Dictionary.com defines the word Psychic as “a person who is allegedly sensitive to psychic influences or forces.” This definition is very vague and therefore it is necessary to try and understand what psychic influences or forces mean. One of the biggest problems determining if psychics are real is that there is not a regulatory or licensing guidelines like there are with other professions.
Therefore there is not a real definitive guideline for measuring their truthfulness or validity.
According to the source Psychic Detective, a professional psychic relies heavily on his or her reputation. Obviously, one with a bad reputation is not going to be able to remain a psychic for very long. A psychic’s reputation is clearly based on the feed back of his or her clients. With this in mind, it would logical that a particular psychic would want good references and thus help the psychic to remain in business and successful.
I interviewed my mother who has had a few encounters with a psychic, and she feels that it is very likely that the “Psychic” she worked with was legitimate. Her husband murdered a good friend of hers, but her body has never been found. There was never any evidence of her husband killing her therefore, he was never questioned. My and a couple of her friends started talking about possible ways to find some end to this tragic event. My mom and her friends hired a psychic to help them, and the police, find the body.
My mom’s closest childhood friend, Janet, disappeared on August 15th, 1996. Her husband Perry was able to keep it from everyone for almost two weeks. Once the word got out, and the police got involved, he left the city with his two children and never returned. My mom instinctively knew that Perry was responsible for her disappearance, and ultimate murder. A few months after Janet’s disappearance, my mom and five of her friends met with a Psychic and had a sense.
Pat, the psychic, asked them all to close their eyes and think about their friend Janet. After a few minutes she told them that Janet was present in the room. Pat looked at my mom and said, “Is there anything you would like to ask Janet, “Dianeee Poo Poo.” That is the name that Janet called my mom since they were little girls. My mom told me that there would be no way that Pat would know that. Pat had said other things to my mom and her friends, and they all felt that a connection with Janet had been made.
My mother contacted the police after the first meeting with the Psychic and informed them about the details that were given to them the night of the séance, and asked the lead detective on the case if he has ever worked with Psychics on other cases. My mom was so excited to hear that he had worked with Psychics before, and was willing to talk to Pat. My mom and Pat met again and Pat was able to contact Janet and find out more details about her disappearance and the location of her body.
Apparently, Janet described to Pat the location of her body and how she ended up there. Pat, the detective, his dog and my mom, spent days trying to locate the place Janet described. My mom thinks it is very likely that they discovered where Janet’s body was originally placed. However, years later it was revealed during Perry’s trial that the body had been moved from it’s original place. Perry’s father was an accomplice to the crime and testified in court that he helped move Janet’s body from the place that Perry had first put her. The site he described in court was the exact spot my mom and the police searched. Had she not been moved, my mom feels sure that they would have recovered her body.
Every few months my mom and Pat would get together to try and make some progress on Janet’s mystery. Very often they would spend a day with the detective and his hound dog searching out places based on the information given to the Psychic and the clues that the police uncovered. This went on for years. My mom told me that there were times that she had her doubts about the whole thing, but overall, she felt that the information Pat knew about Janet was very legitimate and there was no other source where this information could have come from.
Ten years later Perry was brought to trial. The trial lasted two weeks and Perry was found guilty of murder even though her body was never found. My mom was called to the stand to testify and the defense attorney asked her questions about her work with the psychic. He did this to try and discredit her as a witness. She thinks the jury was intrigued by her work with the psychic even though nothing concrete came from it.
My uncle Don also had a very interesting Psychic experience that is truly unbelievable. My uncle is now 52 years old, but when he was in his mid twenties he met with a psychic. He really did it more out of curiosity then anything else. His one-hour conversation with the psychic was tape-recorded. He was willing to sit down with the psychic even though he was not entirely sure of the outcome. At the time he met with the psychic he was single and living in Nashville, Tennessee working for his fathers company, and assumed it would be his one-day. The psychic predicted that very soon he would meet a girl with blond hair and they would get married and move out of town. Within a few months he had met Suzy. She had blond hair and there was an instant connection. Within a few months they were engaged, and a few months after that they moved to St. Louis, Missouri where they have settled and raised a family.
At the original psychic meeting, the woman also gave my uncle some information that was very troubling. She predicted that his father, my grandfather would pass away when we least expected it. About 8 years later, at the young age of 62, my grandfather dropped dead of an abdominal aneurism. This event even influenced the fact that And lastly, the psychic told my uncle that she did not see a long future with his wife. She predicted 3 children, and they did have three children. However, when their youngest child was only 4 years old, my aunt Suzy was diagnosed with a brain tumor. After a very hard, three year battle with the disease, she passed away a few days after her 40th birthday. My uncle would tell you that he definitely believes that psychics have some type of special energy within them, which allows them to feel the energy of the people around them, and in some cases, predict the future.
But to some people psychics are un-real, lucky or just a coincidence. Can they truly see the future? Do they actually have the ability to speak to the dead, foretell future events and recount past lives? According to one article by Jeffery Palmer, There are no professional policies or standardized practices to adhere to. According to Ray Hyman and the National Science Foundation, suggest that parapsychology has methodological flaws that can explain the experimental results that parapsychologists attribute to paranormal explanations, and various critics have classed the field as pseudoscience. This has largely been due to lack of replication of results by independent experimentershere is no established governing body to report fraudulent psychics to. People have no guidelines to base there decision if they are real or not. Determining if a psychic is legitimate or not, is all based on reputation.
Works cited
1. Herbert , Frank. “A real psychic.” frank herbert, october 8 2008. Web. 8 Oct 2010.
2. Kazan, Lorrie. “How do psychics find missing people or solve murders.” Intuitive Connections Network (2006): 1. Web. 26 Sep 2010. http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2006/psychicslocatemissing.htm
3. zammit, victor. “detectives psychic .” psychic detectives (2010): 1. Web. 26 Sep 2010.