SANTA ANA, Calif. — It's the sort of house you might fantasize about. Three stories. A deck with an ocean view. A Laguna Beach, Calif., address.

But like the house in "Amityville Horror" or umpteen other scary movies, it creeped Lori Duarte out.

She woke up screaming from nightmares. Saw things out of the corner of her eye. Heard strange noises.

"It was a pretty house," Lori says, "but it didn't feel that way; I would rather be in a shack."

In November 2007, after a year and a half together, she and her husband decided to split up. And sell the house. It was on the market for the next seven months. There were no takers.

Whatever was in that house, Lori says, was keeping buyers away. She told her ex that there was a woman in town they could hire to chase away the spirits.

"If you can get it to sell," he told Lori, "do whatever … you want."

Julie Belmont lives in Laguna Hills, Calif. She is an artist who works in oils and pastels and charcoal. She makes Victorian chokers. She knits scarves.

And, she says, she sees dead people.

Julie was 4 and living in Madrid when she woke one morning to find her aunt standing at the foot of her bed, wearing a gray dress and smiling kindly. The woman told her niece she had come to say goodbye. Then she faded away.

"OK," Julie says she remembers thinking. "I am awake."

She went to her parents and told them what she saw. She says they didn't flinch.

"Get your coat," they told her.

The family went to a hospital where the aunt had been ill. The old woman died soon after they arrived.

It was the fall of 2007 when Lori, a flight attendant and mother of three, met Julie at the Chakra Shack in Laguna Beach. The woman who usually reads Lori's cards wasn't in, but Julie was.

Some people might call Julie a psychic. She prefers the term "intuitive."

"People still stereotype," Julie says.

Since childhood, she says, she could see, hear and feel things that others couldn't. The more she focused on her intuition, the more it developed. But, until relatively recently, she only shared it with friends and family.

After growing up in Madrid, she moved to Toronto where she fell into modeling, becoming Canada's first poster girl. A 1980 magazine spread titled "Battle of the Poster Girls" shows her in a bathing suit and Farrah Fawcett hair alongside cheesecake swimsuit photos of Cheryl Tiegs, Suzanne Somers and Cheryl Ladd.

Soon, Julie moved to Newport Beach, Calif. She decided she wanted to be a cop. She enrolled in the Golden West Police Academy and, in a few years, she was a reserve officer for the Costa Mesa Police Department.