03/22/2018
Staci Mercado
Character File #22
Cheryl Ann Elliott-Fletcher—Age 55 (2 years ago)
Cheryl Elliott and her friend, Chrissy perched on the second story motel landing dressing their Barbie dolls before acting out scenes they’d planned and rehearsed all summer. This was routine for the two eleven-year-olds. Cheryl’s mother brought her to work every day in the summer to keep her out of trouble. Since Chrissy, the daughter of the hotel owner was Cheryl’s age, the two girls shared similar interests and kept each other entertained while Cheryl’s mother cleaned rooms.
It’s hard to say how many times the girls played their favorite game on those stairs, but on that particular day, Cheryl became bored with the usual and was anxious do something else. She looked down the walkway towards the hotel dumbwaiter, a service lift encased in brick and rigged to transport laundry, and got an idea. “Let’s ride that thing down to see Viola!” A kind woman who was fond of kids, Viola often told them stories while washing the hotel linens.
Chrissy agreed to the plan and the girls ran over to the dumbwaiter, dolls in hand. After opening the small door, Chrissy hopped in first and scooted to the back of the four-foot deep box. They giggled, imagining the look on Viola’s face when they popped out of the laundry chute.
As Cheryl ducked her head inside, Chrissy pressed the green button prematurely. Cheryl screamed and attempted to move out of the way, but it was too late. The dumbwaiter descended, trapping Cheryl’s neck between the service lift and the frame. She tried to pull away, but succeeded only in ripping a five-inch section of flesh from the back of her neck.
A confused and panicked Chrissy did not react fast enough. Seconds later, Cheryl’s cries for help were smothered. The steal bar continued to press down with all of its mechanical weight and Cheryl lost consciousness.
She recalls in our interview 44 years later, “I was encompassed with white light; I heard rushing sounds, then I hit a place where I was in total darkness.” In that disembodied place, Cheryl believes she met the deceased members of her family. She says, “I could hear their voices; I felt love for those people. I didn’t want to come home, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
Chrissy eventually managed to press the stop button, releasing Cheryl who slumped to the floor and hit her head on the railing behind her. When she woke, Chrissy screamed down at her from the lift. “Cheryl! Are you okay? Cheryl!”
Alerted by Chrissy’s cries, Cheryl’s mother burst from a room. Upon seeing her daughter’s prone body, she was able to get a brief, but teary explanation from Chrissy. Cheryl was awake, but still unaware of what had happened. Wetness covered the back of Cheryl’s neck and back, which she later understood was her own blood.
Her mother rushed Cheryl to the hospital where they bandaged the large gash caused by the incident and examined her for other injuries. The doctor told Cheryl she was lucky to be alive. Cheryl remembers, “I was thinking; you have no clue where I’ve been. How do you tell anybody that at 11 years old?”
During our interview, Cheryl felt the back of her neck where the scar tissue from the accident remains. “I have a lump there, a good inch and a half long from the tearing and pulling.”
According to “The Science of Near-Death Experiences” by Gideon Lichfield, The Atlantic, 2015, many people who have gone through a near death experience “…report that their experience did not feel like a dream or a hallucination but was, as they often describe it, ‘more real than real life.’ They are profoundly changed afterward. ” For Cheryl, that change was the beginning of a new kind of sight.
Cheryl believes that her near death experience gave her unique abilities. Today she makes a living as a medium, psychic, and clairvoyant, in the Lincoln, Nebraska area. “Good things came of it,” she says.
Shortly after her accident, Cheryl had her first glimpse of that ability. During a game at recess, she was hit in the head by a baseball. The incident caused a severe headache that sent her to the nurse’s office where Cheryl says she had a vision. After putting her head down on a pillow, she felt as if she was watching an antique film of a street scene in the 1920s. Though it seemed dreamlike, Cheryl maintains that it wasn’t a typical dream. “I saw tall buildings and people everywhere, old 1920s vehicles and clothing. People were talking about problems with their cars and a lady carried an old round gas can. I saw things I’d never seen or experienced before.”
Later that same year, while getting ready for bed, she had a premonition of her older brother’s death. Of that event she says, “It was like if I turned over right now and turned on a movie reel, like the building of vision. It’s a feeling like being pulled or magnetized to something. You just have to go there. I started to see a long dark box, a casket, and there was my brother Pat, of all people, in the casket. I wondered why it was happening, so I told my mom. She thought I just had a bad dream and sent me back to bed.”
A month later, at 1:23 in the morning on January 23, 1971, the Police Department of Lincoln knocked on her mother’s door. As the door opened, flashlights invaded the dark house.
“Are you Miss Leona Elliott?”
“Yes. Is there something wrong?”
“Ma’am can we come in? We need to talk to you.”
Anticipating the bad news, Cheryl clung to her mother while the rest of her six siblings emerged from the bedrooms. Cheryl looked up at her mother and told her, “He’s dead, just like I said.”
The officers informed the family that Pat had committed su***de by hanging. His body was found in the top floor of the original twelve-story Cornhusker Hotel building in Lincoln where he had been an employee for several years.
There was one problem with the coroner’s conclusion. Although it appeared to be a simple case of su***de, Pat had a condition that made hanging himself next to impossible. When Pat was 12 at Whittier Junior High School in Lincoln, he fell from the monkey bars. A heavyset boy fell on his shoulder causing severe nerve damage. Due to this accident, Pat did not have full use of his arm, and did not have the ability to raise it over his head. How then, did Pat manage to tie the sheet around the pipes in the top floor laundry room? Was it possible he found a way? Cheryl doesn’t think so; she says, “The way the sheets were tied were better than Pat could have done with his arm.” Though Cheryl believes he didn’t want to be alive, she knows he must have had help. Years later, Cheryl says she communicated with the spirit of her deceased brother. “I asked him, was it murder, su***de, or assisted. He said ‘assisted.’” The man Cheryl suspects of helping her brother left the area shortly after his death.
When Cheryl married her first husband, Jesse, at age 19, she told him about her experiences. While living with him, Cheryl began predicting the time and purpose of incoming phone calls. Cheryl says Jesse was uncomfortable with her abilities, so she stopped sharing with him and began to write about her gift through poetry in an attempt to make sense of it all.
In 1989, Cheryl divorced Jesse, moved back to Lincoln, Nebraska, and met Mark Fletcher, who would be her husband for 23 years. Though they are now divorced, Cheryl says he is still her best friend.
Mark first noticed Cheryl’s ability after the news reported a missing couple in Hastings, Nebraska. In a phone interview I conducted with Mark, he told me he remembers her saying, “They’re in the water.” Later, after a dry season caused the reduction of much of the water in the local area, their Jeep was spotted upside down in a pond.
While cutting his hair on their porch, Mark recalled Cheryl’s prediction of a wreck on the Interstate. The following day there was a semi pileup.
After observing Cheryl’s abilities on many prior occasions, Mark decided to put her to the test. As Cheryl stood in the kitchen cooking dinner, he watched the local news. The coverage that night focused on another couple whom went missing after a car accident during an Omaha blizzard. Authorities had located the man who apparently decided to go for help and died in the snow. At the time, police were still looking for the woman. Mark called Cheryl in to see if she could envision the location of the body. She grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil and drew the picture of a tree-covered fence line that plummeted into an embankment. The woman’s body was in a water-filled crevice that had since frozen over, inhibiting the search dogs’ ability to find her.
Cheryl contacted Steve White, a news reporter for Lincoln, Nebraska, and told him about everything she saw. He encouraged her to contact the search and rescue team. Between passing emails, the woman’s body was found in the exact place Cheryl sketched. It is unclear whether or not Cheryl’s vision led to the finding of the woman’s body, but Cheryl doesn’t care. “I’m humble,“ she says. “I don’t need recognition. It isn’t about me.”
Convinced that Cheryl’s ability was authentic and that she had a gift she could be sharing, Mark encouraged her involvement with another case. For days, the news had covered the event of a missing fisherman in Elba, Nebraska. Friends found his dog and overturned aluminum canoe; a search and rescue diver found his sunglasses in twenty feet of water, but the body was still missing. According to 10 11 news out of Lincoln, authorities were ready to give up the search.
Certain Cheryl could help, Mark drove her from Grand Island to Elba on a sunny, warm April day. The lake area was cordoned off with yellow tape, but the two of them pulled as close as they could. They watched from a hill for a while as teams of people milled about below. Officers led cadaver dogs around the lake and into the woods surrounding the area. The dive team crouched alongside the water. One diver held his head in his hands. Search and rescue dragged the lake. Clusters of deputies gathered to share theories.
Since the man left behind a wife and infant son, Cheryl was more concerned about the family’s closure than official protocol. She walked underneath the yellow tape and got closer to the scene. Of that moment she said, “I could see into the water where he was at. They were 300 feet in the wrong direction. He was hung up underneath a bunch of trees.” Distracted by her vision, she did not notice the female deputy who approached her. Mark quickly intervened and explained what Cheryl could do. The woman radioed back to the search team and asked if it would be okay for Cheryl to come down to the site. They were ready to entertain any possibility, so Cheryl was given permission to approach the area.
Cheryl remembers, “I looked at the water, and I saw what happened. I told them that he threw his pole in the water and in that specific time the dog walked to the side of the boat he was sitting on. It put too much pressure on that side, and the boat flipped, clocking him in the head. I said he’s under the trees on that side of the lake. If you pull the trees up, he’ll come up on the south bank on Easter morning.”
At a loss for other answers, they pulled up the trees as Cheryl instructed. The next day the man’s body was found on the south bank of the lake, exactly as she had predicted.
According to Mark Fletcher, “Cheryl is one of the best clairvoyants in the country when it comes to finding people. There are a lot of quacks out there, but she’s the real deal.” Mark says if he could afford it, he’d send her to help locate missing persons all over the country.
Cheryl says her visions cause her to feel connected to the victims and family members. For that reason, she attends the funerals of each person she helps to find. Though she did not know him, Cheryl was one of the mourners at the fisherman’s funeral. “I do it for closure,” she says, “for my own personal closure.”
Today, Cheryl gives readings in individual and group settings, assists her local police and Sheriff’s departments in locating missing persons, and conducts paranormal investigations.
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