Scott, Kiersten, Natalie and Grace Hathcock look like the quintessential all-American family of four. However, after 25 years of marriage (they just celebrated their 25th anniversary) they can attest that their life journey has been filled with twists and turns that no one could have predicted nor expected.
Kiersten Parsons Hathcock is the vice president of marketing for Moonshot. She is a self-taught carpenter and furniture designer who defied the odds and built an internationally known furniture company out of her garage, joking that she is a “Mom with a toolbelt.” She has appeared on the television show, “Shark Tank,” winning a deal with Robert Herjavec that never came to fruition.
At the age of 36, she suddenly started seeing and hearing spirits of dead children, some of whom were killed by predators. Her intuitive awakening led her to partner with detectives around the country and a publishing deal for her soon-to-be released memoir, “Little Voices: How Kids in Spirit Helped a Reluctant Medium Escape and Heal from Abuse,” which will be out on September 20. But what Kiersten didn’t know at the time is the kids weren’t just coming to her for help — they were coming to save her life.
Kiersten and Scott’s story began as a normal boy-meets-girl in Charlotte, NC, in December of 1995. Scott said the minute he met Kiersten, he knew that he wanted to marry her. Four months later, they were engaged. In 1997, they married. Scott was 23 and Kiersten was 21. Their life began as a whirlwind, immediately upon returning from their honeymoon. Scott was hired by HBO, and they moved to Birmingham, Alabama. In 1998, their son Noah was born and four years later in 2002, they welcomed their second child, Grace.
Their careers in media took them all around the country, from Birmingham to Chicago and then to Los Angeles. As a young couple, they struggled with making ends meet, working in a volatile industry and raising a family. Kiersten was juggling the typical work-family-life balance. Scott was hired by E Television Networks. “I never had any aspirations to be an entrepreneur. I was literally trying to figure out how I can make money from home that was steady,” Kiersten said. “I nannied for a little while, I did contract marketing work, but it wasn’t steady enough. It was about how to find work and pay the gas bill.”
One day, Kiersten began searching for toy boxes, which was easier said than done. She wanted something that didn’t look like a toy box and that had a mid-century modern vibe. “We wanted something that looks like it could fit in any room. I thought, maybe I could design something. I just Googled everything — how do you construct wood? How do you measure it? How do you join half-inch plywood? Everything I did was research-based,” Kiersten said. “My dad used to build a lot of our furniture when I was a kid in Ohio because we didn’t have a lot of money. They were both teachers and he was a football coach. Although we were building completely different types of furniture — he was building traditional furniture in oak, and I was building modern plywood furniture. It took me about a year to figure it out.”
Scott says that they would spend their date nights in the middle of the living room with eight toy boxes. “I was allowed to help polyurethane and I was glad about that because I didn’t want to mess it up. This was her process. This was her thing. I would just help polyurethane, you know, clear, eco-friendly polyurethane— water-based polyurethane support,” he joked.
Building toy boxes was one thing, but the best part — they both agreed — was delivering them. They brought the toy boxes to fashion icon Rachel Zoe, actress Christina Applegate and actor Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila.
Living life in the middle of the Disney hub, as Scott describes it, took its toll on the family. His daughter Grace was in the third grade and many of her friends were auditioning constantly, with a lot of body shaming happening. It was then that they decided it was time to move the family to live in a normal environment. In 2012, the Hathcocks moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. “It was a complete turnaround, having to reinvent my career which eventually led to Moonshot,” he said. [Scott is the president and CEO of Moonshot, Arizona.] “And then there’s a lot of family stuff that happens obviously in between all this, but neither one of us saw this, even if we tried to connect the dots. We would never have imagined running a nonprofit to help entrepreneurs. But as it kept unfolding, it just made sense.” [See page ….. for the full story about Moonshot].
“At the end of 2013, I had already been going through my intuitive awakening that began in 2009,” Kiersten said. During the time period of “Shark Tank,” I was already starting to hear from kids in spirit. I was starting to recognize this is real. I was starting to work with cops around the country, just very quietly. But it was in 2013 that I started to have visions of myself being sexually abused, and I started to connect the dots that, oh my God, a lot of these kids who have come to me in spirit were killed by predators. Now I know why because I am in a club. I just didn’t perish. And so that’s why they feel comfortable coming to me to give me messages to pass on to their parents or to law enforcement.
So, I started to have this revelation. I was raped by my uncle between the ages of three and six. I was abused and I think it was around the age of five that I completely repressed all of that until my subconscious started to leak that out. So, in true Kiersten fashion, I thought, ‘Oh, I got this. I’m going to go to therapy. I’m good.’”
Kiersten said that the career moves and work layoffs took a toll on them and she didn’t understand how that was going to affect their marriage. “Everyone used to look at us and say, ‘Oh, you guys are the perfect couple.’ It’s kind of hard because underneath I wouldn’t admit it, but I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m not sure if I feel that way.’ So, cut to basically our world imploding because I ended up meeting this man who happened to be, looking back now, identical to my uncle. So, in psychology, there’s a theory of wounded attachment, which means that if you’ve been abused as a child, you will tend to recreate that same trauma in a different way in order to heal and you’re subconsciously attracted to that type of energy. It was a perfect storm,” Kiersten said.
She entered a three-year relationship with a man who she later found out was abusive and a predator. Kiersten says that he had done this type of thing to hundreds of women around the world. “That’s when I started getting all the messages [from the children] and that’s when I started to finally heal, from that subconscious wounding that had been driving me my whole life, the perfectionism, the people-pleasing. All that stuff,” she said.
“When we moved to Flagstaff, all this happened, and to me, it was just a shock because it seems so uncharacteristic of Kiersten,” Scott said. “But almost immediately upon her doing this, I had this weird, intuitive hit that said, we’re not done and that we’ll get married again at some point. And I just had this vision of that happening. In fact, it was so strong that I thought it was from a movie and I kept trying to find the movie where the scene was happening in my mind, and I couldn’t find it.”
Scott says he felt that Kiersten was on her own journey and that he had to allow for that. He believed that he was a good husband and father. He was prepared to wait it out even though he didn’t know how long it was going to take. “It was tough to watch. But we still had the connection of our children, obviously,” Scott said. “But the funniest thing is that we had separation papers. I carried them in my briefcase, and she carried them in hers. And we never signed them. We never filed them. We never did anything with it.”
“As intuitive as I was, and I’m working with cops on murder cases, getting a ton of validation on what I’m pulling in, I didn’t see the predator in my midst,” Kiersten said. “Going back to the spiritual side, the kids in spirit were the ones that actually helped. They were the ones saying, ‘Get the restraining order now.’ I was dealing with a sociopath, and I had not dealt with that in my life.”
Kiersten and Scott did get back together and saved their marriage. In addition, Kiersten had to heal the relationship with her children. “I remember one night I sat there, and Scott wasn’t home, which allowed them to talk more freely. Both talked for about an hour and a half. And I just sat and said, I know I’m so sorry. I am sorry. I wish I could have done this differently. I am so sorry I put you through this. I can’t believe that I brought that predator into your lives,” she said.
As they were putting their family life back together, their son Noah came out as transgender. “I felt like that was divinely timed, because she came out after we got back together. I can’t imagine her going through that and us not being together in the same house,” Kiersten said. “They saw us fight for each other. They saw what wounds of childhood abuse can do. We weren’t presenting some fairy tale, we were saying this does take work.”
Kiersten and Scott both talk about Noah’s anxiety and depression as a child. During the family’s reunion, Noah, who was then 19, spoke to his parents about gender dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is described as distress, unhappiness and anxiety that transgender people may feel about the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identity. “When she told us about going through gender dysphoria, Noah, who now goes by Natalie [Nat], said, ‘I want to do this now. I don’t want to do this when I am married with kids, and I’m in my 40s,” Kiersten said. “I think she’s one of the bravest people I will ever know. And I adore her. I think she’s absolutely one of the oldest souls on the planet. I think that transgender folks feel like their souls come into this life, to teach us to have more love, self-love, compassion for others. They’re helping us move forward as a collective consciousness and she’s phenomenal.”
Nat is now 23 and works as an illustrator. Her sister Grace Noelle is 19, and is a singer/songwriter. Grace opened for Andy Grammer when she was 16 and plays her music at coffee shops, restaurants, festivals, corporate events and online music shows. She was nominated for an Emerging Artist award in Flagstaff. “I will say what’s been really encouraging is that our youngest daughter, Grace, is equally freaking awesome. When Nat came out to all of us, Grace was like, ‘Awesome, I got a sister,’” Kiersten said.
“Unfortunately, so many transgender people are kicked out of their homes, and there’s severe consequences,” Kiersten said. “Our response was, we don’t know much about this, but we’re going to learn and we’re going to support you like crazy. We love you. And whatever you need, we’re here for you. Nat has come to us a couple times and said, ‘Thank you so much for being those parents.’”
Kiersten believes that the message in all of this is a roadmap for life. “I’m an ordinary person. And that is the thing about this journey. I was not a medium that really knew any of this stuff. I don’t have any memory of channeling from the time when I was a kid. All of this was so new. I didn’t believe in any of it,” Kiersten said. “Yet, it was the power of my intuition that saved me from a predator. It saved me in multiple ways. I’m hoping it’s going to help people understand that intuition is real, and you can trust it. And it’s a roadmap if you trust it. It’s a roadmap for life. It’s about the power of love.”
Mark Pucci, a retired NYPD Detective who has worked closely with Kiersten in solving many cases, wrote, “What I love about Kiersten — as is illustrated in her book — is that she’s just a regular person thrown into supernatural experiences. Unbeknownst to her at that time, those experiences had meaning far beyond what she could see. The belief in what we can’t see, especially as a detective looking for quantifiable, tangible evidence, is extremely difficult. However, Kiersten makes it easy to believe. In her moving story, we see that she is just like most of us — extremely logical and fact-driven. The most amazing part of her journey is that she wasn’t looking for any of what has happened to her … it simply found her.”
To learn more about Kiersten Parsons Hathcock and her book, visit www.kierstenparsonshathchock.com. For more information on Moonshot, visit www.moonshotaz.com.
