Have you ever wondered how palm readers can make predictions? How did the psychic on “Larry King Live” know so much about their callers’ friends and family, many of them dead? Enter Timothy Campbell, a psychic impersonator who claims he can easily identify and reveal “seers” tricks. Campbell spoke at OISE on Friday, Feb. 13.
“It’s really very simple,” he says. “Psychics are very quick thinkers, utilizing [volunteered] information by working it into his or her script.”
Campbell claims that a “mark,” a person who requests a reading by a psychic, generally provides enough useful fodder for the seer to pull new details out of the air. He provides an example from a recent Larry King Live show which featured psychic Sylvia Browne. One caller said she was distraught that she had not “felt her mother’s presence” for some time, the caller wondered where she might be. Without skipping a beat, psychic Browne offered: “Oh, she’s with you. You’ll see many birds around…and you’ll smell perfume.”
Campbell says that psychics employ certain techniques, which are easy to spot if you know what to look for. For instance, in the previous example, Campbell explains that “…Browne capitalized on a world view that a contented dead person’s spirit may hover in pleasant things.”
Another technique involves the psychic “seeing” the loved one pointing to his/her head. This, according to Campbell, “…is just a way to draw out the mark, getting him or her to make a connection. It can be interpreted in many ways: the person died of a brain tumour or a blood clot, the person had migraines, or wants you to think about something. It’s up to the mark to remember something that will make it fit.”
Campbell likens a mark to a customer. “Psychics need to find out what the mark wants-usually closure-and will keep drawing out the conversation till they get some useful tidbit of information. Then they give the customer what he or she wants.”
Psychics often include un-verifiable statements in their repertoire of techniques, says Campbell. For example, caller 22, who lost her husband in a head-on collision with another truck, was amazed to learn that the other driver was asleep at the wheel. “He might actually have been blind drunk,” says Campbell, but since the psychic’s statement cannot be verified, she had the freedom to invent a scenario.
But what happens if the psychic makes a mistake? Psychics are great at damage control. After being told by a caller that a loved one did not have dark hair, Sylvia Browne replied, “Oh, I thought so, because that’s not him!” The psychic can then use the technique of “repackaging,” or taking a mark’s volunteered information and restating it as if she/he knew it. If this doesn’t work, “love and light” is sure to melt a mark’s heart and provide consolation. For example, Browne said to the widow, “You know, your husband swerved to protect you.”
Is there anything wrong with providing closure and comfort to grieving people? Timothy Campbell has made it his mission to debunk psychics. “It creates a strong sense of moral outrage [in me] to see grief turned into money. What if that person finds out later that the psychic was untrue-they have to grieve all over again. Furthermore, it’s a lie against how the universe works…that we can somehow reach a dead stranger any time, without delay, and bring back a pleasant little message.”
