A psychic named Shirley
I've met many psychics in the course of being a professional Skeptic, so to speak, but today's was the most astonishing encounter I've ever been involved in. The occasion was a test for a BBC program looking at spirituality; their plan was to do a sort of test today and then do something more comprehensive early next year. I don't think they expected at all what actually happened. Certainly, I didn't.

The test as described to me was this: I would write down five facts about myself, and the psychic would divine *exactly* what they were. It would not be considered a success unless he got all five.

This sounded so specific (how could someone guess the exact wording?) that I thought the most likely possibilities were that psychic must either rely on magic tricks or be entirely delusional. If that sounds closed-minded, it's not meant to: but one must eliminate those possibilities. I'm prepared to accept a paranormal claim as genuine if the evidence is truly extraordinary -- but it must *be* extraordinary and that means ensuring there are no tricks or vagaries of interpretation.

Delusion is something you don't need to protect against; that you hope you can identify on the day. But magic tricks are another thing entirely, and I'm no magician. With the help of Mike Hutchinson, I prepared for the best-known tricks. I provided myself with a selection of stationery -- one piece each of several unlikely colors (turquoise, lavender, yellow card, red) of A4 paper, plus a selection of envelopes that were all easily distringuishable from one another -- an airmail envelope, a window envelope, a plain gummed one, and a pre-addressed one to the IRS in the US). I also thought carefully about the five facts: they needed to be things I wouldn't have posted about here or on my Web site or in 13 years of Usenet postings... Eventually, I used a random dictionary thing to try to jog ideas, selected five that seemed unlikely to be easily guessable, and I wrote these on a piece of yellow lined paper and sealed it inside an envelope, which I marked with the date and time. I also lined all the envelopes with aluminum foil -- one trick I was familiar with is using an alcohol-moistened sponge to temporarily render an envelope transparent and read the contents. I had been told I would keep the envelope with me at all times, but I couldn't be sure in advance that that was what would happen. Suppose the crew wanted to photograph it separately?

I had also read (in one of Randi's booksabout pencil reading -- that some people have trained themselves to read what someone writes by watching the end of the pen/pencil they are using. So I knew I would need to be careful if I was asked to write the five facts out in the presence of the psychic -- it might be that he could only divine them if I wrote them in his presence. Mike warned me to watch out for specially prepared clipboards that could keep a record of what I wrote. So I was prepared to either take the sheet of paper off the clipboard or to insert another sheet of paper under the one I was writing on. It would be hard to see why a psychic would object to that.

In the event, although the crew arrived with blank white sheets of paper and envelopes, they were happy for me to use the one I'd prepared in advance. However, they said they also needed me to do a drawing for the psychic to read. I was a bit disconcerted by this, as I knew of psychcs who had been quite successful with this kind of reading -- either by using the aclohol/envelope trick, as noted above, or by the fact that people tend, when challenged at short notice, to produce drawings of a few common subjects. I didn't want to fall prey to that. The five most common things people tend to draw under such circumstances are: house, flower, stick figure, boat, fish. So my first thought was: don't draw any of those. I was in the canteen, and basically did the dictionary thing again: I looked around me for something I could draw. (Bearing in mind I can't draw.) At the next table, there was a bottle of Coke and a cup. I drew the the bottle and labeled it (with its distinctive shape), Coca-Cola. The researcher who was minding me was fortuitously gone at that moment, getting a bottle of water; when he came back I went to the bathroom and added the cup to the picture, then sealed it in the prepared, foil-lined envelope they had chosen. I put both envelopes down the side of my right cowboy boot, where I figured they'd be safe, unnoticeable, and unpickable.

I needn't have worried about that: the psychic and I were kept apart until showtime. No one asked for the envelopes, and no one else touched them. There was no clipboard. I was a bit worried about the drawing, in that if someone had mentioned I'd done it in the canteen it might have suggested possibilities. I don't think anyone did. In any event, this psychic was not doing magic tricks, as became plain very quickly.

I was taken into the lab they were using as a studio, and seated at an empty table opposite Shirley, who was dressed in an ivory suite with heavily lacquered or sprayed shoulder-length blonde hair. He likes to stare at you; not sure why. We were asked to introduce ourselves, and the direction suggested I begin by talking about what the Skeptic does; I said, why not let Shirley start. After demanding I remove my bottle of water from the table ("I have to have the table clear"), he reached across and shook hands. "I'm Shirley. "I'm Wendy Grossman." Fine.

He then opened by saying that when he hears the word Skeptic he thinks of the word septic. I replied, I hope politely, that "This has been put to me before. But since we spell it with a 'k' I don't really think there's much similarity." When I did get to explaining what the Skeptic does and that I felt it was good to have a counter to the kinds of articles we generally see in the mass media about psychics, which are credulous, he interrupted (actually, he interrupts people more than I do, which is saying something) and accused me of (paraphrase) using big words I didn't understand. I don't think he said "regurgitating the encyclopedia" but it was something like that. I explained what credulous meant. He said he was "of the people". Well, we all know I'm a smart-ass. He informed me that today HE was going to show me that psychic powers and communicating with the dead were real.

The discussion that followed involved increasing hostility on his part. He called me "whacked-out", and suggested that in the 1960s I must have done a lot of - and he made a smoking/drug sort of gesture. (This incident and a later one that I'll come to make me think he's not particularly good at judging ages. I was 16 in 1970.). I said no, I never did drugs (anyone who knows me will back this up), and he winked and half-whispered that he understood I didn't want to talk about it while the cameras were rolling. I said, no, I was telling the simple truth -- and he did it again. At which point, I think it was, that I said that his constantly saying "Do you understand?" made me think he thought I was an idiot, which I didn't particularly appreciate (I was tempted to say, "No one ever did themselves any favors by assuming I'm stupid," but I felt it was more effective to be polite.), and that he should assume I'm not lying when I make a direct statement. If I don't want to answer something, I said, I will *say* "I don't want to answer that." If I make a statement, it will be true. And he did the wink-nod bit *again*. Right.

I said, somewhere in here, that I found his hostility extraordinary. "The psychics and mediums I've met," I said, "try to come across as quite sympathetic people."

We went round in a loop for a bit while the director despaired and Shirley shouted at him to go away because he was on "their" side.

On to the test. I took the envelope out and placed it on the table with my hands over it. Shirley was asked to produce his predictions. "I've already done it!" he caroled. Then he realized we wanted him to write them down. Somewhat impatiently, he asked for a pen -- he rejected my green gel pen (which actually had dark blue ink in it) because he said he wouldn't use a trick pen -- and accepted a black marker from the crew, along with a plain white sheet of A4 paper.

"Are they just one word?" he asked me. I replied, "I was asked to write down five facts about myself."

He wrote, in a column, the numbers 1 to 5 on his sheet, filled in 1 and 2, skipped down to write in either 4 or 5, then came back and filled in the rest. In the end he had:

1 JESUS
2 The man in the video shop
3 lentils,
4 THRUSH
5 ZOOKEEPER

My five facts were (I didn't number them):
- I have two old tennis balls in my dryer
- I am currently reading Bodies in Motion and at Rest, by Thomas Lynch
- My youngest friend is 19; my oldest friend is 73
- Two of my teeth have crowns
- I cannot draw
(I was remembering that fact when I was trying to do the drawing in the canteen.)



Shirley was ecstatic. It was clear to him that if I would just put my glasses on when I reached inside the dryer I would see there was a picture of Jesus inside, and that if I went to my video shop the man there was reading the same book, and that Owen and Tom both love lentils. Afterwards, I wished I'd pointed out the unlikelihood of someone with the name of Grossman having much in the way of pictures of Jesus around. (Actually, of course, almost everyone probably has a picture of what we imagine Jesus to have looked like somewhere in their home -- in art books, encyclopedias, whatever.) Somewhere in there after trying to reason with him, I think I said, "Does the phrase 'grasping at straws' mean anything to you?"

By "Thrush", incredibly, he really did mean what I call a "yeast infection" and not a bird. I doubt he'd know that Americans don't call it thrush. (Nor do they use the word "flossie" which was his effort to explain it to me.) This was another of those wink-whisper you don't want to talk about this while the cameras are rolling, I understand bits. Of course, I doubt there's a woman over the age of 25 who *hasn't* had a yeast infection at some point, but if I do currently, it's not telling me about its presence.

Zookeeper, he related to not being able to draw by saying I couldn't draw a zookeeper. Well, that's true. Among the many millions of things I can't draw, zookeepers do figure.

On to the drawing.
He insisted I reveal my drawing first. As he was getting more and more fractious and hostile, we humored him, although the director insisted he take his prediction out of his jacket pocket, where he'd indicated it was, and place it on the table first. He did so. I unsealed my drawing. Quivering with excitement -- "I got it!" -- he unfolded his paper -- a white sheet covered in small drawings -- the marker had gone through enough that I could see from the back. I definitely picked out a house, there was, as he would point out in a minute, a telephone and a dollar sign. He began explaining his journey across the page, and I can't now remember the details, "First you thought of , and you decided against it, and then you thought of , and...he wound up at the dollar sign and pointed to it and the Coke bottle. "You're American, aren't you!"



We looped some more. He tried several gambits on me that I'm sure actually do work on a percentage of the women he sees "of a certain age". But I am *not* of that age, despite the grey hair.

"I feel your pain; I feel your shame; you are not to blame" was one such. I think I just sort of stared at him. (Oh, yes, earlier he had accused me of being frightened of him and had cited the fact that I didn't look him in the eye. Well, I'm not into staring contests. I'm perfectly happy to let the other person win and do something else.

I *think* he made a very brief effort to hypnotize me. He said something or other and then ordered me to sleep. I stared at him. Then I blinked. He shrugged, "Oh, well."

He then told me he knew my secret shame. Which was: I "can't hold it in". Eh? He fleshed this out in more detail. Apparently, I suffer from incontinence while shopping at Asda, and one time I peed my pants and the staff had to clean up a little pool of piddle (I think he called it). I don't think I've ever been in an Asda, and I said so, and I am not incontinent, and I said that, too. Another nod-wink-cameras bit. When I said, no look, really, he accused me of protesting too much.

The director wanted us to wrap up at this point, and asked me to make a statement about what I thought about the test. Shirley by this time was very fed up with the director -- kept demanding he go away and stop interrupting, said he was "making me look like a prat". I said, "It's his show." and "Do you know what a director does?" To no avail.

Trying to do the wrap-up, I said that I thought -- and Shirley kept interrupting me. He had a little tantrum because I'd put the bottle of water back on the table - "I have to have my table clear!" -- and warned me not to drink all of it, because it would "just run through". We finally got him to quiet down for long enough for me to say that I thought the connections he thought he'd seen between what I'd written and what he'd written were tenuous at best, and that I was not impressed with his performance. He responded that he had won, and I wouldn't admit it, and it was Psychic 1, Skeptic nil. I finally said, as politely as I could, that on the evidence I thought he was delusional. The director wanted to stop there. Shirley kept shouting, "I have to have the last word!"

I forgot that throughout the second half of all this he repeatedly accused me of being jealous of him (as well as frightened) because he had people's attention. When I pointed out that a lot of weeks I have a million readers (in the Telegraph, although probably it's fair to say most of them don't notice who the writer is), he didn't seem to register it, though after that the jealousy was because he was special. He should have done a small amount of Web research about me. I feel pretty special myself, much of the time. There are lots of (bad) psychics. How many people play Irish jigs on clawhammer banjo?

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine whether you think he was successful with his divinations; I have tried to be fair with my reporting. But it was truly one of the most bizarre encounters I've ever had. When I phoned Chris French afterwards -- he'd also been filmed in a discussion with Shirley a few hours earlier -- his experience was similar (without the test), although instead of suggesting incontinence he suggested adultery ("Names!" said Chris. "I want details!"). I have no idea whether they'll be able to use any of it.

wg