This book by ex-newspaper exec needed no ghost writer

Janis Heaphy Durham was an advertising and marketing executive at the Los Angeles Times for two decades before she went north in 1998 to begin ten years as the publisher and chief executive of the Sacramento Bee. She retired from the Bee in 2008, and her first book — out today — is making a media splash. In "The Hand on the Mirror: A True Story of Life Beyond Death,” Heaphy Dunham details what she says were a number of paranormal experiences that followed the 2004 death of her husband, political consultant Max Besler. Books about paranormal and near-death experiences are hot sellers. She received a seven-figure advance for the book, per a piece in the Bee.

She says she didn't talk about the weird things happening with anyone in her newspaper world.

Heaphy Durham didn’t even share what she was experiencing with business associates, fearing they would think that her profound grief had affected her judgment. “I worked in an industry that was a breeding ground for skepticism about almost anything. The business of publishing required a mainstream professional demeanor and lifestyle. ... Journalists can be eccentric; the business side of newspaper management isn’t.”

Heaphy Durham also was skeptical at first, but after one unusual event after another, she began to feel that her late husband’s consciousness had survived his physical death. He died on a calm day in May, she wrote in her book, but friends remarked upon the ringing of wind chimes that the couple had hung in their backyard.

Heaphy wrote that she rationalized this and other incidents, until the one-year anniversary of Besler’s death, when something happened that she couldn’t ignore. She spotted a powdery handprint, about the size of a man’s hand, on the bathroom mirror in her then-Sacramento home.

Not only did Heaphy Durham see it, but so did her teenage son Tanner Heaphy and housekeeper Helen Dennis. Heaphy Durham photographed the handprint; those who read the book will see it and other images she captured.

According to the Bee, her second husband, Jim Durham, also began to observe the phenomena. There was a piece about Heaphy Durham and her book this weekend on CBS Sunday Morning. Excerpt:

In May 2004, a few days shy of his 56th birthday, Max Besler died, and that, Janis says, is when things started getting weird: Lights in her Sacramento home would flicker; clocks would stop at the moment Max died.

But then, on the anniversary date of his death, Janis was stunned by something she saw as she stood in her bathroom washing her hands.

"I looked up at the mirror and I saw a handprint," she told Smith. "A perfectly-formed, powdery handprint. Large, on the mirror. It was the right hand."

Heaphy Durham lives in Tiburon these days.