The Psychic Tourist E-Book

William Little

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Can someone's life be predicted? Are physicists on the verge of discovering the first time machine? And why does a Nobel prize-winning scientist believe that humans are capable of sensing danger before it happens? Following a prediction of his sister's death, William Little sets out to find the truth about the power of fortune telling and prophecy. On a journey that takes him to a witches' coven in a haunted wood, on the hunt for murderers with psychic detectives and to the doorsteps of the world's most powerful and revered psychics, William Little goes on a quest to find out whether people can see into the future - or if the many millions who consult horoscopes, listen to psychics on TV, or who read Nostradamus are simply being sold a lie.

Leseprobe

The Psychic Tourist

The Psychic Tourist

A Voyage into the Curious World of Predicting the Future

William Little

ICON BOOKS

Published in the UK in 2010 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-228-9 (ePub format)

Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-124-4) sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2009 William Little

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Introduction

1 It’s a mystery

2 Back to the past

3 The Psychic Queen

4 It’s a psychic challenge

5 The wise old master

6 Life on another planet

7 The gypsy

8 Psychic murder

9 Captain Realyvasquez goes hunting

10 Deep in the witches’ lair

11 The haunted wood

12 In the palm of my hand

13 The Enlightenment under threat

14 The psychics to the stars

15 The Nobel-winning psychic

16 Testing for the future

17 Psychic school

18 The James Bond of psychics

19 My sister’s prediction – a last rescue attempt

20 Bomber Command gets all superstitious

21 The time machine

22 Taking the lid off

23 My final future

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the author

William Little is a freelance journalist for the Saturday Telegraph magazine, Weekend Telegraph, the Guardian, The Times, and the Financial Times. He has also worked for Arena, Esquire and Cosmopolitan, and contributed articles to the Independent, the Daily Express and the Big Issue, among many others.

www.psychictourist.com

Author’s note

All the events described in this book actually took place, and all characters depicted really exist. I have used real names except for a few occasions when, out of respect for privacy, they have been changed.

For Nikki

Introduction

I’ve just received the most disturbing news of my life. My sister and my nine-year-old niece believe they are going to die in a water accident and it’s all my fault. I’m devastated.

My 38-year-old sister, Sarah, is sitting on the sofa opposite me, her legs curled under for extra protection against this vision of death. ‘It’s that bloody birth chart you gave us. It was in there,’ she barks at me. It’s Christmas at our parents’ house but this doesn’t feel like a very festive conversation.

Her explosion of pent-up emotion is unexpected. I’d simply asked her where she was thinking of taking my niece, Elly, on holiday.

‘I was looking forward to taking her sailing in Greece, but then I remembered that bloody birth chart. I’m even terrified of going to France on a car ferry. I’m certainly not taking the night ferry – we’ll probably get trapped in our cabin as the boat goes down.’

My sister, normally a hard-headed individual, is having a near-panic attack because of something she read in a horoscope.

‘It’s a load of rubbish,’ I say, trying to sound rational. ‘How the hell can a bunch of stars determine anything?’

‘Yeah, well, if it’s such a load of nonsense why did you give it to me, then?’

Ah. Good point. What the hell was I thinking? Well, as it turns out, not a lot. When my sister first mentioned the birth chart I couldn’t remember what she was talking about. Then with a jolt, it hit me. Some time in the not-too-distant past, just a few days after the birth of my niece in December 1999, I had decided it would be thoughtful to present my sister with Elly’s horoscope. But not just any horoscope, a birth chart – a full and detailed stream of predictions about her future and her character based on the date, time and place of her birth. Somehow, I thought – not actually thinking too much about it at all, if I’m being honest – the positioning of the planets, the moon and the sun would all be able to reveal whether the future Elly would be a teenage delinquent or a pioneering physicist. And it would be great if her mum, rather than waiting to see what her daughter would become, knew all of this before it happened. Did I think it was mumbo jumbo or an ancient form of soothsaying handed down to us from the wise old men of ancient Greece? Well, between you and me, I just thought it was a nice present.

Just as I think my sister’s anger has evaporated, another problem emerges – it appears I also had a birth chart written out for her too.

‘It says it in both of them,’ she says. ‘Mine says that I will have an accident in water, which will lead to the death of a child. Elly’s says that she will be involved in an accident in water and that will lead to the death of a parent. I think I might just fly to France instead.’

Shit.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I shout. But moments later I’m sitting in silence. What I’ve just told my sister about it being a load of bunkum is now suddenly at odds with how I feel. Pinned down for eight long years, my superstitious side has just escaped from a high-security enclosure in the murkiest reaches of my brain. It’s leaking out everywhere and making a mess of my view of the situation. Surreptitiously I glance over at Sarah looking miserable on the sofa, and I hear my niece telling my mum off in the kitchen in one of her endearing ‘I’m now an adult’ fantasies, and I suddenly don’t want them to travel across any stretch of open water either. I’m scared. I’m cut up about it. It’s like it’s already happened. But I don’t want to say so because it will just reinforce what she believes already.

There’s still a part of me that thinks this is nonsense, but I’m hedging my bets just in case it isn’t. I can’t prove it either way, of course – there’s just this rational part of me that dismisses it out of hand. But what if that is irrational? What if people really can see into the future and we just haven’t been able to prove it yet? Or are all these fortune-tellers just charlatans, preying on the weak and the vulnerable? But, and this is the thing that’s getting to me, my sister isn’t weak and vulnerable, and nor am I. My sister’s a nurse of vast experience. Whereas I weep at fictional deaths on TV, she routinely deals with the reality of death in people’s homes. More than anyone I know, she really understands the meaning of life, the end result, the real ‘future’ of us all. She isn’t given to getting sentimental, but she does worry about her daughter a lot. For instance, she wouldn’t visit me in London for a long time because she thought Elly might get hurt. By what, I don’t know. Her fear of the city was irrational. So perhaps that’s it – maybe each of us has a weakness that the fortune-tellers, the tea-leaf readers, the crystal ball-gazers and the mystic gypsies are channelling into.

The questions are endless, and I need to get to the bottom of them quickly. But before I do, I need to take a closer look at myself. I have a dirty secret. At different stages of my life, during relationship crises, job dissatisfaction and general boredom, I have dabbled with the future, wanting to find out what was out there for me. And the experience wasn’t overwhelmingly positive. A few years ago, in a state of confusion that followed the dumping of a former girlfriend, I went to see a fortune-teller at London’s Mysteries – a bookshop that calls itself the leading mystic resource centre in Europe. It was all a bit baffling. The female mystic reckoned I had issues with my sexuality – that I wasn’t getting any was the main issue, I thought, until she mentioned that I might be gay. Hmm. So I uncrossed my legs. She was clearly trying to read my body language. Once I put her straight, she then took the opposite tack and said my animal signs were the snake and the hedgehog – I was all spiky and a seducer and in the next few months I would have a lot of fun in the nightclubs of London town. Right. So now I’m no longer gay, just a sex pest. Thanks.

I came out feeling none the wiser. Yet in the months following I still got myself a couple of tarot card readings, and I had my palm read by a friend’s girlfriend. I also had an astrological birth chart drawn up, which has since been ceremoniously burnt as my present girlfriend was unimpressed when she realised I had one. She didn’t like the idea that my decision-making might be influenced by what I read in a horoscope. Would I, for instance, dump her just because it said so? Since then, as I’ve got older and become more sure of myself, I haven’t needed the fortune-telling business. I’m far too rational. I explain it away as mind games, guesswork, clever deductions, or people in a crisis just hearing what they want to hear. But now that I’m thinking about it again, it doesn’t seem enough to dismiss it out of hand. The fortune-telling business is everywhere. A surprisingly large number of people I know believe in psychics and mediums. And they aren’t alone. Thousands call up psychics on premium-rate numbers every day and millions of people read their daily horoscope in the press. Can so many people be wrong?

There’s not a single person I know who hasn’t at one time or another tried to find out about their future. There’s my mum, for instance, who’s visited enough mystics over the past 30 years to be able to read her future backwards. One mystic recently revealed that her windows were going to leak. Great. Another one told her I was going to live abroad. (Hmm, my girlfriend will be going to live abroad with her job and I’ll probably go with her – it was probably just luck.) Then one Christmas my mum tells me something that sends me reeling.

‘Another one said your sister was going to have a motorbike accident,’ she says casually. She hasn’t noticed that I’ve stopped breathing. My sister did have a motorbike accident and she didn’t tell my mum and dad. She chose to tell me instead, as she knew I’d just say ‘Wow’ and walk off, while my parents would have hunted down and dismembered the boyfriend who had foolishly decided to take Sarah for a ride on his bike. I tell my mum this now, and she just shrugs. What? Yeah, just shrugs. My mum believes in it all. It doesn’t even occur to her that it might not have happened.

But what I can’t figure out is that if people can actually read the future, what’s the point? If mystics are giving out gems like my mum’s going to have leaky windows, what’s the point of knowing that? What’s my mum going to do with this piece of information about her windows – put a bucket out to catch the water whenever it rains? Did knowing the future prevent my sister from falling off a motorbike? And if I moved abroad, so what? I could have told my mum that – she didn’t need a mystic to tell her for me.

So on one level it seems people want to know the future just so they can say that the future can be known. Are they just ticking boxes about their experiences, or is there some practical application to all this? If the future can be told, can it be changed? These are big metaphysical questions. Have our lives already been lived in the future? Is there such a thing as fate? After all, if someone can read the future, then our lives are predetermined, which means we don’t have any free will or control over it. If your future has already happened, why bother getting up in the morning?

So I’ve got to get to the bottom of this. I need to find out the truth about my sister and niece’s horoscope readings, and I need to discover whether the future has already happened or whether the mystics are just giving false information to people in a crisis who want to hear some good news. A friend of mine reckons it doesn’t matter whether they can read the future or not – mystics offer people hope by mapping out a positive future. Yeah, right, tell that to my sister. If they can say things that can seriously affect someone’s well-being, should the whole future-telling industry be closed down?

In order to find out the truth about the future, I’m going to take a perilous journey and go there. I’m going to seek out my future from the best mystics the country and the world have to offer. I’m going to try everything from crystal ball gazers to tarot cards, witches, palm-readers and mediums, to the oldest and wisest gypsy in the most run-down caravan I can find. I won’t leave any stone unturned in order to find out the truth. But will they all agree? That’s the test. By the end of this journey into my future, how many futures will I have? And will any of it come true? But more importantly, will I still be the same person? If it’s just the power of suggestion, what if the things that I hear make me subconsciously take disastrous decisions about my life?

Along this journey into the future I also need to talk to the modern-day mystics – the Derren Browns, the quantum physicists who reckon that there are levels of reality of which we aren’t consciously aware. Could quantum physics explain the existence of spirits? I need to speak to psychologists and scientists. And I need to understand what psychics and mystics really believe and what’s really going on in their heads when they see the future or speak to the spirit world. Above all else I need to talk to the psychics who claim to have predicted big events, like earthquakes and famous deaths, and the people who keep going back to them time after time. I also need to find out whether astrologers and mediums are tapping into the same ‘spiritual’ energy source when they predict the future. Are the stars, the planets and mystics’ brains all connected in one giant psychic communications web? And I’m going back in time to speak to the original fortune-tellers, the witches, who claim to control nature using spells. Could they put a spell on me to help me see my future more clearly?

But the ultimate test is that I’m going to become a mystic myself. Some psychics believe that only a few have the gift, while others believe everyone is born with psychic powers but we choose to ignore them. Well, I’m going to enrol myself at a psychic school where they reckon they can teach anyone to have mystical powers. So by the time I reach the end of this journey I will be able to answer the biggest question of all – do we have a future? No ifs, no buts, no annoying compromises or partial answers.

But before I put on my walking shoes and hit the road to my future, I have one final worry, and it might put all my plans in jeopardy … Do they already know I’m coming?

1 It’s a mystery

I’m back at Mysteries, Europe’s finest mystical resource centre, the site of my first reading ten years ago, open-minded, my brain racing for answers because I want … no, I need to give it another try. There must be something more to this place, I figure, judging by the steady supply of customers seeking their fortune, and I have to get to the bottom of it.

Before the disturbing conversation with my sister, I would have said that mystics were the ham actors of the occult. But now I’m not so sure. With my sister on astrological death row, I’ve got to tread more carefully and question my previous assumptions. It’s a matter of life or death.

And I have to remember that the smirk is like kryptonite to these people – they can’t bear not to be taken seriously. Maybe this is because fortune-tellers are the priests of a new-age religion helping give people’s lives structure and meaning. After all, more than 60 per cent of people in the UK believe in the power of psychics. While others self-medicate with alcohol or overwork, is it so bad that some people choose mysticism as their drug of choice?

I’m disappointed when I meet the mortal who owns this place. I was expecting Professor Dumbledore, an eccentric with a long beard and wise old eyes, but Matthew, the owner for more than 25 years, claims not to have mystical powers and doesn’t give readings. He’s clearly a good businessman who saw a gap in the market during the new-age revolution in the early 1980s and is reaping the rewards today. Mysteries has expanded massively since it first opened its doors in July 1982 and does a booming trade.

Matthew hands me a piece of paper outlining the powers of Mysteries psychics. My choice is crucial. Is one among the fifteen dedicated mystics performing today the real thing? Will just one reading here give me the answers I’m looking for? There’s Marco, for instance, who’s straight-talking and deals only in hard facts. He tells it as it is. While tarot astrologer Chris looks like he might do a Kenneth Williams impression and charm you with his dry wit.

Only Alice and Mary are free at the moment. Both claim they were born with psychic powers as well as having a direct line to the spirit world. Yet they have other weapons in their psychic armoury just in case these should fire blanks. Alice consults tarot, while Mary tunes in to her intuition. Alice is also a master at psychometry, which is reading someone’s energy from holding an item of their jewellery. Mary, however, has the ultimate sell – she has gypsy roots and can use Wicca, i.e. witchcraft. She looks intense in her picture, while Alice appears friendly. I opt for Alice. I don’t know why. Maybe Mary’s intense stare has unnerved me.

As I climb the back stairs to the mystics’ den above the shop, I remind myself that I’m not going to give any ground to Alice. It’s a straight fight between me the psychic sleuth and her the mystic.

Compactly small with a blondish bob and an ambiguously arched eyebrow, she sits at a small table covered with a dark blue cloth. The table and room are so intimately small that they seem to exist only for the sharing of whispered secrets. The atmosphere is hypnotic, the intensity such that I can hear my pulse throb. Yet nothing has been said. Alice begins by taking my watch, which she clasps to her chest, closing her eyes and channelling into my energy. She keeps me tuned in with a deep, soothing voice. Throughout she shoots understanding and dreamy glances at me. She adds to the mood by tilting her head to one side and frowning when she speaks to her spirit guide. Her concentration is unnerving – it’s as though she’s having a long-distance conversation with someone on a crackly line to Australia.

Every now and then she gets me to shuffle and pick out cards from a pack of tarot. I don’t know what it is about these cards that unnerves me. The ancient figures of death, kings and princes of fortune are like a ouija board of the soul. Thinking about a particular aspect of life, say a relationship, while shuffling the cards orders them in such a way that Alice is able to reveal what’s in store for me. Handling them feels like playing poker with the occult – will I get a good spread or will I fold into an uncertain future? Weirdly, these ancient pagan kings push out cards towards my fingers. Spread out on the table, these picture postcards of the future are so weighed down with the myths of the past that anything seems possible. I’m so taken in and primed to hear my fortune that when Alice starts predicting my future, I have to ask her to repeat what she says. I think I haven’t heard her right.

What the disembodied whispers and the pagan cards reveal is that I need to leave my current place of work because most of my colleagues are backstabbing egoists and I’m bursting at the seams with integrity. They are, I admit, complete bastards. I can’t stand them. But I left my job more than four years ago to work for myself. She then tells me to dump my girlfriend within the next three months, despite moments before wondering whether she was pregnant. It turns out I have to dump her because she wants to have a baby and we aren’t talking about it. If we start talking and stay together, Nikki will fall pregnant within twelve months. She also reveals that I will go abroad three times on a mission. My ears prick up and I map out a future for myself performing daring antics across the globe. But my Indiana Jones fantasy world is a permanent feature of my professional time-wasting daydreams anyway.

Despite the tension and drama, I’m beginning to feel disappointed. The mystical view of Alice is being slowly replaced by the reality of my rational mind. Her acting is astonishing. I’m more or less open to being impressed in my quasi-scientific search for the truth, but almost everything she says fails painfully to leave a mark. We’re like two ships that haven’t even bothered to leave port, let alone pass in the middle of the night.

I’m on the verge of losing interest when the mood changes suddenly and Alice looks at me like she’s been possessed. My skin prickles. I feel dizzy – am I hyperventilating, or has the air suddenly become heavier? She closes her eyes and rubs my watch and frowns. I’ve stopped breathing.

‘I have your granddad in spirit here.’

Holy shit. I nearly jump out of my skin. She’s caressing my granddad’s watch when she says this. I was given it when he died a few years ago. It has his name inscribed on the back. I’m so frozen with anticipation that the air seems suddenly thick with soot. My eyes are burning and my head hurts.

‘He’s saying your dad’s stubborn.’

I was expecting him to tell me to take better care of his watch, or thank the family for throwing his ashes into the River Severn, something that only he’d know. But I’m so on edge that the nagging question forming slowly in my head like an ice age in the tropics suddenly brings me around like a slap in the face. My dad? Slap. I’m confused. Stubborn? Backhanded slap. I was expecting some information about my mum, because it’s her dad’s watch that Alice is now grasping. I never think about this granddad, my father’s dad, who has apparently just dialled the spirit-world blower. He drank too much, lost jobs because he was down the pub all the time, and he was cruel to my Nan, even when she was dying. I’m surprised Alice can understand him through all the alcohol-induced slurring. And another thing, my dad isn’t stubborn. He is, in fact, the least stubborn person I know, unless you count that time when I was ten and he wouldn’t take me to football practice because I’d set fire to the lounge carpet. But that seems pretty reasonable to me. And then that’s it. He hangs up. There’s not another peep from my granddad.

Drunken granddads and childbearing aside, it’s my relationship that keeps Alice busy for the rest of the session. She tells me that I’m going backwards and forwards in my mind because Nikki, my partner of nearly seven years, is clingy and will try to stop me going abroad on one of my work-related missions.

The reality for me is that she’s more likely to dump me for being a stay-at-home bore. And the suggestion that we don’t talk enough is like suggesting shit never hits the fan. It just doesn’t wash.

I have another surprise. The spirits are frankly a bit pissed off about being taken for granted. This is because I’ve told Alice I’m here to do research. I’ve got to believe in them without question, otherwise they won’t play ball. Spirits getting shirty, I hadn’t expected that. Nor the twist that I’m the charlatan for trying to catch them out. I’m the destroyer of the faith for daring to hold them up to the light.

I’m concerned that there’s nothing on which to judge Alice’s assessment of my life and my relationship. If you don’t believe in psychics and mediums, then Alice getting so much wrong about Nikki and me makes sense. But what if you do believe that Alice was tuning in to the spirit world, my energy levels, my thoughts and feelings – then what? That I’m deluded about my relationship and my life, or that Alice was having a bad day? Well, that’s what Matthew believes.

‘Their powers vary from month to month. Sometimes they get it all right and that can be very reassuring to the customer, but they do have their off months. But all our readers are tried and tested. They all do a trial reading with a member of staff who is experienced at receiving readings,’ he says.

We’re sitting in his office at the top of Mysteries, which is surprisingly well lit and modern. He has a big desk with a TV screen to the left showing images from a number of hidden cameras.

‘There they are.’ He points at the screen, showing the mystics at work. ‘It’s like The Truman Show,’ he jokes.

I ask about Alice’s predictions, but Matthew cuts in and says that it isn’t fortune-telling like fairground gypsies. ‘What they know is what has already happened in the past and what is happening now in the present. The future hasn’t happened yet, that is common sense.’

‘Right. So we all have free will, then? Our futures aren’t predetermined?’

‘Of course we have free will, and no, the future hasn’t happened yet. All that psychics and mediums are doing are tapping into something that is already known,’ he tells me. Matthew believes that the universe is integrated and that there’s some kind of collective consciousness. Psychics use this like a mystical grapevine, listening in to our past and our present and giving suggestions about our futures. It’s a captivating idea and I want to buy it, but it comes a little too cheaply: you know when you get it home it will break down under close scrutiny. I’m all for believing it, but if all it takes for something to be real is a passionate interest, then me and my dad would have made Birmingham City Football Club win the league every year since 1976. If anything, it’s had the opposite effect. My quest is for truth based on verifiable proof. So far all I have is an idea that, in the shape of Alice, has no corroborating evidence. If she was plugging into the grapevine it must have been one hell of a windy day.

So I seek out another opinion on Alice. Nisha, a regular punter, thinks Alice’s the genuine article. Nisha is a pretty Asian woman in her late twenties. She looks startled, as though five people are talking to her at once and she can’t quite make up her mind who to answer. My initial Sherlock Holmes deduction is that she’s a bit weak-minded and ditzy, but I soon learn she’s a lawyer. Shit.

Despite her initial nerves and embarrassment about having to open up, Nisha comes across as intelligent and articulate. The gist of it is that she can’t cope with her friends’ judgemental comments on her life any more and needs a spiritual stranger to guide her. She’s been visiting Mysteries for more than four years and sees Alice six times a year minimum.

‘My first reading was very powerful. It shed a lot of light on an intractable situation that I had been in for a long time,’ she tells me. ‘I was seeing a man at the time. My friends kept on saying the same things, but coming to see a stranger helped put an objective light on it. She said some things about him and his personality that I hadn’t wanted to face up to. It was what I really needed to hear and no one else had done that for me before.’

But coming to Mysteries wasn’t just about helping Nisha to make decisions, which she had never been good at. It was also about becoming more spiritual.

‘I used to have a lot of highs and lows emotionally. Now I’m much calmer about life,’ she says, holding my gaze for the first time. ‘I have a deeper understanding of life.’

Nisha gives me an example of Alice’s mystical ability. She came to see her again recently about a man at work who was interested in her but who she was unsure of. ‘Alice said that I should go and have some fun with him. She also said that I might not think he’s the one for me or my type, which I didn’t, but I should give it a go anyway. Then she said it would hit me suddenly, and bang, it did about three months later,’ she says.

This seems reasonable enough, but in my post-Alice mood I’m in rationalising overdrive. The thing about Nisha is that she reminds me of half a dozen of my female friends, but ten years younger. Although they never went to mystics, they were always worried about blokes and dreaded making decisions. The advice we gave was always, ‘Go for it, have some fun and you might find that he’s the one for you.’ The problem with this was that sometimes we were right and sometimes we were wrong, just like Alice. Nisha, you see, is back to see Alice today because the relationship that was meant to be is now no longer working, and she wants some advice from the same person who told her it would be all right. To me, this sounds like giving a second chance to the surgeon who accidentally removed your leg instead of your tonsils just because you’ve always trusted doctors.

Like Nisha, I can chart my own rise from seeing a Mysteries mystic all those years ago to where I am today as a kind of spiritual journey. But for me, it was the voyage of growing up, becoming mature and having the confidence in my own ability to make judgements. Youthful insecurity and indecision go together like Tom and Jerry – they keep winding each other up, which leads inevitably to a circular neurotic kiss chase. It’s the cat and mouse of life.

I wonder aloud why Nisha didn’t see a life coach instead, but that, she admits, wouldn’t be spiritual. For Nisha, it’s this sense of being grounded in something bigger than yourself that’s the key. The idea that when you look in, it’s not just yourself you’re asking, but also the universe. On those long, dark nights when you’re struggling with your inner demons and life’s travails, it’s nicer not to feel so lonely.

To be fair to Nisha, she does believe that mystics get it wrong sometimes. ‘I do think they can channel information, but sometimes maybe what they say is what they think rather than what they channel.’ Advice from a spiritualist, for instance, not to take a part-time job during her MA in Law left her saddled with debt. ‘It was the wrong thing to tell me. I should have worked then.’

Despite my rationalisation of Nisha’s experience, there’s no doubt in her mind that it has helped her. She has become happier, more in tune with herself and more confident. But she’s provided no real proof that these people have supernatural powers. She’s been given no more than the kind of advice my aunt would give.

I’m about to give up all hope of finding any evidence and head home disappointed, when I’m introduced to Mike. He greets me by slapping me on the back because he’s seen me for who I really am.

‘It’s a load of old bollocks, isn’t it?’ he says, giving me a knowing wink. He’s a 50-year-old plumber and he’s got a tattoo on his arm. He sits down and folds his arms in a confident East End, hard-as-nails kind of way. I just mumble ‘right’ and laugh weakly. Then he straightens up and all his chummy friendliness drops away.

‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Alice.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘If it wasn’t for that mystic I’d be talking to you in spirit, mate,’ he says.

I want to ask a million questions but I just sit there dumb. Mike gives it to me straight.

‘I thought it was a load of old guff, right. Bollocks is more precise. I came here for a laugh with some mates a year ago after a couple of Saturday afternoon pints. And she says she has my dad and my granddad in spirit. She tells me this right at the end, and says they’ve been badgering her the whole time, but she thought it was too big a deal to tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘That if I didn’t go see a doctor right away I’d be in trouble. I mean, straight away.’

‘And did you?’

‘Of course I fucking did. If you hear something like that it plays on your mind. What have you got to lose – nothing more than half an hour down the doctors. But it wasn’t half an hour, was it? No, it was a bunch of tests by a bunch of doctors up at the hospital. It turns out I had some kind of rare blood disorder and they were bloody surprised I was still walking.’

Mike’s in no doubt that his life has been saved by the power of a fortune-teller. This leaves me with a conundrum. Until now, despite a paucity of evidence, the unshakeable belief at Mysteries is that its soothsayers are bona fide, despite negative real-world consequences. And here I am presented with what seems like irrefutable proof. I feel unsettled by the stark contradictions.

I catch up with Alice a few weeks later to talk about her own beliefs. She’s sitting on a packed train and she doesn’t care who can hear her. It’s not just that she thinks that she’s more intuitive or more sensitive than other people, but that she actually sees spirits all the time.

‘I was about seven years old when I first became aware. I didn’t know what they were at first. No one else saw what I saw around me. They were people but there was something different about what they were wearing. One woman was covered in water. Then they started communicating with me.’

‘Why you, why not someone else?’

‘Because imagine if you’re a spirit and everyone is ignoring you and then there’s someone who you can communicate with, wouldn’t you try to talk to them?’

‘I guess. But why can’t everyone speak to them?’

‘I think we are all born with the gift but some of us choose to use it and some of us don’t. If you look at babies they can all see it, but when they start growing up they switch their eyes off from it.’

So far, so spiritual, but what about the inconsistency of her predictions? She is, surprisingly, just as frustrated as me, yet not with herself but with her spirit guides. ‘Especially one that just gives me random words. When I asked him what those words meant, he replied: “I am not here to spoon-feed you, I am here to guide you.” I have to filter information that comes through. I don’t just say anything. I have to make sure it’s right,’ she says.

Reading the future seems to be a serious matter of interpretation, littered with ambiguity and pitfalls. Spirits with attitude – maybe this is what affected my reading. Perhaps they only guide people who really need help, not some nosy journalist with an ulterior motive.

Alice also believes, unlike Matthew, that the future has already happened. ‘It’s not a big deal for spirits to see the future. What I feel is that we are all souls and we make a soul agreement before we are born about the choices we are going to make in our lives. You can change your decisions when you are born, but there is always a higher plan for yourself.’

I don’t understand. Our future is predetermined but we can change it? Was me turning up to Mysteries to see Alice predetermined? I don’t know, but something Matthew said about Alice has me wondering. When I said goodbye to him, he told me that he knew I was going to pick Alice.

‘How’s that?’

‘Because she knew you were coming here when you got the commission three weeks ago,’ he says.

I laugh, expecting Matthew to join me in the joke, but he looks back stony-faced.

This doesn’t bother me at first. But later I think back to when I had the idea to investigate the fortune-telling business, back to that uncomfortable conversation with my sister at Christmas.

I’m in the kitchen when I’m thinking this. I rush back into my office. I pull the calendar from the wall and frantically count the days. I count them again and then once more. I have to admit it to myself, even though every fibre in my body is resisting. I met Alice exactly three weeks to the day after I decided to investigate fortune-telling – the very same day I learnt about the prediction of my sister’s and my niece’s death.

Spooky, huh? Or am I just playing with your marbles? Sure, it happened just like I say. But that’s all I have. Apart from the trips, that is. Yeah, I unexpectedly went on a press trip to Guatemala, I’m doing a road trip around Belgium for a national newspaper, and I’m heading off to the US in a few months. So that’s three out of three missions. Sounds promising? But there’s still all the stuff she got wrong. You see, it’s the pick and mix aspect of the mystics that does for them. They give you a whole load of blackjacks and aniseed balls that you spit out in disgust, then they throw in a strawberry mojo and you go giddy at the knees because it’s your favourite and you think they knew it all along. We just forget about all the nasty sweets they passed us beforehand.

I once heard that Ken Dodd talked fast during gigs in order to tell as many jokes as possible in the hope that everyone would eventually find one funny. Aren’t mystics doing the same thing with their predictions? But is this because they’re charlatansor because their spirit guides are giving them a hard time? We expect them to be consistent and precise, but if they really are listening to a cryptic ghost talking down that crackly old telephone line, then it isn’t surprising that sometimes things get a bit mixed up?

Yet it’s this imprecise nature that’s really bothering me. Maybe Matthew and Nisha were right – sometimes mystics channel what the spirits say, sometimes they get confused, give their own opinions and screw it up. And there’s simply no accounting for Mike’s good fortune. But perhaps it’s because I’m aiming too low. It’s early days yet and I’m still in the foothills of the mystic mountains. I’ve got bigger mystics to sieve. My planned trip to the US is to visit Sylvia Browne, one of the world’s leading psychic phenomena. She has used her predictions to save lives and has predicted plane crashes and momentous world events. Could Sylvia be the real thing, and could she offer me a consistent, unquestionable reading?

FUTURE 1: ALICE AND ME

Predictions:

I’ll go abroad three times

I’ll leave my job

My girlfriend will become pregnant within the next twelve months

I have to decide in three months to dump her

Things I don’t know but I should:

My girlfriend wants a baby

My girlfriend will prevent me from going abroad and this could cause the break-up of my relationship

My dad is stubborn

My girlfriend is clingy

2 Back to the past

I was expecting the home of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) to be a labyrinth of dusty corridors and experimentation rooms. I imagined shelves filled with cracked and battered books of the occult, concealing secrets of how to bring back an evil spirit or two from the underworld. Situated behind the neo-gothic Natural History Museum in Kensington – all turrets, looming towers and gargoyles – it seemed to be in the right part of town for paranormal activity.

Of course it was nothing like that, though the outside was promising enough, with an undertakers housed in the basement offices below. As I pressed the buzzer and was let in by Peter, the administrator of the SPR, I idly wondered whether they had succeeded in bringing people back from the grave. But inside I realised that the dead had already left for livelier places. It felt drab, cluttered and small. There was a small office with an old computer, a library and a scattering of odds and ends that didn’t have any obvious function – if the SPR were a shop it would be Lidl.

After my unsettling experience at Mysteries, I headed over here to undertake some serious research. Having started on my quest for the truth about the future, I thought it wise to head straight back to the past and find out what I was up against. I needed the help of the collected wisdom and knowledge of the Society’s past psychic sleuths. This was essential before I headed off to the US to meet Sylvia Browne, one of the world’s leading psychics. I had some burning questions and I needed help getting answers fast. Do psychics have off-days, like Alice? Are some psychics more powerful than others? There must be a history of psychics and fortune-tellers more reliable and convincing than Alice. I needed to find them urgently.

I figured that if these more powerful psychics had existed, then surely they would have been tested and the evidence would be lying somewhere in these dusty rooms. The SPR has been the home of scientists researching psychics and mystics for well over a century. It’s also home to one of the best-stocked libraries on the supernatural in the country, if not the world, with thousands of books and journals on every aspect of the paranormal.

The SPR was set up in 1882 when Victorian Britain was breeding mediums and clairvoyants like rabbits on a spring bank holiday afternoon. The place was teeming with psychics and spiritualists claiming new powers every day. According to the official history of the SPR, a group of prominent scholars from some of the top universities wanted to get to the bottom of why the country was attracting so much psychic energy.

The first President of the SPR was Henry Sidgwick, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University, who had ‘enormous standing and moral authority in the intellectual circles of the day’. His chief colleagues were Frederic Myers, a classical scholar, and another intelligent fellow called Edmund Gurney. Early members included such ‘prominent figures as the physicist William Barrett; the experimental physicist Lord Rayleigh; Arthur Balfour, philosopher and Prime Minister; Gerald Balfour, classical scholar and philosopher; and Nora Sidgwick, one of the Balfour clan and wife of Henry Sidgwick, herself a mathematician and later Principal of Newnham College at Cambridge’. There was little chance, I thought, that a charlatan psychic could fool so much heavyweight IQ.

They took the investigation of the subject very seriously, applying strict scientific methods. Much of the early work involved investigating, exposing and in some cases duplicating fake phenomena. Yet occasionally they seemed to hit on cases that appeared genuine. The most famous of these was Leonora Piper, an American whose powers were brought to the attention of the SPR by William James, a pioneering psychologist and brother of novelist Henry James.

Leonora Piper, born in 1857, was considered the foremost trance medium in the history of psychical research. She was rigorously tested over more than fifteen years and holds the honour of converting Dr Richard Hodgson, the foremost psychic detective of his time, to believe that she was really speaking to spirits. He was renowned for exposing fake psychics and mediums, but with Leonora he couldn’t do it. This was despite him and William James going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that she wasn’t using any tomfoolery to hoodwink them.

James was first alerted to her powers by his mother-in-law Eliza Gibbens, who’d had family secrets revealed by the medium. Still unconvinced, Eliza asked Leonora to disclose the contents of a sealed letter. Mediums often used alcohol-soaked sponges to make envelopes briefly transparent (the alcohol quickly evaporated), but Leonora gave a convincing explanation while simply holding the letter in front of her. Even more baffling, it was written in Italian, a language she didn’t speak. At first James was amused that she had become a victim of a medium’s trickery. He gave Eliza an explanation as to how mediums accomplished their fraud, but this did little to persuade her that Leonora was anything but genuine. The only way to sort this out was for James to uncover the fraud himself.

According to historian Troy Taylor in his book Ghost by Gaslight, ‘When James arrived at Leonora’s home, he was surprised to note the complete absence of spiritualist props – no cabinet, no red lights, no circles of chairs, no trumpets or bells.’ James was intrigued. Leonora’s spirit guide, it seemed, had given her the names of his father-in-law and his dead child. Yet throughout, James had sat there like a brick wall, not utteringa word or allowing her to fish for information. He was astounded.

The extra appeal of Leonora’s story is that she didn’t attract attention to herself. If anything she was a bit put off by being notorious for hanging out with dead people. Yet once she’d become well known for giving accurate readings, she became little more than a laboratory rat for the SPR.

Hodgson, the most disbelieving sceptic, took every precaution to bar the possibility of deception, keeping Leonora under house arrest and forbidding her to see a morning newspaper. He employed a detective to follow her around and watch possible attempts to obtain information. At one point he even shipped her all the way to Liverpool so that she was among strangers and kept under constant surveillance. But none of these precautions seemed to hinder Leonora’s psychic abilities at all.

James was so taken by her powers that in 1890 he wrote in SPR Proceedings, Vol. VI: ‘And I repeat again what I said before, that, taking everything that I know of Mrs Leonora Piper into account, the result is to make me feel as absolutely certain as I am of any personal fact in the world that she knows things in her trances which she cannot possibly have heard in her waking state, and that the definite philosophy of her trances is yet to be found.’

When she went into a trance-like state, she could perform feats of telepathy that would make Derren Brown look like Tommy Cooper. A stranger would be led in, and told that the only communication he could have with the lady was a non-committal grunt. Leonora would then go into a long description of the stranger’s life, including details known only to the person themselves. They would then leave, shaking and dumb-founded by her powers. Leonora supposedly used a number of spirit guides to help her uncover the facts, including an Indian girl called Chlorine as well as Commodore Vanderbilt, Longfellow, Lorette Penchini, J. Sebastian Bach and an actress called Mrs Siddons.

After years of research, Hodgson eventually reported in 1897 in SPR Proceedings, Vol. XIII: ‘I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the “chief communicators” … are veritably the personalities that they claim to be; that they have survived the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with us whom we call living through Mrs Piper’s entranced organism.’

Critics of the SPR’s findings argue that Victorian Britain was still coming to terms with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was still a very religious society, even for such heavyweight thinkers. The need to investigate and find evidence for paranormal phenomena grew as the uncertainty produced by Darwin’s studies on evolution intensified. If the natural world could not provide evidence that God existed, then mediums communicating with the spirit world would do so. Maybe Hodgson and James were just hearing what they wanted to hear.

There’s much here to compare with Alice, such as Leonora’s use of spirit guides and the suggestion that she was tuning in to people. There’s also evidence to show that Leonora’s powers were weakened and unreliable when she was feeling under the weather or had stresses in her life – for example, when she was looking after her dying mother she couldn’t go into a trance or give readings.

Yet despite Leonora’s communication with named spirits and Hodgson’s belief in them, she gave a surprisingly rare insight into what was going on once all the experiments were over. It was all the more surprising because she suggested that maybe the spirits weren’t real after all.

‘The theory of telepathy strongly appeals to me as the most plausible and genuinely scientific solution of the problem … I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me when I have been in the trance state … It may be that they have, but I do not affirm it,’ she said.

This apparently didn’t surprise any of the scientists working with Leonora. They seemed to change their minds daily as to whether she was telepathic or communicating with spirits. They just couldn’t decide most of the time. All the same, it was pretty impressive even if it wasn’t telepathy. To the last, Leonora herself seemed to be uncertain what she was experiencing. ‘Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not,’ she said, unhelpfully.

One thing is clear, though. Despite all the power Leonora had, she didn’t predict the future once. Unlike Alice who said her spirit guides helped her to foretell events, Leonora, whether using spirits or telepathy, didn’t do it. I don’t understand why she wasn’t tempted to use all that superhuman psychic energy at her disposal. If Matthew’s right that psychics tune in to people, able only to read their past and present states because the future hasn’t happened yet, then it becomes clear why Leonora didn’t predict anything. Despite this, her powers of mediumship have definitely raised my expectations. If she can do all that, then I’m sure I can unearth something specific on predictions and prophecy.

Peter, the SPR administrator, seems to spend his time organising academic paranormal conferences. ‘I’m not interested in the supernatural. I just, you know, work here,’ he tells me flatly, with the look of an office worker earning less than his pay grade. For someone who’s just filling in the hours before going home, he’s a surprising fount of knowledge about modern-day academics working in the area of precognition – the scientific word for foreseeing the future. Some serious people with serious academic credentials are looking at this issue today. Peter clambers over my chair to get to an old filing cabinet which holds information on hundreds of study days. One of them last year was on the very subject of precognition, he tells me, flipping eagerly through the files. He pulls out a list of people with impressive credentials.

Physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Brian Josephson from Cambridge University heads the list, and I discover that he delivered a paper on matter/mind and the paranormal. Could this mean that science really might hold some of the answers? Maybe the future isn’t a matter for spiritualism but for physics to decipher. He believes that we can ‘sense’ the future, which might explain paranormal experiences. Dr Edwin May from California University, who studied precognition during the Cold War, is also on the list, along with a Professor