''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats." ~ Clairvoyant Greta Alexander
Greta Alexander was a dynamo of a woman.
"This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate (IL) institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is 'precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to 'travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help."
"The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those 'abilities', as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
'A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos."
~Smith, Wes. Seeing Things: Downstate Psychic Greta Alexander Is Known Worldwide As A Woman Of Visions; Chicago Tribune, June 09, 1991.
Greta used her celebrity and fortune late in life to open a $3 a night hotel for the needy in the Peoria area. She was a beloved figure, known for her beehive hairdo and uncanny ability to provide insight into the seemingly unknowable. When she made guests appearances on local radio shows, the phone lines would literally be flooded with calls.
(From the Chicago Tribune 6/9/91)
"SEEING THINGS
Wes Smith
Greta Alexander's garlic chicken and stir-fried vegetables were getting cold because she was dying on the telephone, again.
A small-town police chief in upstate New York had called the central Illinois psychic's home in Delavan, about 40 miles southeast of Peoria, during her lunch break. He asked for Alexander's read on a six-month-old unsolved murder case.
Wearily, but without protest, Alexander swallowed one last bite, dropped her fork and tuned in to the victim's vibes.
''I feel like I'm running and the next thing I know I am down. I am rolling and the next thing I know I am no longer in my physical body. Do you understand that? I am dead. I feel like I've been shot in the neck. I feel like I had known the person who did this,'' she said into the telephone.
The others at Alexander's kitchen table finished their meals and drifted off. Her support staff of hired help, family and volunteers wandered in and out, seemingly oblivious that Alexander was being dragged to her death while they cleared the table and chatted about the weather.
''My ear hurts and my arms,'' Alexander told the police chief over the clatter of tableware. ''There should have been a bruise on the arm. Someone is saying, 'You won't ever do that again. . . .' ''
While Alexander did her psychic sleuthing on one telephone line, other lines on other phones chirped incessantly throughout her rambling, 135-year-old home that is chockablock with winged cherubs, images of Jesus and chandeliers.
When the Downstate psychic appears as a guest on Steve Vogel's ''Problems and Solutions'' radio show on WJBC in Bloomington, as many as 9,000 callers are turned away in an hour, Vogel said.
Illinois Bell officials said they can always tell when Alexander's secretaries at her offices in Springfield and Delavan are booking her appointments. They do it only one day a week and ''it's like Mother's Day,'' a spokesman said of the surge in demand caused by thousands of calls.
This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is
''precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.'' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to ''travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help.
The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those ''abilities,'' as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
''A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,'' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos.
It is not difficult for Alexander to tune into psychic signals on command, she said. The difficulty is tuning the signals out when they hit her unsolicited. ''I can be cooking spaghetti and still feel it,'' she said.
''The hardest thing is to restrain yourself when you get the flashes. I don't know whether to tell people or not.''
She said she picked up such a vision recently about a woman she did not know in line ahead of her at the grocery store. She saw a fire in the woman's basement, and ''I decided I had to tell her what I saw. She said, 'Thank God', because her husband had been cleaning with gasoline-soaked rags and he'd said he was going to put the rags in the basement when he was done,'' Alexander said. She felt her vision might have prevented the fire, though she never learned the outcome.
Another time, Alexander was leaving a Peoria restaurant when she noticed a young married couple and got a vision of them holding a beautiful newborn baby, she said.
''I stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do, but I finally told them. They said they'd been trying to have a baby for seven years without success. Well, they had one after that,'' she said.
Swaying the skeptics
At first there were doubters. Alexander knows there will always be doubters. Alexander doesn't care diddly about doubters. ''I'm not here for publicity, I'm here to help,'' said the psychic, who rather than court the media tend to jab their representatives with epithets like ''pipsqueak'' and
''yahoo.''
Alexander has made believers of hundreds of skeptics - police and pipsqueaks among them-through jaw-dropping displays of her abilities, and through her great indifference to whether anyone believes in her. She has also converted disbelievers with her willingness to share and help and give what she can without asking for anything in return.
''I am comfortable in recommending Greta because I don't feel she is going to rip anybody off,'' said Marcello Truzzi, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist who has studied psychic detectives as director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor.
While skeptical of psychics and their claims, Truzzi believes they can be useful and inexpensive tools in criminal investigations, a theme he puts forth in ''The Blue Sense,'' a book he recently co-authored.
Truzzi begins the book on psychic detectives with a case involving Alexander, and he frequently cites her work in it. He said he does not endorse any psychic's claims, but he does credit Alexander with ''an intuitive capacity'' and a good heart.
''She is not trying to make a fast buck at this,'' Truzzi said. ''In fact, all the evidence seems to go the other way.''
Truzzi, whose research is also featured in ''The Skeptic's Handbook on Parapsychology,'' watched Alexander at work and found her to be ''a good quasi-therapist who is very tactful and gives people solace.''
''She does see clients whom she charges, but the money seems to go to a good cause,'' he said.
In central Illinois, Alexander is known as a one-woman Salvation Army. Several barns and outbuildings behind her home, and her second-hand goods business, The Stuff Store, all are crammed with items given to Alexander to distribute to the needy.
She also collects troubled teens and adults, many of whom share quarters from time to time with Alexander and her accommodating husband, Rob, a state employee and electronics buff who has computerized Alexander's astrology and numerology chart business.
The psychic's best-known charitable work is her own version of the Ronald McDonald Houses, though Alexander's operation is financed mostly through palm readings rather than burger sales. Her House of Hope has five bedrooms open to the needy families of children and adults hospitalized in Peoria. The optional fee is $3 a night, she said.
The house is an off-shoot of Alexander's Star of Hope Center, a not-for-profit organization founded in memory of her first husband, Ed, who died of cancer of the kidney in 1976 after 26 years of marriage. Alexander has trouble walking now because, she said, she carried Ed up to his bedroom every night for the last year and a half of his life.
Alexander said she does all of her charity work without any state, local or federal grants. She does, however, tap into her heavenly hot line frequently, she said.
''Raoul and Isaiah, that's my boys,'' she said of the spirits whom she believes guide her abilities and come to the rescue, guiding her to cash sources, when her bank accounts are overdrawn, which they generally are.
Except for her ''bread and butter'' palm readings, which run $40 for a half hour consultation, and modest fees for her charts, T-shirts, fortune cookies, and her new inspirational 900-number message line, Alexander said she provides her psychic services for free or modest honorariums.
''I make zilch off the police stuff,'' she said in frustration. ''It takes up so much of my time and it's so hard on me, but I can't refuse to help them when they call.''
Alexander is perhaps most widely known for her work with police around the country and beyond. She handles more than a dozen police cases each week, re-enacting violent deaths in many of them. Some of her police cases have been featured recently on ''Geraldo'' and ''Missing/Reward.''
Truzzi begins his book on psychic detectives with an account of one of Alexander's most acclaimed cases: a 1983 murder in Alton, Ill. Mary L. Cousett, 28, had disappeared after leaving her home with boyfriend Stanley Holliday Jr. Police arrested Holliday three days after Cousett's
disappearance, believing he had murdered her. But detectives could not find her body.
After seven months of searching, Alton police contacted Alexander. She ran her hand over a map and circled an area that she said police should search. Detectives said it had already been searched several times, but they agreed to give it one more try. They found the body, though it was just outside Alexander's circled area.
Alexander puts her accuracy rate at 80 percent in police cases, but in the book, Alton detectives said she provided 22 leads that eventually proved to be true or near the mark, including the fact that Cousett's head and foot would be found separated from her torso and that the man who would eventually discover the remains would have a ''bad hand.''
The foot was detached as she predicted, but the victim's head was not severed. Cousett's wig, however, was found lying apart from the body. The auxiliary police officer who discovered Cousett's body had a deformed left hand because of an industrial accident. The boyfriend was convicted and served 5 years of a 10-year sentence.
''She seems to have an unusually good track record in terms of finding bodies in water,'' Truzzi said. Alexander agreed: ''I think it's because I was born under the sign of water, Aquarius.''
She's good with fire, too, according to one supporter whom she spied in a restaurant and hailed: ''Hey you lop-eared, horn-toad yahoo! Get over here and give ol' Greta a hug!''
Tony Giardini, director of the arson division of the state fire marshal's office, jumped up from his table and did as commanded. ''This woman has saved so many cases for me it's unbelievable,'' said Giardini, who asked Alexander for quick-and confidential-reads on two arsons before returning to his lunch. Alexander is the mother of five and stepmother to four, as well as being Earth Mama to hundreds of others, she said.
Her motherly services include helping hundreds who know exactly who they are mentally and spiritually, but darned if they can find that missing antique ring, savings bond, parakeet or long-term love.
''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats,''
she said. ''I used to have one lady call me all the time and ask me where she'd put the bread.''
The calls to Alexander come from all over the country and from
''Mohammad in Saudi Arabia'' too, according to spiral notebooks kept by her secretary to record phone requests.
A California toy inventor wants to know if he'll win his lawsuit against a toy company. An Illinois woman wants to know if she and her kids should still go to Florida even though her husband can't get away. A woman in Tucson is thinking about moving East and wonders how Alexander feels about it.
Ailing people call her to diagnose their seizures and their spastic colons. ''I wouldn't dream of having an operation or anything medical done for me or my family without consulting Greta,'' attested the psychic's longtime client, actress Ruth Warrick of ''All My Children,'' when she appeared with Alexander on ''Geraldo.''
Doctors, she said, call her before operating, lawyers call her before going to trial, and producers call her before picking a cast.
The owners of one haunted house called her to get rid of scary spirits. The owners of another asked her to persuade a friendly ghost to relocate with them.
Not long to go
Alexander is fair game wherever she goes. ''I go to the grocery store and it's: 'Hey, you're Greta! 'Is my kid gonna graduate or what?' '' she said.
It is often wearying, and a bit lonely, to be always pursued by people wanting something, Alexander admitted.
''I do feel used sometimes,'' she said. ''About a year ago, I got a call from a guy I went to school with. I hadn't heard from him in years. He said he called because I'd been walking through his mind and he wanted to say hello. I told him that it was the nicest phone call I'd gotten in years.''
''But then he said, 'While I've got you on the line, my son lost a ring. . . . '' Alexander said.
'Alexander has studied her own life line, and she said she feels it doesn't extend much longer than her current 59 years.
Just how much longer does she have in the physical world?
Instead of answering, the psychic made a prediction about how this writer would end his story.
''And then he wrote, 'She turned and smiled sadly, but said nothing.' ''
Greta Alexander was a dynamo of a woman.
"This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate (IL) institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is 'precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to 'travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help."
"The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those 'abilities', as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
'A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos."
~Smith, Wes. Seeing Things: Downstate Psychic Greta Alexander Is Known Worldwide As A Woman Of Visions; Chicago Tribune, June 09, 1991.
Greta used her celebrity and fortune late in life to open a $3 a night hotel for the needy in the Peoria area. She was a beloved figure, known for her beehive hairdo and uncanny ability to provide insight into the seemingly unknowable. When she made guests appearances on local radio shows, the phone lines would literally be flooded with calls.
(From the Chicago Tribune 6/9/91)
"SEEING THINGS
Wes Smith
Greta Alexander's garlic chicken and stir-fried vegetables were getting cold because she was dying on the telephone, again.
A small-town police chief in upstate New York had called the central Illinois psychic's home in Delavan, about 40 miles southeast of Peoria, during her lunch break. He asked for Alexander's read on a six-month-old unsolved murder case.
Wearily, but without protest, Alexander swallowed one last bite, dropped her fork and tuned in to the victim's vibes.
''I feel like I'm running and the next thing I know I am down. I am rolling and the next thing I know I am no longer in my physical body. Do you understand that? I am dead. I feel like I've been shot in the neck. I feel like I had known the person who did this,'' she said into the telephone.
The others at Alexander's kitchen table finished their meals and drifted off. Her support staff of hired help, family and volunteers wandered in and out, seemingly oblivious that Alexander was being dragged to her death while they cleared the table and chatted about the weather.
''My ear hurts and my arms,'' Alexander told the police chief over the clatter of tableware. ''There should have been a bruise on the arm. Someone is saying, 'You won't ever do that again. . . .' ''
While Alexander did her psychic sleuthing on one telephone line, other lines on other phones chirped incessantly throughout her rambling, 135-year-old home that is chockablock with winged cherubs, images of Jesus and chandeliers.
When the Downstate psychic appears as a guest on Steve Vogel's ''Problems and Solutions'' radio show on WJBC in Bloomington, as many as 9,000 callers are turned away in an hour, Vogel said.
Illinois Bell officials said they can always tell when Alexander's secretaries at her offices in Springfield and Delavan are booking her appointments. They do it only one day a week and ''it's like Mother's Day,'' a spokesman said of the surge in demand caused by thousands of calls.
This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is
''precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.'' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to ''travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help.
The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those ''abilities,'' as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
''A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,'' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos.
It is not difficult for Alexander to tune into psychic signals on command, she said. The difficulty is tuning the signals out when they hit her unsolicited. ''I can be cooking spaghetti and still feel it,'' she said.
''The hardest thing is to restrain yourself when you get the flashes. I don't know whether to tell people or not.''
She said she picked up such a vision recently about a woman she did not know in line ahead of her at the grocery store. She saw a fire in the woman's basement, and ''I decided I had to tell her what I saw. She said, 'Thank God', because her husband had been cleaning with gasoline-soaked rags and he'd said he was going to put the rags in the basement when he was done,'' Alexander said. She felt her vision might have prevented the fire, though she never learned the outcome.
Another time, Alexander was leaving a Peoria restaurant when she noticed a young married couple and got a vision of them holding a beautiful newborn baby, she said.
''I stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do, but I finally told them. They said they'd been trying to have a baby for seven years without success. Well, they had one after that,'' she said.
Swaying the skeptics
At first there were doubters. Alexander knows there will always be doubters. Alexander doesn't care diddly about doubters. ''I'm not here for publicity, I'm here to help,'' said the psychic, who rather than court the media tend to jab their representatives with epithets like ''pipsqueak'' and
''yahoo.''
Alexander has made believers of hundreds of skeptics - police and pipsqueaks among them-through jaw-dropping displays of her abilities, and through her great indifference to whether anyone believes in her. She has also converted disbelievers with her willingness to share and help and give what she can without asking for anything in return.
''I am comfortable in recommending Greta because I don't feel she is going to rip anybody off,'' said Marcello Truzzi, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist who has studied psychic detectives as director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor.
While skeptical of psychics and their claims, Truzzi believes they can be useful and inexpensive tools in criminal investigations, a theme he puts forth in ''The Blue Sense,'' a book he recently co-authored.
Truzzi begins the book on psychic detectives with a case involving Alexander, and he frequently cites her work in it. He said he does not endorse any psychic's claims, but he does credit Alexander with ''an intuitive capacity'' and a good heart.
''She is not trying to make a fast buck at this,'' Truzzi said. ''In fact, all the evidence seems to go the other way.''
Truzzi, whose research is also featured in ''The Skeptic's Handbook on Parapsychology,'' watched Alexander at work and found her to be ''a good quasi-therapist who is very tactful and gives people solace.''
''She does see clients whom she charges, but the money seems to go to a good cause,'' he said.
In central Illinois, Alexander is known as a one-woman Salvation Army. Several barns and outbuildings behind her home, and her second-hand goods business, The Stuff Store, all are crammed with items given to Alexander to distribute to the needy.
She also collects troubled teens and adults, many of whom share quarters from time to time with Alexander and her accommodating husband, Rob, a state employee and electronics buff who has computerized Alexander's astrology and numerology chart business.
The psychic's best-known charitable work is her own version of the Ronald McDonald Houses, though Alexander's operation is financed mostly through palm readings rather than burger sales. Her House of Hope has five bedrooms open to the needy families of children and adults hospitalized in Peoria. The optional fee is $3 a night, she said.
The house is an off-shoot of Alexander's Star of Hope Center, a not-for-profit organization founded in memory of her first husband, Ed, who died of cancer of the kidney in 1976 after 26 years of marriage. Alexander has trouble walking now because, she said, she carried Ed up to his bedroom every night for the last year and a half of his life.
Alexander said she does all of her charity work without any state, local or federal grants. She does, however, tap into her heavenly hot line frequently, she said.
''Raoul and Isaiah, that's my boys,'' she said of the spirits whom she believes guide her abilities and come to the rescue, guiding her to cash sources, when her bank accounts are overdrawn, which they generally are.
Except for her ''bread and butter'' palm readings, which run $40 for a half hour consultation, and modest fees for her charts, T-shirts, fortune cookies, and her new inspirational 900-number message line, Alexander said she provides her psychic services for free or modest honorariums.
''I make zilch off the police stuff,'' she said in frustration. ''It takes up so much of my time and it's so hard on me, but I can't refuse to help them when they call.''
Alexander is perhaps most widely known for her work with police around the country and beyond. She handles more than a dozen police cases each week, re-enacting violent deaths in many of them. Some of her police cases have been featured recently on ''Geraldo'' and ''Missing/Reward.''
Truzzi begins his book on psychic detectives with an account of one of Alexander's most acclaimed cases: a 1983 murder in Alton, Ill. Mary L. Cousett, 28, had disappeared after leaving her home with boyfriend Stanley Holliday Jr. Police arrested Holliday three days after Cousett's
disappearance, believing he had murdered her. But detectives could not find her body.
After seven months of searching, Alton police contacted Alexander. She ran her hand over a map and circled an area that she said police should search. Detectives said it had already been searched several times, but they agreed to give it one more try. They found the body, though it was just outside Alexander's circled area.
Alexander puts her accuracy rate at 80 percent in police cases, but in the book, Alton detectives said she provided 22 leads that eventually proved to be true or near the mark, including the fact that Cousett's head and foot would be found separated from her torso and that the man who would eventually discover the remains would have a ''bad hand.''
The foot was detached as she predicted, but the victim's head was not severed. Cousett's wig, however, was found lying apart from the body. The auxiliary police officer who discovered Cousett's body had a deformed left hand because of an industrial accident. The boyfriend was convicted and served 5 years of a 10-year sentence.
''She seems to have an unusually good track record in terms of finding bodies in water,'' Truzzi said. Alexander agreed: ''I think it's because I was born under the sign of water, Aquarius.''
She's good with fire, too, according to one supporter whom she spied in a restaurant and hailed: ''Hey you lop-eared, horn-toad yahoo! Get over here and give ol' Greta a hug!''
Tony Giardini, director of the arson division of the state fire marshal's office, jumped up from his table and did as commanded. ''This woman has saved so many cases for me it's unbelievable,'' said Giardini, who asked Alexander for quick-and confidential-reads on two arsons before returning to his lunch. Alexander is the mother of five and stepmother to four, as well as being Earth Mama to hundreds of others, she said.
Her motherly services include helping hundreds who know exactly who they are mentally and spiritually, but darned if they can find that missing antique ring, savings bond, parakeet or long-term love.
''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats,''
she said. ''I used to have one lady call me all the time and ask me where she'd put the bread.''
The calls to Alexander come from all over the country and from
''Mohammad in Saudi Arabia'' too, according to spiral notebooks kept by her secretary to record phone requests.
A California toy inventor wants to know if he'll win his lawsuit against a toy company. An Illinois woman wants to know if she and her kids should still go to Florida even though her husband can't get away. A woman in Tucson is thinking about moving East and wonders how Alexander feels about it.
Ailing people call her to diagnose their seizures and their spastic colons. ''I wouldn't dream of having an operation or anything medical done for me or my family without consulting Greta,'' attested the psychic's longtime client, actress Ruth Warrick of ''All My Children,'' when she appeared with Alexander on ''Geraldo.''
Doctors, she said, call her before operating, lawyers call her before going to trial, and producers call her before picking a cast.
The owners of one haunted house called her to get rid of scary spirits. The owners of another asked her to persuade a friendly ghost to relocate with them.
Not long to go
Alexander is fair game wherever she goes. ''I go to the grocery store and it's: 'Hey, you're Greta! 'Is my kid gonna graduate or what?' '' she said.
It is often wearying, and a bit lonely, to be always pursued by people wanting something, Alexander admitted.
''I do feel used sometimes,'' she said. ''About a year ago, I got a call from a guy I went to school with. I hadn't heard from him in years. He said he called because I'd been walking through his mind and he wanted to say hello. I told him that it was the nicest phone call I'd gotten in years.''
''But then he said, 'While I've got you on the line, my son lost a ring. . . . '' Alexander said.
'Alexander has studied her own life line, and she said she feels it doesn't extend much longer than her current 59 years.
Just how much longer does she have in the physical world?
Instead of answering, the psychic made a prediction about how this writer would end his story.
''And then he wrote, 'She turned and smiled sadly, but said nothing.' ''
''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats." ~ Clairvoyant Greta Alexander
Greta Alexander was a dynamo of a woman.
"This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate (IL) institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is 'precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to 'travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help."
"The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those 'abilities', as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
'A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos."
~Smith, Wes. Seeing Things: Downstate Psychic Greta Alexander Is Known Worldwide As A Woman Of Visions; Chicago Tribune, June 09, 1991.
Greta used her celebrity and fortune late in life to open a $3 a night hotel for the needy in the Peoria area. She was a beloved figure, known for her beehive hairdo and uncanny ability to provide insight into the seemingly unknowable. When she made guests appearances on local radio shows, the phone lines would literally be flooded with calls.
(From the Chicago Tribune 6/9/91)
"SEEING THINGS
Wes Smith
Greta Alexander's garlic chicken and stir-fried vegetables were getting cold because she was dying on the telephone, again.
A small-town police chief in upstate New York had called the central Illinois psychic's home in Delavan, about 40 miles southeast of Peoria, during her lunch break. He asked for Alexander's read on a six-month-old unsolved murder case.
Wearily, but without protest, Alexander swallowed one last bite, dropped her fork and tuned in to the victim's vibes.
''I feel like I'm running and the next thing I know I am down. I am rolling and the next thing I know I am no longer in my physical body. Do you understand that? I am dead. I feel like I've been shot in the neck. I feel like I had known the person who did this,'' she said into the telephone.
The others at Alexander's kitchen table finished their meals and drifted off. Her support staff of hired help, family and volunteers wandered in and out, seemingly oblivious that Alexander was being dragged to her death while they cleared the table and chatted about the weather.
''My ear hurts and my arms,'' Alexander told the police chief over the clatter of tableware. ''There should have been a bruise on the arm. Someone is saying, 'You won't ever do that again. . . .' ''
While Alexander did her psychic sleuthing on one telephone line, other lines on other phones chirped incessantly throughout her rambling, 135-year-old home that is chockablock with winged cherubs, images of Jesus and chandeliers.
When the Downstate psychic appears as a guest on Steve Vogel's ''Problems and Solutions'' radio show on WJBC in Bloomington, as many as 9,000 callers are turned away in an hour, Vogel said.
Illinois Bell officials said they can always tell when Alexander's secretaries at her offices in Springfield and Delavan are booking her appointments. They do it only one day a week and ''it's like Mother's Day,'' a spokesman said of the surge in demand caused by thousands of calls.
This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is
''precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.'' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to ''travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help.
The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those ''abilities,'' as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
''A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,'' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos.
It is not difficult for Alexander to tune into psychic signals on command, she said. The difficulty is tuning the signals out when they hit her unsolicited. ''I can be cooking spaghetti and still feel it,'' she said.
''The hardest thing is to restrain yourself when you get the flashes. I don't know whether to tell people or not.''
She said she picked up such a vision recently about a woman she did not know in line ahead of her at the grocery store. She saw a fire in the woman's basement, and ''I decided I had to tell her what I saw. She said, 'Thank God', because her husband had been cleaning with gasoline-soaked rags and he'd said he was going to put the rags in the basement when he was done,'' Alexander said. She felt her vision might have prevented the fire, though she never learned the outcome.
Another time, Alexander was leaving a Peoria restaurant when she noticed a young married couple and got a vision of them holding a beautiful newborn baby, she said.
''I stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do, but I finally told them. They said they'd been trying to have a baby for seven years without success. Well, they had one after that,'' she said.
Swaying the skeptics
At first there were doubters. Alexander knows there will always be doubters. Alexander doesn't care diddly about doubters. ''I'm not here for publicity, I'm here to help,'' said the psychic, who rather than court the media tend to jab their representatives with epithets like ''pipsqueak'' and
''yahoo.''
Alexander has made believers of hundreds of skeptics - police and pipsqueaks among them-through jaw-dropping displays of her abilities, and through her great indifference to whether anyone believes in her. She has also converted disbelievers with her willingness to share and help and give what she can without asking for anything in return.
''I am comfortable in recommending Greta because I don't feel she is going to rip anybody off,'' said Marcello Truzzi, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist who has studied psychic detectives as director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor.
While skeptical of psychics and their claims, Truzzi believes they can be useful and inexpensive tools in criminal investigations, a theme he puts forth in ''The Blue Sense,'' a book he recently co-authored.
Truzzi begins the book on psychic detectives with a case involving Alexander, and he frequently cites her work in it. He said he does not endorse any psychic's claims, but he does credit Alexander with ''an intuitive capacity'' and a good heart.
''She is not trying to make a fast buck at this,'' Truzzi said. ''In fact, all the evidence seems to go the other way.''
Truzzi, whose research is also featured in ''The Skeptic's Handbook on Parapsychology,'' watched Alexander at work and found her to be ''a good quasi-therapist who is very tactful and gives people solace.''
''She does see clients whom she charges, but the money seems to go to a good cause,'' he said.
In central Illinois, Alexander is known as a one-woman Salvation Army. Several barns and outbuildings behind her home, and her second-hand goods business, The Stuff Store, all are crammed with items given to Alexander to distribute to the needy.
She also collects troubled teens and adults, many of whom share quarters from time to time with Alexander and her accommodating husband, Rob, a state employee and electronics buff who has computerized Alexander's astrology and numerology chart business.
The psychic's best-known charitable work is her own version of the Ronald McDonald Houses, though Alexander's operation is financed mostly through palm readings rather than burger sales. Her House of Hope has five bedrooms open to the needy families of children and adults hospitalized in Peoria. The optional fee is $3 a night, she said.
The house is an off-shoot of Alexander's Star of Hope Center, a not-for-profit organization founded in memory of her first husband, Ed, who died of cancer of the kidney in 1976 after 26 years of marriage. Alexander has trouble walking now because, she said, she carried Ed up to his bedroom every night for the last year and a half of his life.
Alexander said she does all of her charity work without any state, local or federal grants. She does, however, tap into her heavenly hot line frequently, she said.
''Raoul and Isaiah, that's my boys,'' she said of the spirits whom she believes guide her abilities and come to the rescue, guiding her to cash sources, when her bank accounts are overdrawn, which they generally are.
Except for her ''bread and butter'' palm readings, which run $40 for a half hour consultation, and modest fees for her charts, T-shirts, fortune cookies, and her new inspirational 900-number message line, Alexander said she provides her psychic services for free or modest honorariums.
''I make zilch off the police stuff,'' she said in frustration. ''It takes up so much of my time and it's so hard on me, but I can't refuse to help them when they call.''
Alexander is perhaps most widely known for her work with police around the country and beyond. She handles more than a dozen police cases each week, re-enacting violent deaths in many of them. Some of her police cases have been featured recently on ''Geraldo'' and ''Missing/Reward.''
Truzzi begins his book on psychic detectives with an account of one of Alexander's most acclaimed cases: a 1983 murder in Alton, Ill. Mary L. Cousett, 28, had disappeared after leaving her home with boyfriend Stanley Holliday Jr. Police arrested Holliday three days after Cousett's
disappearance, believing he had murdered her. But detectives could not find her body.
After seven months of searching, Alton police contacted Alexander. She ran her hand over a map and circled an area that she said police should search. Detectives said it had already been searched several times, but they agreed to give it one more try. They found the body, though it was just outside Alexander's circled area.
Alexander puts her accuracy rate at 80 percent in police cases, but in the book, Alton detectives said she provided 22 leads that eventually proved to be true or near the mark, including the fact that Cousett's head and foot would be found separated from her torso and that the man who would eventually discover the remains would have a ''bad hand.''
The foot was detached as she predicted, but the victim's head was not severed. Cousett's wig, however, was found lying apart from the body. The auxiliary police officer who discovered Cousett's body had a deformed left hand because of an industrial accident. The boyfriend was convicted and served 5 years of a 10-year sentence.
''She seems to have an unusually good track record in terms of finding bodies in water,'' Truzzi said. Alexander agreed: ''I think it's because I was born under the sign of water, Aquarius.''
She's good with fire, too, according to one supporter whom she spied in a restaurant and hailed: ''Hey you lop-eared, horn-toad yahoo! Get over here and give ol' Greta a hug!''
Tony Giardini, director of the arson division of the state fire marshal's office, jumped up from his table and did as commanded. ''This woman has saved so many cases for me it's unbelievable,'' said Giardini, who asked Alexander for quick-and confidential-reads on two arsons before returning to his lunch. Alexander is the mother of five and stepmother to four, as well as being Earth Mama to hundreds of others, she said.
Her motherly services include helping hundreds who know exactly who they are mentally and spiritually, but darned if they can find that missing antique ring, savings bond, parakeet or long-term love.
''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats,''
she said. ''I used to have one lady call me all the time and ask me where she'd put the bread.''
The calls to Alexander come from all over the country and from
''Mohammad in Saudi Arabia'' too, according to spiral notebooks kept by her secretary to record phone requests.
A California toy inventor wants to know if he'll win his lawsuit against a toy company. An Illinois woman wants to know if she and her kids should still go to Florida even though her husband can't get away. A woman in Tucson is thinking about moving East and wonders how Alexander feels about it.
Ailing people call her to diagnose their seizures and their spastic colons. ''I wouldn't dream of having an operation or anything medical done for me or my family without consulting Greta,'' attested the psychic's longtime client, actress Ruth Warrick of ''All My Children,'' when she appeared with Alexander on ''Geraldo.''
Doctors, she said, call her before operating, lawyers call her before going to trial, and producers call her before picking a cast.
The owners of one haunted house called her to get rid of scary spirits. The owners of another asked her to persuade a friendly ghost to relocate with them.
Not long to go
Alexander is fair game wherever she goes. ''I go to the grocery store and it's: 'Hey, you're Greta! 'Is my kid gonna graduate or what?' '' she said.
It is often wearying, and a bit lonely, to be always pursued by people wanting something, Alexander admitted.
''I do feel used sometimes,'' she said. ''About a year ago, I got a call from a guy I went to school with. I hadn't heard from him in years. He said he called because I'd been walking through his mind and he wanted to say hello. I told him that it was the nicest phone call I'd gotten in years.''
''But then he said, 'While I've got you on the line, my son lost a ring. . . . '' Alexander said.
'Alexander has studied her own life line, and she said she feels it doesn't extend much longer than her current 59 years.
Just how much longer does she have in the physical world?
Instead of answering, the psychic made a prediction about how this writer would end his story.
''And then he wrote, 'She turned and smiled sadly, but said nothing.' ''
Greta Alexander was a dynamo of a woman.
"This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate (IL) institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is 'precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to 'travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help."
"The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those 'abilities', as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
'A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos."
~Smith, Wes. Seeing Things: Downstate Psychic Greta Alexander Is Known Worldwide As A Woman Of Visions; Chicago Tribune, June 09, 1991.
Greta used her celebrity and fortune late in life to open a $3 a night hotel for the needy in the Peoria area. She was a beloved figure, known for her beehive hairdo and uncanny ability to provide insight into the seemingly unknowable. When she made guests appearances on local radio shows, the phone lines would literally be flooded with calls.
(From the Chicago Tribune 6/9/91)
"SEEING THINGS
Wes Smith
Greta Alexander's garlic chicken and stir-fried vegetables were getting cold because she was dying on the telephone, again.
A small-town police chief in upstate New York had called the central Illinois psychic's home in Delavan, about 40 miles southeast of Peoria, during her lunch break. He asked for Alexander's read on a six-month-old unsolved murder case.
Wearily, but without protest, Alexander swallowed one last bite, dropped her fork and tuned in to the victim's vibes.
''I feel like I'm running and the next thing I know I am down. I am rolling and the next thing I know I am no longer in my physical body. Do you understand that? I am dead. I feel like I've been shot in the neck. I feel like I had known the person who did this,'' she said into the telephone.
The others at Alexander's kitchen table finished their meals and drifted off. Her support staff of hired help, family and volunteers wandered in and out, seemingly oblivious that Alexander was being dragged to her death while they cleared the table and chatted about the weather.
''My ear hurts and my arms,'' Alexander told the police chief over the clatter of tableware. ''There should have been a bruise on the arm. Someone is saying, 'You won't ever do that again. . . .' ''
While Alexander did her psychic sleuthing on one telephone line, other lines on other phones chirped incessantly throughout her rambling, 135-year-old home that is chockablock with winged cherubs, images of Jesus and chandeliers.
When the Downstate psychic appears as a guest on Steve Vogel's ''Problems and Solutions'' radio show on WJBC in Bloomington, as many as 9,000 callers are turned away in an hour, Vogel said.
Illinois Bell officials said they can always tell when Alexander's secretaries at her offices in Springfield and Delavan are booking her appointments. They do it only one day a week and ''it's like Mother's Day,'' a spokesman said of the surge in demand caused by thousands of calls.
This big and occasionally bawdy woman is a Downstate institution known as much for her generous spirit as for her highly touted psychic abilities.
Empowered by a bolt of lightning, endowed with a heart bigger than a 12-acre trailer park, Alexander is possessed, admirers say, with amazing clairvoyance, and also one of North America's last, best and most bountiful beehive hairdos.
According to her handouts, Alexander is not only clairvoyant, she is
''precognitive, clairaudient, and clairsensory.'' She also believes she has healing powers and the ability to ''travel'' at night from her dreams into the dreams of those she wants to help.
The daughter of a farmer in Manito, Ill., Alexander worked as a chicken plucker earning 25 cents a bird in the days before her psychic powers were fully tuned.
Those ''abilities,'' as she modestly prefers to call them, were present from childhood but were greatly enhanced when she was struck by a bolt of lightning 31 years ago while bearing her fifth child and lying in bed watching a thunderstorm out the window, she said.
''A white light came down at me through the window, and the next thing I knew the Venetian blinds were wrapped around me and there was a fire burning a hole in the bed,'' she said.
Neither she nor her unborn daughter was injured, but the bolt changed Alexander's life, she said. Shortly after the lightning struck, Greta began answering the telephone before it rang, and before long she was widely known as the human equivalent of a TV disc antenna, picking up psychic signals from all over the cosmos.
It is not difficult for Alexander to tune into psychic signals on command, she said. The difficulty is tuning the signals out when they hit her unsolicited. ''I can be cooking spaghetti and still feel it,'' she said.
''The hardest thing is to restrain yourself when you get the flashes. I don't know whether to tell people or not.''
She said she picked up such a vision recently about a woman she did not know in line ahead of her at the grocery store. She saw a fire in the woman's basement, and ''I decided I had to tell her what I saw. She said, 'Thank God', because her husband had been cleaning with gasoline-soaked rags and he'd said he was going to put the rags in the basement when he was done,'' Alexander said. She felt her vision might have prevented the fire, though she never learned the outcome.
Another time, Alexander was leaving a Peoria restaurant when she noticed a young married couple and got a vision of them holding a beautiful newborn baby, she said.
''I stood there for a few minutes trying to decide what to do, but I finally told them. They said they'd been trying to have a baby for seven years without success. Well, they had one after that,'' she said.
Swaying the skeptics
At first there were doubters. Alexander knows there will always be doubters. Alexander doesn't care diddly about doubters. ''I'm not here for publicity, I'm here to help,'' said the psychic, who rather than court the media tend to jab their representatives with epithets like ''pipsqueak'' and
''yahoo.''
Alexander has made believers of hundreds of skeptics - police and pipsqueaks among them-through jaw-dropping displays of her abilities, and through her great indifference to whether anyone believes in her. She has also converted disbelievers with her willingness to share and help and give what she can without asking for anything in return.
''I am comfortable in recommending Greta because I don't feel she is going to rip anybody off,'' said Marcello Truzzi, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist who has studied psychic detectives as director of the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research in Ann Arbor.
While skeptical of psychics and their claims, Truzzi believes they can be useful and inexpensive tools in criminal investigations, a theme he puts forth in ''The Blue Sense,'' a book he recently co-authored.
Truzzi begins the book on psychic detectives with a case involving Alexander, and he frequently cites her work in it. He said he does not endorse any psychic's claims, but he does credit Alexander with ''an intuitive capacity'' and a good heart.
''She is not trying to make a fast buck at this,'' Truzzi said. ''In fact, all the evidence seems to go the other way.''
Truzzi, whose research is also featured in ''The Skeptic's Handbook on Parapsychology,'' watched Alexander at work and found her to be ''a good quasi-therapist who is very tactful and gives people solace.''
''She does see clients whom she charges, but the money seems to go to a good cause,'' he said.
In central Illinois, Alexander is known as a one-woman Salvation Army. Several barns and outbuildings behind her home, and her second-hand goods business, The Stuff Store, all are crammed with items given to Alexander to distribute to the needy.
She also collects troubled teens and adults, many of whom share quarters from time to time with Alexander and her accommodating husband, Rob, a state employee and electronics buff who has computerized Alexander's astrology and numerology chart business.
The psychic's best-known charitable work is her own version of the Ronald McDonald Houses, though Alexander's operation is financed mostly through palm readings rather than burger sales. Her House of Hope has five bedrooms open to the needy families of children and adults hospitalized in Peoria. The optional fee is $3 a night, she said.
The house is an off-shoot of Alexander's Star of Hope Center, a not-for-profit organization founded in memory of her first husband, Ed, who died of cancer of the kidney in 1976 after 26 years of marriage. Alexander has trouble walking now because, she said, she carried Ed up to his bedroom every night for the last year and a half of his life.
Alexander said she does all of her charity work without any state, local or federal grants. She does, however, tap into her heavenly hot line frequently, she said.
''Raoul and Isaiah, that's my boys,'' she said of the spirits whom she believes guide her abilities and come to the rescue, guiding her to cash sources, when her bank accounts are overdrawn, which they generally are.
Except for her ''bread and butter'' palm readings, which run $40 for a half hour consultation, and modest fees for her charts, T-shirts, fortune cookies, and her new inspirational 900-number message line, Alexander said she provides her psychic services for free or modest honorariums.
''I make zilch off the police stuff,'' she said in frustration. ''It takes up so much of my time and it's so hard on me, but I can't refuse to help them when they call.''
Alexander is perhaps most widely known for her work with police around the country and beyond. She handles more than a dozen police cases each week, re-enacting violent deaths in many of them. Some of her police cases have been featured recently on ''Geraldo'' and ''Missing/Reward.''
Truzzi begins his book on psychic detectives with an account of one of Alexander's most acclaimed cases: a 1983 murder in Alton, Ill. Mary L. Cousett, 28, had disappeared after leaving her home with boyfriend Stanley Holliday Jr. Police arrested Holliday three days after Cousett's
disappearance, believing he had murdered her. But detectives could not find her body.
After seven months of searching, Alton police contacted Alexander. She ran her hand over a map and circled an area that she said police should search. Detectives said it had already been searched several times, but they agreed to give it one more try. They found the body, though it was just outside Alexander's circled area.
Alexander puts her accuracy rate at 80 percent in police cases, but in the book, Alton detectives said she provided 22 leads that eventually proved to be true or near the mark, including the fact that Cousett's head and foot would be found separated from her torso and that the man who would eventually discover the remains would have a ''bad hand.''
The foot was detached as she predicted, but the victim's head was not severed. Cousett's wig, however, was found lying apart from the body. The auxiliary police officer who discovered Cousett's body had a deformed left hand because of an industrial accident. The boyfriend was convicted and served 5 years of a 10-year sentence.
''She seems to have an unusually good track record in terms of finding bodies in water,'' Truzzi said. Alexander agreed: ''I think it's because I was born under the sign of water, Aquarius.''
She's good with fire, too, according to one supporter whom she spied in a restaurant and hailed: ''Hey you lop-eared, horn-toad yahoo! Get over here and give ol' Greta a hug!''
Tony Giardini, director of the arson division of the state fire marshal's office, jumped up from his table and did as commanded. ''This woman has saved so many cases for me it's unbelievable,'' said Giardini, who asked Alexander for quick-and confidential-reads on two arsons before returning to his lunch. Alexander is the mother of five and stepmother to four, as well as being Earth Mama to hundreds of others, she said.
Her motherly services include helping hundreds who know exactly who they are mentally and spiritually, but darned if they can find that missing antique ring, savings bond, parakeet or long-term love.
''Baby, I've found everything from false teeth to missing kitty cats,''
she said. ''I used to have one lady call me all the time and ask me where she'd put the bread.''
The calls to Alexander come from all over the country and from
''Mohammad in Saudi Arabia'' too, according to spiral notebooks kept by her secretary to record phone requests.
A California toy inventor wants to know if he'll win his lawsuit against a toy company. An Illinois woman wants to know if she and her kids should still go to Florida even though her husband can't get away. A woman in Tucson is thinking about moving East and wonders how Alexander feels about it.
Ailing people call her to diagnose their seizures and their spastic colons. ''I wouldn't dream of having an operation or anything medical done for me or my family without consulting Greta,'' attested the psychic's longtime client, actress Ruth Warrick of ''All My Children,'' when she appeared with Alexander on ''Geraldo.''
Doctors, she said, call her before operating, lawyers call her before going to trial, and producers call her before picking a cast.
The owners of one haunted house called her to get rid of scary spirits. The owners of another asked her to persuade a friendly ghost to relocate with them.
Not long to go
Alexander is fair game wherever she goes. ''I go to the grocery store and it's: 'Hey, you're Greta! 'Is my kid gonna graduate or what?' '' she said.
It is often wearying, and a bit lonely, to be always pursued by people wanting something, Alexander admitted.
''I do feel used sometimes,'' she said. ''About a year ago, I got a call from a guy I went to school with. I hadn't heard from him in years. He said he called because I'd been walking through his mind and he wanted to say hello. I told him that it was the nicest phone call I'd gotten in years.''
''But then he said, 'While I've got you on the line, my son lost a ring. . . . '' Alexander said.
'Alexander has studied her own life line, and she said she feels it doesn't extend much longer than her current 59 years.
Just how much longer does she have in the physical world?
Instead of answering, the psychic made a prediction about how this writer would end his story.
''And then he wrote, 'She turned and smiled sadly, but said nothing.' ''
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