Pachita - Psychic Surgeon, Medium & Mystic

The story of the Mexican healer who cured thousands across 7 decades.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mexico-unexplained--6696126/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Welcome to Mexico Unexplained, where we will explore the magic,
the mysteries and the miracles of Mexico. This series presents
information based partly on theory and conjecture. The podcaster's purpose
is to suggest some possible explanation, but not necessarily the
only ones to the subjects we will examine. Here is
your host, Robert Bitto.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Welcome and muid bim beneathos to episode number ninety one
of me xicuon Explained, where we examined the magic, the
mysteries and the miracles of Mexico. I'm your host, Robert Biddo.
In the Colonia Roma Norte neighborhood in Mexico City, across
the street from the wooded and shady place Rio de
Renero stands a somewhat spooky looking red brick building built

(01:20):
in nineteen o eight. While the sign in the front
of the building says Edificio Rio de Granero, the locals
call this place something else, La Casa de las Brujas,
or an English the House of the Witches. It is
so named not just because of its spooky appearance. Visitors

(01:40):
to the building and passers by have reported strange phenomena
in and around the building. Apparitions of various forms have
been sighted there, and a strange energy field enveloping the
building has been reported throughout the years, especially since the
late nineteen seventies. It is perhaps not just a coincidence

(02:02):
that for many years, the beautiful building in this somewhat
upscale Mexico City neighborhood was home to one of Mexico's
most famous psychics and mystic healers, a woman known to
all as Pachita. Pachita died there on April twenty ninth,
nineteen seventy nine. To this day, some claimed to see

(02:23):
her stout figure standing in one of the windows, looking
across the wooded plaza, with a stern expression on her face.
Pachito was born Barbara Guerrero in the town of Parral
in the Mexican state of Chihuahua in about the year
nineteen hundred. As a little girl, she began to hear voices,

(02:43):
and by the age of ten, she was already demonstrating
the ability to heal people. As a girl, she would
slip into trances and claim that her body was being
taken over by an entity she called El Hermannito or
in English, the Little Brother. She would later identify El
Ermanito as Cuao Temoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs

(03:07):
and nephew of Montezuma. While in her trance state, Pachita
could heal people, she could see the future, and she
would often speak languages unknown to her. By the time
she was a young adult, Pachita left rural Chihuahua and
headed for the big city. She established herself in the
building later known as the Casa de las Brujas on

(03:30):
the tree lined Placa de Rio de Janeiro Street, where
she lived and had a small consultation office. It did
not take Pachita much time to cultivate a loyal following
from all socio and economic classes and backgrounds, including some
high ranking members of Mexico's political and social elite, who
would visit her secretly. Before her healings and procedures with people,

(03:55):
Pachita had a specific routine to prepare herself. She would
sit in a ch chair in front of an altar
in her consultation room, and then would close her eyes
and breathe softly until she heard a soft buzzing sound
in her ears. According to Pachita, the buzzing indicated that
a shift in her state was about to occur, as

(04:16):
if she was about to fall into a big hole,
into another form of consciousness or another dimension of consciousness.
She would then let herself go and perform whatever healing
was necessary, as directed by forces outside of her control.
Pachita was most known for her psychic surgery, very rarely

(04:36):
seen outside the Philippines, where it has been an accepted
practice to many since the nineteen fifties. This is Wikipedia's
description of the procedure without the use of surgical instrument.
A practitioner will press the tips of his or her
fingers against the patient's skin in the area to be treated.

(04:57):
The practitioner's hands appeared to penetrate into the patient's body painlessly,
and blood seems to flow. The practitioner will then show
organic matter or foreign objects apparently removed from the patient's body,
clean the area, and then end the procedure with the
patient's skin showing no wounds or scars. Pachita did not

(05:21):
use her bare hands when practicing her craft. Rather, her
go to tool for her operations was an old hunting
knife with its handle fixed up with successive layers of
duct tape. She would perform her surgery swiftly and efficiently,
often operating on several people at a time, and always
with one or two assistants helping her. Procedures were done

(05:45):
under dim lights, preferably in candlelight, as Pachita claimed that
bright lights harmed organs. Witnesses claimed that she could conjure
new organs out of thin air, and even with her
crude tool, no one sufferffered from infections or bad side
effects from the lack of the use of antiseptics or
even anesthesia. As Pachito was the only one in Mexico

(06:09):
performing psychic surgeries, she drew a lot of attention to
herself from Mexicans and from people overseas. People came to
casave Las Brujas from all over the world to witness
marvel or debunk One such investigator was doctor Andrea Puharich,
an American paranormal investigator whose claim to fame was bringing

(06:31):
psychic uri Geller from Israel to the United States and
thus making Geller a worldwide sensation. Doctor Puharich first visited
Pachita in January of nineteen seventy eight with a small
group of investigators to study her methods in depth. By
the time of this visit, Pachita was close to eighty

(06:52):
years old and still doing eight to ten consultations or
healings per day. Here is doctor Puharich's test stemony of
his experiences quote. I decided to undergo instant surgery for
myself before allowing any of my own patients to be
operated on by Pachita. For two years, I had been

(07:13):
suffering the gradual onset of spongy bone growth in both ears,
causing progressive loss of hearing. The operation was to correct this.
I was not hypnotized before the operation, nor was any
medication given. I lay down on the table and some
cotton pads were placed around the ear to absorb bleeding.

(07:35):
Three witnesses were present, one of whom took photographs. Holding
the knife in her right hand, Pachita quickly inserted three
inches of the knife blade into the right ear canal.
The forefinger of her left hand guided the blade in.
The pain was acute, yet I did not scream or
try to avoid the knife, even though it felt as

(07:57):
if the tip of the blade had penetrated the ear.
After holding the knife in the ear canal, for about
forty seconds. Pachito withdrew it and the pain ceased immediately.
The left ear was operated on in a similar way.
This time the pain was even greater close to my
breaking point. As soon as the knife was withdrawn, however,

(08:19):
the pain stopped. The surgery had taken three minutes, though
sterile procedures were used and Pachita's bare hands were covered
with blood from previous operations. After the operation, there was
only minimal bleeding, but a new complication appeared. My head
was ringing with loud noises, so loud that I could

(08:41):
not hear what people were saying to me. I was
given a tincture and told to put one drop in
each ear daily. The noises decreased gradually, and by the
eighth day after the operation had ceased altogether. In fact,
my hearing was now so acute that I suffered painfully
from hyperacuses, which is the abnormally increased power of hearing.

(09:06):
This condition lasted about two weeks. One month after the operation,
my hearing was completely back to normal. After this experience,
I felt completely confident in Pachita's treatment and able to
recommend her instant surgery to my patients. While known for
these unconventional surgeries, Pachita also performed other sorts of consultations

(09:30):
for her clients, often in her famous trance states. Many
of her treatments used the patient's own belief systems for
help in their healing. Those who had strong faith in
the Catholic religion, for example, were given specific prayers to
say or offerings to make to specific saints. Pachita was

(09:51):
said to use her gifts of esp to act as
a sort of psychotherapist to help her clients work through
emotional issues or men medical conditions that were based on
emotional issues. She was also well versed in the use
of Mexican herbs after studying healing methods used by the
indigenous healers throughout the country. Because of her vast knowledge

(10:14):
of Native American herbal medicine, Pachita was often classified as
a shaman. In fact, Mexican author Jacobo Greenberg zeiler Baum
included her in his multiple book series on Mexico's famous
indigenous healers called Chamanis de Mexico or in English, Shamans

(10:35):
of Mexico. Doctor Greenberg, in addition to being a prolific author,
was one of Mexico's most controversial neuroscientists. Meeting Pachita to
write his book series on Mexican Indigenous folk healing totally
changed his views on medicine, biology, healing, and psychology. Greenberg,

(10:57):
a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico also
known as UNAM, had professional interest in and was widely
published in the fields of the physiology of learning and memory,
physiological psychology, and visual perception. Doctor Greenberg spent several months
studying Pachita, traveling with her and meeting with her patients.

(11:21):
The UNAM professor was convinced that what Pachita had managed
to do was somehow combined two different types of realities
or fields to heal her patients. Greenberg theorized that the
brain creates and emanates what he called a neuronal field,
almost like a personal Wi Fi signal, that interacts with

(11:43):
the broader and larger source field, or what he called
a pre space structure. This source field or pre space
structure is a field that all times space, energy, matter, consciousness,
and biological life emanates from. In Greenberg's own words, these
are the rather technical conclusions he came to about the

(12:06):
interactions of the two fields from observing the elderly Mexican healer,
the pre space structure is a holographic, non local lattice
that has the attributes of consciousness. The neuronal field created
by the brain distorts this lattice and activates a partial

(12:27):
interpretation of it that is perceived as an image. Only
when the brain mind system is free from interpretations do
the neuronal field and the pre space structure become identical.
In this situation, the perception of reality is unitary, without
ego and with a lack of any duality. In this situation,

(12:51):
pure consciousness and a feeling of the all embracing unity
and luminosity is perceived. All the systems that spiritual leaders
have developed have had the goal of arriving at this
direct perception of the pure pre space structure. The science
of consciousness that I would like to develop is a

(13:11):
science that will try to understand, study, and research the
above mentioned ideas. Hakkobo Greenberg embarked on a series of
experiments to test out his theories on the mind source
interface that continued after Pachita's death and involved other human subjects.

(13:32):
In nineteen ninety four, Greenberg published his findings in the
prestigious peer reviewed scientific journal Physics Essays, in an article
titled the Einstein Podolski Rosen Paradox in the Brain the
transferred Potential. Soon after the article was published, doctor Hakkobo

(13:53):
Greenberg disappeared, and no one has seen or heard from
him since he uncovers something in his research that he
shouldn't have. Although considered by many throughout Mexico as a
folk saint, Pachita is not without her detractors even to
this day. Critics range from those who see her as

(14:15):
being merely misguided but with good intentions, to being an
outright fraudster and hoaxer. One American paranormal researcher, Johanna Michaelson,
even claimed that Pachita was harnessing unseen demonic forces in
her healings. The treatment that Pachita was most known for,

(14:36):
psychic surgery, has been branded as a medical fraud by
most legitimate medical authorities worldwide. The miraculous cures experienced by
Pachita's many thousands of patients may simply be chalked up
to the placebo effect, according to skeptics. Others, although wary

(14:56):
of her genuine healing talents, recognize pachita ability to harness
the mind, body connection and healing through her use of
talk therapy and basic psychoanalysis during her consultations. Whether a
fake or a gifted healer, Pachita continues to inspire wonder
and controversy to this day. Thank you once again for

(15:21):
listening to another episode of Mexico and Explained. Remember to
like and subscribe to us on YouTube and follow us
on Twitter. Tell your friends by sharing these shows with others.
Please go to our website Mexico and explain dot com
for references, illustrations, and for free access to transcripts of
past shows. Please visit Amazon dot com to purchase the

(15:41):
book Mexico on Explain to get your hard copy of
the Magic, the Mysteries and the Miracles of Mexico. We
appreciate your kind attention. Once again, until next time, Thank
you and gracias.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Thank you, but listening to another episode of Mexico Unexplained
with host Robert Bitto. For show summary, relevant links, and commentary.
Please check out our website at mexicoanexplained dot com, Like
us on Facebook and be a part of the conversation.
Addie arsand haste la vista