My First Trip To A Spiritualist Church/Medium

[gattino]

That's of course what its like with magicians and the like. Derren Brown in particular gets away with a lot because he asks the person on stage to confirm things are as he says they are...and I always wonder, if it was me and I saw how the trick was being done, who would thank me for saying it?

 

[escargot]

So, I wonder, what part does social pressure play on these occasions? How many people are playing along with the medium just because they feel everyone's gaze upon them, and they don't want to make a fuss?

Yup, and there's also the possibility of realising only afterwards how skilfully one had been cold-read.

A few years ago (as I have mentioned elsewhere on this site) I was dragged along to a Spiritualist meeting and picked out by the medium. She went on about how an older man, a grandfatherly figure, wanted to express how sorry he was for how he'd treated me as a child. He knew now how horrible it had been for me and wanted to apologise.

I was gobsmacked as the description fitted my maternal grandfather. Although he never physically assaulted me he was verbally and emotionally abusive and I was afraid of him. How did the medium know that? I'd never told anyone how much I hated the old trout.

She didn't really know, of course. She'd been fishing and took a chance that someone in the room'd been bullied or molested by their grandfather and happened to hit on me.

Took me a while to realise what'd really gone on. Durr.

 

[gattino]

Ok, so now I've been and returned from my second visit. I'll clear up first of all that the "Frank" of the earlier post was Matteo, Matt to his friends (the latter being the name also of the internet phantom of hte other day.), the whole saga of whom is in the thread "the five year sign"if anyone can be bothered to locate it. The point being what I may have hoped for if survival is real and if contact via mediums - or at least the one in attendance tonight - is also real, is that any of the number of motifs and incidents mentioned in that story would get a mention. That would have startled me and changed everything. So what did I find when I went along tonight?

I won't repeat the original post in this thread and describe everything in detail, I'll simply start by saying the medium this time was a quite elderly local lady, whose rambling intro about not asking your guides and guardian angels for their names etc lead me to believe that she was at least clearly a sincere believer.

What followed was the most flagrant mix of warm and cold reading. Each person she came to had variations on the same basic description, a tell like it is, jolly, yet didn't show his emotions father or grandfather figure who suffered before he died, who is Jim? (3 people got jim thrown at them),he was there at the funeral watching, you've got a family gathering come up, he wants to lift you up, someone in the family has trouble with their leg, they had trouble in the chest area before they died and so on and so on.. The whole "applies to every dead older man" check list was well and truly checked. However unlike the chap two years ago she mixed the warm with the cold... she very definitely was changing her statements and claims in response to the punter's reactions and answers.

And then she came to me. This'll be interesting. As "older man who had trouble breathing" (don't all dead people) might have fit my father I accepted it and let her procede. Again a mix of generic "stating the bleedng obvious" character traits and "find out about it/look out for it" false statements. My father - who was bald - still had his hair in life apparently, and who had the alsation? Nazi camp guards are all I can think of. Connection to ships? Well my dad's grandfather might fit that description...but we're in liverpool and the mate I had with me was dressed like he'd just come from the docks. My father was proud of me and my achievements was another one. Since my most notable achievement is managing to avoid splashing the toilet seat I can only assume he set his sights very low.

You get the idea. And so I ought naturally to summarise that it was all, on this occasion, fraudulent bollocks.
Except....except.....

Once again that crack in the door of mystery was left open. Immediately before me, her shtick was directed at two sisters. Amongst the generic stuff that they were too willing to believe was specific to their dad, there were a couple of pull me up short statements that they agreed with . I can't recall the first one, but when she said "And who's Margi..not Marjorie or Margaret but Margi?" (hard g) one of the sisters said "I'm Margi". Suddely my attention was grabbed. That could not surely be a pure lucky guess. It's too specific and relatively unusual.. Either that name came to her from somewhere unknown or she'd passed them on the way in and heard them talking. On its own I might have gone away satisfied with the latter explanation. Until...

After me she directed her offerings to a man somewhere behind me. I regret not looking round to check him out. I'm pretty certain he could not have been a plant because he had tried to grab the "breathign difficulty" description she had aimed my way, and when she finished with me had clear difficulty remembering what it it was this man had claimed about his dead relative....and was confused and hard of hearing when he kept shouting over about the breathing bit. So for those reasons at least , and the paucity of the audience I don't doubt it was a real off the street member of the public behind me. So here's the mystery. Everything she said he connected to and identified. Name after name and after name he said were direct relatives of his dead grandfather. Harry and George? They were his brothers. Who's Doris? That's my mum. and so on. A good 6 or 7 such names. Even with popular "people of that generation" type names, the fact that they all were immediate family members of the deceased is too far fetch as predictible probabilities go.

So I don't know what on earth to make of that part at all. If she recongised the man, you would assume he would equally know her and that she knew him. So I'm at somethign of a loss.

The only way to account for it as far as I can see is either A) she was also throwing in a bit of hot reading..feeding back concrete information she already possessed about the man by some means or other or B) is it concievable that some of these on demand medium types really do occasionally get anomalous information from the ether, but that being unable to produce it on demand the way a stage performance requires, they pad all the gaps before and around these little sparks of paranormal cognition with the rehearsed and crappy stuff?

Toss a coin.

 

[Heckler]

That's of course what its like with magicians and the like. Derren Brown in particular gets away with a lot because he asks the person on stage to confirm things are as he says they are...and I always wonder, if it was me and I saw how the trick was being done, who would thank me for saying it?

There's a routine used by a Scottish mentalist that uses a technique called 'the instant stooge' that involves that exact thing, essentially the person on stage knows how it is done immediately and the mentalist trusts the person not to blow the gaff.*

I was at a mentalist's act using this very routine where the person on stage smirked rather smugly and promptly blew the gaff. Luckily the mentalist thought on his feet and managed to rescue the routine but with this sort of routine there is always that risk.

*kept very vague as I don't want the Magic Circle Ninjas to murder me in my sleep.

 

[gattino]

So I've just wandered along to the spiritualist church for the third and I suspect final time. Each visit has been at least 18 months apart, and I went today because a Wednesday afternoon is advertised as a "demonstration of mediumship" which made it sound distinct from their Sunday "service" (it was identical, just missing the little homily/sermon bit) and because it was again a different "medium" from the last two times. A younger Irish woman.
I give it extra tries on the simple principle that if some of these people are ever real, I won't find them unless I put myself where they are. Throw in the fact Monday was the anniversary of my brother's death, today is his birthday, and my mum has recently died, surely then however this stuff is supposed to work I'd be a prime target for ghostly attention today....


Short verdict: same pile of shite as ever, but the same infuriating caveats.


She was much more of a jokey "I have a personality" character than the previous ones...and, whether it was intended for humour or to be taken literally I don't know, she's the only one to have done the actual turning physically and talking quizzically to an invisible person next to her, like Jimmy Stewart to Harvey the rabbit.
She never came to me and after 3 or 4 other people I was dreading that she might as I couldn't imagine myself saying anything but "no, no, not really" to any of the kind of things she was telling them. There was the usual names and places they didn't recognise, unless forced to consider the most obscure half forgotten acquaintance or whatever. A lot they did agree with of course, but largely generic stuff of age appropriate physical ailments. She was very definitely reading body language, and really quite openly. Above all the dead seem inordinately concerned with dietary advice.


But then, just like the last two occasions, seeming hits towards the end which if not real would require either some kind of collusion or a hell of a lot of luck. Those are the things which always leave me unable to categorically dismiss them.


In this case the first was a relatively young woman on her own who needed tissues when the medium spoke of her children (plural) on the other side. If this was fraud or guess work, though comforting, it would be unconscionable. I tried to think afterwards did the medium say it was the woman's children or did she merely mention children and the reaction directed her? I don't know for sure either way. But it seemed startling at the time. What seemed to close the matter was after suggesting they were still around mum all the time and playing tricks on her she said "Why am I being shown a Shepherd's Pie?" and the tearful young woman laughed and said "I made one last night".
How do I explain that?


Then she moved on to the final woman, sat with her friend. And again in amongst the faff an impossible "guess"...Did she know a Fred? No. No, think again, medium insisted..he's saying go back to her and say Fred. Pause. It's to do with placing a bet. The Two friends started cackling as it dawned on them "BetFred!" one said to the other "We've just been in there."


I take BetFred to be a chain of bookmakers. Now the only way to explain this beyond being fed information from someone invisible - or an impossible level of luck - is that the Medium spotted the women leaving th bookmakers earlier and recognised them, or the betting slip had fallen from her handbag.


So again I don't quite know what to make of it.

 

[Hannah Faulkner]

Well written journey of Spirituality..

 

[PeteS]

So I've just wandered along to the spiritualist church for the third and I suspect final time. Each visit has been at least 18 months apart, and I went today because a Wednesday afternoon is advertised as a "demonstration of mediumship" which made it sound distinct from their Sunday "service" (it was identical, just missing the little homily/sermon bit) and because it was again a different "medium" from the last two times. A younger Irish woman.
I give it extra tries on the simple principle that if some of these people are ever real, I won't find them unless I put myself where they are. Throw in the fact Monday was the anniversary of my brother's death, today is his birthday, and my mum has recently died, surely then however this stuff is supposed to work I'd be a prime target for ghostly attention today....


Short verdict: same pile of shite as ever, but the same infuriating caveats.


She was much more of a jokey "I have a personality" character than the previous ones...and, whether it was intended for humour or to be taken literally I don't know, she's the only one to have done the actual turning physically and talking quizzically to an invisible person next to her, like Jimmy Stewart to Harvey the rabbit.
She never came to me and after 3 or 4 other people I was dreading that she might as I couldn't imagine myself saying anything but "no, no, not really" to any of the kind of things she was telling them. There was the usual names and places they didn't recognise, unless forced to consider the most obscure half forgotten acquaintance or whatever. A lot they did agree with of course, but largely generic stuff of age appropriate physical ailments. She was very definitely reading body language, and really quite openly. Above all the dead seem inordinately concerned with dietary advice.


But then, just like the last two occasions, seeming hits towards the end which if not real would require either some kind of collusion or a hell of a lot of luck. Those are the things which always leave me unable to categorically dismiss them.


In this case the first was a relatively young woman on her own who needed tissues when the medium spoke of her children (plural) on the other side. If this was fraud or guess work, though comforting, it would be unconscionable. I tried to think afterwards did the medium say it was the woman's children or did she merely mention children and the reaction directed her? I don't know for sure either way. But it seemed startling at the time. What seemed to close the matter was after suggesting they were still around mum all the time and playing tricks on her she said "Why am I being shown a Shepherd's Pie?" and the tearful young woman laughed and said "I made one last night".
How do I explain that?


Then she moved on to the final woman, sat with her friend. And again in amongst the faff an impossible "guess"...Did she know a Fred? No. No, think again, medium insisted..he's saying go back to her and say Fred. Pause. It's to do with placing a bet. The Two friends started cackling as it dawned on them "BetFred!" one said to the other "We've just been in there."


I take BetFred to be a chain of bookmakers. Now the only way to explain this beyond being fed information from someone invisible - or an impossible level of luck - is that the Medium spotted the women leaving th bookmakers earlier and recognised them, or the betting slip had fallen from her handbag.


So again I don't quite know what to make of it.

You clearly have an interest in the subject and, like me, are yet to be totally convinced. I too attended a spiritualist church on a couple of occasions many years ago. The first time I went I listened to the medium making astonishingly vague readings for people and then he turned his attention to me. Here we go I thought. Amazingly there was not a single piece of fluff spouted - everything he said was utterly accurately, even to the fact that my eldest son had a medical problem with the back of his head. (he had a brain tumour in fact). No one in the room knew me and I had called in on spec. My subsequent experience with another medium has been mentioned in another thread so I wont repeat here but was so unnervingly accurate as to be utterly frightening as a result of which I have not dared repeat the experience. It is for me however one of the most fascinating subjects I have ever encountered.

 

[gattino]

Your account it what keeps me interested. I read of such things in books, hear of them third hand in friend of a friend tales etc..the medium or psychic who was spot on and couldn't possibly have known. And yet I've yet to witness it. Thsi disconnect allows us to think well if *I'd* been there I'd have seen through it/wouldn't have been fooled etc. And yet, and yet..the only available evidence to go on is the conviction of the person who was actually there. So there may be real ones out there.

You may recall I had a private reading with a complete fraud a few months ago - he used the same shtick, references, names, descriptions on everybody - but that in the cab on the way home the taxi driver was raving about the uncanny accuracy of the one he went to see. As convinced and impressed as you are PeteS. So I enquired this week if the lady in question could see me (she was easy to find..she has a very fortune teller-y name). I didn't get a reply hence I wandered to the church again as at least its free. Well she's replied today and says she's available on Monday afternoon. ...

I've not replied as yet as yesterday put me off. I just anticipate the same old same old. I found some video of her online and she seemed, personality wise, very genuine and sincere (don't they all?) but the little snippets of reading interspersed with her talking- head interview were not impressive. A young man struggling to make her vague comments fit. Is this what the taxi driver got?

 

[PeteS]

Difficult isn't it? To say I am convinced and impressed is probably the wrong expression. Intrigued is probably more correct. Its one of those encounters that you have to experience yourself to make you question the basis of your previous beliefs. Quite frankly if some friend had related the reading I had on the last occasion in 1999 and what subsequently happened, I would definitely not have believed them. Even now I find it virtually impossible to believe the sequence of events and would put it down to misremembering if I had not had the written evidence I took down on that occasion(which the medium absolutely insisted I wrote down and continually checked what I was writing is what he said) and the written account of what he told me at our first encounter. (how do you guess that I had just removed a side car from a bike?) I don't know where you live or whether I can get a private message to you - if I could I would give you his name- he lives on the Fylde coast . But a couple of words of warning unless you are open minded (and I think you are) he is likely to be dismissive and also as with me he might tell you things that really shouldn't be foretold. I think there was a good reason why he told me what he did because there were other strange events around what happened but those are perhaps for another thread.

 

[Mythopoeika]

The fact that the reading was so amazingly accurate may not necessarily prove the existence of an afterlife or prove that the medium can really speak to spirits. It may, in fact, help to prove telepathy.

 

[gattino]

But telepathy..ie picking information from PeteS's mind wouldn't presumably account for foretelling his future. So then we have two "impossible" things - telepathy and precognition, both of which in some way are predicated on the mind not being confined to the physical brain - to replace one "impossible" thing - survival of death, which is surely just another way of saying the mind is not confined to the physical brain!

 

[Roland Deschain]

The fact that the reading was so amazingly accurate may not necessarily prove the existence of an afterlife or prove that the medium can really speak to spirits. It may, in fact, help to prove telepathy.

I've thought along similar lines, and applicable to other inexplicable things involving groups of people.

 

[PeteS]

Telepathy is one aspect that has always occurred to me in so called medium ship. The idea that we all have a destiny that we can't change and that a telepathic can tune into this fits what my experience was. I agree that this is no evidence of life after death and tuning into the spirit world. And here we come to a strange aspect that has only just now occurred to me in one of those "of course" moments. Wholly dissimilar to other peoples experiences, at no time during my contact with this particular medium did he mention or suggest that he was in contact with the spirit world and that such a body (insert name of elderly friend relative etc) had a message for me. At the height of my interest in the subject in the 90's I came across a handful of mediums and exactly the same approach was taken ie no "message from beyond the grave" simply statements trotted out. Strangely this might be explained by the fact that all my close relatives had died before I was born and my parents were still alive, so perhaps there was no one to pass a message on! (yes this contradicts what I have just said)
Re reading the notes I wrote at the time of visits with these mediums all those years ago, there is one common thread which completely identifies the sequence of events leading to the exact position I am in during 2017. Too long and involved to relate here but one small example if you will indulge me. In the mid nineties I met a really nice guy who was a medium. His reading was that I would end my years in a relationship with a much younger woman. I completely dismissed this as utter rubbish. After I married I met him by chance and told him the good news. He remembered what he told me and strangely the first thing he asked was how old my wife was (she was 3 years younger than me). He was taken aback , I could see. It would of course have been easy for him to say I told you so or some such but no his response was "Peter I can't take back anything I told you". There was a blatant clue (as if I needed any other clues) of what was about to happen. My wife dies a few months later and I am now completely by chance in what I hope will be a lifetime relationship with a much younger woman in a town named by the same guy over 20 years ago.
"Fate" read by a telepathic - who knows?

 

[gattino]

The taxi driver who was keen on the medium he mentioned said when he asked her how she did it, how she could possibly know all these things, she apparently explained that she saw it like a photo slideshow or reel or film in front of her , showing all these different scenes from his life.

There's an obvious parallel to that int eh so called "life review" claimed by people who have near death experiences. One can speculate then that this life record, normally experienced only by ourselves - supposedly - can be seen by certain "gifted" people, whether or not the dead have anything to do with it.

 

[escargot]

Someone close to me had a 'life review' (or 'panoramic life experience' as I've also heard it called) in a car accident. He told me it showed him all the happiest times of his life. He didn't feel inspired, though. He became depressed and killed himself.

 

[PeteS]

Someone close to me had a 'life review' (or 'panoramic life experience' as I've also heard it called) in a car accident. He told me it showed him all the happiest times of his life. He didn't feel inspired, though. He became depressed and killed himself.

Utterly tragic.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Telepathy is one aspect that has always occurred to me in so called medium ship. The idea that we all have a destiny that we can't change and that a telepathic can tune into this fits what my experience was. I agree that this is no evidence of life after death and tuning into the spirit world. And here we come to a strange aspect that has only just now occurred to me in one of those "of course" moments. Wholly dissimilar to other peoples experiences, at no time during my contact with this particular medium did he mention or suggest that he was in contact with the spirit world and that such a body (insert name of elderly friend relative etc) had a message for me. At the height of my interest in the subject in the 90's I came across a handful of mediums and exactly the same approach was taken ie no "message from beyond the grave" simply statements trotted out. Strangely this might be explained by the fact that all my close relatives had died before I was born and my parents were still alive, so perhaps there was no one to pass a message on! (yes this contradicts what I have just said)
Re reading the notes I wrote at the time of visits with these mediums all those years ago, there is one common thread which completely identifies the sequence of events leading to the exact position I am in during 2017. Too long and involved to relate here but one small example if you will indulge me. In the mid nineties I met a really nice guy who was a medium. His reading was that I would end my years in a relationship with a much younger woman. I completely dismissed this as utter rubbish. After I married I met him by chance and told him the good news. He remembered what he told me and strangely the first thing he asked was how old my wife was (she was 3 years younger than me). He was taken aback , I could see. It would of course have been easy for him to say I told you so or some such but no his response was "Peter I can't take back anything I told you". There was a blatant clue (as if I needed any other clues) of what was about to happen. My wife dies a few months later and I am now completely by chance in what I hope will be a lifetime relationship with a much younger woman in a town named by the same guy over 20 years ago.
"Fate" read by a telepathic - who knows?

That's pretty amazing.

 

[gattino]

Here's a couple of intriguing videos.

The first one appears to be a scientific study/test, and hte sitter doesn't say much..clearly he's emotionally effected, but the use of specific terms and references is on the face of it inexplicable by any normal means.

The second is a live reading with two local news anchors. You can skip to 4 minutes 27 for the actual readings part. This is interesting in a different way...the people on the receiving end are clearly impressed, and you can't take it away from them, but from my point of view the things actually being said sound very familiar from things I've heard in real life and on tv many times - eg the young person who dies in a suicide or accident ALWAYS reassures the sitter they couldn't have done anything and weren't to blame etc..including in the video above! (to quote Shirley Ghostman "I feel your pain, I feel your shame, but you're not to blame")...which is doubtless helpful, but sounds far more like psychology than psychic ability. But whether real or not what really gets my interest is the sheer speed with which he delivers his lines..."he says, he says, he says.." etc...with no gap between sentences in which the saying can possibly be taking place.

 

[PeteS]

That's pretty amazing.

I have to confess I still find the whole episode amazing. If I had not written everything down quite frankly I would have not believed myself.( I have a poor memory) I am, after all these years, now leaning to the some type of telepathy viewpoint and that for people with a extraordinarily developed perception and intuition , they are able to "see" future events. I have what I see as quite strong perception and intuition but no ability of what is described as medium ship. I have put on one side until shown proof otherwise , the idea of dialogue with the dead. Why indeed would the now dead be any more able to predict the future than when they were alive?

 

[gattino]

Why indeed would the now dead be any more able to predict the future than when they were alive?

I can imagine answers to that.

The first is that people who have NDEs and other transcendental experiences, and purported messages through mediums, always report the same thing..that that other "place" is timeless, that past, present and future all exist at once there etc.

That to me invites more questions than it answers. Namely why do the dead get in touch or reassure us at all - if the physical world is effectively an illusion, everything is going to be alright and no real harm ever comes to us no matter how it seems, and if that post mortem realm is timeless, why do they give a toss?..in effect we're already up there, so there should be nothing to reassure us about or any need to waste their time invading our dreams or appearing at the foot of our beds!

So an alternative is to say not that they see every aspect of our futures but rather that they're watching our lives from a different perspective and therefore see more of what's coming up.

Any kind of survival of death presumably means vacating both the physical world where time is measured by the movement of heavenly bodies like the Earth and sun, and also the physical brain where our ordinary and flawed conscious perception of time is shaped. Outside of these two limitations, how could they not see more of the future? Given your psychic saw yours in such detail suggests that future is there to be seen, if one is viewing it from the right perspective.

So imagine your life as a car being driven along a long winding road. You see it unfold from the drivers seat, and are fully in charge of making decisions about how fast to go, where to turn, when to stop. But the disembodied's perspective is that of the Eye In The Sky -a helicopter pilot reporting on the traffic - looking down on the whole scene. He's not seeing into the future per se, but does see everything on the road ahead that you can't. The traffic jam or obstacle you're heading towards, the oncoming truck around the corner etc. He can make a pretty damn good guess what's going to happen, so can try and alert you to slow down, stop or change direction.

In other words from your viewpoint that traffic jam 10 minutes further along your journey is an event in the "future", but from the viewpoint of someone looking down its something that's happening "now" that you're just not aware of yet.

I don't know any of this to be true, I'm just saying if hte dead do survive and there is an afterlife realm, then being able to tell us what's coming up seems an almost inevitable consequence of that new perspective.

 

[PeteS]

Interesting perspective - will have to ponder on this.

 

[escargot]

There's a traditional belief that the dead can see the future. There are countless tales of them apparently coming back to warn the living of future events. Sometimes they can forestall things, sometimes not, so it seems.

When people ignore a clear warning they come to grief, though they can also be told bluntly what's coming up so they can prepare for the worst. Major Duncan Campbell is supposed to have been warned by a ghost that he would die at Ticonderoga. It was a place he'd never heard of until the battle there in 1758 where he was indeed killed.

All very curious.

 

[Loquaciousness]

To be fair, I have been to many a Spiritualist service and had readings, and never ever heard anything convincing. However, you couldn't meet a nicer bunch of people and they are always very welcoming, and there is always a cup of tea and a biscuit or two.

 

[PeteS]

To be fair, I have been to many a Spiritualist service and had readings, and never ever heard anything convincing. However, you couldn't meet a nice bunch of people and they are always very welcoming, and there is always a cup of tea and a biscuit or two.

Couldn't agree more about the people - astonishingly lovely and perhaps that's why mediums are never seen to be challenged at these gatherings.

 

[Spudrick68]

We know a Spiritualist medium, he's a lovely bloke but insists he would never do a reading for anyone he knows and asks to know nothing of people beforehand.