Believe what a medium has said?

[wellhelloyou]

Has anyone had a reading from a psychic medium (or like) and had something exactly came true? Not something vague but something specific almost word for word?

I still don’t understand why, if it’s real, people shouldn’t charge for it The workman is worthy of his hire and all that. Obviously if it’s not real, charging becomes more of an issue......

I don't believe that mediums can speak to the dead at all, but out of curiosity I have seen 3 due to family members going.Some of my family are massively into it and believe in ghosts etc which I do not, I know that there is no psychic explanation. But two of the readings I've had have been incredibly specific, and I do not know for the life of me how they knew the things they did. I've seen the Darren Brown show where he acts as a 'psychic' to the audience so I'm aware it's all about cold reading etc, but I'm still baffled. This was before Facebook. Specific things included: the colour of my step mums wedding dress (not a typical colour at all), that I'd lost the stone out of my mums ring, a letter I'd been told to write which I never did (one psychic told me I should, I never did. The next psychic, several yrs later and in a different part of the country then asked why I hadn't written that letter), certain traits of my DH, etc.... Interestingly, not one of them has ever picked up on the fact that my mum died as a child. I find it fascinating though, and don't go to seek reassurance or find closure, but would love to know how they get so much accurate information. I'm not condoning what they do to vulnerable people though- one member of my family continually goes to see different psychics and takes what they say as gospel.

“This was before Facebook. Specific things included: the colour of my step mums wedding dress (not a typical colour at all), that I'd lost the stone out of my mums ring, a letter I'd been told to write which I never did“ The thing is that they aren’t, apart from the wedding dress colour, particularly specific. I bet in the days before email, most people would have had a letter they should have written but hadn’t .(I’ve got two sitting on my desk now!) And many of us have lost a stone from a ring - the reader could tell it was a hit when he mentioned it, and it would have been easy for him to hone it down to it being your mum’s.

The wedding dress is a bit more difficult to explain- but there will be an explanation!

“Interestingly, not one of them has ever picked up on the fact that my mum died as a child.”

Don’t you find that a massive thing? They could tell you the colour of a wedding dress, but not what must be the most significant and traumatic thing that ever happened to you?

I went to a clairvoyant/medium 8 years ago she told me I'd marry someone from 'dungannon' and I already knew him. I told her I don't know anyone from 'dungannon' no one at all she said you do, you definitely do. I thought it was nonsense forgot about it 3 years later I met my husband I did know him we went out briefly when I was 15 and he lived all his life on dungannon road... nowhere near dungannon but still.

This is also classic...people trying to fit what's happened to them after the event to match what the psychic said.

I'm just waiting for someone to say "Mystic Madge told my brother he would soon be coming into money, and that night he shagged a girl called Penny".

“Anyone who does this for money is wrong”

It’s only wrong if it’s not real. If it’s real then why shouldn’t people be paid for their work like anyone else?

Because it's not real. So as Bertrand Russell quite rightly says, Anyone who does this for money is wrong

Retro fitting is a huge element of this....

One day in the area you live in, the weather will be precisely 16 degrees Celsius, slightly overcast and a woman in a dark blu top will cross the road.

bertrand you are a sceptic and I agree that the overwhelming majority of psychics are charlatans but a tiny proportion really do see/hear things.

My mum is one, she gets ‘messages’ from spirit.
Occasionally they will be almost but not quite exactly right.

Explain this one she got to me...

She saw the ghost of my dad’s mum who told her he was going to die soon.

Then she got a vision of him wearing one of his favourite pairs of shoes, quite worn out, slipping and falling on the driveway, breaking his back, falling extremely ill, being put into a coma in hospital and then getting better.

She told my dad to throw out the shoes.

He forgot and weeks later he went out wearing the shoes, he slipped and fell on the driveway but got up again.

He was very sore so visited the GP who gave him lots of painkillers, they didn’t really help so he saw a private physio who said it was muscular.

He then came down with illness and went downhill rapidly, was taken to hospital where he was found to be in septic shock and put into a coma.

They scanned him and found that he had fractured his back.

After many weeks in a coma he eventually started waking up, he started making eye movements and efforts to talk.
Mum is adamant he tried to ask what happened to him.

Just as we thought he was getting better they discovered a massive abscess in his back that couldn’t be operated on, he caught hospital acquired pneumonia and died.

What is your explanation?

I went on a communication training course with work and freaked the fuck out of the trainer. She was trying to get us to think about our preconceptions of people, and asked us a few questions about herself - what paper we thought she read, what car she drove, and where she liked to go on holiday. I got all three spot on.

She had travelled a long way, and it was part of her job to regularly travel long distances to run these courses. So I guessed a diesel car, and just picked a popular brand and model. Also who the hell with a lifestyle like that reads a paper any more - so I guessed BBC news online. As for the holidays - just said 'beach holiday', as she had a good tan. The last answered looked a lot more impressive next to the other two - which were simple deductions, and lucky guesswork.

It seems very strange that psychics and mediums can see general and unspecific everyday things, all of which can be put down to guesswork or coincidence, but when asked to see or predict exact detail we’re told “it doesn’t work like that”.

Why “your gran liked flowers and reading” not “your gran was called Ethel Smith, died on 5 July 2001, lived at 91 Acacia Ave for 27 years and 3 months, always had daffodils in a vase on her mantelpiece, over the years had cats called Fudge, Chocolate, Toffee and Caramel, was known to her friends as Betty because she was obsessed with the queen and had 112 scrapbooks of cuttings about the Royal Family”?

If Ethel was in touch with the psychic she could pass all this on, and plenty more detail. Do all the spirits of the dead just want to be vague and inexact all the time?

Doggy- I can’t explain. Except that if I had an elderly relation who insisted on wearing shoes that were a tripping hazard, I’d try to make them stop too. And if you are worried about someone then your dreams are likely to be full of them.

@BertrandRussell exactly- that's why I'm so sceptical. I'm fascinated by how they do it but because this is never picked up it can all only be bullshit.

Has this been posted yet? How to trap a psychic.
skepticalinquirer.org/blog/operation_pizza_roll_-thomas_john/?/specialarticles/show/operation_pizza_roll-_thomas_john

She wasn’t worried about him before the dreams.
He was old yes but not massively so and fit and well, no real health problems, no one expected him to fall ill.

And it’s a very specific coincidence no?

i went to a pychic many years ago, they described in detail (hair style, eye colour, personality) of 2 reletives that i was close to that had died a few years previously, even knew the nickname for one of them, said they were looking down on me and my siblings (rightly said1 sister and 2 brothers)
theres no way they could have known any of that.
ive been to others who have said vague stuff, some true (guesses)some nonsense

I went to a medium night. I hadn't bought a ticket or booked and I went in late with a friend. Almost immediately the medium came up to me with my brothers name. She then told me my mums name, when she died, howsge died, what happened immediately after she died, also told me an incident involving stolen post that just happened, my hospital visit, something that then happened in dhs job and said things about my mum that were true. I honestly felt I had mum there, I just felt loved, when she was talking to me. She also told me my neices very unusual name and her birthday.
I asked my friend the next day to write down for me what she remembered from it all as I knew I'd forget over time. We both remembered a man's name that was mentioned, I swore it was X, my friend swore it was Y. We couldn't agree the name. X
was mum's dad, Y was her brother, I never met both of them.my friend had never heard of them.

I can't figure it out. I don't do social media. The medium never knew my name no booking or ticket, I paid at the end at the bar though I could have got away without paying at all.
I can't explain any of it. But it made me feel mums out there somewhere and I'm not so alone. And forme that's priceless

@Doggydoggydoggy What is your explanation?

Well one explanation is that you are a complete fantasist who has made the whole thing up. And before you say otherwise, I would point out that there is a mountain of evidence that internet fantasists exist, and no evidence for psychics or ghosts.

Retro fitting is a huge element of this....

Massively so. Combine that with confirmation bias and you've debunked pretty much all of it. And the rest can be debunked in other ways.

Reading thru this thread, the lack of critical thinking is extremely depressing.

“And it’s a very specific coincidence no?“
The problem is that there are two explanations for this. You think that your mother had a very specific vision of the future. I think that your mother saw something dangerous at her dad’s house, didn’t fully realise the risk at the time, and her subconscious processed it for her in a dream. And she will have been worrying about him- we all worry at least a bit about elderly relations living alone.

On the principle that the simplest explanation-and the one that fits what we know about how the world works- is the most likely one, I think my version is probably the correct one.

There is also the possibility that your mother unconsciously retrofitted facts into her dream to make it fit the things that happened. No criticism of her-we all do this.

Well one explanation is that you are a complete fantasist who has made the whole thing up. And before you say otherwise, I would point out that there is a mountain of evidence that internet fantasists exist, and no evidence for psychics or ghosts

Gosh, that’s incredibly offensive.
And hurtful.

You believe whatever you believe, if you want to believe I made up be my guest I suppose, I can’t convince you otherwise.
You’d have to be a pretty fucked up individual to make something like up and I have spoken about my dads passing on here before but hey ho.

My mum is one, she gets ‘messages’ from spirit.
Occasionally they will be almost but not quite exactly right.

So, as above, mainly they are completely wrong. Every now and then they are mostly right, but not completely.

I'm pretty sure I could hit that target with random guesswork.

Doggy- people do make stuff up! Lifecraft could have put it with a bit more tact but she’s right. The internet is full of people who make stuff up. And in threads like this when people post about things that just could not possibly have happened the fantasist explanation always needs to be considered. Your story has a perfectly rational explanation, however!

With respect, doggy, your story is just hearsay. I'm very sorry for the loss of your dad, but to accept your story as literally true, everyone would have to assume that an anonymous person on the internet of whom we know nothing is speaking the exact truth in relaying your mother's account of her vision, with no exaggerations, mistakes, invention/coalescing of details, misremembering etc, AND that your mother was not mistaken or exaggerating in any way, or which is entirely natural, and something most people do at least some of the time retrofitting her 'vision' to fit subsequent events, often in entirely good faith.

My own husband is going in the near future to a part of the world which is dangerous enough to have a FO warning about not going to large parts of it, and which will require him to have an armed guard at all times. I'm worried about this, and have had several dreams about him dying there.

But those aren't precognitive, they're just because I'm worried about the trip, and stressed about a number of things, hence sleeping poorly and more likely to wake and remember my dreams. But if by some horrible coincidence, he did die on this trip, might I then think my dreams were predictive ones? Possibly.