After one psychic's vision led officals to the discovery of a missing boy, many are wondering if she is the real deal. INSIDE EDITION has the story.
It's a mystery that has people wondering if this woman really has genuine psychic abilities. Even police say they can't explain what happened.
Pam Ragland said she went searching for a missing 11-year-old boy named Terry Smith. The sandy blond-haired youngster with a sweet smile vanished after his mom went out for the night.
Ragland said she was overwhelmed with a terrible sense of doom when she heard about the case in Menifee, California.
She told INSIDE EDITION, “I was overcome by grief, as I can put it. I started crying and I said, ‘Ok I am going to have to focus on this.’”
Ragland wasn't the only one. The search for the boy galvanized the community. Hundreds of volunteers on foot and on horseback spent days looking for little Terry.
Ragland lives 50 miles away, but said she had two mental images about the missing boy that she could not ignore.
She said, “I saw this vision of him under a tree. The tree was very specific and there was a particular building that was very specific.”
She felt so strongly about it, she actually gathered her two children and drove an hour to a market, which was serving as a command post. Volunteers were planning their search but Ragland said she was convinced everyone was looking in the wrong direction.
“I pointed to the back of the store and I said 'He's behind the store' and so many people said, 'We've searched. There’s been hundreds of people. We had horses,' and I said, ‘I don't care. I'm just telling you, he's behind this store,’” she said.
Ragland took off. She was accompanied by firefighter Dave Wallender and together they began their own independent search.
She drove for a couple of hours along remote roads in the area all the while knowing her vision was bringing her closer to the gruesome discovery.
‘I said, ‘Oh my gosh! That white building is the building I saw in my vision,’” she said.
Ragland, who is a therapist who specializes in autistic children, said her instincts led her to a home.
We drove down this hill then up then kind of stopped right there and we saw the single tree,” she said.
Incredibly, it looked like the same tree in Ragland’s vision. As she approached it, she noticed a scent which led to the tragic discovery of the boy's partially buried body.
Ragland said, “I think I was really, honestly in shock for a while.”
The boy's body was found at his own home, a location that the sheriff's department confirms it had already searched.
Ragland’s story was backed up by the firefighter with her who called 911 where he said, “We believe we may have found a human head. And we're out searching for the little boy Terry Smith. The lady I’m with smelled something dead and when we looked for it, that's how we found it.”
After the body was discovered, police questioned all the family members and arrested Terry Smith's 16-year-old half-brother.
Psychics do not usually have a great track record. In 2004, famed psychic Sylvia Brown appeared on The Montel Williams Show and told Cleveland kidnapping victim Amanda Berry's mother, that he daughter was dead. Of course, Amanda was found alive four months ago in the Cleveland house of horrors.
Now, police are left to wonder whether Pam Ragland was just lucky or is she the real deal.
