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Genuine Mediums and the like

Cultjunky

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Jan 26, 2009
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Well, I've taken PMs advice and started the thread about the time a medium/psychic predicted something that came true.

Many moons ago, myself and a few mates had a psychic evening, where a card reader came round to the house and read the cards for all five of us during the course of the evening.

I'm not normally fussed about this sort of thing, I really don't put much stock in it, but my arm was twisted to participate, plus, it worked out cheaper than a night out in Queens Court!

On the night, we had a few bottles of wine and some nibbles, the card reader turned up and chatted with us all in the living room for about half an hour, explaining what she was going to do, told us a little about herself and really didn't ask any questions about us. A couple of times she even stopped a conversation saying she didn't want to know about how we knew each other and the like.

For some strange reason, I was bricking it, so I asked to go second to last, hoping that having spoken to someone who had already had a go would calm my nerves. We each took it in turns to go off into the kitchen and have our cards read. As each of the first three came out, there were smiles and and excitement, new loves, job offers and such being the most common theme to come up. The one thing everyone had in common though was that they felt she didn't speak as she had when we were all in the living room, but more in a very similar manner to how each of us would speak, using favourite phrases and such. Now the first person coming out said that, but was saying it all while the second person was having their turn, so it wasn't until the third person went in that the manner in which she spoke was raised and discussed.

When it came to my turn, I went into the kitchen and she just smiled at me and said sit down it won't hurt or something similar. She used what appeared to be an ordinary set of playing cards, they were well worn and curled. Then she laid out some spread of cards and turned them over one at a time. She very accurately detailed my current situation. Then she laid out a different spread and, I'm not kidding you, almost every card was a black card. Now that made my arse nip! She went on to explain how there was going to be a very bleak period for me because of X, Y, and Z. Then she tried about four different spreads trying to get some positive news for me. Finally, she said I would be taking a trip over seas. I told her I was planning on a holiday to Malta, but she said 'No, much further than that'.

I left the reading almost in tears, as it was all bad news, about my home, my relationship, my family, the lot. Just this one ray of sunshine regarding a long trip. She did speak to me in a manner that I would speak to my friends, it seems to mean so little when written down, but honestly, it was significant.

Well over the next few months, the bleak period did descend, because of X, Y, and Z. The bad news about my home came true - the redecorating I began had to be stopped because once I removed the wall paper, half a wall came down with it! My relationship turned sour, but it doesn't take a psychic to predict that a relationship with someone who is married isn't going to work - so I don't know how much credence to give that revelation. The family prediction also came true, though many years later, although she didn't place it in a time frame. And I did get that trip further than Malta, I went to live in the Good 'ol US of A, down in cotton country. Had X, Y, and Z not happened, I'd have never met someone who would help put me on the path to the long trip.

She gets a 9/10 from me for accuracy.
 
Thank's for starting the new thread. I was looking for ideas to start it myself as the criticism was aimed at me.

I'm glad you had a positive outcome to your reading. I usually use Angel Cards or my pack of Alchemy Cards for reading requests and I've had no complaints thus far, just the opposite.
There are never any negative readings from Angel cards for reasons too involved to discuss on a short thread, although the Alchemy Cards have given a wake-up call to one or two persons I can think of.

There is sometimes a time factor, where the outcome is delayed. My wife and myself have experienced this recently needing to find a new house and not being able to buy one. The cards have been predicting a positive outcome for some time and now we have it. Moving in November.
:D
 
Ghostisfort said:
There is sometimes a time factor, where the outcome is delayed. My wife and myself have experienced this recently needing to find a new house and not being able to buy one. The cards have been predicting a positive outcome for some time and now we have it. Moving in November.
:D

You needed a new house. If the cards had predicted "nope, it's not going to happen" would you have stopped looking for one? You'd have eventually found a house to suit your needs whatever the cards said.
 
Cultjunky said:
>snip<

When it came to my turn, I went into the kitchen and she just smiled at me and said sit down it won't hurt or something similar. She used what appeared to be an ordinary set of playing cards, they were well worn and curled. Then she laid out some spread of cards and turned them over one at a time. She very accurately detailed my current situation.>snip<

Possibly because she'd already spent some time with you all and spoken to several of your friends individually before you. She would have been able to glean quite a lot of information from that.


>snip< She went on to explain how there was going to be a very bleak period for me because of X, Y, and Z. Then she tried about four different spreads trying to get some positive news for me. Finally, she said I would be taking a trip over seas. I told her I was planning on a holiday to Malta, but she said 'No, much further than that'...

...>snip< And I did get that trip further than Malta, I went to live in the Good 'ol US of A, down in cotton country. Had X, Y, and Z not happened, I'd have never met someone who would help put me on the path to the long trip.

She gets a 9/10 from me for accuracy.

According to the earlier paragraph there were 4 different spreads between the XYZ bit and the Travel bit - nothing that said they would be connected.

And "a trip far abroad at some point in the future" is probably a good bet for whoever your Medium is reading for.


IMO: Genuine Mediums = Oxymoron
 
Hmmm.......isn't it just abit negative, Eyepod, to jump in and tear someone's experiences to pieces, when the thread has only just been started?

I'm a member of my local Spiritualist church.
I've admitted as much before on this board, but I don't say much about it , because I know my imput will be torn to shreds by the very vocal resident sceptics.

I've occasionally had mediums give me "messages" that I'm sure were for real.There may be be some odd little mention of a name or personal detail or experience, that acts as verification. It hasn't happened very often, but when it does, it's brilliant!

I've also experienced a medium picking up on my own thoughts or phrases, almost like telepathy, although mediums fiercely deny being "mind readers".

It would be a great shame if posters are put off from contributing to what could be a very positive and entertaining thread, due to the knowledge that their experiences were about to be chewed up and spat out!
 
Sorry, I thought that was the Fortean Times message board, not the Let's Accept Everything Without Question message board.


ETA: My opinion of mediums/fortune tellers was formed by years of watching my mum spend her hard-earned on them.
 
This is the Fortean Times Message Board and as such there are usually a wide variety of viewpoints on display.

I've had some interesting results with a tarot deck. A bit like water divining, only with the future.
 
eyepod
You needed a new house. If the cards had predicted "nope, it's not going to happen" would you have stopped looking for one? You'd have eventually found a house to suit your needs whatever the cards said.
Hi!
I don't seem to have come across the Grim Reaper before.
You certainly have jumped in with both feet.
I think it's customary to ask a few questions before arriving at a verdict?
But, of course the court of scepticism has preconceived ideas.

The reason we asked about the house was because we didn't have the money to buy one and I think this puts an altogether different slant on the outcome.
If the cards had said "nope", we would not have pursued a seemingly impossible course. :)
 
eyepod said:
Cultjunky said:
>snip<

When it came to my turn, I went into the kitchen and she just smiled at me and said sit down it won't hurt or something similar. She used what appeared to be an ordinary set of playing cards, they were well worn and curled. Then she laid out some spread of cards and turned them over one at a time. She very accurately detailed my current situation.>snip<

Possibly because she'd already spent some time with you all and spoken to several of your friends individually before you. She would have been able to glean quite a lot of information from that.

OUCH!

All she really got out of me when we were all in the living room was my name and a preference for red wine. We all arrived before her, however, she told me I lived very close to the house we were in. There was no way of her knowing if anyone drove or got a cab. Now, seeing me drinking might have suggested that I wasn't driving, that night at least, but she actually asked me why I was scared to drive. I suppose it is possible that the three people before me might have told her I was very nervous, but I trust that they didn't, as I can't think of any reason why my fear of driving would come up. I'll admit that one of the guys was an overly obvious puff, so she might have surmised that we were all queer, although that wasn't the case. Equally, there was one woman in the group that a couple of us hadn't met, as she was a new work colleague, so I'm not sure how much info she could have revealed about me.


>snip< She went on to explain how there was going to be a very bleak period for me because of X, Y, and Z. Then she tried about four different spreads trying to get some positive news for me. Finally, she said I would be taking a trip over seas. I told her I was planning on a holiday to Malta, but she said 'No, much further than that'...

...>snip< And I did get that trip further than Malta, I went to live in the Good 'ol US of A, down in cotton country. Had X, Y, and Z not happened, I'd have never met someone who would help put me on the path to the long trip.

She gets a 9/10 from me for accuracy.

According to the earlier paragraph there were 4 different spreads between the XYZ bit and the Travel bit - nothing that said they would be connected.

True, she never said X, Y and Z were connected to the trip, but they were explicitly personal things, not generalisations. I'd explain them but then I would have to borrow your scyth.

And "a trip far abroad at some point in the future" is probably a good bet for whoever your Medium is reading for.

I would concede that, had not X, Y, and Z been so devastating that a trip further than Argate (at the bottom of Argarden) would seem impossible.


IMO: Genuine Mediums = Oxymoron
:)
 
Recycled1 said:
Hmmm.......isn't it just abit negative, Eyepod, to jump in and tear someone's experiences to pieces, when the thread has only just been started?

I'm a member of my local Spiritualist church.
I've admitted as much before on this board, but I don't say much about it , because I know my input will be torn to shreds by the very vocal resident sceptics.

It is in the nature of the sceptic to attempt to tear apart anything that does not fit into their narrow world view.
I used to sit and watch TV with the kids and I must have seen most of the episodes of Scooby-Doo, so I know what I'm talking about.

This is an FT forum and as such you are entitled to give your views without harassment. I, for one, would certainly like to hear about your Spiritualist experience.
Some time ago, I used to exchange regular threads with a Spiritualist lady on a different forum. In fact, I think it was thanks to her that I was able to do my Jupiter viewing that I've recently written about on the Parapsychology/Out of Body Experiences thread.

I would like to point out to the uninitiated on the forum, that such experiences and the use of mantic tools such as cards are not difficult to achieve. That is, if you are prepared to put scepticism on hold.
 
I think one of the problems with this kind of thread is that a poster has to try to explain why a certain thing is accurate, whilst not wanting to give away any personal details. That then makes is easy to pick holes in it, or for it to seem somewhat diluted compared to the actual event.

I suppose several posters could just post "I saw a medium and what was said came true", and we would all have to accept that and respect their privacy. Equally, I think it's fair for posters to question the validity of any statement, point out flaws or in the case of this thread, why the poster might have been duped.

However, I wonder if I should have started the thread in the IHTM section of the board, as I had hoped that the thread would be an opportunity for posters to share their experience of what they believe to be genuine/accurate mediumship/fortune telling occurance, as we already have a 'debunk the medium type thread' right here

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19653



Perhaps a mod could move the thread into the IHTM section?

I might not have been offended by Eyepod, as I'm confident in my belief that I had a genuine experience, but clearly it sets a tone for the thread that some folks might find intimidating to post on. So let's link pinks and make a carin' sharin' circle before the petty point scoring begins. Alternatively, read the siggie. :lol:
 
Moved to IHTM.

P_M

I lodged with a spiritualist family for a time and attended their church, as a sceptical, 'I want to believe', observer. There is certainly something interesting going on. Often, the most convincing messages were of a highly personal and intimate nature, making sense and having significance, only to the recipient. Often the more apparently trivial, the more significance for the recipient. Curious stuff.
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
I lodged with a spiritualist family for a time and attended their church, as a sceptical, 'I want to believe', observer. There is certainly something interesting going on. Often, the most convincing messages were of a highly personal and intimate nature, making sense and having significance, only to the recipient. Often the more apparently trivial, the more significance for the recipient. Curious stuff.
True. I told elsewhere on this MB how a medium said she could see me recently 'looking at a red flower'. At first I couldn't connect this with anything I'd done, but eventually the incident popped into my mind. And the significance of it, to me, was the exact shade of red...

Trivial? Not to me.
 
I tried a search for my original 'red flower' post, and was amazed to find it's still here:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 5182#15182

The search did turn up some other interesting old threads along the way, which was nice! Here's one of my posts that I'd forgotten about:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 886#205886

There was another spiritualist church experience I had - I'm not sure if I posted it here before, but it's not here now. From memory:

The medium was going round the room with messages for some of the people in the usual way. She spoke to the woman seated in front of me: "I have a young man here. He died tragically young. He was interested in sailing..."

Now the recipient of this information seemed puzzled by all this, but I used to know a young man like that - I'll call him B. He worked in a chandlery, and he'd been sailing with me and other friends. B died, aged about 20, during an operation to fix a long-standing heart defect...

Then the medium said, "No, madam, sorry, the young man's not here for you - the message is for the gentleman behind you.." Now this got me quite spooked, so I denied any knowledge of the young man, something I've regretted ever since. Who knows what else I might have heard?

Now I wasn't particularly close to B; he was part of a group who I hung about with, and he was about 10 years younger than me. His death was at least fifteen years before the medium's reading, so he was hardly in my thoughts very often.

So, just coincidence? A random reading thrown out into the room, and then the medium changed her target because she spotted some slight sign of recognition from me?

Who knows..?
 
For a while my mother and some of her friends were on a psychic/medium kick, having readings done, etc. I think I had my palms read several times, all with differing opinions, different numbers of children in my future, etc. My mother and her friends also tried out different methods of reading, and somewhere along the line one of them was supposed to be uncannily good at it.
She actually started taking money at bars for it, from what I understand.

She told me once, pretty much point blank and out if the blue, that she could see me married to some Asian business man in the future. My mom didn't really like that idea all that much - with the last of the Japan is stealing our jobs and buying up the country hysteria of the 80s and early 90s still in full swing...

I would have probably forgotten all about it except that my husband *did* end up being an Asian business man. :D 20 years after the fact, she contacted me to tell me she had been spot on with the prediction. :shock:

I have no idea how accurate anything else she predicted was, but if it was anything like that one she should have been famous. I wasn't even slightly interested in Asia at the time... Too bad she ended up drifting into heavy drugs and screwing her entire life up.
 
Are you sure you didn;t do it unconsciously just to flip her off?

I don;t mean that in a judgemental way, only my stepfather utterly hated the germans and for really quite a long time, until i picked up on what i was doing, i absolutely could not resist german men. :lol: he also hated the japanese and i love jap stuff, although so do a lot of geeky people so maybe there is less in that.

She kind of did have a win-win for herself there, predicting something she didn;t want, like she got what she wanted if it didn;t happen, but got bragging rights on the prediction if it did?
 
I've also experienced a medium picking up on my own thoughts or phrases, almost like telepathy, although mediums fiercely deny being "mind readers".

I've experienced that too with some charismatic christians i used to know, it quite freaked me for a while, until i got into thinking about how few actually original or unpredictable things a person can actually think in a given situation.

Just because the situation is new for you and you didn;t know what you were going to think, it doesn;t mean the other person hasn't been there before, they can make a pretty tight guess.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Are you sure you didn;t do it unconsciously just to flip her off?

I highly doubt it, as she didn`t care *that* much. She certainly wasn`t someone who hated Japan or Japanese. It was more "Oh, well, that`s great. They`ll buy up the country and then my daughter too." sort of thing. She isn`t what I would really call a strong racist in any way - and she certainly didn`t give a crap when I did get married.
If she`d been very vocal about that sort of thing all along I can see that, but I didn`t even live with her for most of the time. If anything, she was very into "exotic" men, but it was a matter of "Asians have small dicks, so I`m not interested!"

She kind of did have a win-win for herself there, predicting something she didn;t want, like she got what she wanted if it didn;t happen, but got bragging rights on the prediction if it did?

I guess I wasn`t really clear - it wasn`t my mother that made the prediction. It was her friend.

Of course, after I did get married, my mother was full of praise for the old prediction. At the time I think it was a roll-the-eyes sort of thing.
 
That isn't quite what I meant, Black River. ("Picking up thoughts".)

I'm thinking of a couple of examples where, in an ordinary Spiritualist church service, the medium on the platform has told me something that SHE (usually a "she"!) thought was a message from the other side, but that I myself recognised as my OWN thought.

It's similar to the the case of Matthew Manning the healer, who eventually realised that the diagnosis he was giving a patient, tuned out to be what the patient himself THOUGHT was wrong.

There are all sorts of variations in sensitivity / communication to be considered. Nothing is really plain black or white!
 
Ghostisfort said:
It is in the nature of the sceptic to attempt to tear apart anything that does not fit into their narrow world view.

How would you know what my world view is? Did a clairvoyant tell you?

I am actually one of those people who WANTS to believe there's something after life, USED TO believe, but the older I get the more I believe that this right here is all we get.
 
Hi all - I have indeed had a very 'real' experience with a well know TV medium.

I went with 2 friends for a bit of a laugh, although one of my friends did want to receive a 'message' about a relative...

The medium came on stage and explained a little bit about herself and her history, then mentioned that 'someone' had followed her down here and was very insistent, she then walked near where we were and said she thought it was for someone in this area...

This person didn't do the typical someone with a B no a C type of stuff she was very accurate and didn't ask the audience questions as such just passed on messages...

My friends and I were not giggling anymore, can't explain the feeling accurately, we were just rivited to what was going on!

She then said she had somebody here (said name of my relative) who was looking for a (my name) or (name wasn't clear)
Without giving too much personal information away she said how this person had died (not usual) and this person was very insistant , I was frozen to the spot with shock and didn't respond, my friends were just staring at me...
She kept repeating that he was insistant, in the end I put my hand up and all I said was 'I think it is my (relative)' I said nothing else but she accurately described my relative the manner of death and other facts without any input from me.....
I just cannot explain this to myself, It did give me comfort, and my friends were amazed...
Sorry I am rambling, please ask questions etc....!
 
eyepod said:
I am actually one of those people who WANTS to believe there's something after life, USED TO believe, but the older I get the more I believe that this right here is all we get.

Eyepod, have you ever tried using a ouija board? I've just been hunting down a post I made back in 2003.
(I was "MsT" then, not Recycled 1) -page 10 of "Ouija Boards" In Esoterica, 7 up from bottom. (Sorry I don't know how to link).

If ever I'm tempted to think that there's "nothing more to come", I remember the words "Do not vex me"! It just wasn't the language of a 15 year old in the 1960's!
 
Recycled1 said:
(Sorry I don't know how to link).
Top left of each post is a document icon (next to 'Posted'): right-click that, then select Copy Shortcut. Job done! 8)
 
Could indeed be some sort of mind reading or similar, just couldn't explain it rationally....(answers own post - have been a member for a very long time and have posted before, but had to re-register for some reason.....)
 
My problem with even the best mediums is that nowadays there's a new generation of magicians doing exactly what they do, and just as well, but with no claims to special powers. Derren Brown started it off, and there are now performers taking his cue.

Of course, these magicians are just as reluctant to reveal their secrets, so it still looks all mysterious.
 
When my sister was in her early twenties, she and her then boyfriend (now her husband) and two of their friends were in a pub in London and this woman came in and sat with them and said she could predict what astrological star signs each of them were by my sister, her partner and friends describing their parents. They did this. The astrologer got each star sign completely correct. They were really freaked out.
 
gncxx said:
My problem with even the best mediums is that nowadays there's a new generation of magicians doing exactly what they do, and just as well, but with no claims to special powers. Derren Brown started it off, and there are now performers taking his cue.
Magicians are very good at duplicating the real thing, but its not the real thing.
Because something can be reproduced does not mean that all mediumistic readings are done that way.
Other problems on these and other threads seem to involve those who pay high prices for readings and I would suggest avoiding these demands. You don't necessarily get high quality for high prices in this case.

If anyone feels they need to consult a medium then I suggest they look at the forums dedicated to this subject. There are usually mediums who will give readings for free.
This one used to be quite good, but I haven't been on the board for two or three years: http://www.mysticboard.com/
 
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