The place is loud, packed, and almost exclusively female. The women sip wine and share laughs before Maureen Hancock walks in, and silences the crowd with the couple hundred more people she escorts in with her.
These pasty new guests — the event’s real headliners — are the mothers and daughters, the fathers and sons, the crazy uncles and bawdy nieces of the people seated upstairs at Haddad’s Ocean Café in Marshfield the other night.
Oh, and those late arrivals are all dead.
Correction: “They’re not dead. They’re just different,’’ Hancock tells her audience.
Hancock is a spirit medium and holistic healer, who says she has been seeing dead people since they crowded around her bedroom in Stoughton at age 5. Her “Postcards from Heaven’’ events, routinely sold out across Eastern Massachusetts, are a combination of PG-13 stand-up comedy and serious soothsaying.
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And it is no exaggeration to say that she has her audience — many of whom have lost children to drugs, disease, or suicide — on the edge of their seats. They paid $50 a person. They so want to believe. You can see it in their widened eyes. And, by the end of the night, most do.
“I want to give people hope,’’ Hancock said from her home south of Boston the day after her show. She calls herself a comedian medium, the freckle-faced girl next door who happens to converse with the dearly departed. “It gives me a lot of joy, but it can be a burden,’’ she said.
And, it seems, this reaching beyond the grave stuff can be a hit-or-miss proposition.
Hancock searched in vain for someone connected with Jeannie — “I think it’s Aunt Jeannie” — or with Ruth or Richard or Nancy or Ryan. “It might be Brian,” she said. She asked one guy, “Are you on the train a lot?’’ Um, no.
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“Sometimes it flows, and sometimes it doesn’t,’’ she explained later.
But there are more than enough moments of jaw-dropping specificity to electrify the room. She knew about lost wedding rings, and the overdose death of a young woman’s ex-boyfriend.
Janice Foley’s knees nearly buckled when, without any prologue, Hancock told her she saw a bonfire on Nantasket Beach. Turns out Foley’s late grandfather managed a theater on the beach and she is now looking to live there.
“That’s totally out of the blue,’’ Foley said. “How could she know that?’’
At a recent event in Andover, a woman was stunned when Hancock walked up to her and announced: “You’re moving to Florida. And your [recently departed] mother said you need to do it because you’ve been talking about it for three years.’’ All true. All un-Google-able.
Look, I’m a professional skeptic. There’s an old adage in the newspaper business that goes like this: If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. I’d have to surrender my membership in the professional reporter society if I were to unconditionally embrace Hancock’s psychic powers.
There is a cookie-cutter quality to some of her visions from the Other Side. I’m happy. I’m not alone. I’m whole again. I love you. I’m with you. I’m your guardian angel.
It seems many dearly departed mothers are feisty, pick-yourself-up-dust-yourself-off women. Even from the Great Beyond, most fathers are still long-suffering types, men with a wry sense of humor who retain their habit of deferring to their better halves.
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I’d be more convinced if the voices from Heaven, at least some of the time, sounded like this: “Your mother says she is upset that you’ve let your gym membership lapse. She says it looks like you’ve gained 20 pounds. She wants you to lay off the double-cheeseburgers and hit the treadmill.’’
Hancock, 47, is used to skeptics like me. She said her brother Jim has adopted a diplomatic description of her work as a medium that I’ll embrace here: “I believe that Maureen believes.’’
Hancock says everyone has the ability to receive these messages. I think so, too. Loved ones are alive in our hearts. Their spirits dance in the winds. You don’t need to go to Haddad’s to find that out.
Thomas Farragher can be reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @FarragherTom.