How do clairvoyants know things??

[Homer2]

I have never believed in this, I saw one once just for fun at my aunties house and she wasn’t great. She did say a few things that were accurate, but I put this down to being guesses or general vague things that would be relevant to the majority of people.

However, recently my friend went to one. She recently lost her dad and her partner. Without telling the clairvoyant anything, she knew how her partner died and what his name was. She mentioned my friends dad blowing kisses in a weird way, with the palm of his hand instead of his fingers, which is something he did used to do. How would she know these things??? I don’t honestly believe in it, but can’t understand how she’d know such specific things

Whenever anyone who claims this has been properly tested, it always turns out not to be true. They are all doing versions of cold reading. Some don’t really realise how they’re doing it. Most do.

You’re going to get people on here saying its not true they get things from FB etc and some saying it’s true and clairvoyants are gifted etc, the truth is we’ll never know!

I’ve been to a medium before she didn’t say one correct thing about me or they were very vague.

My mum visited one a while ago and my friend who passed around 12 years ago came through and the medium told her things about my friend my mum wouldn’t have known she had never even met her, I was surprised when she relayed the info back to me.

Once I was in a shop with my son when he was around 5, and a random lady came up to me and said excuse me you’ll have a gorgeous daughter one day - which i did 7 years later, she could have been bonkers and I forgot all about it until I found out I was having a girl and it did make me laugh.

I do see how it can comfort people who have lost loved ones, I can’t be mad at people wanting that comfort.

This woman correctly told me (after I pushed her to tune in) that I was carrying twins and what their sexes would be. This was before I knew, but of course my body knew!

This is so easily deniable and falsifiable, though. If she already knew you were having twins, it's a one in three chance that you'll have either two girls, two boys or one of each. If she gets that wrong, she can claim that e.g. one of them is actually a girl, but she'll show an interest in [some male-stereotyped interest] or may be questioning her 'gender identity' at some stage, however briefly.

If it turns out to only be a single baby, then she can say that they started off as twins but tragically one of the embryos died at a very early stage before anybody else knew.

I meant to say she didn't charge any money because it wasn't allowed within her "church" but when she did parties there would be a whipround that she would always refuse until they insisted She was a friend of MILs. a tiny little grey haired lady but an absolute fraud !

Clearly the medium was the other side of the fence and threw the guitar 😂But also they would've slung it back - so wouldn't have come into her possession as such?

Did she say her powers didn't stretch that far? A local medium, for local people.

A few years ago I went to boundary mill to pass the time waiting for dh to finish a meeting. We live over 50 miles away.
At the back was a 'clairvoyant' to pass more time and for fun I went for a reading.
He was very good in a fun way.
Told me I was married and had 2 children there was a third but he didn't live.
He got that my dh was in a meeting and it would be successful for him.
I was thinking that some of those he could guess.
At the end he told me that I have a strong connection to Canada. I didn't know anyone from there. He insisted that it was strong.
The time was 3.15pm.
Got home at 5.30pm.
Rang my mum about 8ish and she had just got off the phone to my younger brother.
He was in the army and that afternoon his platoon had received orders of their next posting.
Canada.

Yes she only did a few areas there was nonsense about it being to do with her church.

Yup. You essentially have a choice between ‘unconsciously reading people, so suggestible they actually believe in their own ‘powers’’ and ‘Rapacious scamster, consciously reading people, researching people etc’. Both lots happy to profit from the gullible.

I am very good at tuning into people and be able to see how something will turn out. I once said to my mum that i thought my dad had another brother. This turned out to be true but wasn't spoken about in the family. All very strange.

I just get feelings so I think i'm a huge empath. I don't think i've special powers though i'm just extremely sensitive. (which can be a bit rubbish!)

I used to read people's cards using playing cards at Uni. I made it up but it was actually concerning how easy it was to convince people it was true! Basically if you tell people they are undervalued and have great potential they will lap it up. If you tell men they want to impress their dads and their dads are impressed but don't say so (assuming their dads are alive), they love it. If you tell women they don't give themselves credit for how clever/ competent they are, they love it. If you tell a 20 something year old student that their love life has been complicated but something wonderful is coming their way, they love it. I did always used to finish by telling them I had made it up but they never wanted to hear that!!

I went to a psychic after my DH died as a friend wanted to go ,i'm a sceptic and scientific in my approach to life.
I have no online footprint, no facebook, instagram etc.
The psychic said "who's XXXX" ,I though could be co incidental as its a very common name for a man of my late husbands age. But answered "my late husband"
She then said a few things that were generic to the bereaved about love and loss and could have applied to many people.eg: he thanks you for everything you did for him.
But just before the end of the session she said my late husband was describing an affectionate unusual gesture that i made when we were alone as he was dying,i'd never told anyone about it.
Made me think......

I remember Richard Dawkins seeing a clairvoyant for a TV programme. She told him, "you're moving from a very active, to a less active era in your life". As Dawkins said, you don't need powers to know someone in their mid-60s might be retiring.

Thats fascinating. Do you know why your friend would come through to your mum if she had never met her? Did your friend give her a message for you?

I have incredible stalking skills on social media and have stunned people with how much I can find out about long lost friends/schoolmates/partners 😅
I can find information out with the tiniest bit of random info about them (ie where they worked 10 or 20 years ago) and through a trail of other people.
Last week I tracked down someone I hadn’t seen for 24 years, who had changed their name and completely locked their profile down. We had no mutual friends. I did it with a Google obituary of her grandfather from 10 years ago, grabbed a couple of names and played around with surnames, trial and error, then worked my way through several family members pages until I found a comment from someone on one or their pictures. Took me less than an hour.
This person has remarried and I had no idea of her married name. There was no link to her maiden name and none of her family members I knew of had social media. I now know her name, where she lives, works, the names of her kids… it’s quite scary really. Obviously I’m not doing anything with this information, I was just being nosey because we were great friends but lost touch after school.

I realise this probably makes me sound like a total lunatic but I’m just highlighting that with a bit of brain work, it’s easy to find out a lot about people.

These people are also very good at cold reading. So cold reading, internet sleuthing and also the person being read often slightly exaggerates what the clairvoyant knew when telling others, even if they don’t realise they are doing it. It’s conformation bias.

Guess work, luck, vulnerable punters who want answers about loved ones, and who look for the truth in general statements.
Pre internet, a famous woman "clairvoyant" used to do the rounds. Before her shows, she had mates hang out in the toilets. They'd overhear conversations about what people were hoping for, eg "I hope she can help me about Harry/my grandma/my cousin in Australia/my lost wedding ring" etc
Then she'd use that in the show.
A charlatan, and exploitative

Go and watch Derren Brown - the cold reading is amazing - but that's what it is - he's not a clairvoyant.

Clairvoyants are charlatans who are preying on people who are vulnerable. It is all confirmation bias - you remember the bits that chime with you.

My ex NDN convinced me to see her clairvoyant on the basis that he was “brilliant” she had lost two close relatives in REALLY shocking circumstances and the whole family swore by this guy.

He was abysmal. Really crap and off the mark asked me if I knew a Dave etc.

All I could think was that he was taking this whole family for a ride in their grief and I couldn’t even tell her because I didn’t want to be the person taking that certainty and belief about her relations from her.

I don’t believe in it because of that experience and one other whereby the “psychic” seemed to get his kicks from hurting people

They don’t!

Things have happened to me that I can’t explain - dreams that have literally happened the next day, coincidences that I can’t even begin to get my head around

Am I a clairvoyant? Definitely not. But I know that there are things that we simply can’t explain. So I tend to have a “sceptically open mind”

My family had an unsettling experience with a medium a year or two ago. My sister and dad went to see one, partly out of curiosity, partly to see if a message from my mum might come through.

My sister was given a message from my mum, saying she was with a baby who had been born too soon, whose name began with a certain letter and some very specific information about the baby's funeral - details about the quite distinctive cemetery, location of the grave and the weather. This all related to a family member who had had a stillbirth a year before. Nothing was posted on social media about this baby or the pregnancy, only a handful of people were at the funeral and the cemetery was a location miles away. My sister or my dad hadn't given any information about this family at all to the medium.

I am usually of the mind that mediums are charlatans and are fishing for info, trawling socials etc but in this case I can't see how they could have got hold of the information they had.

As a person with Christian beliefs, I don't believe that dead people can send messages, the bible says that when you are dead, you are sleeping, it also says that the satan can disguise itself as an angel of light and this is what I personally believe happened here - the medium genuinely received a message but it wasn't sent with good in mind.

Hence, my personal belief is that you shouldn't mess about with trying to contact the dead like this because you don't know what you could unleash. 99.9% of the time it's a bit of fun, Derren Brown type stuff, but there is a tiny chance that it could be something a lot darker.

I can’t remember her name, but much more recently in Dublin, two audience members could hear the UK touring ‘psychic’ on stage being fed information by employees in the sound booth via an earpiece, based on things people had been asked to write down on slips of paper in the lobby before the show.

Doris Stokes, the adorable granny of psychics, was a cold-blooded charlatan, who used to reserve the front rows at her gigs for regular fans, about whom she knew everything, so she could have detailed ‘messages’ for them, and even phone up survivors of car crashes and house fires who were in local papers, inviting them to her performances so she could have messages from those who’d died. She used to visit hospitals to make contact with the gullible soon-to-be bereaved!

I suspect your friend booked in advance with her full name and the “psychic” stalked her on social media.

The ones who play to crowds use extremely vague prompts to target the gullible. For example, they might say at a show in Cornwall “I’m getting a name with an E in it. And water. Something to do with water, but not sad - happy.” E is one of the most common letter in names, and it stands to reason that people living in Cornwall probably all have happy associations with the water. Someone in the audience gasps aloud or reacts, and the “psychic” says “yes, you’ve lost someone with an E in their name, someone important to you” - obviously, because the person has to be dead or they wouldn’t have reacted like that. The person will usually say something like “yes, my mum.” Or “it must be aunt Elsie”, which tells the psychic it’s a woman. They’ll then say “yes, it’s definitely a woman, she’s here with you.” Statistically, an older female relative is likely to have owned at least one piece of decent jewellery, and to leave jewellery in a will so the “psychic” will then say “there was a ring…. Or a bracelet…. No, a necklace (testing for the reaction) that Elsie always wore. It was important to her?” Once they hit on the right jewellery item, they’ll go with “and Elsie left it to you?” If the answer is yes, they’ll say “Elsie is here. She wants you to know that whenever you wear her necklace she is with you.” and if the answer is no, it’s “Elsie is here. She wants you to know she’d have liked you to have the necklace because she misses you” - it’s actually really very, very easy because the people who are gullible enough to buy tickets and react to these things are all emotionally vulnerable.

Ive been twice, both times to the same guy who has an amazing reputation. (And an amazing house paid for by that reputation!)
First time was pre internet and I went with my sister who did not want to go alone. I'm a complete sceptic but went along with it and was surprised that he got some very good shots. Then he told me it was clear the other person in the waiting room was family, he said he knew I was talking to her mentally whilst I was in with him. Had I said it was not family he would probably have said that it must be someone close to me which would cover his mistake. I went along with it and when he said he had 'Ted' with him I acted amazed and said it was my grandad. I 'forgot' to mention that grandad was still alive and was actually called William.
Of course, when my sister went in he gave her the same dead grandad!

A few years later I went again because a friend wanted to go and wanted company. By this time he was famous in the local area and living in a massive new build and you got a strict 15 mins for your money rather than 45.
My friends dog had died and she was desperate to find out if he was at peace. When she came out of her session she was very upset because he had not mentioned Gordon her dog so she has decided she could not leave without asking about him.
So she told him that Gordon had died 4 weeks previously and she just wanted to know he was ok and now with her grandma.
He replied that they were very happy in the afterlife just as they had been in their long happy marriage!
Charlatans all of them, preying on vulnerable people.