Sceptic to Believer and back !

[DivaLasVegas]

I am a "born again" sceptic *grin* but i am still chewing on a few things a " Psychic" told me a few years back while i was living in the UK.
This women was very well known in Sheffield where i lived and my friends and i booked her for a session out of curiosity.
Not any of us had ever met her or knew anything of her and as a sceptic i wanted to see and hear for myself.
I was not expecting anything as i had always thought this a load of baloney but see what you think.

As i walked into the room she described my dead grandmother perfectly and said that she was standing next to me and in fact was always with me as my guardian angel.
She described her as follows:
a big woman with black and grey hair, wearing glasses, with a huge loud voice and her language does not seem to be anything she had ever heard before.

Fact: everything she said was true and in fact even i could not understand her sometimes because she came from Cologne and there is a very strong regional accent. To top it even when she spoke quiety she was very loud and she had the loudest laugh i have ever heard.

This women also insisted on me taping the conversation..... i say conversation but really just she talked as she also insisted that i dont speak, nod or utter anything. This surprised me a lot....anyway....

She carried on with allsorts of stuff that i dont remember exactly ( at the time though i was amazed) still 3 things will stick in my memory forever.

1. She told me my mother used to live on a farm and nearly died in a fire but my grandpa saved her.
I was dumbfounded and in my mind i just shook my head.

Fact: I rang my ma a few days later and told her of this and i was greeted with utter silence. My Ma then told me that it is absolut true. *shock*

2. She told me that my father was not born in germany. I thought this women must be stupid as my father is as german as i am.

Fact: A few days later he called and i laughingly told him her story and to my astonishment he confirmed that he was indeed born in Poland.

3. She knew i had a daughter that did not live with me ( long story) but would be doing so when she was 16.

Fact: i had forgotten about this prediction until 3 years ago.
I had moved back to germany 6 years ago and my daughter was in UK with her father to finish her schooling. When she was 16 she wanted to come and live with me because she was always arguing with her dad and she was unhappy. I made her understand that she should stay in UK to finish her schooling as she did not speak german it would be to difficult for her here.
She unhappily accepted my "rejection".
3 month later she was raped by her boss.
I will have to live with the decision i took then for the rest of my live, because... if i had taken her back when she asked me this would not have happened.
Only later did i remember what the psychic told me so many years ago.

That experience brought me to Sylvia Browne but that is a story for another day. :-(((

It would just interest me what others think of my psychic experience.

 

[Tricky]

You booked a session? She knew your name before you showed up? Sounds like a classic "hot" reading, though I could be mistaken.

You may never figure out how she did this. These people are very good. But I saw Banacek and Jamy Swiss Ian do similarly incredible things at TAM3. However, they were honest about it. They wouldn't reveal their tricks (of course) but they assured us they were tricks, not real magic.

No, it doesn't prove that the "psychic" you went to was a fraud. But if you have two people who can perform the same incredible feats and one admits trickery while the other claims supernatural powers, Occam's razor suggests that the former is telling the truth.

Anyway, welcome back from the dark side!

 

[DivaLasVegas]

You booked a session? She knew your name before you showed up? Sounds like a classic "hot" reading, though I could be mistaken.

You may never figure out how she did this. These people are very good. But I saw Banacek and Jamy Swiss Ian do similarly incredible things at TAM3. However, they were honest about it. They wouldn't reveal their tricks (of course) but they assured us they were tricks, not real magic.

No, it doesn't prove that the "psychic" you went to was a fraud. But if you have two people who can perform the same incredible feats and one admits trickery while the other claims supernatural powers, Occam's razor suggests that the former is telling the truth.

Anyway, welcome back from the dark side!

Hi

in booking a session i meant that my neighbour rang her to ask her to come to her house one night. All that she told the medium was that there would be 5 of us.
I thought of that one too and i asked her afterwards what she told her and she replied * absolutely nothing* she didnt want any info from me, she just wanted to know how many there would be.

Oooopps, what i forgot to mention was...... she did not have a standard fee and did not ask us for money as such. She just said * give me what you think it was worth and can afford and if you are not happy you dont need to give me anything*

I think she was a bit weird, hihi

 

[Ashles]

Fact: i had forgotten about this prediction until 3 years ago.
I had moved back to germany 6 years ago and my daughter was in UK with her father to finish her schooling. When she was 16 she wanted to come and live with me because she was always arguing with her dad and she was unhappy. I made her understand that she should stay in UK to finish her schooling as she did not speak german it would be to difficult for her here.
She unhappily accepted my "rejection".
3 month later she was raped by her boss.
I will have to live with the decision i took then for the rest of my live, because... if i had taken her back when she asked me this would not have happened.
Only later did i remember what the psychic told me so many years ago.

That experience brought me to Sylvia Browne but that is a story for another day. :-(((

It would just interest me what others think of my psychic experience.

It's an awfulthing to happen to your daughter. But it has absolutely nothing to do with th psychic and you must not feel "If only..."
The psychic predicted your daughter would be living with you whe she was 16.
She got this prediction wrong, and that is the end of her involvement.


And psychics do not provide useful information about the future, it is always the readers' desire to make the psychics' words have some meaning after an event.

Anyone who regularly (or even rarely) visits a psychic will experience the same phenomonon:
When a significant event occurs in their life the will immediately start to think back to what psychics have said to them that might be connected with this event.
It never occurs to people that it should be the other way around. They should be expecting the event in the first place if psychics were real.

If the psychic had had any sense of what might happen to your daughter there are many ways she could have been more specific.
The fact is she didn't.
It was a generic prediction about your daughter living with you that may have stood a good chance of coming true in the normal course of events (even more so when people actually folow the psychic's advice to make the prediction come true).

When something awful happens everyone thinks "What if I'd done that" or "Maybe if I had suggested..." but what reason would you have to do this?
You wanted your daughter to finish her education, which is what any responsible parent would want.

And bad things happen in life. If we hadn't taken that different route maybe we wouldn't have been hit by the car... but maybe something else would have happened.

There is no path we can take through life to avoid suffering and bad times. But if our choices have been made for good reasons and with good intent then we must not doubt them. We cannot change them.

You have no decision to regret because the only decision you made was to encourage your daughter to continue her education. And there could never be any reason to question that decision.
It's just as easy to say you never know what might have happened if your daughter had chosen to join you in Germany. Perhaps something worse.
The point is none of us know the future so we make decisions as best we can.

If psychics ever make us doubt our own good intentions, well that's just one more reason that I don't like them one tiny bit.

All the best.

 

[Dragonrock]

Do you still have the recording? It may not be as accurate as you thought it was. Human memory has a way of filling in the blanks or even flat out making things up to suit our ideas and attitudes. The longer it has been, the more our memories change. If you have the tapes, go back and review them, it may turn out to not be as impressive as you remember it.

ps. Welcome to the little slice of insanity that we call the JREF forums!

 

[DivaLasVegas]

Do you still have the recording? It may not be as accurate as you thought it was. Human memory has a way of filling in the blanks or even flat out making things up to suit our ideas and attitudes. The longer it has been, the more our memories change. If you have the tapes, go back and review them, it may turn out to not be as impressive as you remember it.

ps. Welcome to the little slice of insanity that we call the JREF forums!

Thank you *smile* glad to be here

Ha, recording indeed..... that was just another weirdo thing that happened.
Eyeryone of us taped there session with her from my neighbours taperecorder. So did i. Everyone else had there recordings except me.
I know i am "only" a women *g* but i do know how to use a taperecorder ( you`ll be pleased to know i can also programm the VCR, hihi) alas there was just "noice" on the tape and it was a brandnew one.
By noise i dont mean anything like voices or such....just like listening to water running *shouldersshrug*

 

[plindboe]

Memory can be quite malleable. People often forget the misses completely, and make the hits out to be even bigger than they in reality were. I bet, if you had the recording today and analyzed the reading carefully you would discover that it was quite unspectacular.

Also, as is quite typical in these cases, you only mention the hits. I recently wrote this on a paranormal board: "A great analogy is a guy who flips a coin 20 times, and gets 10 heads and 10 tails, and later goes around telling everyone that he flipped a coin 10 times, and they were all heads. He's telling the truth, but the problem is that he only proclaims his hits, and none of the misses, so people can't see that he performed no better than chance. That's what you do, you only report the hits".

Edited to add: Welcome aboard.