Séance, Psychics, Frauds Or the Real Deal?


/ English Communication
· 羅狼仁· Brian David Phillips, Ph.D., C.H. ·
· · http://www.BrianDavidPhillips.com · / /

Séance, Psychics, Frauds or the Real Deal?

Practicum Handout Six

John Edward Is the Oprah of the Other Side

By CHRIS BALLARD

What comes after life? It is a question that has flustered philosophers, birthed religions and stumped history's greatest minds. Now an answer comes not from a theologian or a scholar but from a baby-faced former ballroom-dance instructor from Long Island, a man who grew up wanting to own his own deli but instead is the host of a cable television show on which he claims to talk to the dead. John Edward, the 31-year-old star of ''Crossing Over With John Edward,'' the hit Sci Fi Channel show that goes into national daytime syndication Aug. 27 (at 3 p.m. on CBS in New York), has been called everything from a charlatan to a messenger from heaven. In the process, he has also managed to unite an unlikely coalition against him, become something of a pop icon and create a whole new genre of television: the psychic talk show.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Edward is taping two half-hour episodes at the ''Crossing Over'' studio in Manhattan. Slowly pacing the stage, he peers down at the floor for a second, his face fixed in a deep frown, and then points to an area about three rows up in the audience, which is assembled before him, about 80 strong, in a semicircle. ''I'm over here,'' he says, waving his finger back and forth. ''They're telling me to acknowledge that a female figure is coming through. It's got to be somebody above, a mom, a mother figure that's crossed over.''

Edward's yellow-brown eyes shoot back and forth, searching the crowd. ''They are telling me to acknowledge an M connection; two people's names begin with M in the family. They're telling me that somebody had the Parkinson's, or somebody had some sort of neurological disease as well. I'm in this area over here'' -- he points to a row in the audience. ''Do you understand this? Yes? No? Hello?''

A couple of people nod. Edward narrows it down to one man and continues spewing forth a mix of statements (''Somebody in your family is a very heavy smoker'') and questions (''Does 'Dr. Zhivago' have any meaning to you?''). It is a typical beginning to a reading: as Edward explains it, he ''sees'' symbols and messages from those who have ''crossed over,'' then tries to interpret these ''validations,'' which could be anything from congratulations on a coming wedding to an aunt's favorite TV show, and relay them to the members of the audience. Much of the information is fuzzy -- Edward may get only ''a J or a G'' sound for a name or see ''blackness in the chest,'' which may be lung cancer. But occasionally he says something startlingly specific, mentioning a peculiar family nickname like ''Miss Piggy'' or a long-forgotten keepsake. On this afternoon, such a moment occurs when Edward is relaying information to a young woman who has recently lost her father.

''Is there a joke between them with the celery or something?'' Edward asks her, looking puzzled.

She gasps, then laughs and corrects him. ''It's onions.''

''The chopping of it?''

''No, they have a nickname in Italy,'' she explains, smiling. ''It means like a running onion.''

''So if they show me the vegetable joke, you know what it means?''

She nods, grinning. Edward moves on. ''He's telling me to acknowledge the wedding, do you understand this?''

At this, the woman crumbles, breaking into tears and nodding in jerky time to the sobs.

It is an impressive display, like watching a gambler who keeps doubling down and keeps hitting, but it is also the best reading of the afternoon. Twice during the tapings, Edward spends upward of 20 minutes stuck on one person, shooting blanks but not accepting the negative responses -- Do not not honor him!'' he says at one point, staring down a bewildered man. On other readings, his statements have a throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks flavor, and he clearly struggles to get a rhythm going, hitting well below 50 percent for the day. Later, when the edited version of the taping is produced (all episodes are edited for entertainment purposes), it includes only the onion woman and the second-best reading of the show.

After finishing, Edward thanks the audience and retreats, Oz-like, behind a large, white curtain, where he sags into a plastic chair. The near-manic energy he musters onstage has dissipated. Dressed in a dark T-shirt, blue blazer and khakis, his short dark brown hair brushed back from his forehead, he looks disconcertingly average. There is no turban, no gaudy amulet, just the type of sturdy Italian-Irish guy one might expect to see heckling opposing pitchers at Yankee Stadium or riding the Brooklyn-bound A train.

As he decompresses, Edward analyzes the day's shows, which he calls the ''worst in a while,'' apologizing not for his performance but for the audience's ''refusal to validate'' his statements. ''I don't mind the skeptics -- in fact, I like the skeptics,'' he says, referring to one woman he tried to read, ''but she was rolling her eyes before I even started.'' He is interrupted when an older, well-dressed woman from the gallery approaches and asks for an autograph. Edward smiles, takes the proffered piece of paper, scribbles his name and then hands it back. She pauses for a second before leaving.

''Can I -- I just want to touch you,'' she says.

Edward takes the lady's thin, almond-colored fingers in his palm.

''Ooh, I'm getting chills,'' she says, then looks up at him. ''At first, I didn't believe, but after seeing you, well, I just want to thank you. You've meant so much to me.''

'Crossing Over'' was originally on at 11 p.m. on Sci Fi, but it was so successful that the channel now shows back-to-back episodes five times a week from 8 to 9 p.m. Edward's first two books -- One Last Time'' and ''What if God Were the Sun?'' -- have sold more than half a million copies combined, spurring a third, ''Crossing Over: The Stories Behind the Stories,'' which is due out in August, just in time for his syndication. His Midtown Manhattan office (the location of which reporters are asked not to disclose) contains a room half-full of plastic boxes that spill over with ticket requests from all over the country. Those who can't get into the audience can add their names to a two-year-and-growing waiting list for a $300 half-hour private appointment with Edward. ''I've been offered $5,000, $10,000, a blank check to do a reading, but I'm not going to whore myself out,'' Edward says. ''I can't get to everybody.''

Instead, he performs in front of hundreds of thousands on television. Working on a bare-bones set and aided by few gimmicks other than taped follow-up interviews with those he has read, Edward manages to traverse the range of human emotions deftly in 30 minutes, piloting us from grief and fear to hope and joy to, inevitably, redemption and closure. Not only does the audience usually cry at some point during the process, but the staff often tears up as well. ''He connects with people on an emotional level, and it's very compelling,'' says Bill Carroll, vice president and director of Katz Television Group, a consulting company in New York. ''Even if you're totally skeptical, you can't ignore that a lot of people in the studio audience are experiencing something, whether it's what they bring or what he provides, and that's what makes it great TV.''

That there is a something is partly because of the expectations of the audience, which often accepts the most general validations (''Your father was a funny man'' or ''Your mother says the dog is with her'') as proof of their loved ones' continued existence. But it is also a testament to Edward's formidable nonpsychic powers. Alternately funny, sarcastic and compassionate, he comes off as sensitive yet strong, a sort of all-in-one priest, father and husband figure for the show's predominantly female audience. (Despite the nerdy-guy stronghold that is Sci Fi, the audience for ''Crossing Over'' is 60 percent women.) ''Before John, we'd already had a gazillion psychic paranormals come by to pitch shows,'' says Sci Fi's president, Bonnie Hammer, who became interested in Edward after seeing him on ''Larry King Live'' in 1999. ''But what attracted us to him was his personality -- he's so genuine. At the pilot taping, the way he took to a television camera was amazing. By the end of the day, everyone, including the crew and the producers, had bought into it.''

Soon enough, the public had as well. ''Crossing Over'' went on the air in July 2000, and by the winter it had become one of Sci Fi's most successful programs. This fall, it is expected to be the season's breakout syndicated hit. As a result, every mind-reader with an agent and a few dead grandmas in the wings now has a show in development. (Offerings include a vehicle for the medium James Van Praagh and a game show called ''State of Mind.'') Nielsen-savvy celebrities have also taken notice, and a string of lower-wattage names, including Sebastian Bach, Deborah Gibson, Jane Seymour and the Nelson brothers (twin sons of Ricky and the duo who made up the early 90's hair band Nelson) have appeared on ''Crossing Over'' to be read and, of course, to promote their latest projects. Matthew and Gunnar Nelson followed their reading, during which Edward claimed to connect with their father, with a musical tribute called ''Just Once More.''

Edward is only the latest in a tradition of spiritualists and mystics in America. During the 1800's, mediums came into vogue when the Fox sisters channeled a noisy ghost in their home near Rochester. (They later admitted to using apples tied to strings to create the knocking noises.) More recently, buoyed by a wave of interest in alternative medicine and all things New Age, after-death communication -- A.D.C., as it is known -- has made a comeback, as evidenced by best-selling mediums like Edward, Van Praagh, Sylvia Browne, Rosemary Altea and George Anderson. (Publicly, the mediums present a united front, realizing that in their line of work, any legitimacy is good. Privately, though, Edward says he is not close with any of the other four, and as the psychic-come-lately among the group, his rapid rise to fame must be a little grating.) A 1994 USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll found that 70 million Americans believe, as Haley Joel Osment's character did in ''The Sixth Sense,'' that it is possible to talk to the dead.

Not surprisingly, there are plenty of people who scoff at such claims. ''John Edward's good at what he does, but he's not a medium, just a confidence man,'' says Ray Hyman, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon and a member of the group Csicop (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, pronounced SY-cop). Hyman says that Edward appears to be using an old magician's ploy known as ''cold reading,'' in which he makes educated guesses about a person based on the person's responses and visual cues -- everything from posture to clothing to facial expressions. ''It's like playing 20 Questions,'' Hyman explains, ''and it works because there is a collusion between Edward and the audience -- they both want it to work.'' Thus Edward's vague statements -- I sense an older female figure present'' -- allow those being read to fit the information to their lives, the same way two people might take away different meanings from the same poem or work of art.

Edward, a Catholic who no longer attends Mass regularly (''I'm not exactly welcome,'' he says), is also fiercely criticized by those he calls ''the holy rollers and the people who use religion as a crutch.'' Not that this comes as a surprise, considering the implicit threat he poses to the traditional spiritual dictum that if you live well and worship God, you will be reunited with your loved ones in heaven. Edward instead offers someone the chance to talk to her deceased mother directly, whereupon she can tell her daughter that she's fine and that, by the way, she loves the new perm.

''I know I've got a bull's-eye on me every day when I walk outside,'' Edward says. ''But I've always taken the approach that you cannot defend this work, because if you're defending it, then you're actually admitting that there's something that needs to be defended.''

As Edward sees it, there are three types of people: the 20 percent who believe no matter what, the 20 percent who will never believe and the 60 percent who keep an open mind, and this 60 percent can be won over. This is what happened to Bill Falk in 1997. At the time, Falk, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who is now editor in chief of The Week, a news commentary magazine, was with Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. After hearing about Edward, Falk spent a month trying to debunk him, but in the process he was forced to reconsider. ''I'd been a reporter for 20 years and dealt with a lot of trained liars: politicians, P.R. people, the like,'' Falk says. ''But it was the specificity of the information that I couldn't refute.'' Falk brought in an unannounced visitor to be read -- a woman Edward had never met or heard of named Joan Cheever, who had spent nine years as the appeals lawyer for Walter Key Williams, who had been executed for murder. During the reading, Falk says that Edward not only channeled Williams but also nailed a number of unusual details, including mentioning a name ''that sounds like Hirsch.'' (Cheever's co-counsel was an attorney named Bob Hirschorn.)