One influence on this path was his mother’s Italian side of the family. Growing up around them in Queens, they frequently went to visit psychics and had their fortunes told. Unfortunately, this caused conflict in a household that also featured a police officer and career military father who believed strongly in rational thought. When his parents split up, he found himself surrounded by those who actively believed in the paranormal, while he maintained his father’s skeptical outlook that “this wasn’t real.”
The first inkling Edward had that paranormal activity might actually take place occurred when the psychic Lydia Carr visited his house when he was 15 and did a reading. Thinking in the moment that “she was completely out of her mind,” he watched her perform a psychometry on his high school ring, which involves reading a person’s energy from a material object. He only realized in hindsight the value of what she had said, as things she mentioned during the reading, which she could not possibly have known or anticipated, came to pass.