I know what you're thinking … Who goes in for psychics and fortune-tellers anymore? Didn't they go out of fashion along with other 1980s hits like Soap-on-a-Rope and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ?
As it turns out, no. They're more popular than ever. While only 49 per cent of visitors to the Mind Body Spirit Festival in Sydney in 2012 were interested in having a psychic reading, that level jumped to 72 per cent for this year's festival in May.
Could it be because, as Emma Freud – great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud – put it earlier this year, they are "cheaper than therapy"?
I'm a die-hard sceptic. But then, I also have wince-inducing therapy bills. And as novelist Jeanette Winterson once put it, a hole in my heart in the shape of a loved one who has died – in my case, my late father. Could Emma Freud be right?
In order to find out, I meet with Christine Morgan, an "evidential medium" who provides "evidence" that a loved one has communicated to you from "the spirit realm".
Greeting me at the door of her spotless semi wearing a simple black dress and ballet flats, her hair a demure platinum bob, Morgan looks like your kind librarian aunt. In a tidy room upstairs, she settles into a black ergonomic chair and jumps right in.
"Have you lost your father?" she asks. (I have not mentioned my father to her.) "Yeah," I say, quietly.
"Because your dad spoke to me this morning," she says with a firm nod of her head, as though she's divulging a secret. "I just sent out a thought to the spirit world. I said, 'I have a young lady named Samantha coming to see me…' and I just heard, 'I'm her father.' "
Her words pour forth like a calm British auctioneer for the next hour.
Many of the suggestions she makes absolutely miss the mark: that "either Mum or Dad's sister is in the spirit world" (neither has had a sister), that "your Mum [is] in the spirit world" (my mother is alive, and when I indicate this, Morgan then says she meant my dad's mother), that my children "haven't been to Canada as yet" (they've all been to where I'm from, and when I say so, she says she means "for a length of time").
I scrunch up my mouth.
She circles back to my father's death. "I feel very distinctly with him, that –" she speaks now as though he is speaking through her – " 'I would've liked to have travelled more … Because I would've liked to have seen more,' " she says.
"Yes," I say, my voice gentler now. (My father died at 58, of a brain tumour, and he wished that he'd seen the Rocky Mountains before he died.) My shoulders slacken. I look down at my shoes.
That Morgan keeps circling back to topics that elicit an emotional response from me is a classic "cold-reading" technique that psychics use in order to make a client believe they have contacted their dead loved ones, or know something about their future, says Tim Mendham, executive officer of the Australian Skeptics.
"It's the customer who's supplying all of the emotional response, and basically it's the fortune-teller, or whoever, picking and choosing what works, what hits with the client," and then focusing on that, he explains.
Reflecting back, I see that the technique works. Again and again, Morgan launches into misses that make me um and ah, before abruptly asking me about something that has previously hit an emotional snag.
"Now, all children love to colour in, and things like that, but one of your children loves books," she says, out of the blue, after some misses.
My face lights up. "Because he sits," she says, referring to my dad – "and I can see him watching [your son reading] … and he's absorbing what's going on with this grandchild … he's just making me aware of this quite strongly, so he's saying, 'You're never alone.' "
"Can I have a tissue, please?" I ask tearily, after some more Dad talk.
Do I think Morgan is actually communing with my late father? No. There is far too much misinformation. (She does explain that mediums are not "infallible", but then she also senses, among other wild misses, a "memory from the spirit world [of someone] who made candies at Christmas" – and we're Jewish and don't celebrate Christmas.)
Not to mention those instances when she makes it seem as though my father has said something quite specific to her, but only after I've provided her with the information.For instance, after she asks – knowing I'm a journalist – who "writes" ("Is it you that writes? Who is it that writes? Or did he do writing?") and that I tell her that my father wrote a book, she asks me if I have it. When I say, "Yes," she shoots back: "Yes, that's right, because he's just said, 'She has it.' "
She does get some details correct. But many are fairly easy to guess: that my father was "in a hospital, and unwell" before he died, that my husband and I have been talking about property (we're Sydneysiders), that, regarding my father, "There's a significant link with education." (My father was a teacher assistant late in life, but I think it is safe to bet that most parents value education.)
So why did I cry?
There is a huge comfort in someone recognising the sad fact of my father's early death. Because he died in Canada, few people knew him, and those who did bravely uttered his name in the 12 years since he died. The topic, I assume, is too uncomfortable for them.
So hearing Morgan speak about my father feeds a yearning to have him enter my life again.
Is this why so many people still go to see psychics? Is it simply because they speak to us about matters that other people don't want to hear about?
And what, I wondered, would a fortune-teller tell me, if I divulged my own personal struggles? Would he or she be anything like Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, the New York-based fortuneteller who made global headlines last year for bilking an online entrepreneur, Niall Rice, out of more than $730,000 by promising him, among other things, a bridge into another dimension to reunite him with a former girlfriend?
Delmaro even continued the ruse after Rice discovered, through Facebook, that his former girlfriend died, by promising to reincarnate her spirit into the body of another woman. (Delmaro later served eight months in prison.)
I visit fortune-teller Paris Debono, in inner-city Sydney. Sitting at his table in a dark corner by a window, I ask him: will a book that I'm writing be published?
And what should I do about my 18-yearlong struggle with periodic loneliness here in Australia? Should I stay? Or return to Canada, where I was born?
Debono, a thin man with prominent cheekbones and delicate tapered fingers, asks me to randomly select 13 of 20 Greek mythology cards that he has made himself. The black-and-white figures of Greek gods are oddly saucy, with bulging groins and heaving breasts.
Nevertheless, as he places the cards in rows, I can't stop tensing up. Holding my hands flat on my thighs, I feel like a schoolgirl waiting to be called into the principal's office.
"You have Mars in your house of publishing," he says, pointing to a red card in the bottom row that features a pouting man with the six-pack of a Chippendales dancer. (The placement of each card corresponds to a particular "house", or area, of your life.)
"Mars is a soldier, which means you have to work like a soldier to get this published. So I would say yes, you can get it published and you will, but it isn't going to get done by itself."
So far, so flattering. (And, regarding the hard work, bleeding obvious.)
Debono is sensitive, though. When he points out that I've chosen Vesta, "The God of Investment" (bone corset, Dolly Parton cleavage), he says, after waffling a bit about property: "It could also mean that your time in Australia has been an investment. It's something you've learnt from, gained from, something you'll use in the future …"
I can't stop my brain from buzzing with the realisation that it would calm my frayed central nervous system to view my life this way more often.
Still, other pronouncements go laughably wrong. Among them: "Are you single?" he asks me, after scanning the cards and noting that I have not chosen Venus, the Goddess of Love.
"No! Very much not," I say, through laughter. Not only am I wearing wedding rings, but it's two weeks from my 15th wedding anniversary.
Will my palm reading be more convincing? "You have a very strong gap of independence," says Debono, staring down at my right hand. He is referring to the supposedly large gap between two of the horizontal lines (my "head line" and my "life line") that run across the middle of my palm. "It basically means that when you were younger, quite young, you were an independent thinker."
He adds that my "heart line", which runs across my palm, near where my fingers meet it, has a "fork" in it, meaning, "You like to have your partner, but you like to do your own thing."
It's difficult to believe someone has any particular intuition about your life or future, when what he has said would, I believe, appeal to most sentient beings.
But a "Gypsy" deck of divination cards, says Debono, can help him predict the future. Which in my case means resolving a specific 18-year-long conundrum: in which country will I finally settle for good?
He counts out the 20 cards I've selected, face-down, from the deck – they feature simple symbols, like a love heart, anchor and ring – and he lays them face-side up in four neat rows. The card in the top left-hand corner is a heart. "It's telling you to focus, to feel your way through, and go with your feeling, to go with what you love," Debono says.
The heart card has the number six printed on it, so he counts six cards over, to a card with a picture of a moon on it. The moon, he says, represents "revisiting the past". "So this is a bit of a clue about you going back home."
The other clues, based on the cards he counts to next? "It's going to maybe depend on your relationship as well." (Thanks, "ring" card). "It's gonna take time, and the anchor can mean family roots, so that again has a Canadian feel about it." (Thanks, "anchor" card.) "You have to talk to your partner." (Thanks, "bird holding a letter in its beak" card.)
Being told that the site of your future home will be determined by utterly commonsensical factors that would likely determine the outcome of virtually any conundrum makes you wonder: why are psychics so popular?
"Often, people are moving away from traditional religion, and more into this idea of, 'I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious,' " says Leela Williams, publications officer with the Australian Psychics Association. "A psychic is a tool to discover your own spirituality."
And fortune-tellers will always appeal to people experiencing a period of uncertainty, says the Australian Skeptics' Tim Mendham. "Life is random, and that's probably one of the biggest things that affects people all the time: like, shit happens," he says. "[So] they want to go to someone who can give them certainty about the future."
This is what Emma Freud said she found most comforting, during her visits to a variety of psychics and fortune-tellers in New York City. "The higher purpose of this thriving industry," she wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this year, "would seem to be that in a competitive, frenetic, feisty, forceful city, they offer a quiet moment to consider the notion that there may be a universal plan, to allow yourself to be guided, to let someone hold your hand."