
Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has a gift - she can communicate with earthbound spirits or ghosts who cling to the living because they have unfinished business in our world preventing them from "crossing over."
Melinda navigates between the dead and the living with her sometimes chilling, heart-rending and amusing actions as an intermediary between the ghosts and those they haunt. Never publicizing her gift, she accepts her unique abilities as a blessing and sometimes curse, but always helps her clients, living or dead, find emotional closure.
Inspired in part by the work of famed medium James Van Praagh and of Mary Ann Winkowski, a real-life communicator with earthbound spirits, Ghost Whisperer explores the spiritual side of life and death.
While playing tennis with the new girl in school, Olivia, Ned witnesses a classmate of theirs, Diana, collapse during her lesson. Diana is rushed to the hospital with Ned and Olivia in tow, but doctors fail to revive her. There by coincidence, Melinda watches as Diana's spirit emerges and briefly follows a nurse around, and is surprised when the spirit leaves the hospital with Olivia's family instead of her own.
Jim and Melinda attend the festivities surrounding the second marriage of Jim's good friend Tricia, a young widow with a daughter, Natalie. The location for the wedding is Tricia's family's lake house, where she had spent her summers growing up. Once there, Natalie, who is still young enough to see ghosts, starts playing games with a young spirit who leads her to clues meant for Tricia.