Tyler Henry, America’s most watched medium with a waiting list of over 600,000 hopefuls, is staring at a model sailboat on the bookshelf in my office. 

“On the way here,” he says. “I was seeing a model boat. I kept having a very strong mental vision of an older man—a grandfather—and I was seeing a model boat. It’s funny, I sat down and…there’s a boat. What are the odds? Maybe I just had a premonition.”

I explained to Henry that I had only just gotten the boat the day before, a gift, so of all the things on my crowded shelves to zero in on, it’s new. He tells me that things will come up in our session that won’t necessarily make sense, that I’ll have to reach out to others for clarification. The next day, I spoke to the friend who gave me the boat. As I was hanging up, I asked about it. It was his grandfather’s.

Henry’s origin story is widely known by the fans of his work and has been chronicled on television since 2016, first on E!’s Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry, now on Netflix’s Life after Death. Born in California’s Central Valley to parents in the floor-tiling business, he was an only child raised in a strongly religious agricultural community. “It was ordinary,” he says, “And very far from LA.”

Henry had his first premonition in April of 2006 at 10 years old: He woke up in the middle of the night knowing his grandmother was going to die. Upset, he tried to explain to his mother what happened. Then the phone rang. It was his father. Henry’s grandmother had passed. “At 10, you don’t recognize that as an ability,” he says. “But [it] changed how I grieved thereafter.”

For the next six years, Henry set out on a stretch of self-discovery, juggling both his uncontrollable premonitions and coming to terms with his sexuality in a town that held prayer circles for him. “It took self-reliance and courage,” he says. “I think a lot of gay people can relate to having to be true to who they are, even when other people don’t understand.” 

He didn’t yet have a mentor or a community to reach out to. “It really was a process of self-discovery, of being self-taught. I think we all have the potential to explore ourselves and to develop our inner worlds. And for me, when I found myself struggling or needing help, I found that the more I developed those inner worlds and inner faith—but moreover, an inner trust in my ability to show up and do the work and have good intentions—it created a foundation for me to be successful.”

Henry graduated high school on an accelerated track at 16 with the goal of becoming a hospice nurse. “I thought that would be a natural synergy with being a medium,” he says. 

Very quickly, however, his life went in a different direction. Henry performed a reading for a dean at his college, without knowing who he was. The next day in the cafeteria, they recognized each other, and the dean suggested that Henry look further than hospice work and school. “I always joke that he gave me permission to quit school and pursue this work as a medium because it impacted him personally,” smiles Henry. “The rest is history.”

Word traveled fast. People knocked on Henry’s front door and left notes in the mailbox. “I’m a big believer that if you’re real, you don’t have to advertise,” he says with a laugh. “I got to a place where I just had to make a choice of either pursuing mediumship or not.”

In my office, Henry is holding a notebook and a pen. His eyes alternate from polite eye contact to taking in various objects around the room. Clocking, noting, remembering. His mother (just like it happens on the show) dropped him off here. “She’s so cute,” he says. “She can’t drive at all, but bless her heart, she does drive me around and I can’t drive at all. So who am I to say?” 

Henry is 27 years old and lives with his boyfriend outside Los Angeles without a driver’s license. He’s in a simple button-down, jeans, and comfortable sneakers. Blond hair sweeps his forehead with an almost boyish haircut. His voice is permanently cheerful. Even when he delivers news about your health or death or worse, he makes it all seem okay. When he’s surprised, even by his own discoveries, he lets out a laugh so hopeful, so free, that it could be the audio track used for the Tickle-Me-Elmo toy.

Despite building a career off of high-profile readings for the likes of the Kardashians, RuPaul, Jim Parsons, countless NBA players, CEOs, and media personalities—Carmen Electra was probably his most willing celebrity collaborator—Henry is making time for the less fortunate, traveling across the country to offer his services when he’s not filming. Getting back to his roots has been rewarding and restorative—and often untelevised, though the new show has taken him to “salt-of-the-earth rural places that I would’ve never found myself in, where I can really help people who need it most. And that, for me, is why I started this work.” 

I get the sense that Henry has a complicated relationship with fame. If the exposure has helped people, then it’s a win. But he’s desperately seeking normalcy and privacy after a decade of public vulnerability.

Before our interview really starts, Henry offers me an impromptu reading. Before this assignment, I’d never seen the show, though friends of mine who have experienced loss have found solace in the series and raved to me about Henry’s abilities. I must say that I was astounded by names, details, health specificities, and other surprises that he came up with, none of which are googleable. As someone who probably leans toward cynicism when it comes to mediums, I was amazed. When he’s done, he hugs me. He is tired and sweating. It seems to have taken a lot out of him. He offers me his notes. Scribbles, sketches, and a few crossed-out names—all the names are of people close to me. 

In closing, Henry offers me this: “I think it’s important that we view grief as something to not be resolved. ‘Closure’ is a big buzzword, especially in the world of mediums, and I try to avoid it because I don’t believe that there is ever truly closure around grief. I think of grief as a bit like weight, and everybody carries weight differently. I’m a big believer that we can grow through our grief. We make room for it, but we carry it. That’s how it works.”

For as long as Henry can remember, he’s loved television. Being on it feels natural. Watching it, however, can be challenging. He’ll start picking up on the actor’s energies and experience distracting premonitions the whole time he’s watching. “I take certain measures to try to distract myself to bifurcate a normal life and a spiritual life, and to have some normalcy,” he tells me. “But there are absolutely times where impressions come through from listening to music to watching media to being on the internet to being on TikTok. Everything and everyone carries an essence. It’s a lot mentally. I’m lucky I’m not in a nut ward to be honest.”

While watching American Horror Story, there was one actress in particular whom he felt more deeply for: Sarah Paulson. So it was a shock when Paulson cold-called him. “I about pooped my pants,” he remembers. “I love her. I was shaking. I remember I had the phone in my hand and my palm had gone full sweaty, and it fell out of my hand, and I was like, grasping on the ground, hoping she didn’t hear.”

He was used to getting calls from Los Angeles at this point—“People are a lot more open to paranormal and psychic phenomenon there”—but never from a celebrity directly. Suddenly Henry finds himself being invited to Hollywood parties, including one in which he met a producer. Fast forward: After doing readings for nearly 30 skeptical suits at E! to prove his skill set, he was offered the show. “I passed their tests every time, so they knew it was real.”

Nevertheless, skepticism is still a big part of his life. But when explaining himself, he seems to have come to peace with this reality. “We might not all relate to being a medium, but everyone relates to being the outsider, be it in the workplace at some point, or maybe at school or maybe even within their own family,” he says. “So I deeply sympathize with those who feel like the other. I would say for me, one of the greatest pieces of advice I was ever given is that someone told me, ‘Tyler, you can be the biggest, juiciest peach in the world and there’s still going to be people who hate peaches.’ I love that because it really reminds us that we are what we are and diversity is the beauty of the world. My work is ideological—it falls into the realm of religion and politics, which are typically things people don’t talk about at the dinner table. So naturally I knew, especially as a young person, I’d be under a lot of scrutiny. I accepted it and I’ve embraced skepticism. I really understand why people have doubt, and I would rather people have doubt to learn more through that process of understanding than just blindly believe everything everybody does. So I really value critical thinking, and have always been a big proponent of it, despite the fact that I’ve dealt with some vitriol.”

With the Netflix show, Henry continues to delve into a family mystery they discovered while filming in 2022. His mother, Theresa Koelewyn, discovered through a genealogy test that she was taken as a baby. “We came to the understanding that the people I thought were my grandparents for 20-something years were not, and that they had abducted my mother,” says Henry stoically. “That discovery ultimately led the family down a path of trying to understand my  mom’s biological family and how my mom was stolen as a child.”

“She had a whole family out there looking for her and she didn’t even know it,” he continues. “It was like a punch in the gut because the woman who took my mom as a baby put her through extensive abuse, murdered two people and tortured them, and spent 30 years in prison. So my mom had a horrendous childhood, and equally had a family out there who was begging to find her but couldn’t, because this monster stole her from her family.”

Henry has been with his boyfriend for seven years. I ask if he already knew he was the one on the first date. He laughs. He doesn’t go on about the boyfriend, but in meeting new people in general, he admits, “You learn that everybody’s complex, everyone has good sides and bad sides and it’s made me a lot more nonjudgmental as a person, understanding that a lot of hurt is informed by pain. It has really taught me that everybody has things about themselves that they’re not proud of.”

As he packs up, he acknowledges he’s taking life day by day. His book Here & Hereafter came out last year, and he’s involved in an online community called The Collective by Fireside that allows participants from Mexico to India to seek a reading virtually. I ask if he has plans to get his driver’s license. 

Boyishly, he smiles. “No, but I might get a bicycle.”

This article, and its headline, has been updated to reflect Tyler Henry's current waiting list.