philip said Lew is like a co-author and he will turn to him for advice on what to do with all the information, and he said he thinks it’s important to highlight the work of such healers.
“What we do in medicine is poison the body with drugs or open it up,” according to Philip.
“Doctors have their place,” he admitted, “but I think there are more subtle energies at work in the body (and) we have no idea how they work.”
