Do you believe in psychics?

[EwwwwDavid]

I've been to a few psychics over the years and some things they've said have been weirdly accurate, some not so much.
I had a very tragic bereavement about 12 years ago and haven't seen one since but done things I was told almost predicted what would happen.
Does anyone have any similar stories?
Ps im very much atheist and not at all 'woo' but sometimes reflect on things that are weirdly accurate.

@Herani

I don't, as a rule, believe in psychics, but I keep my mind open.

This sounds beyond woo, but I had a weird experience once where I was completely absorbed in an activity - let's say something like marking worksheets - when I suddenly went into what I can only describe as a vivid daydream where I saw my old friend, who'd been in hospital with cancer for 2 months (definitely wasn't thinking about her at the time), pull a hospital mask off her face and said 'shit...oh no...oh right...I'm..oh no...' and then she realise she was gone, and felt utter sadness about leaving her daughter behind before feeling resigned to it happening. Then, I was straight back to what I was doing.
No lie - two days later, her mum called me and she had passed away at the time I had that feeling. So, I don't as a rule, think people talk to the dead, but it would be very odd to have had an experience like mine and say there was nothing to it.

When I as 18, my friend's dad was in hospital, he was often in for leukaemia treatment, and was expected to be discharged after another blood transfusion. I was working in a pub and suddenly lost concentration while trying to add up a round (pre electronic tills). For some random reason I thought of her Dad and a feeling of lightness is all I can describe it as, came over me. I quickly thought,' Oh I hope he is OK' and got back to the mental addition, without thinking any more of it. Her dad died at the exact time I thought of him, which was just before last orders.

@OhWhyNot

No I wouldn’t

As I said I was freaked out it just didn’t make sense

Many people question their beliefs being religious is testing for many people especially when their faith is tested people are looking for truths all the time how we find them is different

Believing in something or an experience that can’t be proved to others, makes no logical sense can be unsettling

Why wouldn’t you? Without her input you would have had a dream about an old man with the same name as your grandad. You would have had no context to it, it would be meaningless.

The meaning came when your friend’s grandmother convinced you it was her dad. Without that input, you’d never have thought about it again.

@Brighton5555

People seem to have not understood

I called a physic

She said immediately I have a Jimmy / James .

And he’s asking after John.

John was my husband
His dead father was Jimmy

I don’t see how she could come up so accurately within 15 seconds of a call.

Are the common names yes

But to have Jimmy asking for John
And that he his son

No I do understand and in your particular case it’s bang on the money, especially if she was not expecting your call and couldn’t have looked it up.

However if that had been me we have lots of Johns in our family and we also have a James. So I would cast my mind about and think ‘oh that must be great uncle John asking for our Jamie!’

Not our James but a nephew who is the great uncle’s grandchild. It’s easily done. If it had been Ezekiel asking for Frazier-Michel that would be different. But even in that case I’d presume a bit of the old Facebook detective business.

@Nesbo

When you see a magician do something on stage, like tell someone exactly what they’ve drawn and placed into a still sealed envelope, you know from the context that you are watching a trick. It can be marvellous and baffling, they can’t possibly have known what they appeared to know, and you might never find out how they did it, but you know that beyond it’s miraculous appearance there is a rational explanation.

The really clever thing about psychics is that instead of leaving people thinking “that was incredible, I wish I knew what the trick was”, they leave people thinking “that was incredible, I just witnessed actual “ magic” “ (for want of a better word).

The point Derren Brown has demonstrated so well is that a magician and a “psychic” can literally perform the same routine on someone, but because the contexts of those performances is different, people will leave one of them thinking that there is a rational explanation they just haven’t been able to figure out yet, and will leave the other believing that they just witnessed an actual miracle.

That’s the true genius - change the context of the performance and you completely change the response from the audience.

Yes like the television programme the mentalist. He makes his living as a psychic/medium but he isn’t, he’s just a very good Sherlock Holmes style guesser basically.

No I did say I was freaked out it was like a dream but not a dream

So not something I would have forgotten so easily it was too odd and scared me

But going round in circles to you it’s nothing and all explainable to myself (and others) it’s not

@OhWhyNot

No I did say I was freaked out it was like a dream but not a dream

So not something I would have forgotten so easily it was too odd and scared me

But going round in circles to you it’s nothing and all explainable to myself (and others) it’s not

With respect, @OhWhyNot, you clearly don’t want this episode debunked at all.

@OhWhyNot

No I did say I was freaked out it was like a dream but not a dream

So not something I would have forgotten so easily it was too odd and scared me

But going round in circles to you it’s nothing and all explainable to myself (and others) it’s not

Only because you don’t want it explained. You want to believe you had a paranormal experience, which is why you ignore logic.

I am not sure how I could I have explained in detail what he was wearing

How did I know his name (I just did this was the bit that freaked me out)

How did I know about the very specific details about his hands

How did I describe someone who I had never met, seen a picture of, and do not remember hearing anything about him (though I may have at some point heard his name was the same name as my great granddads)

I do believe we can have experiences where our brain jumbles up information and we believe we have seen something we didn’t.

It was not explainable to me or to anyone close

I said before debunked was not the right word more I wanted to make sense of it

For me it’s why me, what is the reason for these experiences some find comfort in them I certainly didn’t I not sure there is a reason

I don’t think we shall ever know as I said I believe some things are unexplainable but that doesn’t mean no questioned are raised

OhWhyNot - I think the story you related is now so much a part of your personal history it would be impossible for you to let it go.

To me it sounds as if a peculiarly vivid dream of a child was relayed to adults who had a tendency to believe in woo. One of those adults told you it was important and said it had a meaning, because they wanted to see a meaning there.

It became a significant moment in your early life, a bit scary, something out of the ordinary a d certainly special. Elements of it have grown with each retelling, memories have shifted and blurred a little over time - that’s all just normal, humans are natural storytellers and terrible witnesses!

None of this comes from people deliberately being deceptive, it’s just how our minds work , we’re all constantly searching for meaning in events and the world around us. Humans have been doing that for thousands of years.

I can remember, or believe I can remember, a couple of events from my childhood that fit this sort of pattern. I know at least one of them my mum firmly believes was woo - but then she does tend to believe in that sort of thing.

By this point it’s hard to distinguish between the parts of it I genuinely remember and the parts that have been created by hearing her version of it repeated over the years! What she thinks was woo though, I put down to me having a very vivid imagination.

I think if you did honestly want to debunk your unsettling experience this would sound reasonable to you, but as I said, I think it is incredibly hard to just let go of things we’ve held on to as truths for so many years.

Nice bit of armchair psychology Nesbo

NCd for this, but I predicted a car crash and the day and time it happened, I just got a really strong feeling. I was meant to be in the car, but changed my plans based on this. I told someone else about this in advance and they were gobsmacked when it happened.

I predicted a second car crash many years earlier, as a child. My parents told me not to be so stupid.

I also predicted the time of my MIL's death.

My gran was also said to have predicted various events.

I can't control this or summon it up, I'd be rich otherwise 😆

But I don't believe in psychics who are in touch on tap with someone on the other side.

OhWhyNot - You’re welcome.

You can now rest easy knowing that as a teenager you weren’t in fact randomly visited by the spirit of your friends great grandad.

Unless of course you prefer that version of events.

Aww thanks

I wasn’t aware it was such a huge part of my childhood and so many had feed into the story until you pointed it out it all makes complete sense now

👍

“OhWhyNot

I would happily have my personal spooky story debunked

It was an experience that unsettled me and years later I still can’t make sense of it

I would certainly like sense made of it”

HTH

My MIL went to one when her son died. She was saying about all the things this woman knew about her him and her etc.

I looked at her Facebook profile (and his) from the account of someone who wasn't friends with them on there and all the information the 'psychic' claimed to know, was on there. She'd done some digging, but it was all just lifted from Facebook with added smoke and mirrors.

No, psychics aren't real.

I explained further …

Why not just say I think you are talking bollocks OhWhyNot

OhWhyNot - Because in the main I don’t think you are talking bollocks at all.

As I said, I think you had a very vivid dream, which felt disturbing enough to talk about the next day.

An adult took your description of an old man with the name of your grandad and ran with it the next morning, making all the same sort of connections that people look for when they hear a “psychic” give a reading. After all, the only reason you are now convinced that this was your friends great grandad is because of the response you got from the gran.

She told you she saw connections, you are having to trust that what she said was accurate and totally unbiased.

You say you described a coat accurately. I’d query what language a 16 year old would use to describe a man’s coat of a style from many decades earlier. Were you describing whether it had a peaked or a notched lapel for example, or we’re you saying long and tweedy? Unless we know the exact words used we have no idea how generic the description was. How many coats did the man own, how many different styles? How likely was it that your description would have been close to one of them?

What did the gran say? Did she ask any leading questions at all? The sort that aren’t permitted in court because a witness can easily be led to embellish what they saw. I wouldn’t trust your own memory on that as people are terrible at noticing that sort of thing, that’s why you need transcripts to be absolutely sure (if only we had one!!)

You say the arms were outstretched, he was in pain. That sounds like a classic description of a horror trope (zombie type aspect, arms reaching out to get you, or perhaps influenced by religious imagery, a pained Christ-like pose?). I wonder if the gran have any religious imagery in the house at all that might spark a young persons imagination.

When she heard that description it was her that then linked it to a specific thing to do with the man’s hands though. That’s the classic pattern of offering some information but the other person doing all the work - she found a meaning because she wanted there to be a meaning in what you were telling her.

None of this was you talking bollocks. You were honestly describing a weird dream experience, but the person you were with gave it a whole new meaning and then fed it back to you, making it something wholly different.

Sorry-I'm back! The psychic I saw I was about 20 and she mentioned random names bud luckily I had recorded it all. After my husband and I were married (years later) we listened to the tales and they were spooky!

Some people can just read other people. I had a tragic bereavement and now work in a therapeutic setting. I can often tell when others have experienced similar. It’s always just reading people

At best fake light entertainment, at worst fucking chicken hawks

I remember having my tarot cards read when I was 16.
I remember that he told me a lot of things that turned out to be right.

He seemed to know that I was pregnant at the time. He told me that I wouldnt stick with my boyfriend for long, 12-18 months.
He said that I would fall in love with an older man, and he would seriously hurt me. He would love me, but not like I needed. (It happened. At 18 I fell hard for someone, he cheated and got someone else pregnant- he was 14 years older than I was)
He said I would have a troubled life, but it would always be the people I let in that create the problems.

I then had my cards read by my stepdad at 23. He was told he was good by quite a few people. So I said let's see what you can tell me.
The thing I remember most from his reading was that there would be people that have brought me nothing but problems, and when I get away from them, the problems would stop, they'd try and try again to get back into my life, but ignore them, they're not good associations, just have a happy life without the problems. Sadly, those people he saw in my cards included him, my mum and siblings.

On the other hand, I had someone else read my cards, she told me I would have 2 boys in close succession to one another the next year. That was year 4 of infertility. Year 12 and I'm pregnant now, definitely later than she said, and I definitely will not be having another after this one

@Sunshinealligator

I remember having my tarot cards read when I was 16. I remember that he told me a lot of things that turned out to be right.

He seemed to know that I was pregnant at the time. He told me that I wouldnt stick with my boyfriend for long, 12-18 months.
He said that I would fall in love with an older man, and he would seriously hurt me. He would love me, but not like I needed. (It happened. At 18 I fell hard for someone, he cheated and got someone else pregnant- he was 14 years older than I was)
He said I would have a troubled life, but it would always be the people I let in that create the problems.

I then had my cards read by my stepdad at 23. He was told he was good by quite a few people. So I said let's see what you can tell me.
The thing I remember most from his reading was that there would be people that have brought me nothing but problems, and when I get away from them, the problems would stop, they'd try and try again to get back into my life, but ignore them, they're not good associations, just have a happy life without the problems. Sadly, those people he saw in my cards included him, my mum and siblings.

Sorry, don’t know if I’ve misunderstood this. Are you saying your stepdad told you he, your mum, and your siblings would fuck you over, and then they did?

Because that’s not psychic. I could tell you most of my family are nothing but trouble but that isn’t superpowers, just experience.

Also, your stepdad would have chosen to do what he did - so again not psychic anymore than me saying ‘I’m going to have a sandwich’ then making and eating a sandwich. Just common sense really.