Among the other unique features of the first-time “Haunted Histories and Mysteries of Port Townsend” event Nov. 1-2, jointly presented by the Port Townsend Main Street Program and the Jefferson County Historical Society, will be psychic readings by professional psychic medium Ankhasha Amenti.

Amenti has been certified as a research medium by the nonprofit Windbridge Research Center, and has worked professionally in the field for the past three decades, although she began studying up on psychic disciplines in earnest as early as the age of 12.

“It was just a natural fit for me,” said Amenti, who explained that the proper name for her specific gift is psychometry, the ability to sense truths about a person or a past event by touching inanimate objects closely associated with them.

Mari Mullen, executive director of the PT Main Street Program, contacted Amenti’s media representative for the “Haunted Histories and Mysteries” program after seeing Amenti at the annual Port Gamble Ghost Conference, where she was doing psychometric readings.

“It was like a haunted roadshow,” Amenti said with a laugh. “Someone would hand me an object like an old pocket watch, and I was able to tune in to its former owners, coming up with a name or a memory or a familial relation connecting to the object’s current owner.”

Amenti encouraged those who would bring objects to her for readings to choose objects that had a strong significance to the people they wish to learn more about, and to learn as much as they can about the history of the object in question.

“If they know very little about the object, then they can’t confirm my impressions,” Amenti said. “If they don’t know the object’s history of ownership, I might wind up connecting with a past owner who’s not the one they had in mind. I want to help narrow down the search.”

Amenti has conducted psychometric readings with keepsakes ranging from jewelry and glasses to hats and other items of clothing.

“I’ve had people bring in guitars and video games,” Amenti said. “It can be any personal object that was important to the person who has passed. In a lot of cases, people bring these objects to me because they feel there’s something strange about them, like something bad has happened that they were part of in their histories. Some people even think they’re haunted.”

Part of Amenti’s Windbridge certification, which is intended to weed out any potential frauds of cold-readers from the ranks of its research mediums, is that she makes no guarantee of pat answers.

“I’m not going to tell you, ‘Oh, I know your grandma loved you,’” Amenti said. “That would be very easy to say, but there’s no way I can know that.”

An example of the enigmatic nature of her psychic readings is when Amenti got an image from an object formerly owned by a young man who had passed recently, and she told the young man’s friend, who was her client, that the image was of zombies on a TV set.

“He asked me what it meant, and I admitted that I didn’t know,” Amenti said. “I was thinking my answer had made me lose him as a client. But when I went to the young man’s place, another of his friends answered the door, and he was wearing a shirt that had that same image of zombies on a TV set. It’s amazing how much more there is to this world than the mundane surface level of what we see.”

(To learn more about Amenti, visit ankhasha.com.)