But now, in 2006, it was Pratt who needed help. “Something that made life meaningful for her was to help people,” says Liz Gude, a childhood friend who became Pratt’s neighbor in Chilmark. She also helped fund a holistic facility in Washington, D.C., called the Green Cross Clinic of the Americas (later the Center for Natural and Traditional Medicine), which offered herbal medicine and acupuncture on a sliding fee scale. She donated to Oxfam and the American Civil Liberties Union, and bought houses for Tibetan refugees in New Mexico and Maryland. She did so with loved ones, paying the private high school and college tuitions of nephews, nieces, godchildren - all of whom she doted on. She also continuously left her mark on the world with her generosity. She befriended Yule Kilcher, a key figure in admitting Alaska as the 50th state and an advocate for nature conservation. She studied with Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist experimenting with psychedelic drugs. She learned about Jungian psychology in Vienna. She traveled the world, visiting Europe and Africa, Asia and South America. The lack of a romantic partner, however, didn’t stop her from living an adventurous life. Heartbreak hardened a belief that she wasn’t emotionally confident enough to have a loving partnership, and the subsequent hurt led to a loneliness she was sometimes too eager to fill.
She never failed to inspire the attention of suitors, but for reasons only she could know, gravitated toward married or otherwise unobtainable men. A love of the outdoors cultivated on a family farm led to a landscape architecture degree from Radcliffe College in the ‘50s - she’d also earn a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the ‘70s - and a lifelong passion for walking and gardening. She was drawn to the arts - singing, painting, and pottery. As she grew into a young woman, she considered herself plain, but to anyone who ever met her, she was beautiful and tall, with striking bright eyes. She was a dutiful child, more likely to follow than lead. Vera Christine Pratt was born in New York City on the eve of Valentine’s Day 1935. And she couldn’t have known that Johnson would fail at her goal - to exorcise the demons - despite the more than $3.5 million dollars she would get from Pratt to try. She couldn’t have known that the woman she would come to share her deepest secrets with was really named Sally Ann Johnson, and that their business arrangement over the next nearly seven years would lead to an investigation that started with a curious Vineyard police officer and ended with the FBI. She even believed herself to be mildly psychic, but found the prospect too frightening to pursue.īut psychic abilities in others weren’t frightening to Pratt, and her intuition led her to believe that Angela was the person she could trust to restore the promise of her remaining years.Īs she prepared to call Psychic Angela, Pratt couldn’t see the future. She was interested in Eastern medicine and philosophies. Pratt believed in alternative spirituality and healing. Pratt found hope one day when she came across an advertisement in a magazine for a Florida woman who went by the name Psychic Angela. Those were her plans, but the demons were hijacking all of them. She would lend her melodic alto soprano to a local choir, take up dancing again, and - after never marrying due to a lifetime of romantic disappointments - perhaps find a good man. She aimed to spend her days in her garden planting broccoli, lettuce, and strawberries. She gave herself an art studio where she could paint more of her Impressionist landscapes. Of her four bedrooms, she dedicated one to canning food and another to meditation. But in 2006, Pratt decided to finally invest in herself, buying her 3,000-square-foot home in Chilmark and planning to attune her remaining years to her passions.