Melinda Gordon (TUAU)

Melinda Irene Gordon is a young woman who can communicate with the earthbound spirits of the dead. She moved to Grandview after she married Jim Clancy, a paramedic who knows of her ability.

Apart from her husband Jim, Melinda shared her secret with quirky Professor Rick Payne, an expert in occult beliefs and history who thrives on helping her gain insights into the more baffling paranormal phenomena she encounters. Other individuals who are aware of her gift include Andrea Marino (her deceased best friend and business partner), Delia Banks (Melinda's best friend) and her son, Ned Banks, RU psychology professor Eli James, as well as all the relatives or friends of ghosts she has helped.

History
Melinda and Jim move to the small town of Grandview where Melinda opens a small antique shop, named "The Same As It Never Was ANTIQUES". She becomes friends with Andrea Marino, who comes to share management responsibilities of the store. Eventually, Melinda gains enough trust in Andrea to tell her about her ability.

In Episode 5 of Season 1, "The Lost Boys", Melinda helps three young boys to cross over into the light from an orphanage, where the young boys die. One boy, Vic, tells Melinda before they crossed over, that he will tell everyone on the other side that Mel is his mom, making Vic her unofficial adoptive son.

In the later part of the season, Melinda begins encountering a malevolent spirit (Romano) that wears a black hat while trying to "cross over" earthbound spirits.

In the season finale, a plane crashes in Grandview. Romano uses the massive death count to his advantage, "keeping" the souls that Melinda is unable to cross over, one of whom was Andrea, who died in the crash.

Powers and Abilities
Melinda is at least a sixth-generation medium on her mother's side; her great-great-great-grandmother, Tessa, her grandmother, and her mother are also ghost whisperers. It is also later revealed that her biological father had the same ability, although it is unknown how common it was in his family and the ability was only mentioned once.

Powers

 * Mediumship: Melinda can perceive and communicate with earthbound spirits and other's astral projections. She can also perceive the spirits of those who are having an out-of-body experience because they are near-death or comatose. While zombie speech patterns are unintelligible to ordinary humans, Melinda's power allow her to understand them. Melinda's power as a medium is shown to be stronger than most other supernatural creatures, as she could see several spirits that the Charmed Ones could not, and project some spirits (e.g. Andy's and Patience) onto the physical plane for non-supernatural humans, such as Darryl Morris, to see. Melinda can summon a spirit just by thinking of said individual although she needs to have some sort of connection to the ghost in question when they were alive (i.e. a personal relationship or a physical keepsake). However, it has been demonstrated that being around someone connected to the ghost she seeks can be enough to contact a spirit if Melinda had no interaction with them in life or cannot find a physical object tethered to them.
 * Spiritual Empathy: According to her grandmother, Melinda will be able to feel the emotions of spirits. Initially, Melinda had a hard time telling the living from the dead, but with practice grew adept at differentiating between the two.
 * Retrocognitive Dreams: Melinda has retrocognitive abilities, which manifest themselves in her dreams, enabling her to perceive past events which she has not personally witnessed. To recieve such visions of the past, Melinda must make a bond with the person she wants to examine, either by asking a series of personal questions (if the person is available and willing to answer) or by learning as much as she can about the individual (this can be done by reading stories, listening to gossip, examining paintings depicting that person, etc.). Also, it is stated that her dreams are confusing and often open to interpretation. Melinda's retrocognitive power developed to the point at which she could see images of past events even when conscious.
 * Psychometry: According to Professor Rick Payne, Melinda displayed psychometry — when touching certain objects, she sometimes gets visions or flashes from the past surrounding said object.
 * Dream-Self Projection:  With intensive practice, Melinda developed the ability to place herself in a trance-like state while remaining fully conscious. While she is in this trance, she can project an intangible, ghostlike image of herself to another location, through which she can see and hear what goes on at that location. What Melinda has called the "dreams" she has while in this state are not truly dreams, but her conscious awareness of the environment into which she has projected her "dream-self." It is not yet known how far Melinda can project her "dream-self" away from hef physical body, but she has projected it to a rain forest while her physical body was in Grandview. In a freak occurrence, Melinda was able to project her consciousness inside a virtual reality to embody a game avatar so as to communicate with a ghost who haunted that online chat game.

Weaknesses

 * Mortality: Despite her psychic abilities, Melinda is still human and share many of the same weaknesses as non-supernatural beings (e.g. age, decapitation, disease, heart-failure, suffocation, etc.).
 * Magic: Melinda is susceptible to the powers of magic. This is inclusive of mystical objects such as Papa Tunde's Blade, and Dark Objects.