Jaime Breeze was three years old when she saw her first “spirit.”

She’s not alone in that experience; many children claim to see ghosts. The difference was, unlike most children’s parents who chalk such behaviour up to an over-active imagination, Jaime’s mother was always supportive of her visions. 

“She never shut me down,” Jaime said. “I was able to speak freely about seeing spirits and having these feelings or sensing energy.”

Not everyone was as encouraging, of course. In high school Jaime was labelled as “weird,” and she herself didn’t understand what she was experiencing. As a teenager, being able to sense spirits on the “other side” was confusing, or worse.

“I didn’t know how to control my abilities,” she said. “Particularly at night, it could be terrifying.”

She lived that way until one day, while working as a waitress at age 16, she connected to someone who confirmed what she only half-understood: that she could be a medium for the metaphysical. That someone was a five-year-old girl. 

“She looked at me and said ‘you have a lot of spirits around you,’” Jaime recalled.

“It was such a relief.”

It was a relief because the little girl’s mother wasn’t fazed by what the child was seeing. In fact, she talked openly to Jaime about the afterworld. The woman reassured Jaime that departed friends, family and loved ones want to help us. For Jaime, it was a turning point. Eventually, she said, she learned how to tune her “frequency” so that she could connect and even communicate with the spirits she was sensing. She was tapping into an ability she’d always had—that everyone has, she said, when they are first born.

“We are all  born telepathic,” she said. “It’s just that many of us lose it when we learn verbal communication and when we’re told spirits aren’t real.”

That might sound “woo-woo” to some, she knows, but since first realizing her abilities more than 20 years ago, Jaime has shown many of her friends and family members that she is able to learn things from passed-on loved ones, things that would otherwise be impossible for her to know. In 2020, right as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic was declared, she expanded that circle of believers significantly when she launched her medium and animal communication business; yes, Jaime’s ability to communicate with spirits also extends to the animal world.

“Animals are infinitely knowledgeable,” she said. “They have shared with me diseases their owners are suffering from, they’ve talked to me about their owners’ miscarriages. Because they’re so spiritually in-tune, they know things we’ve ignored or don’t realize.”

That message is obviously resonating with people. Jaime’s spiritualist business (The Mountain Medium on Instagram) has taken off. But just as she is starting to branch out and develop an international client list, including lending her spiritual assistance to missing persons files, an unanticipated snag is tripping her up.

It’s not an unsettled spirit from the afterlife; it’s not religious zealots decrying her practice as heretical; and it’s certainly not customers unsatisfied with her claim to connect to their loved ones. Jaime’s issue is as old as the internet: The Mountain Medium is falling victim to fraudsters. Imposter accounts are popping up on social media, contacting her followers and in some cases, scamming them out of money. 

“It’s so frustrating,” she said. “It makes me look horrible.”

By copying her photos and information, then creating social media accounts with slightly- different handles (ex. MountainMedium vs TheMountainMedium), hoaxers are taking advantage of the precious trust that emotionally-vulnerable clients put into psychics such as Jaime. They not only imitate her business and trick social media users into following the fake accounts, they also reach out and aggressively cold-call those followers, buttering them up before inevitably asking them for money.

“They’ll message people, telling them how amazing their energy is and how they want to do a reading for them,” Jaime said. “Then they’ll harass them for money.”

Unfortunately, some people have fallen for the scam; Jaime’s heard from several of her would-be clients that the imposters have swindled them out of hundreds of dollars. 

“It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I work hard to build my business and trust in my clients. I don’t want people to think I’m targeting grieving families.”

Yet there isn’t a lot she can do. She reports the fraudsters to Instagram, but the company writes back that their hands are tied, that they’re short-staffed and that their capacity to weed out imposters is limited. She puts out posts to alert her audience that this scam is taking place, but the fake accounts have upwards of 4,000 followers—nearly as many as her.

So she’s taking her message cross-platform. She wants everyone who might interact with her online business—and locals who simply know her as a friend or an acquaintance—to know that she’s not behind the dishonest demands for money. Whether people want to believe that she is able to communicate with spirits is up to them, but she’s not in the business of coercing people.

“This work is my life’s mission,” she said. “I don’t want to be associated with these scammers.”

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com