Like any good father and son, Philip Smith receives regular visits from his father and receives life advice from him.
But there’s a catch: 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 paranormal medium.
Philip, 72, believes Lew visits him in times of need. signaling his presence to his son through a tickling sensation in his ear.
Philip will then say, ‘Is that you? What do you want to tell me?’
“The trick is to trust that it’s not your own mind talking to yourself,” as he explained his process, “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 claims may be the result of grief, strong emotional attachment to the deceased, or a need for closure during a difficult period of grieving.
But Philip has never given up the story about speaking to his late father.
Lew’s “powers” first began to manifest sixty years earlier when he was working on designing film sets for Charlie Chaplin.
Philip described his father’s transformation from interior designer to “supernatural” healer as very strange, with his father waking up at four in the morning to “take dictations” from the dead.
“In 1921 he was recording his dreams and noticed he was having premonitions,” Philip told DailyMail.com.
“He talked about picking up the newspaper the next day and reading about events from his dreams.
‘For example, one entry describes a dream about a train crash in the desert, with children screaming and shooting.
“The next day, the front page reported a train crash in the Nevada desert, with thirteen children killed in the fire.”
In 1968, Philip claimed that his father discovered he could talk to the dead and heal the sick.
His father was known as a medium and healer in the 1960s, and his story was published in newspapers
Philip’s mother (center) supported her husband’s shift toward healing
“And then our lives changed,” he said.
“Our house became like Lourdes, with people coming and banging on the door in the middle of the night, crying, you know, their husband had a heart attack. Their sister has leukemia.”
‘When you’re fourteen years old. It was a bit difficult,” as Philip summed it up, “because he had an active relationship with dead people – and had paranormal 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.
“So our lifestyle changed: my mother would go to Havana on weekends to gamble, but that all came to an abrupt halt.”
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 power or control over others, but then there are “wounded healers” who have processed trauma and hope to find solace 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 buzzing around my ear. Assuming it was a mosquito, I kept hitting it, but we don’t have mosquitoes in winter,” he said.
The first sense of his father’s paranormal powers came while working for Charlie Chaplin – when he reportedly took the first photograph of Chaplin outside the studio.
After his father’s death, Philip noticed something strange and wrote a book about the experience
‘Eventually I realized it was him, I started asking questions, and that’s how I started receiving messages.’
Philip used a medium to talk 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 developed while he was alive.
“The other day I said, ‘It would be nice if you would come visit me.’ He [Lew] replied, ‘I am always with you; all you have to do is 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 to some of his father’s ideas about the afterlife.
Next summer he wants to start working on the book, based on ‘five or six hundred’ audio tapes left behind by his father.
Philip said that Lew is a co-author of sorts and that he will turn to him for advice on what to do with any information – and that he believes it is important to highlight the work of such healers.
“What we do in medicine is we poison the body with drugs, or cut it open,” Philip said.
“Doctors have their place,” he admitted, “but I think there are subtler energies at work in the body [and] we have no idea how they work.”
