by Debra LeBar / photos by Hannah Huff

Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Claire Long became known as “the weird girl.” Not because she looked weird or necessarily acted weird but because she felt she had psychic powers. She says her mother and grandmothers had all been strongly “intuitive,” able to tell when their children were sick, in harm’s way or (more often) fibbing. But she was the most outright clairvoyant in her family, predicting, for example, when she was eight years old that her father’s plane would have mechanical trouble and have to make an emergency landing, or being able to feel, at age nine, that the dungeons in a fort she toured with her family in St. Augustine, Florida, had been used to torture people. “People don’t always like hearing the truth, but that’s what I saw,” Long says. She knew being different wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She just needed to find an outlet for her gifts.  

Now, at age 38, she’s found it. Trouble is, it doesn’t always pay the bills. So, for 25 to 30 hours each week, Long, a mother of two who lives in Asheville, drives 22-foot delivery trucks for Johnson Auto Recycling, a local junkyard that buys old cars, dismantles them and sells the parts. The rest of her time, however, she spends doing what she loves, working with clients in hour-long sessions that combine Reiki energy work and psychic healing. Reiki, a spiritual practice developed by a Japanese man in 1922, involves a practitioner laying his or her hands on a person and transmitting healing energies through the palms. Long claims that, in addition to transferring energy, she can see a person’s aura and past experiences. After a session, which costs $65, she gives an analysis of the client’s energies and helps them “move the trauma out of their energy field,” she says, “out of their mind.” 

Because her Reiki work can be draining, doing something more straightforward, like hauling auto parts for the junkyard, is soothing. “Getting in the loud, manly trucks is very grounding,” she says. “It helps me stay centered, to be with my thoughts and just drive.” Hauling junk also pays better than her previous jobs, mostly waitressing. 

But having special powers has its drawbacks. For one, she says the energy that flows out of her after an intense psychic session can wreck appliances. She claims to have blown out cell phones, her home phone line and the headlight switches in the junk-hauling trucks. “Sometimes I have to have my kids type my emails,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Don’t touch the computer.’” In fact, while she’s grateful to have found Reiki, which she sees as a constructive outlet for her psychic power, she often feels burdened by her visions, which give her too much information—even about herself. “People say, ‘I wish I was clairvoyant,’ but I say, ‘Honey—it ain’t all pretty.’ You have to be prepared for whatever you may see.”