Note: this piece includes discussion of losing a child to suicide.
It’s 7pm on a Friday evening and I’m nervously driving through a somewhat rough looking neighbourhood in Hamilton. Thinking that Google Maps is leading me on a merry dance towards a dead end, I prepare for a 17-point turn at the end of the narrow road I’m on, but surprisingly it opens out and my destination is on the left-hand side. In keeping with the general aesthetic of its surroundings, the ‘social club’ I’m heading for is surrounded by the type of spiky metal fencing that’s normally reserved for electricity substations.
I park my car and enter through the gate nervously – expecting to have to show some papers at any point. These are hardly the surroundings you might predict for a display of psychic mediumship, even if you had such powers.
The only challenge I meet as I enter the main function room is from the ‘star’ of the show I’m attending, Elaine Claire. Somewhat disappointingly, she has to ask my name and check the QR code on my ticket. She seems nice and welcoming, though, and appears to be somewhat aware of my sore-thumb status.
To make it clear just how much I was sticking out; I was the only person there alone, which is normally ok for a theatre-style seating arrangement, but the venue for the show was what appeared to be a Phoenix Nights style old-school social club, and the function room was loosely arranged in a cabaret style with groups of people sat at their own tables that surrounded the performance area.
I sit conspicuously at my own table and survey my surroundings. There are approximately 30 people in the room, and 27 of them appear to be women. The only other men there besides me appear to have been invited along by their significant others, and spend most of the evening pondering their pints rather than showing any real desire to dally with the dearly departed.
I’ve had a couple of encounters with Elaine Claire before: in late 2015, she replied to my email asking for testable predictions for the following year with a somewhat snarky refusal. Then, in 2017, my older daughter went to a small house party where Elaine had been brought along to give psychic readings to the attendees. She still does this, and mentioned it at the start of the evening. It’ll cost you £40 per person, presumably cash. That evening, she gave my daughter some spectacularly bad and ultimately incorrect relationship advice/predictions.
I’ve been to many psychic shows before, and I always do my best to keep an open mind and be objective about proceedings. Despite Elaine already being on my radar in a somewhat negative sense, I find myself more emotionally compelled to do so this time. At the time of the event it was less than six months since my brother had died. I still miss him, and considering his talent for making himself heard, if ever there was a golden opportunity for the dead to contact the living, this was it! As I look around the room, I suddenly feel a little less ‘different’ than the other audience members. We’ve all lost someone. There’s always a gap to fill. There are always unanswered questions.
Despite my stirring emotions, I try to keep my head together as things kick off. When evaluating these shows, my end goal is to make a judgment call on whether I believe the practitioner has any special powers or not. If not (which has always been the case to date), I will try to figure out whether I think they genuinely believe they have those powers, or whether they’re knowingly faking it. It can of course be somewhere between those two. It’s messy, and you rarely get to find out definitively.
It’s even messier in the case of Elaine Claire. Unsurprisingly there were no indications of any actual psychic ability, but the haphazard nature of the evening made it hard to gauge. The aforementioned cabaret-style seating layout could have been a carefully planned ploy from a seasoned fraudster who wanted a clear separation of friend/family groups that you wouldn’t easily see if there were simple rows of seating. It would be very easy to link each table to the email address(es) that booked the tickets, since Elaine herself was her own box office staff, so any Googling that could have been done before proceedings could have been easily tied to a specific table. Or, it could have simply been the case that this was the way the room was laid out before the evening started and there was no desire to shift any chairs around.
What we get from this layout is a large empty space for Elaine to ‘work’, and she asks the audience if she needs to use a microphone. There was minimal response from the crowd, so Elaine decided to go without one (for what it’s worth, there was no indication that a microphone or PA system was even ready to be used). It was not a good decision, because as she moved around the room to focus on individuals or groups, she would have her back turned to much of the rest of the audience and it was very hard to make out what was being said.
The result of this was a loss of attention from many of those who weren’t being directly spoken to and, as she finished speaking to a table and moved on, the people she had just spoken to would have a little post-mortem discussion about their recently received post-mortem discussion. In terms of creating a compelling piece of entertainment, it was an absolute disaster.
To add to my indecision, Elaine also said that she would ‘try to get around every table’ during the evening’s proceedings. Could that be a calculated attempt to ‘work the crowd’ so that everyone leaves feeling satisfied and more likely to come back in the future? Or, could it be a genuine desire from the practitioner to help connect loved ones? It could be somewhere between, or it could be neither. Surely there’s no way you could guarantee that a representative for each table group could be conjured from the ether?
Whatever the motives of our psychic, what we were treated to was an evening of alleged mediumship that was similar to what you might expect from any mentalist’s cunning display of cold and warm reading. There’s nothing close to being accurate or insightful enough to make me suspect hot reading, though. We get some hits, we get a lot of misses, and a deluge of tenuous grasping to try to make things fit. There’s a lot of name guessing going on, or at least of first initials.
At one point we get a comedic “J. Jo. Jeh … A ‘J’-sounding name” from Elaine, followed by a blunt “No” from the audience member. We get random numbers thrown around: “Why am I getting the number three? Did it happen three years ago, or three months ago? Do you have three children?”
We find out that people were ill and lost weight before they died, and that they had problems in the lower body area, or the head area. Those who were seriously ill suffered pain and discomfort. Some of the deceased really liked music, or had a great sense of humour, or didn’t suffer fools gladly. If Elaine had channeled the spirit of a bear, we would have no doubt discovered its preferred defecatory location was in forested areas.
It was as bland and generic as you could imagine, but I appeared to be the only one who was unimpressed. What struck me more than ever was the desperation of the audience members to try and ‘take’ what Elaine was throwing out to them. At one point we had two separate tables raising their hands to whatever name or situation Elaine was ‘reading’, and Elaine chose to speak to the table that she hadn’t already done a reading for, which seems to make a mockery of the concept of bringing forth a loved one.
As we got towards the end of the evening, it seemed like there were attempts to raise the stakes of the readings. Elaine said she had a child who had been murdered with her. No raised hands in the audience to begin with, then eventually someone who was clearly older than me (I’m 50) said that a boy at her primary school had been murdered – presumably over four decades ago. The reading that ensues is bafflingly short and almost completely bereft of details.
Then, with the last reading of the evening, we hit tragedy gold. Elaine says that she has someone with them who died by suicide, and slowly, reluctantly, the last remaining table not to have received any attention raises hands. It was a heartbreaking story of a wayward child who seemed to be on a path to destruction no matter what her parents did. The story was of course vague, and it was the grieving mother and her sister (the child’s aunt) who filled in blanks.
It’s hard to imagine the crushing grief of losing a child, but there’s something particularly brutal about suicide, because along with the loss you have the feeling of impotence and failure as a parent to go with it (if you want a science-based understanding of suicide, then a good starting point is Professor Rory O’Connor’s lecture for Skeptics in the Pub Online, “When it is darkest”).
This jarring, incredibly emotional end to the evening left a nasty taste in the mouth. Grieving a loved one is different for every person, and there’s no easy way to do it. I can understand the feeling of wanting to know that the person you have lost is still with you in some way. It may soften the blow somewhat in the short term, but the grieving mother in this case had lost her daughter four years ago, and she still felt the need to go out on a Friday evening and hope that someone she has paid money to is able to tease out some form of connection. This can’t possibly be healthy. It’s almost certainly harmful in the long run.
As things finished up and we headed for the exit, I wanted to go and talk to the grieving mother afterwards, perhaps to ask her if she’s ok. The urge to encourage her to seek professional help was overpowering, but I resisted as it’s just not my place to do so. Instead, someone else approaches me and says “Sorry you didn’t get a reading tonight”. Right enough, Elaine did try to make it round all the tables, including mine. At one point she looked in my direction and asked if a car crash made any sense to me. Aside from my evaluation of the evening’s show, it did not. I shook my head and someone at the next table shot their hand up like an overly keen child who knows the answer to a question in primary school, and Elaine moved on to them.
So, not only was I conspicuous in being the only person to attend alone, but Elaine couldn’t even summon up a dead friend or relative to keep me company. It seems to the rest of the audience I may have been deserving of some sympathy, whereas I felt like it should have been very much the opposite.
