After sitting through over 50 medium readings (using fake information so they couldn’t Google me!), I’ve watched human beings defy the laws of the universe as I always understood them to be. I have now spent the past five years researching the evidence of an afterlife and the scientists who officially study it. (Yes, they exist!) The experience even inspired me to write a book about this topic, WTF Just Happened?!: A Sciencey-skeptic Explores Grief, Healing, and Evidence of An Afterlife, which comes out next month. For example, I have had mediums who ask clients not to give any personal information when booking a reading, or who hire assistants to manage all bookings so they don’t know anything about the future client going into a reading. In group readings, some mediums have shared that they know some information about me “by normal means,” meaning they know I lost my dad ahead of time. To avoid mediums who are fraudulent, I suggest staying away from the storefront psychic shops where they have signs offering cheap, $10 readings. I also suggest, as I mentioned above, concealing your information so mediums cannot “cheat” by looking you up beforehand. (The ethical ones won’t anyway, but if they end up giving you accurate information, this will ease any potential doubts about how they got it.) For example, when I took a mediumship class and had to give a reading to another class member—a middle-aged woman—I told her she had lost her grandmother, that her grandmother was a warm woman, and that she had gray hair and baked cookies. These were all logical deductions that I figured would most likely be right, and they were. I was not intentionally “cheating,” but these thoughts popped into my head logically. I was not reading her mind, nor could I sense her grandmother communicating with me. If I thought I had psychic abilities (which I don’t), I might have considered this a psychic moment. However, if I’d known the name of her grandmother, her hobbies, her personality, or the cause of her death, that would be harder to attribute to logical deductions. There is a small selection of mediums that get to this level of specific information regularly. For example, The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) is a research group of the University of Virginia School of Medicine that studies everything from past life memories to near-death experiences to, yes, mediumship. The Windbridge Institute administers rigorous testing to psychic mediums to assure they get accurate information without cheating. And The Forever Family Foundation is an organization that combines science and spirituality to help those grieving, and they work with certified mediums and also have a scientific advisory board. You can learn more about her on her website and Instagram.
