Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: March 02, 2019 10:07PM
Last year I read a couple of books on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. Both books mentioned nationally famous psychics who either were on the ships, of through some quirk of fate missed the voyage.
I was thinking that at least there are no "national famous psychics" anymore. That's progress. I thought psychics were definitely passé now, but then I saw this article in the NYTimes Magazine section that will probably be in tomorrow's physical paper.
While psychics are pretty fringy now, there are still tens of thousands of psychic related businesses out there, and they don't lack for adherents. This is a fascinating article about how the psychics operate, and the people whose self-appointed mission in life is debunking the psychics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.htmlPaywall if you've exceeded your ten freebies a month. Sorry about that. You might find it on facebook of elsewhere as a secondary posting.
It's a long form article, but here is a paragraph to give you a sense of it:
“Tell the Ginnie Wade story,” his wife, Donna, suggested. Ginnie Wade was a 20-year-old woman during the Battle of Gettysburg, and in 1863, she died by a stray bullet, the only civilian casualty during those three bloody days. A man visiting the battlefield had a picture that his daughter took and discovered a ghostly image in a window of a woman in period clothes. Certain that he had captured the ghost of Ginnie Wade, he submitted the picture to Biddle, who wasted no time in returning to Gettysburg, using the same camera and taking the same shot, revealing how “the old wavy glass created an image and made it look like the back of a woman dressed in an old Civil War period dress. And we were able to recreate it and show him.” Donna added, “Kenny just crushed his dream; he was literally in tears.”
The reference to Facebook in the URL refers to a debunking technique of creating false personas on FB, making an appointment to see a psychic, and having the psychic "reveal" items s/he gleaned from the fake FB profile.