Troy Griffin saw a dear friend get into a car accident six years ago.
Trouble is, it hadn’t happened — yet.
“I told my friend Diana, ‘I’m concerned about you driving home,’ ” Griffin, 51, tells me. The crash occurred as Griffin foresaw it. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured.
But from that moment forward, Griffin could no longer deny something he’d known from the age of 12. He says he’s “psychic,” “clairvoyant” or a “medium” — horror-meister Stephen King would say he’s saddled with “The Shining” — although Griffin prefers the term “intuitive.”
He says he can predict things people will say before they say them and events that will happen before they happen.
He also sees dead people. Or so he claims.
Here are two recent cases in which he’s used his sixth sense:
Lora Hale Costner, a 42-year-old mother of two, went missing for three weeks in Tennessee earlier this year, and her sister-in-law was frantic. She asked Griffin to take the case after he contacted her through Facebook.
Looking at the area in which Costner disappeared on Google Maps, “I see pictures, places and things. I saw the road [where she vanished]. I felt that there was drug use by the victim.”
Griffin went back to Facebook, and zeroed in on three of Costner’s friends, two men and a woman he thought were involved. He sent his findings in a report to the sister-in-law, who forwarded it to police.
“A few hours later, they found the body,” he said. Finally, 19-year-old McKinley Lane Cody was indicted for allegedly robbing Costner of prescription pain medication and murdering her by hitting her in the back of the head.
Cody was Griffin’s main “person of interest.”
The body of Ashley Jones, a 24-year-old mom of three, was found last year by a hiker after she went missing for seven weeks in rural Georgia, two months after telling family members “something is going to happen.” Police initially suspected a drug overdose, but her mom, who contacted Griffin, didn’t believe it. Neither did he.
A man who Griffin suspected was involved in her death was arrested and charged in an unrelated kidnapping. The case of Ashley Jones remains open.
Griffin, a devout Christian who once hosted an entertainment radio talk show in LA, says his extrasensory perception compelled him to sell his company, which converted real-estate and medical records into digital files. He’s now a freelance psychic detective who pays the bills by giving paranormal readings, at $90 a pop, to people who crave communing with the spirits of departed loved ones.
You might call him a ghost whisperer. He rejects the titles “sorcerer” and “necromancer.”
“Before I help anyone, I pray,” he says. “After, I also pray.”
Griffin, who lives in Greenfield, Colo., and has a wife and son, uses his paranormal insights to provide clues that help solve “cold cases” that have confounded authorities. But he gets little official credit. Is he qualified to mess with the dead and the gone?
Some victims’ family members, friends and lovers think so. Law enforcement officials, in this country and abroad, have quietly turned to psychics when all else fails.
He finds the majority of his cases on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database — NamUs — whose pictures he scours until he gets a “feeling” about one. “They come to me in my dreams,” he says. “I see people’s faces and I look into their eyes.
“The eyes tell me so much.”
Griffin’s testimony is not admissible in court, but he says he’s worked on about 100 cases in the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia — 99 percent of them unpaid.
“We all need to use our God-given gifts,” he says. “Your gift is journalism, that’s how you help people.”
Flattery will get Griffin far — but I’m not sure it’s enough to erase mental images of storefront mediums and carnival fortune-tellers.
Next, he might look for a way into a case that for nearly 20 years has flummoxed local cops and federal authorities — that of the so-called Gilgo Beach Killer, an unknown serial slayer believed to have murdered between 10 and 17 people, some of them sex workers, and dumped their remains around Gilgo Beach on Long Island.
“I want to see if I connect with the families, with the victims,” Griffin says.
He may seem like an opportunist or attention whore, but I hope he gets involved.
Police and FBI agents can use all the supernatural intuition they can get.
US voters ‘rate’ the speakers
Donald Trump wins an upset victory — in the TV ratings.
Hillary Clinton’s “historic,” but clunky, speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, after she became the first woman ever to accept a major party’s presidential nomination, drew 29.8 million TV viewers, according to Nielsen.
But 32.2 million people tuned in to commercial networks to watch The Donald accept the Republican nomination at that party’s confab a week earlier, Nielson reported.
I think the voters have spoken with their remote controls.
Men no longer fit to be ‘tie’d
I stood on a New York City street corner one recent lunchtime to test a Post story declaring the necktie “dead.” Surprise! The dodo bird may soon have company on the extinction list.
Out of some 30 dudes, most wearing dress shirts and business suits, just four sported neckwear. (I think they came from out of town.)
Helping inspire the bare-throated trend is a frequently casual Prince Harry of Britain, the sometimes tie-averse President Obama and hoodie-favoring tech startup company employees.
Still, everyone I saw — male, female and everything else — wore tops, although that’s not required by law for people of any gender in New York state.
Good thing for ordinary folks.
Next time, eat him
Larry the lobster, a 15-pound behemoth bound for the dinner table in a Florida restaurant, was saved by crustacean-rescuers who packed him up in Styrofoam and shipped him to the Maine State Aquarium. But by the time the beastie arrived, he was dead. A crying shame.
I’ll bet the big guy would have made a delicious meal.