Do you have any paranormal experineces?

[adey67]

I knew you'd say that!

 Hang about.

Not always quite as simple as some might think;

One of the most famous photographic frauds was the case of The Cottingley Fairies. It fooled some pretty serious people.Eg the techies at Eastman who declared the photos could not possibly have been faked. Also Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  believed. He even wrote a book about it; "The Coming Of The Fairies'"

Context: During WW1, 1917.  Sir Arthur had lost a beloved son, and was desperate to believe. I think that mindset also at least partly explains the massive interest in spiritualism at that time.

Over 50 years later, one of the girls confessed it was a hoax, and showed how they did it. Look at the photos today, and they are obviously fakes.  Everyone has 20/20 hindsight. Detailed pictures are available on Google images.

The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

Excellent post, and grieving people like Conan Doyle are why I can't stand psychic mediums in particular. No medium has ever been proven genuine in 150 years of modern spiritualism and mediumship. In controlled testing where the chance to cheat is removed 100% of mediums fail 100% of the time but over the years many thousands have been definitively proven fake, the arithmetic isn't hard to follow. 

These people are grief vultures preying on the vulnerable usually for money sometimes for complex psychological reasons such as the kudos of being perceived special and gifted, occasionally a mixture of the two.

They mess with the grieving on a psychological level in a way they are completely unqualified for, implanting in the minds of bereaved people false memories of their loved ones, frequently surplanting and sidelining the genuine memories.

They take money to pretend to talk to the dead and justify it to themselves and others by saying they're helping with the grieving process but they're NOT, at best they hinder it and at worse they halt it completely sometimes causing a lifelong dependance in the bereaved for consultations with mediums.

There's a good website you can Google called Bad Psychics which debunks and exposes bad mediums and other paranormal phenomenon including ghost hunting shows and the like, it's worth a look if anyone is interested.