Obviously my own feelings of the legitimacy of the matter aren’t hard to guess. However, for the sake of this article, I will try not to simply summarise this practice with one of the many vulgar four letter words that are currently piling up on the tip of my tongue, gently rapping on my teeth, begging to be freed from their oral captivity.

Ghost readers, séance mediums, and psychics are one of three things; finely tuned liars, stark raving crazies, or (somewhat less likely) the most incredible, walking, talking, human anomalies to be produced in the two hundred thousand years of modern man’s existence; and not only that, but also inarguable proof of the existence of an afterlife, extra-sensory human perception, and spectral sensitivity, wasting away their unfathomable talents by inhabiting the lamest of shanty shops, late night social club evenings, and darkened kiosks.

Since I assume I don’t have too many irreparably brain damaged morons reading my blog, I think we can go ahead and scratch off that last one. My true feelings on the matter, what has really gotten into me and bitten into my anger gland (that’s right, I’m so cynical and opinionated, that I have my own anger gland) is the fact that people allow those amoral monsters to practice their deception, without regard or judgement to what it is that they are actually doing.

Here’s the bottom line: These people are lying and smirking behind their teeth at their own deplorable ability to twist and wrench at the rationale-consuming grief of a widowed wife or husband, a childless parent, or a parentless child, and use that mourning, optimistic suspension of disbelief as a means to make money from them. What they are doing, at its most basic level, is one of the most fundamentally sickening things a person can do to another person. They are profiting from the pain of others; capitalising from the susceptibility of the weak, the saddened, or simply the ill-educated by flat out, barefacedly deceiving them; telling a mother that you’ve contacted her dead son and that he says he loves her and misses her? That’s beyond description. It’s the physical, human action equivalent to dirt; filth, the mildewy scum that you infrequently have to scrape away after it accumulates on a leaking pipe. It’s not only reprehensible to take advantage of death and suffering, but in supposedly insuring the grieving that their departed loved ones are waiting for them beyond the grave, you are not just baiting, but actively encouraging their suicide. They enthusiastically wait to find people who are so insane with grief, that they literally have nowhere else to turn, and then boom… Payday.

There are so many practices and superstitions and cults that have been banned and discredited for being far less dangerous, profiteering, illogical, and fallible as this one, and the fact that we didn’t ditch it back in the Dark Age is an inexplicable mystery to me.

Death is hard. I know this. But turning to a unmitigated charlatan with a crystal ball, in the hopes of recapturing one more moment of love and connection with a murdered child, a car crash victim husband, a winter pneumonia grandparent, is a besmirchment of any feelings that you had for them at all. They’re your feelings to have and cherish; and yes, the pain of losing them may be more than a person can bear, but by giving in to the unequivocally cash hungry liars who tout themselves as spirit readers or psychics is achieving nothing more than lightening your wallet, and continuing a practice that represents the darkest, the lowest, and the stupidest, that mankind can possibly stoop to.