CLEVELAND — Mary Ann Winkowski says she sees dead people, and has been able to do so since her grandmother first noticed it.
That was when Mary Ann was just a toddler, growing up in Northeast Ohio.
"All of a sudden grandma hears me talking to somebody in the room," Winkowski recalled in a recent interview with 3News. "She comes in and she just stands in the doorway, and she's looking at me and I'm talking to a corner. There's nothing there. And she says, 'Mary Ann, who are you talking to?' And I said, 'Him.'"
Her grandmother also had the same abilities. She had Mary Ann ask him questions, and Mary Ann would tell her grandmother his answers. That's when she knew Mary Ann had what she called a "gift."
By the time she was 4 years old, Winkowski's grandmother was taking her to funerals, but she wasn't allowed to tell her parents. At the time, Mary Ann didn't know why they were attending these funerals, but it turns out they were going so she could talk to the person who'd passed.
"We walked up to the casket and I looked down at him and I looked up at him and I said, 'Hi,'" Winkowski remembered. "And he looked at me, he says, 'Oh, you're the granddaughter.' So then my grandmother says, 'So is he here?' I said, 'Yeah.' (My grandmother would tell me,) 'So ask him this and ask him that.' You know, it's amazing what people want know when somebody's dead. It's not always 'How are you feeling?' or 'Did it hurt'? It's 'Ehere's the key to the safety deposit box? Where's the will hidden?'"
Mary Ann says at a funeral, there’s an almost blinding white light surrounding the person who died. She says it's purpose is to take them to heaven, but some don’t go. and they get stuck here.
"People that are murdered, sometimes they want to know who killed them or try to get that information out there," she explained. "Couples that are married for 50, 60, 70 years, one's going to wait for the other one."
But Mary Ann says at some point, they do want to go to the light and cross over. They just can’t find it anymore, but she says she can.
"It took me a long time to be able to make that light," she said. "I had a pretty good handle on it by the time I was 10, 11."
These days, Winkowski has been working with clients as a paranormal investigator for decades, helping them understand the human side of the paranormal and offering solace — by reuniting them with loved ones who have died or by removing unwanted spirits and negative energy. But she doesn't live in fear of the paranormal.
"They need human energy to keep going," she said. "If I were to be scared, all I would do is give them more energy. That's how they get energy from most people: by scaring them. So they're not going to get that from me."