Psychics wanted for call centre

IS THERE anybody there? Yes, and they will answer the phone. Psychics are being recruited in Scotland to staff a phone service which offers to provide readings and attempt to put the bereaved in touch with the deceased.

Applicants will be put through a range of rigorous tests to ascertain whether they have clairvoyant abilities and a “connection with spirit” – an ability to communicate with the departed – before being offered a job. More than 150 candidates have already been turned down for not being able to prove their psychic skills.

The man behind the job offer said he is trying to offer a genuine psychic service. “I was sick of people with no psychic ability doing so-called readings,” said William O’Connor, who has worked as a medium in Glasgow for 31 years. “I wanted to set up a phone line where you would speak to a genuine clairvoyant or medium and have a genuine reading.”

His advertisement, which has been posted on the Scotcareers website and describes a full-time position offering with a starting salary of £6.40 per hour, says: “A range of skills are required such as clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience etc, however you MUST have a demonstrable connection with spirit and demonstrate mediumship. These skills will be assessed by William O’Connor.”

Clairvoyance, clairsentience and clairaudience refer to the practice of gaining information about a person or an event through extrasensory perception, through sight, touch or listening, and are often described as tools of the trade for psychics who claim to be able to make predictions about a person’s life. O’Connor said: “We will supply training but successful applicants must have a credible gift. They must be able to demonstrate that they have natural psychic ability.”

O’Connor, who worked with Strathclyde Police on the 1997 murder investigation of prostitute Tracey Wylde, has been putting potential recruits through a series of gruelling tests, including a blindfold experiment, where he writes a name on a piece of paper and places it on a chair in a room, then asks the candidate to tell him the name and on which chair the piece of paper has been placed.

He also sets up mock readings in which the potential psychic must correctly identify key pieces of information about a person’s life, including the state of their relationships, their work life, their family, and give accurate predictions about the short-term future.

He is also keen to find candidates with a “connection to spirit”, meaning they can communicate with the dead.

“We would start by looking to see if they had a direct connection to spirit,” he said. “We would ask them to give a reading to someone who had experienced a direct loss – someone that they wouldn’t know anything about, and see what they could identify in terms of the person’s name, age and their life.”

O’Connor, who has so far filled ten posts at his phone line company, called Psychic Psychic, and is looking for a further five, said he felt there are a number of people within the psychic industry who exploited people for money.

“A lot of companies aren’t interested in the person they’re giving a reading to, they’re just interested in money, and they don’t recruit people who have a reputable psychic gift,” he said. “It’s a hugely lucrative business as a whole.”

The field has been boosted by high-profile mediums such as Derek Acorah and Colin Fry, who have both had successful TV shows based on their purported psychic abilities. A recent survey suggested that 43 per cent of the population believe they have been contacted by the dead or have attempted to contact the dead themselves, while 22 per cent have visited a fortuneteller and 16 per cent used a psychic.

However, the business has also been accused of fakery. Sally Morgan, “Britain’s best-loved psychic” and a confidante of Princess Diana, was accused of faking her stage act, in which she supposedly receives messages from the dead which she passes on to relatives in the audience. Fans at a show in Dublin said they heard a man’s voice giving what sounded like prompts and suggested Morgan was using an earpiece. She later rejected the claims, saying: “I don’t hear anything through my ears. It’s like trying to say I receive messages through the soles of my feet.”

Magician and sceptic James Randi has offered $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate a supernatural ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria. Although the challenge was set up in 1964, no-one has yet passed the test.