I’m psychic, and I speak with the dead all the time.
They can be quite entertaining, even though their dialogue is a bit stiff.
Why, so do I, or so can any man. But will they answer when you do speak with them?
MORTIMER: Come, come, no more of this unprofitable chat.
And I just checked-- most dead people are way too busy to participate. The one exception I found is Harold Sargent, late of Lake Amy Belle, WI.
But there’s a problem. The only reason Harold’s willing is that he plans to mess with the psychics by giving them varied and embarrassing information.
If it could be made to work we may have the makings of FTL communications. Put two psychics a few billion light years apart and get a spirit to relay messages between the two, if only it wasn’t all complete arse-gravy.
This is an area I know quite a lot about, and to the best of my knowledge the answer is no, this specific experiment has never been attempted, or at least not in any formalised way that justifies the use of the word ‘experiment’.
I’m based in the UK. There were two professional psychics who used to work together as a team - one claimed to receive communications from the dead, while the other claimed to be able to draw pictures of the deceased spirits (as they looked in this life, so as to be recognisable to those still on this Earthly plane). They would go to the sorts of events and conventions organised by believers. The first would claim to be relaying messages from ‘a spirit’ to someone in the audience (as per the usual clairvoyant schtick) while the other drew a picture of the spirit’s Earthly form. More often than not, the person in the audience would corroborate both the message and the drawing or portrait. This would be seen by believers as ‘proof’ that two psychics were contacting the same dead person at the same time. Of course, this has no scientific or evidential validity whatsoever. (I’m sorry I can’t remember the names of these two psychics or provide a cite, but these are memories dredged from some time ago.)
Diogenes: I don’t think your assertion is quite fair, although it depends what you mean by ‘help’. If you mean actually helped solve a case, then you and I are in complete agreement. I am 100% certain that no psychic has ever contributed more to an investigation than guesswork and hunches, or achieved any ‘success’ greater than can be attributed to luck, chance and educated guesswork.
However, Truzzi’s book ‘The Blue Sense’ makes it clear that in some cases, police detectives have been gullible or credulous enough to work with psychics, sincerely believing that the psychic could help in some way. There are documented instances of this kind of ‘working relationship’, and a small number of police officers are on record as saying that they have worked with psychics and believe they found a psychic’s help useful. I’d say they are utterly delusional about that, of course.
I’m sensing… something on the electromagnetic spectrum. Definitely a color of some sort… Maybe red, or something that contains red, like purple or orange… Or something related to those colors… Yes, green, exactly! Green is a mix of blue and yellow which are components of purple and orange just like I said. Sorry, it’s not an exact science, I just get images you know.
Guys at my high school used to contact the dead all the time. It was no big deal.
Yes, I didn’t mean that they haven’t tried or that the police haven’t sought them out. I meant that they’ve never actually contibuted ostensibly paranormally derived information which solved a case.
Not that I have to tell you, but typically, they make vague, non-specific but plausible guesses about locations or cirmumstances (“the body is near water. I see a red building”) which do not serve to actually solve anything, but can allow them to pad their resume if the solution ever yields a hit.
Talking to dead people is easy. The real trick is getting them to talk back.