SORTING OUT THE FAKES FROM THE REAL SPOTTING CHARLATANS
Now I had to post this being in "the trade" so to speak, but before I even start on this article's views properly I want to point out something that really infuriated me, here the journalist who wrote this did not do his research, indeed IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO SAY YOU ARE A MEDIUM and you only have to look on the Internet and in every magazine to see "Mediums" advertised.
I would agree there are plenty of charlatans, fakes and frauds around, I have met a few in my time and some I might add who were supposedly spiritualist mediums. A genuine Medium does not guess nor ask questions or try and make things fit. A genuine Medium does not ask leading questions, nor listen in to a crowd nor read people's body language or take any heed of the tone of the recipients voice. A genuine Medium should be able to connect with the recipient's loved ones in spirit without any prompts what so ever. One of the most accurate and best ways to connect on a spiritual level is via instant chat messaging. I say this because, you have no physical contact, you cannot see one another, nor can you hear the recipient's voice. Nor can you conjour up a particular 'Spirit' i.e. the recipient's late mother, sister, brother etc. Spirit come forward for a reason. But by doing communications in this way, you are wholly dependent on your guides and the recipient's loved ones in spirit, you cannot cheat.
As a medium who has worked on platform myself, I would never start a spirit communication, with, "I have a Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever here". That could apply to over half the audience, but to always pick a recipient and deliver the message and give survival evidence i.e. proof I have who I say I have, by finding out what they passed over with, a full description of their appearance and their character and a memory perhaps a description of the recipient's home or the loved one's home, what they did for a living and some activity the recipient had been doing. I would be looking for concrete proof like a description of a particular photograph or what they had been reading or watching on TV to prove that their loved one was around, a name would not be enough. It is good survival evidence that weeds out the genuine mediums from the 'Fakes'.
Genuine Mediums trust spirit and if they are unable to obtain a good link with spirit too, they should have the courage to say so. Mediumship is not about party tricks or showmanship but a deep conviction to help others for that is the reason Spirit convey this gift. OK there is an argument why do psychics and mediums charge if they really want to help others, put it this way, you are not paying for their skill but their time, for if we dedicate our lives altruistically how can we work elsewhere, we still have to eat. What most people realise Mediumship takes a great deal of energy its extremely tiring and challenging for the medium to obtain a spirit link. would you go to work and do a tiring and demanding job for no recompense? I doubt it.
Coming back to this article, yes audiences can be fooled and it saddens me there are charlatans, frauds and showmen who parade themselves as mediums, but its like that in all aspects of life, there is good and there is bad. Hopefully you will now know what to look for and know that a genuine medium will give you survival evidence and not try and make things fit.
THE ARTICLE BELOW WAS WRITTEN BY PAUL ZENNON (A MAGICIAN BY THE WAY) WHO'S NO DOUBT WRITTEN THIS FOR THE DAILY MAIL FOR PUBLICITY FOR HIS BOOK. HOWEVER HE HAS NEGLECTED TO DO HIS RESEARCH AND ASSUMES EVERYONE IS TARRED BY THE SAME BRUSH AS HIM. JUST BECAUSE HE USES TRICKERY TO DECEIVE, HE NEEDS TO REALISE NOT ALL DO. IF HE WAS A PSYCHIC IN HIS 20'S HE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN A GOOD ONE SO RESORTED TO CHEATING, SHAME ON HIM
What a load of crystal balls! As Diana's former psychic is accused
of cheating on stage, a TV illusionist exposes how trickery can fool any
audience
Picture the scene. ‘I’m
getting a Derek, a Donald… no, it’s a David,’ the middle-aged woman on
the stage announces to ripples of excitement from the packed audience.
‘Does that mean anything to anyone? Does someone know a David who’s
passed recently?’
Nervously, an elderly woman in the stalls raises her hand. ‘My late husband was called David.’
Bingo! The psychic has found her target.
Di lie: Sally Morgan, once Princess Diana's psychic, is accused of misleading vulnerable people
She closes her eyes and sways a
little, hoping to give the firmest impression that’s she’s listening to
voices the rest of the audience cannot hear.
‘I
think your David is with us now,’ she announces, to gasps of
astonishment. ‘Did your David suffer from pain in his back?’ In the
stalls, the woman nods incredulously. ‘Did he pass recently?’ The woman
nods again.
‘Well, he
wants you know that all the pain has gone now, that he loves you very
much and that thing you’ve been worrying about... you’re not to worry
about it any more.’
As applause fills the auditorium, the elderly woman dabs away the tears.
On stage, the psychic gives a humble little bow of her head — so pleased to be of service — and moves on.
Trick of the light: Paul Zenon says rooting out information on people in the audience before a show is common practice
Now, something very like that happens
in most performances given by stage psychics — it has done for
centuries — and newspaper reports say that something along those lines
happened at a recent performance given in Dublin by Sally Morgan,
self-styled as ‘Britain’s best-loved psychic’ and reportedly the daily
confidante of Princess Diana.
But was Ms Morgan really addressing the spirit of dear, departed David?
A
member of the audience claims otherwise, saying that she could hear a
man’s voice relaying information, presumably via a microphone and hidden
earpiece — such as ‘David, pain in back, passed quickly’ — to the
psychic superstar on stage who, 10 seconds later, claimed to be talking
to the spirit of David.
The voice only stopped when it was heard by a theatre usher, who closed an internal window.
So
was Ms Morgan getting a little help from the real world rather than the
spirit world? While she insists absolutely not — *although it is still illegal in this country to claim to be a medium — having studied stage
psychics for years and been one myself in my 20s, I am sceptical.
Got your number: Magician Paul Zenon says psychics have been deceiving people for years
My own experience as a psychic,
manipulating audiences using various tricks, led me to become a
magician, which feels altogether more honest.
When
people come to see a magician, they know they are being deceived, be it
by sleight of hand, misdirection or technical ingenuity. But they’re
happy to be deceived because it’s skilful, entertaining and fun: people
are happy to suspend their disbelief. Unlike at shows such as Sally
Morgan’s, when the audience genuinely believe they are communing with
the dead.
‘Stage
psychics’ and mediums have propagated this myth for years, using various
techniques to overcome our natural disbelief in their so-called powers.
People tend to forget
that psychic shows are very big business. In some theatres you can get
audiences of 2,000 or more which, at £20 to £50 a ticket, generates a
huge amount of cash to be shared.
This money, the innocent audience believes, will be shared between the theatre and the single person they have come to see — the stage psychic who, of course, is there ‘to help’ the bereaved and the grieving.
Game's up: An audience member claims he heard a man's voice feeding information to Sally Morgan over a microphone
But what if the psychic is sharing some of his or her cash with others? What if he or she is employing unseen assistants?
These
days, most psychic performers have given up using ‘plants’ — people
they pay to pretend to be regular members of the audience — because it’s
too easy to be found out.
But
what if the plants aren’t actually seen in the show? What if they just
mingle with the audience, listening into conversation, only to sneak off
and relay the information backstage before the show begins?
Gullibly,
we believe the performance starts when the curtain goes up; in fact, it
probably got under way the moment you walked through the theatre door
and started to have a conversation with your friend, despite that chap
who was standing so close.
Pre-show
work, it’s called, and television audiences for these increasingly
popular shows are particularly vulnerable to it. Was that really an
audience research questionnaire you filled in before the show started,
or have you just made the performer’s job a whole lot easier?
The
same goes for anyone who’s paid by credit card at the theatre or whose
name appears on its mailing list. Armed with that sort of information, a
researcher could be examining your Facebook wall in seconds.
But
there’s nothing new about pre-show work. In the heyday of the
travelling show in America in the 19th century, members of the psychic’s
team would arrive in town the day before the rest of the show.
Keeping
a practised low profile, they’d wander through the cemeteries, looking
for newly-dug graves, seeing which one had fresh flowers on.
Combine
that with an afternoon spent at the town library looking at obituaries
in the local paper and huge amounts of information could be dug up to
dazzle the audience with when it was duly unveiled the next day.
Communications technology has been used by psychics for around a century.
Magic touch: Psychic Sally claims she spoke to Princess Diana every day for four years
Claude Alexander Conlin, the American
performer billed as ‘The Man Who Knows’, amassed an astonishing fortune
of $4.5million (£2.9million) in the second and third decade of the 20th
century, his ‘mentalist’ act enhanced by hidden microphones in the
ladies’ rest rooms connected to the primitive earpiece hidden under his
turban.
Hidden
microphones (now in mobile phones, pens or badges), earpieces and human
helpers are all still employed by psychic performers, but the biggest
research resource these days is, of course, the internet.
A
few months ago I was offered a piece of software that if you fed it a
name and a town — which psychics could have access to through ticket
sales — would give you an address, and the names of family members
(including the recently deceased) and neighbours.
Courtesy
of Google Earth and Street View, it could even give you full details of
their house, right down to the colour of the front door and the make
and model of their car.
It took about 30 seconds and cost around £5,000 a year, small change given the amount of money these performers rake in.
Body language: There are endless techniques
'psychics' like Sally can use to get information on people - but are any
of them the real deal?
However, despite these expensive
tricks, the very best psychics rely simply on their patter and presence —
their stage charisma, if you like — and two inter-related skills known
as ‘cold-reading’ and ‘fishing’.
Cold-reading
starts with examining your audience closely as your performance begins:
their clothes, hands, hair. It’s amazing what a skilled cold-reader can
learn just by looking at someone, such as their age, their marital
status and their social class.
Then
you take an even closer look. Who’s nudging their neighbour? Who’s
leaning forward? Whose jaw has just dropped at the mention of a name.
You’ve found a target.
Then the fishing starts.
‘Have
you lost someone you loved? Have they passed over to the other side?’
Now, that’s a silly question at a psychic show. The only reason people
go to such shows is because someone they loved has died and they’re
hoping for a message from them.
But
because the psychic has got the first question right, the audience
member starts to believe. Emotionally, they desperately want to believe,
so when the psychic runs through ‘Was it your mother, father, brother,
husband?’ the target hears only the right answer: everything else is
mentally edited out.
‘It was my brother Edward,’ they mumble, and from here, the skilled psychic performer is away.
It
can be vague — ‘You find it easy to make friends but you haven’t many
close friends. Am I right?’ But it can also seem very specific, with
questions designed to further win an audience’s trust. ‘Have you got a
scar on your left knee?’
You’ll
be amazed how often the answer is yes, and if it isn’t, they simply
move swiftly on. The audience barely notices and the psychic goes on
with the show — raking in pots of cash in the process.
And
it is the lucrative nature of this deceit which annoys professional
magicians like me. Stage psychics use very similar techniques to us —
their audiences are being deceived by the same means — but those
audiences don’t realise it and are parting with their money only because
they’re bereaved, lonely and at their lowest ebb.
So
if, Heaven forbid, performers like Ms Morgan aren’t actually talking to
the dead... then I think the public has a right to know.
- Paul
Zenon is a magician, paranormal sceptic and author of books about magic
and swindles, including Street Magic and 100 Ways To Win A Tenner.
* IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO CALL YOURSELF A MEDIUM IN THE UK
Maggie Brown (Author)
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