This is going to be a tough one.
I do so want to believe that there are individuals that can intervene with the spirits of the deceased! When John Edward was on television every afternoon, I watched his show and marveled at what he was able to tell people about dead relatives. But.
But what?
This is an area that is so fraught with fraud, I'm not going to dive in full force without saying that one must be cautious and vigilant in this.
For every single "right on" message, there may be ten vague things that anybody could guess correctly. For every definite hit, there may be more that mean nothing to those being read.
And there are so many ways around all this.
You can't call up a specific spirit. You can't ask "where did you hide all your money" and get an answer. You can think you're going to talk to grandpa and get some relative who fought in the Civil War at Vicksburg that was a legend in the family. For every hit, there may be close enoughs that when you think about it, you force it to fit the memory or history. Or, you may get absolutely nothing that hits right, but the person three seats behind you can fit it into their relatives' lives.
Unlike most psychic phenomena, this one seems to come at will, but not always. In order to make money doing this, the medium has to produce something and therein lies the danger of fraud.
"Tell 'em anything" and they'll go away happy.
Why do people want to talk to the dead?
Why would those who have passed want to talk to the living?
Most people say, "I just want to know they're all right". Sure they're all right...they're dead! They're not suffering, there is no pain (as we see most dying people, suffering terribly) and they don't remember where they hid all their money. So, if most people just want to know if the dead are all right, the answer inevitably has to be "yes". Of course they're all right.
Do they have any messages for us?
Sometimes they indicate that someone will fall ill. That's really large.
Of course people in the family will get sick. But if the spirit says, "So and so (name) will have a heart attack if they don't watch the smoking and drinking and overeating", that again is closer, because anyone doing these things will probably have a heart attack. But if they say, "Your sister is headed for an automobile accident", I'd tell her to stay in the house for a long time.
Getting specific is the key. If the medium can be extremely specific, describe the individual, with a whole name and correct initials, tell specific things about their lives (not like...he was a hard worker, but he worked in a steel plant) then I'd get goosebumps and start to believe there was something going on here.
Now, it's true confession time.
I don't want to see dead relatives.
I don't want to see dead people in funeral homes, either.
I have, however, seen ghosts.
One saved my life and the lives of three other people with a warning.
But it wasn't anybody I knew, no one else had ever seen the ghost, and I really wonder sometimes whether I'd actually seen it.
The proof of something happening was that the ghost told me not to go riding in a car. There was nothing to do, so the others decided to go for a ride. When I warned the others about it, they laughed. I was quite uncomfortable riding, remembering the warning, but figured, oh, what the hell? It can't be true. Nothing will happen.
But something did happen.
A canister of starter fluid leaked and the driver was nearly overcome with ether fumes and had it not been for quick actions on my part and someone else managing to stop the car, we'd all have been dead.
I am no medium.
I would not want to see dead people or pass on messages from them to the living.
I have no spirit guide.
A "Spirit Guide" is a being that often acts as an intermediary between the medium and other spirits. This is perhaps the hokiest part of mediumship...the need for some ancient Egyptian or Native American to come help the deceased step forward, but it certainly adds to the allure of the "exoticness" of a reading. What would make an Egyptian who died thousands of years ago help out a medium IN ENGLISH, I cannot say.
Right there it sounds a little weird.
But it does add to the drama of it all.
So, this spirit guide pulls spirits out of this other plane to talk to those in this mortal plane. On cue. Because the spirits WANT to talk to these folks who are paying to be read. How convenient.
How lucrative.
How easy to fake.
Gone are the days of the spiritualists who faked seances in dark rooms where assistants could walk about and blow trumpets (why would Aunt Sally want to blow a trumpet unless she was a Harry James fan?) But frauds still exist.
Frauds who promise those who are torn by grief that they can contact their loved ones for a fee. A large fee. And they can hear more if the living come back again and again. For more money. This scam has been going on for hundreds of years...no, make that since the early 1830s in the US. I don't know about other countries, but I would imagine the scam went around the world pretty fast.
There's a history where two bored farm girls from Upstate NY I believe used to crack the knuckles in their feet as answers to questions posed by believers in "spiritualism"...talking to the spirits of the dead.
They made money doing this and started traveling with their little show, but in later years recanted all their tales with what they said was the truth. They faked it pretty well.
And the gullible believed in them.
But as I said in the beginning, there are mediums today that pretty much defy the skeptics. They have a good accuracy rate and their hits outnumber their misses. People are warned not to give away information beforehand and to keep their mouths shut during the reading so as not to give the medium ammunition or information to be used later. It looks on the up and up and when they hit, they hit pretty close.
I gotta believe something is going on.
I want to believe they aren't tricksters out to get money, but they do get money. Nobody gives away this information for free. If they did, they would remove all suspicion. Why lie if you aren't getting anything out of it?
Again, as with remote viewing (this is really quite remote if you're talking to the departed) the visions come swiftly and like a movie going fast forward. It is up to the medium to interpret symbols and actions, maybe getting a tenth of what flashes through their minds. It would be difficult to do this unless there was some talent involved, but I really don't know if it's TRUE.
Like all things that involve the extra senses, this one is hard to prove one way or the other.
