#247 Spirit Encounters and Mediumship Through Tarot with Carly Ann Corrar

Host Johnny Burke interviews Carly Ann Carrar, a pagan witch, tarot reader, and medium who has seen and communicated with spirits since early childhood, including a frightening Native American spirit in her bedroom and an early obsession with visiting cemeteries. She explains the differences between earthbound spirits and visiting spirits based on the heaviness of their energy. She talks about how her oldest son has similar abilities and how she supports him through spiritual protection, deity-based grounding, and a cleansing spray made with sage, white quartz, and moon water. Carly describes how her Catholic grandmother encouraged her to explore witchcraft, outlines paganism as an umbrella of nature-based and multi-deity paths with links to Christian traditions, and explains how tarot complements her mediumship while she avoids guaranteeing spirit contact. She shares evidential experiences, including remote-viewing-like spirit contact by phone and delivering a therapist’s message from her abuela, emphasizing open-mindedness and the comfort of knowing loved ones remain present.

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

00:42 Early Spirit Encounters

02:50 Earthbound vs Visiting Spirits

04:00 Raising a Gifted Child

06:54 Grandmother and Pagan Path

07:53 Paganism vs Catholicism

10:15 Paganism Supporting Mediumship

11:44 Tarot and Reading Style

15:05 Evidential Spirit Stories

17:23 Graveyard Spirits and Moving On

21:36 Skeptics and Open Mindedness

24:20 Wrap Up and Where to Find Carly

https://www.facebook.com/MotheringMagick

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Closure to Venus. I'm Johnny Burke, and today's guest is Carly Ann Carrar. She is an eclectic pagan witch, tarot reader, and medium who has experienced encounters with the spirit world since early childhood. She uses her gifts to see and communicate with spirits to give closure to those who have lost loved ones. In this episode, we'll talk about her experiences as well as how best to approach things if your child has this gift as well. Carly, welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

So you are a pagan witch, a tarot card reader, and a medium. I'm assuming that the mediumship did come first.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

You were able to see spirits at an early age then?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Yeah, very early.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

When you were two, you would ask your mom to take you to the graveyard to read the stones and talk to people.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Yeah, to this day, it she'll say it terrified her when I was a child, how obsessed I was with wanting to go to the graveyard and cemetery to read the stones and talk to the people.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

What was it like? What do you remember about being a kid and being able to see spirits and communicate with them?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

I know as a really young child, I was absolutely terrified of it. There was one spirit that would come to me specifically in my bedroom. Where I grew up in Pedricktown, there used to be Native American settlers there. Not settlers, but you know what I mean. And we know this because when they tore down the forest behind my house, they found artifacts. There was a man who would come into my room when I was young, and he knew I could see him, so he tried to communicate with me, but he didn't speak English. It terrified me. I spent many of my younger years not sleeping in my own bedroom, much to my mom and my sister's dismay. But it's because this man was trying to communicate with me, and I had no idea what he was saying because he was Native American and he didn't speak English. And it wasn't until I was a little older that I kind of realized what was going on, and my grandmother actually helped me figure that out as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Okay. What tribe was this particular spirit from?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I don't actually know. I would have to ask my friend who owns the land where that artifacts were found. But I do remember them telling me when I was a kid, because that's when they tore down the forest to build a vineyard, that she came to me in school, was like, Oh my god, you're not gonna believe what they found out back when they were digging up all the trees, and it was like arrowheads and pottery and weapons and a whole bunch of stuff. I don't think they found any like burials, but they found a lot of artifacts in the area.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

So would you consider these spirits to be earthbound ghosts?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Some of them are, some of them aren't. So there's definitely a good amount of spirits who are earthbound spirits that either have unfinished business or a negative memory tied to something. There are some people who are just waiting to move on because they're waiting for someone else. And then there's people who just visit. I've had many people who just visit. They moved on, but they come back to say messages or to look over other people, just like a guardian angel, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

I bet you can imagine that a lot of people get those two varieties or those two types confused. Is there a way to tell pretty much right away?

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Usually the earthbound spirits have a much heavier energy with them than visiting ghosts and spirits because the earthbound ones feel kind of lost or angry or sad. So the emotion that's tied to their spirit is a lot heavier to feel and experience than someone who's just coming from love and happiness and here to protect you.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

It's fairly obvious then. Good. So do you believe your son has this gift as well?

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Yes, we have been seeing signs that my oldest son does have this gift as well. We've seen those signs since he was probably, I would say, about 12 months old. So that's been very interesting. And he even recently has started asking to go to the graveyard too. And as someone who loves graveyards, I'm honestly very proud of that. So we will be going there in the spring.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Family tradition.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

That's what my mom said. She literally said, This is what you get for doing it to me.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Okay, so speaking of family traditions, on either your mother's side or your father's side, was there any psychic background or being able to see spirits?

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Not that I'm aware of. My grandmother was convinced that on my dad's side, through my grandfather and that lineage, that they were very intuitive, but that I was the first one to fully tap into the gift. And I've seen that experience with my father, but it's more, like I said, intuitive than it is being able to see spirit.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Having this kind of experience and seeing that it's happening with your oldest son, what do you do when you have a son or daughter for that matter that is the same gift? If you had to do it over again, how would you approach it?

SPEAKER_00 5:08

So I definitely wouldn't approach it by telling them that what they're seeing is not there because when I went through that as a child, it was very scary and invalidating because it made me feel crazy. If you believe that your child is actually seeing spirits and not just afraid of the boogeyman under the bed, the best way that we're handling it is one, letting them know what methods of protection they have, spiritual protection. So we have told our son to speak to one of the deities that we work with. So I know a lot of people in the pagan community they work with Hikate, or there's the Christian people who work with God. No matter who your deity is, telling your child to ask them for protection can be very grounding. And then something that we've worked on is we made a sage and white quartz little spray bottle that's blessed like holy water with moon water for us, because that's what we use for holy water. And when he's feeling the need to cleanse his space and doesn't want anything there, we spray that around the room and he can verbally say, I don't want you here right now, I need to go to sleep. And that is so far working very well with him.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I've heard that the protection rituals are as important as the practice itself because there are some not so friendly energies, which we won't talk about a whole lot today. So speaking of deities, you were also a pagan witch. What inspired you to explore that path?

SPEAKER_00 6:41

She was raised Amish, went to Catholic school, slept with a rosary bead. She sat me down in a very young age, bought me my first book on witchcraft from a yard sale, and said, You're not meant to follow the same path as I am. That she believed that God gave me this gift, but it was not the kind of gift that I would be able to utilize under the Christian path. She wanted me to look into witchcraft because she thought that that was going to be slipping that align much more with me and what my gifts did. And she was very right about that. I started exploring that probably around seven years old, maybe eight, and I felt right at home within witchcraft and paganism, and it's felt like peace to me ever since.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

When I hear people talk about paganism, it really does bring up conversations we've had before about rituals and practices that are thousands of years old, actually older than Catholicism itself, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yes, it is. There are many actual similarities between the two religions, actually.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

With paganism, what are the biggest differences between that and Catholicism?

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Paganism as itself is very in tune with nature. There are pagans who don't worship any deities, and there are pagans who worship a vast variety of deities. So paganism is pretty much an umbrella term for any religion that kind of goes outside of the norm. It's based on ancient traditions, but there's not that many rules to it either. There's different categories of paganism that have strict rules. Paganism as itself is, like I said, an umbrella term for the old ways that worship multiple deities, different energies, nature itself, and that's where a lot of the differences come in. But there's also so many similarities. Most of the pagan holidays and traditions were adapted into Christian holidays and traditions.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

It's like Christmas.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah. It's so crazy to see that. And when you actually study religion like I did in college, it becomes like this really crazy clear picture about how we're really all worshiping the same thing, just in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

That's a good point. With paganism, is there any similarities to spiritualism, like a spiritualist church?

SPEAKER_00 9:12

I haven't experienced one of those churches before, honestly, but I know that there are a lot of similarities to it. A lot of people who don't really want to tie themselves down to the religio religious title of pagan identify as spiritualist. And it's very similar. It's using the same energies, the same practices. I've seen people use them interchangeably because, like I said, paganism has individual paths, but it's an umbrella term that even spiritualists fall under.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

So spiritualism would fall under the pagan practice then?

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Technically, yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Okay. Alright. How does the paganism support or complement your mediumship work?

SPEAKER_00 9:56

When I was a kid and I was so confused about this, paganism was the one place that one didn't tell me I was crazy, and two didn't tell me I was a sinner for practicing this type of gift. And it has been a place of comfort for me as well as a place of growth because w through paganism and through witchcraft I've been able to work on things like spiritual protection and I've been able to work on ways to both increase my abilities and slow them down so that it wasn't so overwhelming that I couldn't focus on things like school and college and my friends and my relationships. Because without that, it very easily could.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

So in other words, it pretty much removed the shackles of the dogma and the superstition, oddly enough. I think some people who don't know a lot about it would assume there's more superstition with paganism, but it's actually the other way around, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

It really depends. There's so many beliefs on both sides of things that kind of can play a part in it. But I feel like paganism has a lot more solutions to those beliefs and those issues than a lot of the other paths do.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Where does the tarot readings come into your workflow? Does it work with mediumship readings or is it like an adjacent? How does that work?

SPEAKER_00 11:29

So I originally started doing tarot probably around 9 or 10. Also got that at a yard sale, and I started doing it more professionally in college, and with my mediumship, it's become something that I tie apart into that. I don't offer mediumship as a service solely because there's a lot of times people want a certain spirit to be there, and they might not be there, and I don't want to disappoint people, but I always tell them if someone's gonna come through during a tarot reading, I will give that to you, include it in your reading. And I have recently in the past two or three years been able to kind of increase my abilities with my mediumship through my tarot reading divination practices and have helped connect multiple people to loved ones through my tarot readings with the mediumship as well. So it's definitely kind of like another tool to add to that mediumship tool belt that I'm working on and the practices that I'm doing.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

So it's an added value. Okay. Tarot does come up with mediumship a lot. Often there are mediums that also do tarot card readings, and I think it's interesting that you don't really position yourself as a medium, you do readings, but you tell your clients that I can't guarantee anyone's gonna come in, but if they do, I will let you know. Is that your approach?

SPEAKER_00 12:54

Pretty much. I don't like telling people I can summon things because technically, while I can, that's very, very hard and difficult to do. And the amount of energy, both physically and mentally, that takes is not something that I can do. I know that there are many mediums who are better at that than I am, but it's not something that I've been able to guarantee with every reading. Uh so I let them know if they're going to come through. I will let you know they're here, but I cannot promise that they're going to come through.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Isn't it true that for any medium, we're talking about the experienced ones, they can't guarantee anything. They could be the best medium in the world, but if that particular spirit or spirits don't want to come through.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah, it's definitely no one can guarantee. I just notice that it's something that some other mediums have been able to have a better success rate at than I have. But I think a lot of that has to do with my own insecurities, because I used to be bullied for this immensely. So to this day, I kind of question myself, even though I've had multiple experiences that have been amazing and I've never had a negative one. I'm still like waiting for the person to come out and be like, Oh, I caught you. You're not good at this, and I think that's part of the reason why I don't offer it as a service because mediumship, even though tarot is too, but mediumship is so much more personal because it's about someone you lost, and that level of pain is just hard to touch.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

From what I've been told, it can be very draining as well. So, do you have some examples of connecting with spirit however you did it, which offered compelling evidential information?

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Yeah, I've had experiences in my younger years when I was in high school with a friend at the time, her boyfriend. Uh, that was a really crazy experience because it was the first time that I had connected with the spirit through technology. We were on the phone with him, and then the one of the other most like evidential experiences I've had, and one of my favorite stories to tell, is me proving to an actual mental health professional that spirits exist when they told me that they were a skeptic. Both of those experiences really shaped who I was and made me be like, yes, this is something I can do that helps people, and that this is something that I need to stop doubting is real.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

What are some of the highlights and otherwise most important things that you've learned from your experiences with the spirit world?

SPEAKER_00 15:37

The things that I've learned that are the most important would probably be that these people that we lost are still with us. I've lost people who meant the world to me. And it was through my abilities with mediumship that I was able to find peace and closure with that. And that's how I've been able to help other people also get peace and closure. I've helped a good amount of people get their closure, and experiencing that within the spirit world has been one of the most beautiful things that I've ever experienced. And my ties to the spirit world also kind of helped me deal with my own trauma and understanding that good and bad happen in the world because we need balance, and all of it combined, it's such a dark area, but it's caused so much light for me. And like I feel the most peace in the graveyard. That's where I feel the most relaxed and most calm and most serene, for lack of a better word. And it's something that so many people think is dark and scary. But once you actually tap into the spirit world and getting to connect with your ancestors and those that we have lost, it really becomes one of the most beautiful gifts in the entire world.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

When you were talking about being in the cemetery, it's almost as if the gravestones or the plot is almost like a calling station. So do you get the feeling that person buried there is aware that you're basically right in front of their plot, or is that a bit far-fetched?

SPEAKER_00 17:13

No, that's very true. Especially if they're an earthbound spirit or they happen to be visiting, they do know that you're there. It's very common for them to see that I can see them. There is a woman who walks around the graveyard that I go to the most often, and her and I have become friendly, and she notices me every time I come. She won't necessarily tell me her name, so I don't know which grave she belongs to, but she does recognize, hey, she's here. I see her. How are you? That kind of thing, and so do a lot of the other spirits.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

Is she a visitor or is she earthbound?

SPEAKER_00 17:55

She's earthbound. She's buried somewhere in the cemetery, but she doesn't want to let me know who because having your name would help her move on. I'd be able to help her move on, and she doesn't want to do that.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Have you had the experience of actually being able to help an earthbound spirit move on?

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Yes. What had happened in that situation specifically was I was on the phone. Me and my friend were on the phone with her boyfriend at the time, and you know, typical teenagers were just hanging out. So me and her were just talking, and he was reading poetry and not even talking to us. It was just, I have to be on my phone with my boyfriend at all times. And all of a sudden, I heard someone reading the poetry along with him, and it was almost like I was transported to his living room. And I paused and I said to him, I said, Hey Sebastian, are you on a green couch? And like I started describing his living room, and he was like, Yeah, how did you know that? I've never been to his house before, let alone know what his house looks like. And then I start describing that there's a man there with him reading the poetry, and I describe what he's wearing, and all of a sudden Sebastian starts crying, and that's when I got the message from the man, and it was, My son, my boy, I'm so proud of you. I'm so proud of you, over and over again. And apparently for years, because it had been a couple years since his father had passed away, he had struggled really badly with nightmares that he was not making his father proud, and it was part of the reason why his father stayed to one, make sure his son was okay, but because that was like his unfinished business to be able to confirm that to his son, and it was a very emotional experience, but I do believe that after that time his father was able to let go of that pain that was happening with them.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Are you able to show them the light in that instance where they can go to the light and move on?

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yes, I have been able to definitely show them to move on and go into the light and go to wherever they're going on the other side.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

And that last example that you gave us, being able to see into the living room, that sounds a lot like remote viewing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Yeah, it was one of the mainly only experiences that I had with that. So I haven't really tried to explore that more, but it was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Sounds like it. So it was remote viewing and spirit contact all in one, in one experience. And I don't know if you were able to show them the like right then and there, but that led you to basically releasing an earthbound ghost. I've always been fascinated that mediums, first of all, can do what they do, but as an added benefit, they can actually help a spirit move on if they want to. Not all of them want to, do they?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

No, not all of them want to, but I've been able to help get a lot of last messages to people for those who need it to move on to move on.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

What are the most important takeaways for us from your experiences?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

To be open-minded. Like I said, I that experience with a therapist once, and it was hilarious. She asked me, She goes, Do you have any special powers? And I was like, Well, I can talk to dead people. And she did not believe me at all. And she ended up getting a very important message. She kind of did what a lot of skeptics do. It's part of the reason why I don't offer the mediumship as a service because skeptics like to do this. And she goes, Are there any spirits here right now? All cocky. And at first no one was there, but then one ran in and I start describing the spirit to her. And I couldn't get her name quite right because she had a very thick accent. And I tell the therapist, I'm like, I'm pretty sure her name's like Angelica, but it's not, and that's when the therapist's face dropped. And she said, Is it Angelica? And I go, That's it. And she goes, That's my abuela. You would have never known. That's when her abuela told me about this family cookie recipe that she used to make with her granddaughter that the therapist had never made with her own kids. I did not know this woman had kids, but I had I was I knew she never made these cookies with those kids, and she started crying. And that's all I ask for people who don't have these experiences is to be an open-minded too to it, to not shut it out, because the reality is even if you can't sense the spirits there, they're probably there. You're probably visited by someone who cares about you deeply, even when you don't feel them or see them. And it's so important for you to know that they're there and that they care about you still because losing someone you love is one of the most painful things to go through. But when you know that they're still with you and that they're still helping you in their own ways, it kind of alleviates that pain a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

A little bit, you're right. And everyone with that ability has told me the exact same thing. They're always here, maybe not every single minute, but they could be five feet away. I had a recording a few weeks ago with a woman that has that kind of ability. And she started asking questions like, Did your father pass? I said, Yeah, he passed when I was a kid. Because he's with you right now. I said, What do you mean? He's right behind you. I said, What does he look like? Looks like you. And she says, Does he have glasses? I said, Wow. So just another reminder, they could be literally right next to you. That's what I've been told again and again. Good stuff, Carly. I think a lot of us can get some value out of a talk like this one. So thanks for joining us. In the meantime, how can our listeners find you online?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

If anybody wants to get a hold of me, you can follow me on Facebook or on Instagram at mothering magic. So mothering and then magic with a K at the end.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

You've been listening to Closer to Venus. I'm Johnny Burke. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing. You can also find more info on closer to Venus.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.