Close Encounter of the Psychic Kind

How an encounter with a medium made me realise the real snake was the faker who ‘saw’ the other side

One of my old contacts used to be a successful fortuneteller who even had the privilege of gazing into his crystal ball for Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.

But this spiritualist was driven to a much different type of spirit when he packed it all in to start up an illegal Poitin distillery!

The self-confessed chancer, who looked like something straight of out central casting with his bandanna, quipped he gave it up because he couldn’t see any future in it!

This dying trade wisecrack turned me into a doubting Thomas who reckoned a tasseographer was just shorthand for “tea leaf”.

But my outlook was suddenly changed after a chance meeting in a Spanish bar with an elderly Irishwoman who was a medium.

Somehow she was able to reveal deeply private details about my past, which floored me.

This Close Encounter with the Medium Kind profoundly changed me.

I no longer considered myself to be an atheist. It had me leaning towards agnostic if nothing else.

God’s honest truth, it was a wonderful release just being able to imagine the prospect of a reunion with deceased loved ones again.

But after a recent episode, I’m now left wondering if my medium friend might’ve overheard me talking earlier that night about some of these things to my friend.

A relatively well-known medium, one who shall remain nameless, recently reached out to me about the possibility of doing an article on them.

I had forecasted to hear some dramatic revelations from this psychic because a few household names had been singing their praises.

This particular medium told me their experience was very similar to Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Ghost.

I was assured that your dead family members would appear in front of their very eyes like a glowing Patrick Swayze if they were good souls.

While an evil spirit rushed upwards from the ground in the shape of a swirling black cloud.

This medium insisted they could even instantly detect if any new client was a paedophile.

I was told, “And they’ll be shown the door. I will tell them, ‘You know why I can’t do your reading!’”

It was all heady stuff, which had me keyed up at the prospect of getting messages from dead loved ones.

Then the clairvoyant closed their eyes and held out their arms as if holding a serpent.

I was immediately transfixed by this eerie vision of biblical proportions.

As the mist slowly cleared, the medium could see an older Irishman in a short-sleeved shirt with a snake in his arms.

“He’s in a foreign land,” I was told.

The scales fell from my eyes. He had described a photograph of my grandfather with me as an 11-year-old on a trip of a lifetime to Thailand in 1984.

It would’ve been mind-blowing stuff if not for the fact that this very same holiday snap had been put on my Facebook in recent times. It had been posted as a screenshot of an article I’d written about grief in my old column the Irish Sunday Mirror.

The only snake in the room was the actual medium.

I continued to play along with this dog and pony show as my own version of Ghost’s medium Oda Mae Brown “talked” with some of my dead relatives.

Everything uttered to me was gleaned from my social media or some articles I’d penned.

I think my medium friend had hoped by getting their name in print it would soon have them on Dancing with the Stars.

But it was no better than dancing on the graves of my loved ones.

I was surprised the medium didn’t see it coming when I blocked them after one of their silly rants on WhatsApp.

We could do with legislation to prevent these parasites from taking advantage of vulnerable people.

But I can’t see that happening, either.

To paraphrase John Lennon, I don’t believe in mediums - I just believe in me...

© Jason O’Toole