What just happened?! I don't know what to make of this.

[Believers]

I've had the strangest experience tonight and I don't know how to explain it.

I volunteer with a charity, and tonight myself and 3 others from there went out to a pub I've never been to before for a pre-Christmas drink.

At one point I went to the toilet and as I was on my way out a woman was on her way in. We exchanged pleasantries and went on our separate ways.

About 5 minutes after I'd joined my friends, this same woman came up to us, and sat next to me on the banquette thing. She took my hand and said she had to tell me something.

It was all a bit odd, but I figured she'd maybe had a drink, and I had no objection to her joining us. But then she said to me that she had xxx with her and he wanted me to know that he was happy, that he loved me and that it was time I moved on. She was crying as she said this and I started crying too because xxx was the name of my late dh.

I have no idea how she could've known any of this. None of us knew her, I'd never been to that pub before, dh's name isn't wildly unusual but not that common either, why did she come and find me after our brief encounter in the toilet etc.

I can't get my head around it! Any ideas?!

An older woman stopped me in the street once years ago. She said - "Oh, you are going on a long journey soon, across the seas". I had just won a trip to India (nobody I knew knew anything about it at that stage), and was I leaving in less than two weeks. I had never travelled so far before.

A big part of me thinks that's it's all bunkum... however nobody knows for sure. Yes it is weird but try to either pass her off as a weirdo or take comfort from it. Either way, it sounds like it was done without malice. I'm pretty cynical but I got a great deal of comfort from a dream where my mum visited me and seeing a robin (probably not the same one) several times on the day of my dad's funeral.

A woman once came up to me in a pub and told me my father was at peace and wished me well, and that I would be going abroad soon.

The only trouble was, my father was alive and well. None of us went abroad because this was February 2020 and we all know what happened next - which, strangely, the woman failed to mention at any point.

This reminds me of 2 occasions, one I was at a party for one of my sons parents, who I knew only through my DC, they had an aunt at the party who made a beeline for me and said i have a little girl following me around and that she told her she was my DD, I was a bit surprised and then she said its the baby you wanted but couldn't have, I had to have a termination years ago due to various reasons, but even at the last moment I said tearfully, I don't want this I want the baby, but it was too late. No one except my parents and my counsellor, and the father knew about this. She told me lots of details, and the odd thing is I was actually thinking about it at the time, wondering if it was a boy or a girl when she said this. She knew so much and I always wondered how.

The second time, I had a knock at the door, it was from a neighbour, she said she had come from a medium who told her that someone called Jenny had lost someone close and needed comfort, I was the only person she knew called Jenny and my mum had died earlier that night.

Yes sorry I was making a point about the ridiculous "she just wants your money comments".

I think stuff like this op, you either discount as a fluke or a phony, or you accept it how it was seemingly meant. Kindly, and because its something yo u needed to hear even if you don't know that yet. You haven't moved on (no judgement, I can't imagine what you've been through), but maybe this is the jolt to start doing so, whomever the message came from

This is what convinced me. I was shopping in a large store shortly after my mother died (in another city and state...USA) when a woman I'd never seen walked up to me and said, "You'll think I'm crazy, but your mother says to open the box marked '1996.' There will be a jeweler's bracelet box in there, and it has slipped under the batting." And she walked away. Well, curious, but not expecting much, I did go home where some 30 boxes of Mom's things waited for me to sort through. Found three marked "1996." Nothing in the first one, but in the second one, I found the jeweler's bracelet box. I opened it, lifted the batting, and found my grandmother's engagement ring, which we had searched endlessly for (3.5 carats...you'd best believe we searched!).

There is no amount of "cold reading" that would account for that much very specific detail. Yes, there are psychics out there, but I doubt that many, if any, advertise the fact.

Sheesh, some of these posts.. obviously every medium looks at social media JUST IN CASE we run into anyone who looks familiar, and as for obituaries, people don't tend to put things in the papers now, it's too expensive.
Do you naysayers think that's all mediums have to do all day? Scam people for - oh no, wait, NO money..
For those of you who have had good experiences / messages which have brought joy & comfort, thanks for posting. x

I think she was genuine. Our loved ones do contact us via third parties. I had the most bizarre experience not so long ago for which there is no rational explanation. Take it for what it was x

I’m someone who has had an incredibly accurate reading before with information given to me that I wasn’t aware of at the time. I’d guess this lady was genuine especially as there was no follow up, no exchange of money etc.

With my accurate reading she said I had family abroad and that they were either already in England or they would be imminently. My uncle and his family live in Italy they don’t just pop over and they weren’t here at the time. Two days after this meeting one of my other uncles died, my Italian uncle came over within a few days.

She said that my Nan was looking after the baby but she is all grown up now. I had no idea what this was discussing. About two weeks later at my uncles funeral, my sister was heavily pregnant, which encouraged a conversation about how old she will be when the baby was born my Italian uncle commented “of course because you should have been 6 months older than xxxxx (my cousin) but your mum lost you”; neither of us were aware until this point that my mum had a miscarriage at any point.

There were a couple more things that could have been fishing but they still did come true however the thing above I feel were much more specific to me.

That's what I mean!

There must be so many encounters like this where is vague, but also wrong. They play a numbers game. Some you win and some you lose.

Those are such generic, stereotypes of what these people do. If it was real wouldn't the messages from the other side be a bit more varied and interesting? No, it's almost always opaque and could cover a multitude of different scenarios.

I'm genuinely amazed that so many have come on here and say they believe this stuff.

Why wouldn't they advertise the fact? If you knew you were genuinely psychic and that you could finally prove to the world that it was real, why wouldn't you do that? There must be more than one "real" one too. Not one if them wants to expade our knowledge about what some humans can do? That's very strange.

Totally agree. If our loved ones who have passed have an important message for us, some will try to find a ‘channel’ they can communicate with who can get a message to us. I think of it as communication via a different frequency. Some people who practise mediumship have developed an aptitude to communicate at that frequency.

I believe we all potentially have a psychic ability but in some people it is more developed than others.

I don’t have a very developed psychic ability but there have been times in my life I have ‘just known’ things before they have happened. They are often very significant things rather than day to day occurrences. We all have intuition. We all have gut feelings. Some people are more highly attuned to these than others.

Some may advertise it. But a real psychic would be barraged by people desperate to make contact with a loved one, or to find a missing person. I would think that it could very quickly become overwhelming. And I would imagine, especially in the area of missing persons, one could be exposed to some real horrors.

Our FBI does make use of those they consider to be "proven" psychics, and I believe that they consider anyone with 78% accuracy (although that number was given several years ago, and may have changed) to be worthy of listening to.

I know. It's depressing me, to be honest.

They also don't want any of the prizes on offer to anyone who can actually prove it, including the one which was worth 1 million dollars and on offer for half a century.

Both of those statements are incredibly vague and non specific and apply to loads of people.

Many people have relatives abroad. Many people have a dead grandmother and I would wager that every family on earth has a baby that has died, If, as you have done, you include any woman having had a miscarriage.

you've said yourself she was obviously fishing with a load of other generic statements too, two of which happened to be vaguely relatable to your life.

You've disregarded the other 38 generic statements which, even at a stretch, meant nothing to you, and remembered the two which could be somehow made to seem relevant..

@knittingaddict but my earlier point remains you don’t get people coming up to you all the time predicting things. It never happens does it. Yes cold reading is a numbers game. You’d need to stand on the street “ predicting” thing if you wanted to make money (or maybe a psychic fair) but strangers in pubs?

As to proof you’d need an independent verifier to follow someone round for months until a message came through and then check the message. If people don’t listen to the message, never open the drawer and find the ring you’d never know if they were right.

Proving things scientifically is not as easy as saying someone was accurate 100% of the time . For example how do prove we’ve had a white Christmas in the U.K? The Met Office say one solitary snowflake falls in a specific location during the 24 hours of Christmas day. Yet no one would say they’d had a white Christmas based on a single snowflake or even that it was enough or even evidence of snow itself, given it was so fleeting. But it’s proof to the Met Office.

@BloodAndFire in your opinion they are vague. In mine they aren’t, I paraphrased them both for the purpose of this. However they visit from overseas relatives and it being imminent is not vague she was convinced they were coming the next day which obviously would be planned usually and it wasn’t they rarely visited. She also referred to an age for the baby lost which at the time meant absolutely nothing to me.

I also didn’t disregard the other things that she said but realise they could be more generic. However they also did come true. An example would be she stated that within a year I would come into some money but it wouldn’t be gifted and I wouldn’t earn it, she noted it wouldn’t be an inheritance and either. Six months after the conversation I was in a car accident and received compensation.

She referred to a situation that specifically occurred the last time I saw my Nan before she died and noted that my Nan wanted to apologise for it.

She also referred to my other Nan by name as her name isn’t overly common.

Re dogs and sensing things, someone I know moved into a large, old property, that had been added to over many years, where their dog refused absolutely to set a paw over the threshold of a certain part of the house.

The family had sensed absolutely nothing, but the owner mentioned it to an acquaintance who was said to have the gift.

That person (who didn’t charge) came, and told the owners that after a tragic death many years previously, for which he’d felt responsible, ‘someone’ was still there, out of guilt.

She asked him to leave, and evidently he left, because after that the dog had no problem at all with that part of the house.
So according to many on here, the dog must have imagined it.

Ok. You said in your first post With my accurate reading she said I had family abroad and that they were either already in England or they would be imminently

In your second post you've changed that to her specifying they'd arrive the next day. So just in that one post you've already changed it in your head to being more specific than it actually was.

This is a very very common thing that people do with 'psychic' readings- they retrospectively change them in their memories to be far more accurate than they were.

But it's obviously up to you, and anyone else, what they choose to believe. If it makes you happier to believe that she actually had supernatural powers then no amount of evidence can change that.

You are muddling up the concepts of 'proof' and 'definition'. That is how the Met Office formally define a white Christmas (for the purposes of bookies, records etc. )

It has nothing to do with the scientific method and how proof works.

This wiki page has lots of detail about how proof was established in the JR Prize

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_Challenge

in depth a case from any period in history, around the world, "that presented the gold standard for evidence". Tsakiris chose psychic Nancy Weber who, in 2006, appeared on an episode of the Biography Channel Psychic Investigators. Weber claimed to have helped the New Jersey police solve the 1982 serial murders of Amie Hoffman and Dierdre O'Brien. The police arrested James Koedatich in 1983 who was later found guilty of serial murder. Psychic Investigators interviewed Weber as well as the two police detectives she worked with, Hughes and Moore, who verified Weber had given them information "she could not have known".[47][48][49] Radford spent the next nine months reviewing the case, and he and Tsakiris re-interviewed the detectives as well as the psychic on the Skeptiko podcast. Radford discovered that the detectives had not kept their notes from the case, and that their story had changed since the TV show aired. In fact, he found that their stories now contradicted the psychic's story. A further discovery by Radford using a New Jersey phone book from 1982 found that if the psychic had indeed given the detectives all the evidence she claimed she had, the police could have discovered the killer with a 15-minute search through the phone book. Radford believes that the police and the psychic "simply fell prey to confirmation bias".[50][51]

@BloodAndFire I haven’t changed what happened, I just paraphrased it for the purpose of the first post. I didn’t quote verbatim exactly what was said. We spoke for about 10mins about that particular thread. I haven’t changed anything about what was said retrospectively.

Yes to all this BloodAndFire.

I supect that if some of the encounters mentioned on here had been secretly filmed then some people would be surprised at how the conversation actually went. I doubt it looks nearly as credible as it seems a few years later. It has been proved that memory is very flawed and people fill in the blanks when memory fades. Retelling a true story also means false memories get mixed in.