I’ve been reading the material on the website for the James Randi Educational Foundation, and reading all the stories about the psychics, and I wondered if psychics ever decide to follow their conscience and come clean about their evil ways…you know, like some of the executives of cigarette companies & nuclear facilities have. I don’t believe I’ve heard of one yet, though I’ve heard of those who went the other way, like David Blaine & in a less evil & more deluded way Doug Henning. Has it ever happened?
Well, I don’t know how often psychics come clean of their own free will, but these scams are busted all the time.
The closest I’ve heard to this is a guy named Marjoe Gortner (sp?). He was an evangelist and faith healer when very young, like before he was ten. He was aparently forced into it by his parents.
As an adult he recanted and became an actor.
There was an article in Harper’s Magazine about four years back or so (I wish I could be more specific, but it has been a long time) written by a guy who decided to become a phone psychic just for fun.
He wrote about how to do it, the types of callers, pretty much anything you’d want to know. Also, he’d call the phone number, and when the other psychics picked up, he’d pretend that they called him. 
On ‘Penn And Teller Bullshit!’ they had a guy demonstrating cold-reading, and I think they said he was a reformed con-artist psychic.
The guy on Bullshit was Mark Edward (no relation to John Edward).
I think that a lot of psychics are pure BS, but some like Edgar Cayce seem to be quite believable. Read his history and you will read something quite amazing.
Well, there was M. Lamar Keene. I’m pretty sure his book * Psychic Mafia* is the same one I enjoyed in detention many, many moons ago. In his book, Keene (assuming it’s the same guy) tells how he became a psychic, read people’s pasts and futures, created ectoplasm, and all kinds of other neat stuff. Keep in mind, I was probably only fourteen or so when I originally read and enjoyed this book, and I’m more than twice that age now . . .
Anyway, the answer to the OP’s question is yes. The book explains it all in greater detail. Here’s the Amazon link: Amazon Link
Okay . . . no Amazon link after all. Just go to www.amazon.com and search for “Psychic Mafia”.
The article in Harper’s that you’re thinking of was by Stephen Glass, who turned out to be a fake himself. Over several years he wrote a lot of articles for a number of national magazines. They were all very well written, I thought. Each of them required him to do research of the sort that would be hard for an editor to check. In many cases, he didn’t do the research at all. Because he wrote so well and because the pseudo-research sounded so plausible, it took a while before some editor realized that something was fishy. The editor (I believe it was Charles Lane at The New Republic) was able to show that many of his articles relied on fake research.
He was fired from his staff position at these magazines and was banned from journalism for life. The last I heard he was going to law school. I presume he’s graduated by now.
Glass’s basic point in that article is probably more or less true. Here’s an article by someone who apparently really did work as a phone psychic:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9812/features-woodruff.shtml
This guy’s point is that most of being a phone psychic is telling the callers what they want to hear.
Further reading on Edgar Cayce, who, as far as I can tell, didn’t even need to do any cold reading. People would tell him what their problems were, and he would invent answers while in a “trance.” At least today’s “psychics” do a carnival trick.
It’s refreshing to know that government agents can have a sense of humor:
As a kid, I remember that Henning always made it very clear that what he was doing was just an illusion, and that we shouldn’t believe it was really magic (he had a blurb at the beginning of every show saying so, and I think he repeated it a few times during). Has he changed from that? That’s a darn shame, if true.
The mentalist “The Amazing Kreskin” of many Tonight Show appearances during the Johnny Carson era, always prefaced his performances with a disclaimer that what the audience was about to see was not supernatural phenomena. His official website states,
He passed away from liver cancer in 2000 at the age of 52.
Towards the end of his life he was big into Transcendental Meditation.
Yes. Excellent book. He later felt guilty and told people he was a fake, but they refused to believe him!!
“As a kid, I remember that Henning always made it very clear that what he was doing was just an illusion, and that we shouldn’t believe it was really magic (he had a blurb at the beginning of every show saying so, and I think he repeated it a few times during). Has he changed from that? That’s a darn shame, if true.”
He was still honest about magic, just dishonest with himself. He believed he could fly someday, if he tried hard enough, and he thought he could cure his cancer with TM. One of the TM quacks who was taking care of him declared his cancer was gone.
“Yes. Excellent book. He later felt guilty and told people he was a fake, but they refused to believe him!!”
No amount of evidence will sway a true believer. I know people who will get violent if you even suggest that dowsing doesn’t work.
I read an article about the start of spiritualism, and it told about the Fox sisters who held seances for quite a while. At least one of the sisters later admited they had faked it all. For one thing, the ‘rapping by the spirits’ they’d produced by pressing their feet against the floorboards and ‘cracking’ their toe joints.
Of course, that was back around 1900. I haven’t heard about any psychic/spritualist coming clean more recently.
While I wouldn’t think it is the main reason by any stretch, one reason that professional psychics may be reluctant to admit that they are fakes is that they begin to believe in their own spiel.
Curtis D. MacDougal was a prominent professor of journalism who wrote extensively about the treatment of superstitions and urban legends in the mass media.
In his book Hoaxes MacDougal alludes briefly to having worked as a mind reader in his youth. He acknowledges that he was a thorough fake. He adds, though, that doing such work tends to have an affect on a person, and that he found that he began to believe somewhat in his own posturing.
William Lindsey Gresham addresses this same point in his novel Nightmare Alley, which concerns a carnival huckster who becomes a prominent Spritiualist minister. There is a particularly spooky chapter in which this character, who appears to have been based at least in part on the Reverend Arthur Ford, begins to creep himself out, even convincing himself that his home is haunted, even though he had never really believed in ghosts himself. (Ford is the man who convinced Houdini’s widow, for a time, that he had made contact with her late husband.)