Visit to a Medium: Notes on a private sitting with a clairvoyant medium

Time and place

Monday 25^th February 2013, 4.30pm    

Private flat in London, UK

Present: Fiona Bowie (Sitter) and the medium

Method

I recorded the session and listened to it again a couple of days later. I also discussed the contents with Oliver Davies (husband) that evening in some detail. In attempting to transcribe the session, however, I deleted the blank rather than recorded portion of the tape and the notes were written from memory on 7.3.13.

Background and preparation

I found this medium through the College of Psychic Studies. I saw that he was to give an evening demonstration at the College and hoped to go, but another event intervened so I asked for a private sitting. I went without an agenda but curious and after my previous disappointing experience with a College Medium, with no hits at all, at en evening demonstration with a message aimed at me, I hoped for something more evidential. I made a mental suggestion a day or two before the sitting that if Mum came through the signal or sign would be Rosemary (her middle name) and if her sister, my aunt Gill came through it would be a pearl, as her full name was Margaret (pearl) Gillian.

Setting

The session took place in a small private flat, which the medium said belonged to a friend, although he was staying or living there temporarily. He didn’t ask for any preliminary information, but I gave a quick resume of my limited experience of mediums and their negligible success. He said that he started by gathering information about the sitter, ‘my guide chatting away to his guide’ as he put it, then he was open to whoever came through. We taped the session, which lasted about an hour (£70 which I paid in cash) on my iPhone. I didn’t realise that it was still recording after I thought I had turned it off at the end of the session, hence the need to edit the recording as the file was too large to save or send. I selected the portion to save, or so I thought, but through inexperience erased the recorded portion. Having talked through it with Oliver as well as listening to the recording, the session was quite fresh in my mind when I wrote these notes.

General impressions

Immediately after the session I would have given it about 7/10 for accuracy. After listening to the recording I was less impressed and would rate it at about 5/10 as I fed back quite a bit of information, and there were substantial portions that didn’t resonate or ring true.

Motivation

The medium came over as sincere. He was keen to be reassured that I had got something out of the session. I sounded, if not sceptical, certainly straightforward when I couldn’t identify something, but generally encouraging. In some instances where I couldn’t recognise what he was saying I admitted that it could be my memory that was at fault. There was nothing I would call unequivocally evidential. My overall impression is that he picked up some psychic information about me, and there was some information about my parents that was reasonably accurate, but of a fairly general nature. In his defence he did say that the first time people ‘come through’ the communication isn’t necessarily strong and they are learning how to communicate. There was a bit of what might have been fishing and a few changes of direction when we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I had not gone with the idea of giving away as little as possible and booked under my own name. The session was intended to be a way of experiencing a sitting for myself, not as a controlled test of mediumship. I have read of and been told of enough very good readings not to need convincing that some mediums can bring through extremely accurate and detailed information that seems to come from the deceased. I was also aware that this quality of mediumship is not particularly common and that many other processes, including guesswork, cold reading, projection and imagination might well be involved on the part of medium and sitter. I did try to stay open minded as to what was going on, and to adopt the overall worldview of Spiritualism/Afterlife in my interpretations and comments at the time and in writing up as a way of remaining in tune with what might or might not be taking place.

The sitting

The medium started by saying that he felt he had a good connection with me. His manner was quiet and at times a bit tentative. I have arranged the topics in two columns, what was said and my assessment of it.

1	The medium started by talking about my work. He said I did research and had recently submitted a paper for publication – “It feels good doesn’t it” he asked/stated. I assented. This way of semi-asking a question and semi-making a statement required some sort of acknowledgement and helped keep The medium on track to some extent.	I was initially impressed by the fact that he had started on the right track. I am doing research and have recently submitted a paper for publication – but as an academic this is not unusual and previous mention of my connection with King’s College London in an email could have prompted this suggestion. I am  frequently submitting papers for publication rather than just one.
2	He talked quite a bit about “collating”, that I had taken or was taking a break from work, but that things were now coming together. What I was now doing was the fruit of many years research. I was already well respected in my field but things were moving or were about to move to a new level.	These statements were a mixture of reasonably accurate description of my circumstances but not quite spot on – they took a little interpreting. I am taking a break from full-time paid work, having taken voluntary severance in 2010. I am well respected in the field of anthropology of religion, but my current research into afterlife material doesn’t go back all that far, maybe four or five years at most. I have not yet published much although arguably things could be said to be coming together after considerable reading and some personal experience in the world of parapsychology and mediumship.
3	He also mentioned a recent book contract and said later that it would be completed by the summer or end of the year.	If he had me down as a university researcher it was not a bad guess. I had recently signed a contract for a 3rd edition of my Anthropology of Religion text, and did move the completion date from October to December. I do, however, have other on-going book contracts with various deadlines (past and future) so it is not a unique event. I may have looked sceptical when the end of the summer was mentioned as a completion date. A video of the session with body language would show what sort of cues I was giving.
4	The medium had me down as a research scientist, which came up several times. I  explained that I was not a medical doctor and he replied, “No, you are more into research aren’t you”, with which I agreed.	One might regard this mistake as an indication that any information The medium had was not obtained by googling my name, which would have revealed a considerable amount about me and my interests and projects. On the other hand, it was inaccurate as regards my discipline.
5.	I was asked if I had a connection with Africa and immunology. I mentioned a friend (from Africa) who worked on sickle cell, but otherwise no. He mentioned immunological research again. This was so far out that I told him that I was a social scientist.	As above, the information was inaccurate, but suggests that at least he had not looked me up. I do have connections with Africa, having done my doctoral fieldwork in Cameroon. I have kept personal and research interests in Africa, but nothing to do with medicine or immunology.
6.	The medium said that he heard (from his discarnate sources) the word “King’s” and said that I had a connection with King’s (College London). I agreed that I did, but that it was not a very strong one.	He may have forgotten that when arranging the time and place to meet I had said in an email that I would be coming on from seeing a postgraduate student at King’s. As a Visiting Senior Research Fellow my connections are not particularly close and it is rare for me to meet students there. I could not place any evidential weight in this having mentioned a connection with King’s prior to the sitting. None of the universities I have had or do have stronger connections with (Bristol, Oxford, Durham, Lampeter) came up during the sitting. It might be worth noting that Oliver does work at Kings. He took some of the information as applying much more straightforwardly to him, which could be the case. (Was he also in my aura? to provide an emic explanation?).
7.	The medium mentioned the East Coast of the USA and the name Harvard. I said I had no contact with Harvard, but did have contacts on the East Coast. I was told that it would be significant in the future. He said I would be travelling to the US and it was paid for, and that being careful with money was an issue. I agreed, but said I was going to the West Coast, albeit via the East Coast.	We spent two periods of Study Leave at the University of Virginia in 2000 and 2001. I have kept contacts there, particularly with Edie Turner. Esalen are paying for me to go via Charlottesville to accompany Edie to a conference in California in October, all paid for.  I do have family connections on both the East and West coasts of the USA. When naming places (Harvard) it was inaccurate, and although the bit about travel and expenses paid was/is hopefully true, it is not unusual for British academics to attend conferences in the USA.
8.	The medium then talked about Asia and said I would travel there this summer in July or August. There was some important event for my work. It was not altogether clear whether this important event would take place in Asia, but that was the implication. I said that summer was usually family time, but I had tentative plans to go to China in Summer 2014. The medium responded that it is quite difficult to interpret, maybe I would go to the East of China in a year or so.	This was one point when Oliver wondered whether The medium was reading him rather than me. He is booked to go to China for a conference in August this year and China is an important area for the expansion of his work. My going would probably be linked to his contacts, even if I was able to do my own work and teaching once there. He is going to the South China Sea rather than East this time. I had forgotten about the IUAES anthropology conference in Manchester in August at which I am organising a panel. This is potentially important for my afterlife work (but is certainly not in Asia). One would have to say that there were more misses than hits here. The wide sweep of time and geography, lack of specificity or where there was specificity (East China in Summer 2013) it was not accurate.
9.	The medium then returned to the subject of ‘collation’ as he called it. He had a sense of things moving on. He predicted that I would spend more time in Asia/China – the East of China, more than a few weeks – maybe a year or so.  It would be an area of expansion of my (immunology) work.	This sounded a little like returning to a safe subject. The reference to China and more specifically East China (Beijing wouldn’t be a bad guess for contacts in China) rather than Asia, came from me, although the East bit was added by The medium. This is a prediction that may or may not be true but is not totally implausible. I might well have given that impression.  It is hard to imagine spending a year, or more than a few days, away from home while the boys are still of school age and living at home, unless we moved to a new job as a family.
10.	I would be offered a nice teaching job in the near future, which I would enjoy.	Another prediction – not implausible but impossible to verify at present. It is more likely to happen if I am proactive in seeking such a job but we will see!
11.	There was then a change of tack from reading my aura/energy, or as The medium put it when I asked if that was what he was doing, ‘his guide talking to my guide’, to ‘bringing through’ discarnate spirits. The medium said that he had brought through a man he said he saw clearly. He wasn’t family member but had probably taught me when I was a student. His signature was a light summer suit and bow tie. He died at about 75. This man described himself as  one of the most intelligent men in the country. He was a bit pedantic and would correct The medium’s English. The medium saw him in Cambridge in a college garden party type situation and associated him with summer. He would have been an important person in my intellectual development but not necessarily best friends or particularly close. I said that I couldn’t identify him and asked for a name. The medium came up with ‘Jones’ and an ‘Owen’ or ‘Owens’. I responded that the only person I could think of who was a Jones and might match part of that description was Cheslyn Jones but he never taught me. He would have been in his 60s when I knew him in Oxford, but we did become friends and he was influential personally, particularly for Oliver, rather than intellectually. He did wear light suits and a bow tie but the personality and occupation didn’t fit, nor the Cambridge link. He ended his career as a humble parish priest rather than a don. I said that I had studied in Oxford rather than Cambridge, to which The medium responded that it could be either – it was an Oxbridge type college setting that he saw.	There were parts of the description that could fit a number of people but altogether did not resemble anyone I could think of. Edwin (Owen?) Ardener, for instance, was my supervisor in Oxford. He did wear light summer suits, in summer (and in West Africa) but I don’t think of him with a bow tie and he died aged about 60. He was associated with the LSE and Oxford rather than Cambridge. The ease with which The medium moved his location from Cambridge, which had been quite specific, to Oxford, was a little disconcerting. The intellectual arrogance of the personality The medium described didn’t fit with anyone I could think of, certainly not someone who had taught me or who has been influential intellectually. The teachers who have influenced me are very different in appearance and character. Godfrey Lienhardt would be another contender – light summer suits, Oxford college (we were both in Wolfson and he did influence me). I think he might have worn a bow tie on occasions and I can imagine him saying he was very intelligent after a few drinks but he never struck me as pompous or someone who took himself or others too seriously.  Godfrey was an undergraduate in Cambridge but spent most of his career in Oxford. He was in his early 70s when he died. One is casting around for composite characters, not the specific individual The medium had in front of him. This was similar when I went to the public demonstration of mediumship at the College of Psychic Studies. The person brought through with a message for me sounded like a general composite of several people but matched none very well. In both cases I was left with the uncomfortable idea that a projection of a stereotype seemed a better explanation than a discarnate spirit with accurate information.
12.	Not having had much luck here, The medium said he had someone he thought was a father energy (surely a fairly safe bet as it didn’t have to be an actual father, just a paternal male relative). He described a rather diffident figure who was rather wary of the situation as he hadn’t ‘been through’ before. He died from problems with is chest but also problems in the head or brain. He had been ill for about three years. I hadn’t been around much for some reason during this time. I was geographically or otherwise separated. I said that this was true. My father had died from lung cancer with secondaries in the brain, and had been ill for a while. It was also the case that I hadn’t been around much (I was at university and in Africa doing my fieldwork). He mentioned a lot of tubes and drugs at the end, which would have hastened his death. He was moving in and out of consciousness. When he was in hospital there had been a Welsh nurse who had looked after him very will.	This was a good description of Dad’s illness, and possibly of his character. It was also true that I had not been living at home when Dad was ill, and was in Cameroon for 14 months during the last two years of his life. I returned in September when Dad was already quite poorly, but I don’t think had been diagnosed. He died in January 1982 in the Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey. I was preparing for my wedding as well as writing up fieldwork, teaching and in and out of hospital myself at the time and could not confirm the medical details. I do have photos of me after the wedding visiting Dad in hospital and he was full of tubes. I have no way of verifying the bit about the Welsh nurse. There were no obviously inaccurate statements here and struck me as a more accurate description of Dad’s illness and death, plus my being separated at that time, than likely by chance or cold reading. There was no sense of fishing for details that I was aware of.
13.	The medium asked if I had any questions for Dad. The medium was inviting him to come forward, but he was a bit tentative. I asked if Mum was with him. Apparently Yes, Dad laughed and said something like “that old bag” in an affectionate way. Mum then came forward, also tentative as she had not ‘been through’ before either. The medium said she had died much more quickly, about 6 weeks from diagnosis to death. She hadn’t really had times to come to terms with it and to take it all in. She had problems in the lower body and they didn’t operate on her as it was too late. If they had opened her up they would have found everything a mess, she was too far gone. I think he alluded to the sense of trying to separate – something trying to come out, but I don’t remember how he phrased it.	The description of Dad calling Mum ‘that old bag’ jars somewhat. It doesn’t sound quite like Dad and is not a phrase I remember him using. They had a close friendship but not a jokey relationship. The description of Mum’s death is again much more specific and accurate than seems likely by chance and I hadn’t given any hints or cues. She did die very quickly (of prostate cancer). She was diagnosed in July when she developed jaundice after a pilgrimage in Israel, and died on 8 October (1990). It is true that they didn’t operate and that by the time she went for tests she was told that the cancer had spread to her liver and there was no point. She was still trying to absorb the fact that it had all come to an end so quickly. Maybe the bit about something needing to come out was my projection, but it chimed with the experience immediately before she died when she said to me that something was trying to come out. I did wonder whether it was her spirit/astral body trying to separate. She had a haemorrhage so may have been describing the sensation of the internal bleeding. She was conscious and at home until a few hours before she died (in a hospice from a morphine overdose).
14.	I was invited to ask a question. I was told that Mum and Dad were quite excited by the process – “very respectful your parentals”, they didn’t push themselves forward. I asked what the connection was between me and my mother’s sister. The question puzzled The medium and he asked for clarification. I said that she had died before I was born but that I had been seen as a replacement for her in some sense. He said that he didn’t get much except that they wanted to hang onto something of her and seeing her in me was a way of doing that – that they saw me as replacing or continuing her life. The medium asked if I looked like her. I said ‘No’, I didn’t think so. It was only my grandmother who made an explicit connection between us. The medium said he felt a constriction breathing, that she had had a problem with her lungs or chest. I said that she had died of drowning. The medium then mentioned a family problem with the chest. As I was coughing during the session this may have suggested it to him. He didn’t appear to have any sense of connection with Gill other than problems breathing.	Once again the most accurate part of the reading seemed to be the mode of death. Gill drowned in her mid-teens from drowning. We had the story of how it happened recounted on a few occasions, normally when in the company of Mike, her younger brother, as the family rarely mentioned her and there were very few photos of her around. I have had occasional strong impressions of Gill and relived the scene of her accident in some detail in my mind, mainly made up of components I’d been told over the years but adding things which may or may not be true. When talking to Celia (my younger sister) I discovered that she had had a similar experience. It had been a major family trauma, not surprisingly, exacerbated by the difficulty in speaking about what happened and about Gill. It seems that each one was left to mourn alone and there was a lot of blame and self-blaming. As children we used to find Gill’s childhood things in the attic at Pendell, the house my grandparents bought after the war. I was fascinated to see traces of this person who had been part of the family then gone; old school books, butterfly and birds egg collections, nature books, old photo albums. It was quite late on, probably in my early teens, probably through Mike again as his presence generated family conversations, that learned I had been given Gill’s godmothers, chosen by Granny. I had wondered why they were so much older than my parents, and was a bit upset that I was seen as a substitute. Granny often spoke to me in private of Gill’s difficult birth, how beautiful she was as a baby, and then how she held me in the car on the way home from the hospital – making the connection between us explicit. I had on occasion wondered whether there were other ties between us hence the question. What was said just repeated back my cues, but not in a way that sounded particularly accurate or true to life. They certainly didn’t add anything.
15.	The medium then brought through a tall slim woman in her 30s with long blond hair and a red dress. He had a sense that she had killed herself. She had mental problems, probably drug abuse. He reflected that she was probably not the sort of person he would expect me to associate with but she was a gentle soul, fragile. I said I couldn’t identify her at all. He asked if my husband had known someone like that. I couldn’t think of anyone. The medium then suggested that I ‘brought people home’ and that she was perhaps someone who had ‘followed me home’. She evidently didn’t match his idea of the kind of people I might know (which isn’t quite true). I asked whether he meant that she followed me energetically, and he replied in the affirmative. He said he would ‘send her away’, presumably ‘into the light’.	Again a clear description of someone I couldn’t identify. When reading about spirit attachments I booked a session with Martin Richardson (hypnotherapy) specifically to look at the question of spirit attachment, a sort of psychic health check, as I managed to tick off most of the checklist of symptoms. Before going I asked myself whether I thought I was carrying other people’s energy in my aura and thought not.  I had the ‘answer’ that I was strongly protected, with the mental image of a white or gold cloak of light that I use frequently as psychic protection. According to which author one reads such attachments are very common or very rare. Martin confirmed that he didn’t think there were any attachments and that I was well protected. I didn’t know what to make of this woman I might have ‘brought home’ with me, other than to feel sympathy for any possible ‘lost souls’ and to wish them well. It could hardly be described as a ‘hit’ in terms of the reading.
16.	Either before or after the woman in red The medium said something like, ‘am I right in thinking your house is a very busy place, or maybe it was noisy, a sense of a lot of people around’. I though of our empty house (with the boys at boarding school and Oliver away or in London much of the time) but didn’t say anything. Maybe it showed in my face because The medium qualified his statement by saying that people follow me home, spirit presences.	It can be a noisy house when the children are around – more high stress than busy – although the animals make up for lack of human company. I can’t comment on the spirit company other than to say that I’m not aware of it. I have never had the sense that the house is haunted or has other discarnate inhabitants. More of a miss than a hit as far as one can judge.
17.	We had had our hour by now and The medium sought reassurance that I had got something out of it. He had mentioned some dates that had been ‘lobbed down the line’ that were significant months. Maybe one was September or November, maybe January. What ever they were I couldn’t think why they might be of any particular significance. September is Dad and a sister's birthday but birthdays weren’t mentioned.	If these were meant to be predictive there was not much to go on and almost anything could be read into them given the lack of specifics. The natural desire to know that I was satisfied and felt the money well spent wasn’t particularly reassuring. There had been a mixture of the accurate, vague, unknowable and inaccurate statements fairly evenly distributed.
18.	At the end I asked if there was any particular help I could give a sister who wasn’t well and was in a difficult situation, or something like that. The medium said a bit about her need to accept or take responsibility for the situation and that she/things would get better. She had to come to a decision. All I could do was be there for her and give her support. I said that she had MS and that it had deteriorated. The medium said that he had a cousin with MS. I thought of Martin Richardson’s comments that people with MS (one of his specialisms) tend to hang onto their illness and rarely seek his help, even when it is offered free. In his experience it is often a path people choose. However, given the nature of her illness, The medium’s comments about getting better seemed at odds with the progressive nature of the condition.	I couldn’t attribute any of this conversation to psychic ability – it was either repeating what I had said back to me or a bit platitudinous, but in ways that were not really appropriate to my sister's situation. The medium’s concern was appreciated but ‘being there for someone’ is pretty standard stuff. I’m not quite sure what I had in mind when asking the question, but maybe something along the Newton/Richardson line. Was this a path she had chosen? Was there a purpose in it or just a mess. She did volunteer to me that until recently she had managed to find some objective interest in the condition, but I would put that down to her generally plucky, uncomplaining approach to life.

Summing up   

I was reasonably impressed with the medium’s description of my current situation, my recent work and so on. The manner in which Mum and Dad died was accurate, but there were also a lot of things that didn’t make sense or ring true, and that struck me as likely to be unconscious projection and imagination. Some of the predictive elements I could comment on more accurately in due course. Listening to the recording, the medium spent a lot of time responding to cues I’d given, but often in doing so got it a bit wrong. I don’t know what the chances are of the getting the direct hits right – it appeared to me at the time and now higher than chance. If that is the case the most impressive parts of the sitting were picking up what I do and my current situation and how people (parents and aunt) died, which the medium appeared to ‘feel’. None of the other supposed discarnate visitors made any sense to me. This is not to dismiss the medium’s skills or mediumship more generally. Many people go to several sittings, often over many years, and don’t expect 100% accuracy. I would have been happier if there had been some evidential information, something that could only have come from a deceased person. My various workshop experiences of ‘reading’ strangers has shown me that we can all pick up surprisingly detailed and accurate information about others, the information just popping into one’s mind, in my case often like a film unfolding, a feeling or word, so I strongly suspect that some of this was going on. This is a long way from saying that discarnate intelligences are communicating through the medium and from this sitting I would need to remain pretty agnostic about there being a direct contact with discarnate intelligences. When I asked the medium directly what he thought was happening he rejected the psychic reading explanation as his method of working, and clearly thought that he was in contact with his spirit guide, who was the source of much information about me, and with other discarnate beings.