Joseph Tittel is opening a portal between the living and the dead.

About 30 people have paid Tittel $45 each in the hopes of hearing from their dearly departed.

And Tittel, a rising local medium, self-taught and unpolished, but gaining droves of followers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, is the pipeline.

"I have a passing with lung cancer . . . I think from the back of the room," intones Tittel, 37, who resembles Ricky Schroder with thicker eyebrows.

He homes in on a trio of sisters sitting together in the last row: "Somebody is pregnant and don't even know they are."

He gestures at one of the women. "You might want to get a test, because if you're not pregnant you will be by the end of the month.

"Who is missing the tip of her finger?" he asks, switching subjects abruptly.

"My great-grandmother was missing the tips of all her fingers," the astonished woman says.

He clutches a purple crystal in one hand and a white one in the other, squeezing them, as he says, to keep himself "grounded."

So it continues throughout the afternoon on Memorial Day weekend as Tittel mixes what sounds a lot like clever guesswork with startling details.

"That lawnmower you're thinking about buying - Dad says, 'Go to Sears,' " Tittel instructs a woman.

"Your brother is driving me nuts," he complains to one elderly man about his departed sibling. "He will not shut up."

When Tittel dry-gulches with one of the crowd, all his suggestions meeting with either denial or bafflement, he blows past it, almost as if annoyed. "Just write it down," he says brusquely. "It'll make sense later."

At the end, half the room leaves without having had the opportunity to make a connection. Tittel had warned the crowd beforehand that he cannot control what comes through. But those who do get a reading seem impressed.

"Stunningly accurate," says Lori Juillerat of Lambertville. "The only thing he said that I couldn't figure out was who Buddy the dog was. Everything else, he hit the nail on the head. He got the names of all my relatives, my father's name, and how he died.

"I've had a light that dims and brightens," she continues. "I've been blaming it on an old house. But Joseph brought it up and said my father's been doing that constantly."

It's difficult for Tittel to explain exactly how information from the other side gets transmitted.

"Mostly when I see things, it's with the mind's eye," he says. "I see it but not like I see you. I get a lot of pictures. The spirits have installed a whole dictionary in my head. Certain things they show me mean certain things. My favorite is [a can of] Maxwell House coffee which has nothing to do with coffee. It's the name Max, but that's what they have me trained on."