Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

It’s happening again; the flood of complaints about my views on psychics. As a paranormal investigator, I get this every couple of years. I’ve made no secret that I hunt ghosts, and also that I don’t have a lot of respect for those who claim to have psychic powers to communicate with them. Both Amy Allen and Lorraine Warren, self-claimed psychics, have come to this area and claimed to have psychic experiences, and they have both indirectly caused me headaches by doing that.

Let me explain to you why psychics make bad ghost hunters.

Think about your job. I’d imagine you know what you’re doing at your job; I’d imagine you consider yourself to be good at it. Whatever your job is, think of how long you’ve done it, how you learned to do it, and how you do the best you can at it every day.

Now, imagine someone walks in one day. They haven’t trained to do your job; they’ve never learned it. They know nothing about it, and in fact have never even been there before. But they insist that they can do your job better than you can.

They screw everything up, leaving you with a mess to correct. Everything they do is a mistake. And yet they still insist that they’re better at the job than you. And, no, you are not allowed to correct them, question them, or even compare their performance with yours. You just have to believe them, regardless.
This is what it’s like for me, dealing with a psychic.

I’m all about proof. Whatever you read in my columns, I can back it up. If you’re sitting at home and reading my stuff in the newspaper, then you can rest assured that I have a document somewhere that proves what I say. I don’t put something in a column unless I can prove it, and that’s important.

It’s the same with paranormal investigation. Before I enter a house to investigate, I do the research. I check the deeds and city directories, and find out who lived and died in that house. I look at obituaries and cemetery records, and I have a list of who is most likely to be haunting the place. And if you ask why, I can show you those documents to back up my claim.

So, no, don’t come in and tell me I’m wrong. Don’t claim that the documents are wrong, but there’s some little girl named Sarah there that nobody’s ever heard of. Don’t tell me that there are unknown ghosts that nobody can see but you.

“But this psychic was really good!” gullible people claim to me. “She knew things that nobody could know!”
First off, this is the age of Facebook. There is no more information that nobody can know. But even without social media, fake psychics use a variety of tricks to make themselves appear competent.

Recently, I had a ghost hunt at a home where the clients had consulted a psychic. “She knew what she was talking about,” the homeowner told me. “She knew I had lost someone, and his name was Marcus.”
Now, that sounds pretty dead-on, until you question it a bit. The psychic did not give clear precise names and dates. The psychic said that she was sensing the letter M, and the homeowner filled in the information that she’d lost someone named Marcus.

That’s one of the tricks, to throw out a very vague guess, and wait for the gullible person to connect the dots on their own. The letter M could apply to a lot. Did they move from Montana? Was the person a mother? Does someone have a birthday in May? Do they need money? “I’m sensing the letter M,” is not the laser-focused psychic prediction that you might think.

I work very hard to prove what I say, and it makes me angry when someone tries to claim the credit without having done the work. And to all the psychics about to send me hate mail right now….Hey, if you’re so psychic, how come you didn’t send the hate mail before this column was published?