medium

Robert Todd Carroll

SkepDic.com

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for the gullible▼

New Laws targeting mediums spot on

New Mystics see trouble ahead over new EU law

Van Praagh interviewed on VideoJug (he's from another world and he's here to help)

Psychic turns Justin Timberlake away

New Zealand Skeptics - Guide to Scoring a Medium/Psychic

Shirley Ghostman

According to a Gallup poll, belief that some people can hear communications from the dead has increased from 18% to 26% over the past decade.

Shooting crap Alleged psychic John Edward actually gambles on hope and basic laws of statistics. By Shari Waxman Salon.com 6/13/02

Van Praagh Lives With Dead - miniseries with Ted Danson playing Van Praagh

medium

"...we [psychics] are here to heal people and to help people grow...skeptics...they're just here to destroy people. They're not here to encourage people, to enlighten people. They're here to destroy people."
--James Van Praagh on "Larry King Live," March 6, 2001

"I've never heard of a skeptic helping anybody with their skepticism. To a large degree, they just want to shame somebody so they can feel greater than them. But they're not going to shame me. I'm very proud of what I do." --Allison DuBois in an interview with Allen Pierleoni

"Death is a part of life, and pretending that the dead are gathering in a television studio in New York to talk twaddle with a former ballroom-dance instructor is an insult to the intelligence and humanity of the living." --Michael Shermer

In spiritualism, a medium is one with whom spirits communicate directly. In an earlier, simpler but more dramatic age, a good medium would produce voices or apports, ring bells, float or move things across a darkened room, produce automatic writing or ectoplasm, and, in short, provide good entertainment value for the money.

Today, a medium is likely to write bathetic inspirational books and say he or she is channeling, such as JZ Knight and the White Book of her Ramtha from Atlantis. Today’s most successful mediums, however, simply claim the dead communicate through them. Under a thin guise of doing “spiritual healing” and “grief counseling,” they use traditional cold reading techniques and sometimes surreptitiously gathered information about their subjects to give the appearance of transmitting comforting messages from the dead. Subjective validation plays a key role in this kind of mediumship: The mediums rely upon the strong motivation of their clients to validate words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate. The clients' success at finding significance and meaning in the sounds made by the medium are taken as evidence of contact with the dead.

Using the information provided them by their clients either during the cold reading or from other sources, such as conversations with the subjects before the readings or during breaks from studio sessions, they are able to convince many clients that they are getting messages from their dead loved ones. The medium passes on messages from the dead such as “he forgives you” or reveals things that are already known but leave the client wondering how did the he know that? In the good old days of séances and elaborate trickery, a spiritualist fraud would be more likely to pass on the message “give more money to me and my group” (Keene 1997).

Today, it is unnecessary to be so crude as to directly ask for money or prey upon elderly persons who have lots of cash and little time. People are literally waiting for years to give money to those who give hope that a dead loved one will communicate with them. There is also a lucrative book business for those who have messages from the dead and there is good money to be made by doing live shows for hundreds or thousands of people, each of whom pays $25 to $50 for the chance to connect with a lost child, spouse, or parent. There are also television opportunities for some mediums.

George Anderson, a former switchboard operator George Anderson and author of Lessons from the Light: Extraordinary Messages of Comfort and Hope from the Other Side (2000), got his own ABC special featuring celebrities who wanted to contact the dead. Some mediums even get their own syndicated television programs, such as John Edward and James Van Praagh, although the latter’s show was canned by Tribune Media Services after only a few episodes.

John Edward established himself as the first clairaudient to have his own show that featured deceased loved ones contacting audience members: "Crossing Over with John Edward" on the Sci-Fi Channel. Edward has been described as a fraud by James Randi [Skeptic, v. 8, no. 3] and Leon Jaroff [Time, March 5, 2001], to no avail. He may be a fraud, but he is an attractive and impressive one. Edward’s show was syndicated and for some time he joined Xena the Warrior Princess and Jerry Springer on the USA Network. The vulgar misogynists Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the animated series South Park, named Edward the Biggest Douche in the Universe in episode 615.

James Van Praagh is a self-proclaimed medium who claims James Van Praagh goosed by an angel he has a gift that allows him to hear messages from just about anyone who is dead. According to Van Praagh, all the billions and billions and billions of dead people are just waiting for someone to give him their names. That's all it takes. Give Van Praagh a name, any name, and he will claim that some dead person going by that name is contacting him in words, fragments of sentences, or that he can feel their presence in a specific location. He has appeared on "Larry King Live," where he claimed he could feel the presence of Larry's dead parents. He even indicated where in the room this "presence" was coming from. He took phone calls on the air and, once given a name, started telling the audience what he was "hearing" or "feeling". Van Praagh plays a kind of twenty-questions game with his audience. He goes fishing, rapidly casting his baited questions one after the other until he gets a bite. Then he reels the fish in. Sometimes he falters, but most of the fish don’t get away. He just rebaits and goes after the fish again until he rehooks. The fish love it. They reward Van Praagh's hard work by giving him positive feedback. This makes it appear to some that he is being contacted by spirits who are telling him that being dead is good, that they love those they left behind, and that they are sorry and forgive them everything.

Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine calls Van Praagh "the master of cold-reading in the psychic world." Sociologist and student of anomalies, Marcello Truzzi of Eastern Michigan University, was less charitable. Truzzi studied characters like Van Praagh for more than 35 years and describes Van Praagh's demonstrations as "extremely unimpressive." ("A Spirited Debate," Dru Sefton, Knight Ridder News Service, The San Diego Union-Tribune, July 10, 1998, p. E1.) Truzzi said that most of what Van Praagh gives out is "twaddle," but it is good twaddle since "what people want is comfort, guilt assuagement. And they get that: Your parents love you; they forgive you; they look forward to seeing you; it's not your fault they're dead."

In Why People Believe Weird Things Shermer describes Van Praagh's success and how he wowed audiences on NBC's New Age talk show The Other Side. Shermer also tells us how he debunked Van Praagh on Unsolved Mysteries. Yet, no one in the audience was sympathetic to Shermer. One woman even told him that his behavior was "inappropriate" because he was destroying people's hopes in their time of grief.

Van Praagh has books out with can't-miss titles: Talking to Heaven and Reaching to Heaven, as well as Healing Grief. (Talking to God and Talking to Angels have already been taken, not that they couldn't be taken again and again and again.) His website keeps us informed of his books, tapes (e.g., Develop Your Psychic-Self), upcoming products (e.g., a series of meditation tapes), tours, and appearances. Van Praagh and mediums like him can expect that their success will continue as long as they never tell a client that his parents forgive him for torturing them while they were alive or that it’s time to admit to the murder. There is little chance of that happening, however.

In an interview with Dru Sefton, Van Praagh states that “there is no death, there is only life....every person is psychic or intuitive to a degree,” and most spirits end up in heaven (Sefton 1998). These claims seem to based on nothing more than the belief that this is what many people want to hear.

Another devotee of Van Praagh is Charles Grodin, whose talk show on CNBC was cancelled shortly after Van Praagh's second appearance. Grodin demonstrated how open-minded, gullible, and devoted to his dead mother he is, as he fawned over the man who talks to heaven. Van Praagh's performance on Grodin's show was less than heavenly, but it was enough to satisfy Grodin and at least one couple in the audience who seemed to believe that their dead daughter was talking to Van Praagh. The only skepticism shown by Grodin was in wondering whether Van Praagh wasn't really reading the minds of the audience and the callers, rather than getting his messages from "the other side". The only person on the show who stated her doubts about the authenticity of Van Praagh's contact was a woman who lost a daughter to murder by terrorist Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. She stated that nothing Van Praagh said rang true about her daughter except some generalities. The woman also claimed that her daughter communicates to her directly.

When Van Praagh, Edward, Sylvia Browne or some other medium can’t get a good bite, they remind the audience that sometimes the message is in fragments, sometimes they don’t understand it, sometimes they misinterpret it, etc. If they're wrong, don’t blame them since they never claimed to be perfect. Van Praagh seemed particularly inept on the Grodin show. He was not very artful. He used his usual bait: questions about girls and grandmothers, changes in the home, unresolved feelings, etc. He claimed to get messages about the usual stuff: angels, cancer, the heart, newspapers. What saves him much of the time is shotgunning which ends with the ambiguous question “am I right?” and the client saying “yes,” though we have no idea what the “yes” is in response to.

Sylvia Busted Again!

Van Praagh’s shows are unimpressive to a skeptic, but to someone like Charles Grodin, who obviously is still deeply grieving his mother’s death, he is a saint. Grodin practically asked for Van Praagh’s blessing as he thanked him for his wonderful work. Let's hope that some in the audience were left wondering why there wasn’t more skepticism shown.

Currently, there is a three-year wait for a private session with Van Praagh. However, there may be some dissatisfaction in Heaven, as several others on Earth are now getting messages from the dead, too.

One of the more successful mediums is Allison DuBois, whose success multiplied when NBC showcased "Medium," a program said to be based on DuBois's psychic exploits. On her website, DuBois says

I call things like I see them and I am not afraid to push the boundaries of my abilities under university research conditions. I pride myself on accuracy, consistency and easing the pain of those who have lost loved ones.

In other words, she is cut from the same cloth as John Edward, George Anderson, Laurie Campbell, James Van Praagh, and a host of other "grief counselors" who offer their services to the grieving and the bewildered, for a fee of course. And like Edward, Anderson, and Campbell, DuBois has been tested by Gary Schwartz and declared by him to be a bona fide psychic.

One reason we should distrust Schwartz's evaluation of anyone's psychic ability is his persistent revelation that he has little or no understanding of how subjective validation works. In a classic experiment that has been repeated many times in many different contexts, Bertran Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student an "evaluation" he had taken from a newsstand astrology column. He asked his students to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2. We might translate this to mean that it is quite common for people to be given strings of statements that are not based on any knowledge of the person and yet they commonly rate the statements as something like 80% accurate. Similar experiments have been done with phony biorhythm charts, graphology readings, astrological charts, and who knows what else.

According to Schwartz, when he tested DuBois she "always scored in the near-80 percent range. That clearly puts her among the best of the best" (McClain 2005).

However, without a control, Schwartz has no way of knowing whether DuBois's scores are extraordinarily high or just average. But even without the validation of someone of Schwartz's caliber, the motivation to make contact with departed loved ones is stronger by far than the drive to scrutinize the work of a scientist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University whose motto is Veritas.

Sylvia wrong again!