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Psychic pets and pet psychics - Investigative Files
Skeptical Inquirer, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Joe Nickell
To find other lost animals, Carl claims she uses "visualization" to help them "find their way home." Thus, if an animal returns, Carl can claim credit; if not, she has a ready rationalization: some animals do not wish to come back and, says Carl, "I have to respect the animal's wishes" (Cooper and Noble 1996).
Some pet psychics offer still other services. For example, Oklahoma "equine parapsychologist" Karen Hamel-Noble claims to heal horses. She uses her hands to detect "the source of weakness in their energy fields"--i.e., their imagined auras--then supplies compensating "energy" from herself (Cooper and Noble 1996). However, since auras remain scientifically unproved and rests of psychics' abilities to see them have repeatedly failed (Nickell 2000), Hamel-Noble's claims require proof, not just her feelings and assertions. Perhaps the animals' perceived illnesses are merely responding to their natural healing mechanisms and the medical treatments Hamel-Noble provides them--including penicillin injections (Cooper and Noble 1996).
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Pet Mediums
In the popular imagination, animals, like their human counterparts, may continue their existence after death, there being many reports of animal apparitions. And since pets are loved and often regarded as members of a family, it is not surprising that people occasionally experience "visitations" from their departed animal friends just as they do their human ones. However, these seem to have similar explanations to those of other apparitional experiences. For example, some who hear a dog's phantom bark or footsteps, or see (as one reported) "a shadow jump up on the bed," do so just after rousing from sleep (Cohen 1984) and may thus be having "waking dreams." These are common hallucinations that occur in the twilight between being awake and asleep and exhibit content that "may be related to the dreamer's current concerns" (Baker 1990). Similarly, apparitions that are seen during wakefulness tend to occur when one is tired, daydreaming (perhaps while performing routine work), or the like (Nickell 200la, 291-292) .
With the advent of spiritualism--the belief that the dead can be contacted--certain self-styled "mediums" began to offer themselves as intermediaries with the spirit realm. Some produced bogus spirit "materializations" and other physical phenomena, but these were frequently exposed as tricks by investigators like magician Harry Houdini. Today's mediums tend to limit themselves to purely "mental phenomena," i.e., the use of "psychic ability" to obtain messages from "the other side."
Such mediums--like James Van Praagh, John Edward, Rosematy Altea, George Anderson, and Sylvia Browne--appear to rely largely on the old psychics' standby, cold reading. In fact Edward (real name John MaGee Jr.) came to mediumship as an erstwhile fortuneteller at psychic fairs and now styles himself a "psychic medium." But on Dateline NBC he was caught cheating: attempting to pass off some previously gained knowledge as spirit revelation (Nickell 2001b).
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