Psychic Mediums

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

My first husband died in a drunk driving accident back in 1984.  About 15 years later I was back home and spent an afternoon with one of his sisters.  She went on to tell me how she had gone to a psychic who told her that he (her brother) was fine and was sitting at a table drinking a beer and said not to worry about him.  Seemed so odd to me that he supposedly was in the ether doing what got him killed.  She really believed it and I was stunned that she fell for that crap.  I had always thought she was pretty bright.  I didn't really say anything...partly because I couldn't think of anything to say and partly because I figured if it gave her some peace of mind I wasn't going to try to dispute it.

Very smart people believe in all kinds of nonsense. EG My father was a brilliant man. He was also a dogmatic Irish catholic. In just about everything else, he was fine. He had this one area where reason did not dwell. 

The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a pretty bright cookie. At one point he went to seances and was conned by The Cottingley Fairies. He even wrote a book, "The Coming of The Fairies"

Doesn't make sense until one learns Sir Arthur lost a beloved son in WW1. One reason I think spiritualism was so popular throughout the 1920's. So many people simply could not cope with their grief any other way.

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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  phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been fake



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

Doyle was a spiritualist long before the death of his son. He was investigating spiritualist phenomena and joining spiritualist societies as early as 1887, whereas Kingsley was killed in 1918.

Some people have claimed that Doyle’s interest in the supernatural was partly the result of the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, that he was so fed up with people expecting him to be the same sort of emotionless calculating machine that Holmes was, he went to the other extreme. Personally, I think that’s a load of rubbish. I find it much more likely that his loopy spiritualist ideas were the result of a rather grim childhood.

Boru

[brewer]

[TheClearCleanStuff]

I believe there are things we don't understand that people might call paranormal, but there is a scientific reason behind everything as sure as the universe operates on predictable laws. It may be based on laws we are unaware of but it it based on real physical laws, not on mere fantasy. If we go off in the weeds and act like new age kooks we'll never comprehend new information.

[Brian37]

James Randi has taken on these frauds. The most famous was Sylvia Brown, whom told Randi he had heart issues. Well no shit, lots of people of his age at the time have heart issues. She also decided guess at here own death, turns out she ended up being 10 years early from that "seeing". 

And I forgot the other guy, whom he watched do his trick, then explained that the guy was basically fishing and leading his mark. I used to know a math trick that worked the same way. You'd ask the person to pick a number 1 through 100 but not tell you. Through a series of questions, you come up with the number they were thinking of. No magic, no mind reading, just a trick.

I don't mind those who admit it's a trick, but I hate the cons who prey on the vulnerable.