Can psychics really see the past/future?

I’m sure everyone has seen the signs for “$5 Psychic Readings” in their town or while traveling elsewhere. What I wanted to discuss here were your thoughts on using psychics for more than just personal entertainment, more specifically in police and detective work.

There’s been documented cases in the past where police haven’t been able to solve a crime, at which point they turn to a psychic for help. What I find the most interesting is when the psychics they hire actually solve the case.

What are your thoughts on this? What about using psychics to help solve some of the current investigations (such as the Peterson or Hacking trials?)

I’m not an expert myself on the topic, but I’ve been learning a bit more from a new show on Court TV called Psychic Detectives. It’s on Wednesday’s at 9:30pm in case you want to watch it too.

~ Marysol

I believe in pyschics, but I also believe in ghosts and other dimensions. But either way I have a good story relating.

My Grandmother told my brother and I this once, she told us in a very candid manner and was almost embarassed to be talking about it. For some background, my Grandma is an elderly British woman who lived in London during WWII (and actually survived an incendiary bomb landing in her flat while she was there). She is a very religious person and thus takes...other worldly...matters very seriously. So on to her story:

It was shortly after WWII had concluded and my Grandfather had returned home from the war (he was a naval captain). She, my Grandpa, and two of their close friends had driven into London for a night on the town. The girls had broken off from their male counterparts and had spotted a storefront psychic and decided to stop in just for laughs. The psychic told my Grandma many things, family things she wouldn't have known otherwise, but thats not important - as my Grandma was walking out of her session the psychic told her;

Psychic: "Stop"
Grandma: "Stop what?"
Psychic: "You'll know when stop"

So my Grandma left, kinda shaken by the family things the psychic had told her, but she shrugged off that last comment because it really didn't mean anything to her. She didn't smoke or anything like that, there really wasn't anything in her life that needed to be stopped. So the gals went and met back up with the guys and they drove back out to their house.

It was one of those nights where the fog is just rediculous and you pretty much have zero visibility. Of course, and the Brits on this site can probably credit this, British people are so used to it that when they drive they really don't think much of it, they still plow ahead as usual. So they were speeding along an empty road, not being able to see what was more than 20 feet infront of the headlights. My Grandpa was driving when all of a sudden my Grandma screamed for him to stop. My Grandpa didn't stop immediately, because he had no clue what she was talking about, so she yelled it again, grabbed tightly onto his leg to let her know she was serious and so my Grandpa slammed on the breaks. Everyone in the car was a little shaken up not knowing why she had just had such a random and passionate outburst. My Grandpa asked her what was wrong with her, why she was yelling and all she could say was, "I don't know, it just came to me, lets just get out for a minute and walk around to settle down."

They all got out of the car and started to walk around. They walked forward, just slightly past what was immediately visible by the headlights and discovered a gigantic sinkhole in the middle of the road. The road had caved in to reveal a wide, 20-30 foot deep cavern.

Now some people can say that psychics make general statements (like "you'll know when to stop") because people can always find a meaning out of something that is intentionally vague...and I'm sure there are people out there who do this simply to make money, but I don't doubt that there are people out there who can do it for real.

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Found this thread while browsing through the forum. Not sure why it's in the TV and Music Forum, besides the small part about Court TV: Psychic Detectives.

WHOA! That's quite a story, OG. Thought I'd reply since nobody else did and I (for most of the time) believe in that stuff. I say "most of the time" because atheists do make a lot of good points when it comes to psychics and the impossibility of life after death. But... I've had a lot of experiences myself that really make me believe.

One example. Do you remember when Chris White, who was a senior at Stonewall Jackson High School (OG and I both went there), died in a motorcycle accident? It was in September, 2002. Well, the day it happened - actually, around the exact time it was happening (Chris got out of school early, on his motorcycle, and that's when he died) - I was in chemistry, and I had this strong feeling that someone was dying. I thought it might be my grandpa. This feeling was so strong that when I came home from school, I asked if anyone had died. The next day, a Saturday, mom woke me up. She had just read the paper. She told me that Chris White died the day before. I was so shocked. I knew Chris White a little bit - he sat behind me in Spanish I when we were in the eighth grade. It spooks me out too because he signed in my yearbook that year, "I won't see you again because I'm moving". Well, for some reason, he didn't move away after eighth grade, but after he died, I found what he wrote and those words just sound so... foretelling.

I've had other things happen, but that's the strongest, most important, on target psychic feeling thing I think I've had yet.

I've had a similar experience, though not with Chris White (I didn't know him, but knew a lot of people who were really affected by it).

My mother died when I was 9. I was actually at a boy scout camp the entire week before and she died the day after I got back, before I got a chance to see her. I got a really sick feeling in my stomach while I was at camp and wanted to go see my mom, and asked my scout master, who was also my neighbor, if I could leave to go see her, but he said I couldn't (go figure). Anyways, that week she was moved into the Intensive Care Unit and my mother's brother and mother came into town from NJ. That feeling I had may have been related to the move, but that can probably just be chalked up to having home sickness (though I never had it before).

However, the morning she died. I was watching early morning cartoons by myself. My dad had gone to the hospital with my grandmother, leaving my brother and I home with my uncle. The phone rang and my uncle answered it. The thing was as soon as the phone rang I knew my mom had died. Now, I didn't even know what the ICU was at the time, I didn't know her condition had gotten worse, but the second that phone rang I knew it was my dad calling my uncle to tell him to bring us to the hospital.

I have a lot of other psychic tendencies, though I usually chalk those up to me just thinking logically and ahead of the curve, but at age nine...I just knew.

My aunt died in 1998 and it was a big surprise (not the good kind, of course). Her daughter, my cousin, who was 20 at the time, has talked about how she had a gut feeling to call her mom the day before she died, but didn't. She now regrets it.

That day it happened, I received a telephone call from my grandma, who didn't know that my aunt had died yet - just knew she had a heart attack. She asked to speak to my mom, so I ran outside to give her the phone. Now, I had no psychic feeling that when the phone rang, it was gonna be major, but my mom says she knew it was about my aunt. Coincidentally, that phone rang while I was watching Contact on cable and it was the scene where young Jodie Foster's character ran inside her house and found her dad, dead. It's also interesting because my aunt died August 16, and August 6 was the last time my mom and I saw her alive -- which came about by pure accident (or was it?) A short trip through the drive-thru at McDonald's, and whaddya know, there's my aunt's jeep right in front of us. She had driven from Leesburg and was on her way to visit my grandparents. We chatted briefly outside McDonalds, and then she came over to our house to eat lunch. She then looked around our house, and my mom remembers how strange that was for my aunt to do - like it was the last time she'd be there. I remember the oddness of that last time I saw her too - she and my mom exited the house to walk her to her car. Usually, I'll stroll along too, but for some reason, I didn't want to then. I guess because they had spent so much more time together alive that I needed to be away to give them their last moment.

Hell NO!!!!

But I knew you were going to post this

In my view, it's not debateable that ESP is a factual phenomena. Basically because of one man: Nostradamus. The stuff he predicted was so rediculously accurate and distant there is no way ESP in some form isn't real. I mean, how could someone in the middle ages predict ww2 and Hitler? Or napoleon or a man destined to become the pope? Far fetched enough it would be if a different person predicted every event but all of them were predicted by the same guy! A couple things he got wrong though. He predicted a third world war which would cost more than the second one. And some guy with a purple Turbin was going to start it. Well that didn't happen but meh. Undoubtedby extraordinary.

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we went to a harry chapin concert back in 1981...at the end of all his concerts he usually sings a song that starts out with "all my life's a circle" and always breaks in with the line "and we'll all get together again" something that he throws in at the end...this particular time when he was singing that song, he didn't include that line...a few months later he was killed in a car accident...

I was very close to my grandmother when I was a kid. The last year or so of her life, when I was 9-10, she had a calamity of health problems. I got in the habit, at the end of visiting her, of saying "see you later". I was afraid if I said 'goodbye' that she would die. This went on for months, until the last time I saw her, when I said, "goodbye" without thinking about it. I stopped short, and something told me (and I remember this very specifically) "it's ok, you should say 'goodbye' this time." She died about 3 days later.

So in answer to the thread question: I think anyone can see the future, the past, read other people, at times... if they're open to it. As far as psychics, there's an entire spectrum between "con artist"/performer and "genuinely precognicient".

I've gone to a couple of psychics because I find it interesting to see what they say, assuming they're basing what they say on their first impression of me. First impressions fascinate me, and I think anyone in that spectrum I mentioned has the ability to talk about those.

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Are you sure Nostradamus predicted those things, Krack? Surely he didn't word it exactly like that, so it's anybody's guess really. I've looked through some Nostradamus books in the past and didn't see anything really striking.

Susan's example isn't convincing or really that synchronistic... there are lots of concerts

Delilah's a good example. Nothing really major, but her intuition was on target and it was in synch.

well, it was pretty freaky at the time considering the night the truck hit his car we were on the way to another one of his concerts..and waiting for him to show up