The Psychic Sally Adventure

October 21, 2011

Continue Reading In October, @xVirtutex (Myles) and I decided to go down to Guildford’s GLive venue to speak to Sally Morgan fans. On the 1st October Simon Singh @SLSingh had tweeted that Sally had seen him coming and blocked him before he’d had the chance to even follow her (spooky, eh?) so I decided to follow @SallyMorganTV for laffs. Little did I know she’d be coming to the home of the Guildford SITP – an event that I kind of help out with running.

Placebo-controlled analyses were conducted using repeated measures analyses with bonferroni corrections for multiple com Reading about 10 minutes behind tweets, @SallyMorganTV said “Another new venue, at the G Live in Guildford tonight. It’s a sold out show. Look forward to seeing you there xSx”

Jokingly, I tweeted “Sally Morgan’s in Guildford… tonight? Why did no one tell me!” and “Maybe I should print out some @ProjectBarnum posters and give them to the audience?”

Sally Morgan

I should point out that I wasn’t entirely serious. At such short notice  there was no way I’d get there (45 mins drive from my home) in time to speak to them before they went in. However, I did get some encouragement from Alice Sheppard (@penguingalaxy), Simon Clare (@faithlesseye) and Hayley Stevens, (@HayleyStevens/@ProjectBarnum) who founded Project Barnum.

Project Barnum Logo

 

Project Barnum is a campaign to get theatres to understand the kind of psychic trickery that many Mediums and Psychics use in their shows & a free online resource for info on psychic trickery and how you might be being misled

Myles was kind enough to volunteer to come along to gallantly defend me from any kind of shenanigans so we put on our trainers in case we needed to run away (we definitely didn’t) and went on down.

Of course, being a sold out show, there was absolutely nowhere to park, so we settled on York St parking and went away to a nearby pub to regroup, talk about psychic practices (Myles is not particularly au fait with the skeptic movement… yet). Returning to the venue, we saw streams of fans pouring out, towards the very car park we had parked. Fortuitous.

I nearly lost my bottle but my curiosity got the better of me and I approached a group of three women. My cold reading skill told me that they were clearly related. Breezily, I asked them if I could ask them a few questions.

They had indeed been to see Sally, they had heard the media reports of her alleged cheating, but they weren’t put off by them. Sally had apparently covered that in her show and moved on to what she does. They hadn’t received a reading themselves, but they were hoping to hear from their deceased grandmother/mother. I asked them whether they thought it was for entertainment purposes but they clearly didn’t believe that. They seemed to understand that theatres had to say it was for entertainment purposes only to cover themselves, but didn’t recall that there was any information about that on the tickets or at the venue. After asking them a few more questions about whether they believed in Sally’s powers (they were paying for their parking), we skipped off. I was fairly happy to have got some answers to my questions, but they were perplexed as to why we asked them. It probably helped that we only asked questions, we didn’t try and push our agenda. That wasn’t really our aim.
Their curiosity piqued, they caught up with us, asking why we wanted to know. Myles had a few posters from the Project Barnum website in his hand and we showed them what we had.

That’s where things got interesting. The older lady said that she didn’t believe that a grandmother could be lying on stage. ‘Argumentum ad twinset and pearlsum’, said @Mickvagg.

Old Ladies: Not exempt from lying

Indeed – although this is actually argument from personal incredulity with a bit of emotional appeal thrown in. The lady’s daughter seemed to see the fallacy in her mother’s argument and pointed out that old ladies and old men sometimes do unspeakable things. Having a child who then has another child does not mean that you are immune to doing things that are immoral or illegal or even just a little naughty.

After speaking to them a while and gently putting my point across about the techniques that some psychics and mediums employ (using the ‘Spot a cheat‘ sheet from Project Barnum):

Project Barnum 'Spot a cheat' sheet

Image credit: Project Barnum (projectbarnum.co.uk)

and talking about Randi’s million dollar challenge they suddenly seemed a little uncertain about Sally’s powers and we gave them another poster with a link to Project Barnum’s website to seal the deal.

We later talked to a group of two women and three guys. One of the men seemed slightly taken aback that someone would approach him to ask questions and Myles and I both said later that we were worried he might kick off. But he didn’t. He was aware of P.T Barnum (the man, the legend) and appreciated the link. His wife was a tarot reader, which set my skeptical brain off a little. I didn’t go into tarot reading, but she seemed rather skeptical of it herself. They too weren’t aware of the ‘entertainment only’ caveat but did seem a little on the fence about the abilities of psychics, which leads me to ask why someone would spend around £25 quid on a ticket if not for entertainment value? We had a jovial conversation and they went off to eat their McDonald’s meal in peace, with another poster that linked to the website.

By the time we’d finished speaking to those people, most of the other fans had gone but we felt proud to have said our piece and maybe made a little dent in the confidence that those 8 people had in the power of the Psychic to reach across to the other side. Worth the 90 minutes of driving? Absolutely.