We got into a theological family discussion the other day about the existence and nature of demons and angels. My 13 year old son was asking my wife and I what we thought. My wife believes in angels and demons along the standard conservative Christian understanding. I’m not so sure. Perhaps there are indeed immaterial beings, created by God, but I don’t care to speculate much further, and I’m pretty sure the typical understanding of demons and possession is largely imaginative nonsense.
The conversation soon turned to psychic phenomena, and my wife told us the story of a work colleague (let’s call her Julie Fitzsimmons) who met a psychic who knew all kinds of things about her, and could even see and commune with the spirits of Julie’s dead relatives who followed her to the psychic’s home. The psychic knew that Julie was in a lesbian relationship, and was able to tell her the name of her deceased grandmother. This grandmother was actually present in the room at the time, holding a baby boy – Julie’s miscarried son from several years before – and was able to relate personal family information to Julie via the psychic.
My wife had warned Julie not to go to the psychic in the first place, and remains convinced that such people might well be capable of channeling evil spirits.
I’m inclined to think differently. Honestly, I’m surprised that people are surprised that someone could know all manner of details about them, especially these transparent days when our lives tend to be all over the internet.
So, I asked where Julie had first made contact with this psychic, and the answer was “Facebook.” And there we go. Mystery solved. As an experiment I went on Facebook and looked up Julie (who is friends with my wife, but not with me). It was astonishingly easy to find out personal information about Julie. Her profile itself provides much of the information: her relationship status was public, so I discovered within 3 seconds she was in a lesbian relationship (engaged to her partner). Her friend list then provided me with details of her relatives. By searching Julie’s friends using her surname I got a list of other Facebook profiles of people who were almost certainly relatives, including her mother, at least 1 sister, and several others. These profiles – of varying levels of privacy – provided a wealth of further information. Her mother’s profile provided all the information a psychic could want concerning Julie’s grandmother. Moreover, a less obvious source of information on Facebook is information about a person provided by third parties: comments on status updates or photos. So, a photograph of a person holding a dog might have a comment like “Aw! Reminds of your wee spaniel, RIP Rocky!” So, without telling us themselves, we know the person had a Spaniel called Rocky, now deceased. For effect we could pretend to commune with said beast in a psychic reading.
The funny thing is, Julie swears that she provided no information to this psychic. And in one sense she maybe didn’t (though we can’t rule out information provided subtly to the psychic in the course of the reading), but the information was all there in public for any research-minded psychic to make use of.
Sadly, many people yearn for the other-worldly and are comforted and excited by the thought that our dead relatives are still with us and within reach. We’ll happily be parted from our hard-earned cash to be caught up in a supernatural story that takes us out of the humdrum of our mundane lives. We want our nearest and dearest to be with us. We want the world to be magical. By comparison “the psychic gleaned your info from Facebook” just isn’t a very sexy explanation.
Stephen J. Graham
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