Recently something has caught my eye in my home town, which may have well been there previously, certainly before COVID, but only became apparent in more recent months. I am talking about Psychic Evenings or Mediumship Evenings. Whilst I have known such things to occur at private residence, booked halls or most common at Spiritual Churches; they have been less common in pubs around my home town.

I mean nothing by this apart from it being a statement based on observation. As I actually know many pubs around the country that hold psychic evenings; its just not something I have seen in the town I live in or at least not until now. Incidentally the pubs holding these psychic evenings are not little independent pubs, they are part of larger chains.

Now, my personal assumption based on these little facts is as follows. Firstly, aspects of the paranormal such as Mediumship are once again becoming more popular. Why else would larger pubs dedicate an evening to such things, unless they were going to help them turn a profit. Secondly, but kind of linked to the previous, they must be socially more acceptable to be something that can take place in a communities social centre. However, in my opinion they are accepted on two levels; seriously by some who believe that spirit communication is taking place, but other think it to be a complete joke and often engage in it because they believe the ‘performance’ to be entertaining. Which could be seen as somewhat disrespectful of the beliefs of the Medium.

It certainly seems that things like Mediumship are back on the rise again as they were in the late 1800’s when the SPR was founded. Which then makes me wonder about the true abilities or gifts here, probably as my colleagues at the SPR originally thought about the Mediums in their time too. The problem is, these days there are even more way to gather intelligence on people receiving readings by Mediums.

In the late 1800’s, Mediums could use methods such as cold reading or even slight changes to someones pulse to understand if they were on the right track. Some may have gone a step further to gather additional information, but that would involve time and money. These days with Social Media so readily available and utilised, you can find a lot of the information online for everyone to see. Of course access can be locked down, restricting access, but many people have open accounts. So, potentially only has to know who is present at the psychic evening and they can search the internet for information. Remember they only need gather enough to gain your trust and belief that their source is someone you know that has passed away, then they even provide information about your future.

Of course not all Mediums are charlatans trying to scam you out of your money. Some genuinely do seem to be able to gather information from a paranormal source through their belief. Over the years there have been few Mediums that I truly trust, but those few do often provide some interesting information. Sometimes information that they could not have known in any way what so ever. That said, it does not mean that they are without doubt talking with the dead, as other possibilities come into focus, like telepathy. Equally we must consider the possibility of the information coming from multiple sources, fragmented over the minds of many, which means the personality of a spirit could be memories telepathically located in the minds of many that knew the individual in question.

Imagine for a moment, a social media feed like Twitter or Facebook. Often they are littered with various posts from other people, little snippets of who they are, what they had for dinner or their favourite meme. No matter how you look at it, that is a little piece of who they are in the world. As time passes those posts remain there, you just have to scroll down the feed to find them. Also, those posts that receive more comments and likes are easier to find, they are more connected to other profiles because of this. Perhaps in some odd twist of fate, this is exactly how true Mediumship may work. The Medium is the Social Media platform or Google. As such they have access to all the posts or memories in the minds of others. The more they can stitch together, the more it seems like they are connected to a responsive personality, but in reality it could be just a fragmented collection of memories.

Of course, I could be wrong, but then there is more academic research to support telepathy than survival out there. However, there are the odd cases here and there that make you stop in your tracks and wonder. I have even had a few moments myself where Mediums have provided some remarkable information, personal to me. Things that place the possibility of survival on the edge of reality.

So, if Mental Mediumship is gaining in popularity once again, does that mean that perhaps the investigation of Mediums, their abilities and if they are actually genuine, needs to return with them. So we may understand more about this odd ability, but also finds those that we find taking the money of those simply seeking a connection with a lost love one.

Of course, Mediumship can be used for more than connecting someone with their departed relative. Something to delve into later I think.

What do you think; is there an increase in Mediums in your area currently? Should we once again be looking to research and understand more about Mediums?

Either way, whether its the ability to connect with the personalities of those that have past or gather information from the minds of the collective; its impressive and if its true, we need to understand more. After all is that not why we are a part of this ‘field’?

Exploration doesn’t always mean travelling to the highest or lowest points on earth or beyond, sometimes exploration can have you looking into things that are still hidden from us; our own minds or perhaps even an afterlife. You decide?