Although traditional church attendance has been waning for a long time, interest in the spirit world remains consistently strong. A 2005 Gallup poll found that while roughly three in four Americans profess a belief in the paranormal, only one in four regularly attends church. Such statist­ics suggest our fascination with the Other Side remains steady, though the appeal of particular clairvoyants, like that of all public figures, is subject to the unpredictable ebb and flow of fashion. 

Here in the US, we have ridden out the powerful but short-lived wave of West Indian psychics which reached its height in 2001, when pay-per-call clairvoyants – most of them charging 99 cents a minute – were shilling themselves everywhere you looked. Particularly memorable was Dionne Warwick’s “Psychic Friends Network”, well known for both its omnipresent infomercials and its well publicised bankruptcy case. Equally notor­ious was the exotic Miss Cleo, who succeeded Warwick as queen of the late-night soothsayers (“Cleo can see Into your Heart and Into your Life”). Miss Cleo’s fall was equally swift, and resulted from legal pressure exerted on her employers, the Psychic Readers Network, by State attorneys-general and the Fair Trade Commission. The charge was fraudulent advertising: turns out a lot of those calls cost a lot more than 99¢ a minute. Particularly dismaying was the news, leaked during the investi­gation, that the sultry Miss Cleo – née Youree Dell Harris – was in fact born in Los Angeles to American parents, and was not remotely Jamaican, as both she and her accent had led us to believe. 

While lesser mystics might regard this as something of a setback, it was not enough to dissuade the indefatigable Miss Cleo, who now describes herself as a “proud voodoo woman”. Although she no longer advertises her services on television, Miss Cleo continues to offer private consultations from her home in Lake Worth, Florida, and – at least until recently – hosted her own podcast, V Radio (V for voodoo). Her longevity puts Miss Cleo among the older rank of US media clairvoyants, beside such well-known figures as spirit communicator James Van Praagh, and Shanti Ananda, the Puerto Rican psychic formerly known as Walter Mercato. Although most of these senior seers are still with us – the unct­uous Sylvia Browne was making occasional appearances on Montel Williams and Larry King Live until recently – they have largely been usurped by a wave of younger, more tele­genic and web-savvy sages, most of whom have their own cable shows, websites, and blogs. 

Until just a few years ago, the king of the new clairvoyants was the charismatic John Edward, whose show Crossing Over – a major success on the Sci Fi (now Syfy) Channel – was rapidly snapped up for syndication. Yet despite his blue eyes, casual demeanour and gym-rat physique, Edward, once described by the New York Times as “the Oprah of the Other Side”, seems, at the tender age of 41, to have passed his psychic sell-by date. His new show, John Edward Cross Country (“world-famous psychic John Edward travels cross-country helping families reconn­ect with their departed loved ones”) has, for the past three years, aired on WE TV – a channel whose programm­ing is largely aimed at a female audience – but has been on hiatus since 2009, and has shown no signs of returning from the dead. 

Since 2005, fans of psychic phenomena have been drawn to the tele­vision series Medium (“She Sees What Others Can’t”), starring Patricia Arquette as clairvoyant Allison Dubois. Although the show is fictional, its plotlines are apparently based closely on the work of the real Allison Dubois, a 38-year-old shaman whose psychic abilities are allegedly put to work by law enforcement agenc­ies all across the United States. Cancelled by NBC after five seasons, the show was then picked up by CBS in fall 2009; its ratings at CBS, however, were consistently low, and it was announced in November that the show would be cancelled after the end of the seventh season. 

Those seeking spiritual guidance through the airwaves have always been spoiled for choice. Currently, subscribers to the Sirius network can listen to Angels on Call with Mary O – full name, Mary Rose Occino – star of the SyFy Channel reality show Mary Knows Best and proprietor of the Celestial Whispers gift shop on Long Island. Sirius also plays host to Animal Intuition with Sonya Fitzpatrick, a genteel English lady who is not only able to communicate with still-living animals, but who also possesses the ability to contact pets that have passed on. On her now-defunct show The Pet Psychic, which once aired twice-weekly on the cable channel Animal Planet, Mrs Fitzpatrick studied worn photographs of deceased cats, dogs, and guinea pigs in order to let their owners know what their ex-pets have been up to on the other side. And for listeners on the West Coast, a part-Cherokee actress and singer named Danielle Egnew channels angelic entit­ies on her LA Talk Radio show Haunted Playground. 

Multi-talented though these mystics may be, none of them can hold a candle to the current Queen of all Mediums, 37-year-old Lisa Williams. In contrast to frumpy, fashion-challenged spiritualists like Sylvia Browne and Doris Stokes, Williams, a stylish young British woman, presents herself as fun, flirty and informal. Her spiky hair is teased into coloured streaks, and her blog shows her sitt­ing in her pajamas with a laptop on her knee. In her show Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead, which ran from 2006 to 2007 on The Lifetime Channel, the cameras followed Lisa on a “typical day” as she communicated with the deceased, investigated haunted houses, and conducted other spirit-seeking activities. Her most recent show, Lisa Williams: Voices From the Other Side ran for five consecutive nights in October 2008, also on the Lifetime Channel. She has also appeared on Oprah! and claims to have been visited by a number of dead celebrities, including Bob Hope, Princess Diana, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe and Ray Charles. 

Despite her trendy appearance, there is nothing modern about Lisa Williams’s performance (I saw her in Baltimore on 20 November 2010). As with similar clairvoyants, her show consists of identifying details of her audience’s recently deceased relatives. Although many of these tidbits are predictably vague, her hits are sometimes remarkably on-target. For example, in Baltimore she asked one woman whether her dead mother had “taught her cat to use the toilet”. “Oh, that was her dog,” the woman replied. “She taught it to pee in the shower”. Once the connection has been firmly established between the presenting spirit and his or her worldly descendents, Williams dispenses love, forgiveness, and a little worldly wisdom (one lady was advised from beyond the grave to “get her transmission checked out”). If the details do not match or if advice seems confusing, the loved ones are instructed to “let it sit for a while”, to see if anything comes to mind. 

If the make-up of the Baltimore audience was any indicator, Lisa’s fans are predomin­antly women, accompanied by a few bored-looking boyfriends (including mine). Many of her fans were already clutching tissues even before Lisa arrived on stage, which suggests there is an enormous need for the comfort such performers can bring. This impression is confirmed by a glance at Lisa’s chatty and colourful blog, where each entry is followed by grateful comments, almost all of them from women: “Thank you for sharing your journey with us and giving us all inspir­ation in our own lives”; or “Thank you so much for a wonderful evening and for bringing such peace and well-being to so many. Your energy was contagious and brought so much happiness.” 

Like many clairvoyants, Lisa Williams believes her psychic powers are inherited. “My grandmother, Frances Glazebrook from Birmingham, had these powers too,” she reveals on her blog. In her transatlantic popularity, Williams is part of another tradition – that of British psychics, usually female, who are popular on both sides of the pond. Pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick was born in England and lived in London until 1991, when she moved to the US with her husband. Before Fitzpatrick, the mystic du jour was Rosemary Altea, “Voice of the Spirit World”, another popular British-born clairvoyant who appeared on numerous national tele­vision shows including The Oprah Show, Larry King Live and Prime Time Live with Diane Sawyer. Altea’s predecessor was the ghastly and garrulous Doris Stokes (1920–1987), a grey-haired, grandmotherly figure associated with the Spiritualist church. Although Stokes was based in England, she often travelled to Australia and the US, and even helped out the LAPD with a murder case (or so she claimed). Her main psychic rival was a lady with the Dickensian name of Sybil Leek, who claimed descent from a line of witches going back to the 16th century. Leek moved to the US in 1964 and began collaborating with the Austrian-born parapsychologist Hans Holzer, who invited her to join him in his investigations into haunted houses and psychic phenomena. The duo went on to host numerous TV and radio programmes on the subject, continuing to collaborate until Leek’s death in 1982. 

When watching Lisa Williams’s stage performance, I began to wonder why British ladies make such popular and successful psychics. Perhaps their genteel accents harken back to the heyday of Victorian spiritualism, the era of séances, ectoplasm and Ouija boards. Or perhaps they fit the archetype of the magical English nanny embodied by characters like Mary Poppins and Nanny McPhee, a stock character closely related to those dotty British aunts played in the movies by the likes of Maggie Smith and Margaret Rutherford. Or maybe there is a connection to the tradition of Celtic witchcraft, passed along from Morgan-le-Fay, Vivian, the Lady of the Lake and other mythical mystics. Interestingly, these trad­itions pre-date Christianity, which perhaps explains why, although mediums and clairvoyants will often discuss various planes of the afterlife, there is never any mention of Heaven or Hell, let alone any reference to the existence (or otherwise) of God. 

But back to Lisa Williams, who, although she may have brought hope to countless loved ones, has seen a run of bad fortune in her own not-so-private life. She is separated from the father of her child, and her marriage came to an end in 2009. But things are currently looking up. In her latest blog entry – posted on 10 December 2010 – Lisa has revealed that she is now in a same-sex relationship. If this revelation gives you a sense of déjà vu, it’s probably because she is far from the first psychic to have “Crossed Over” in this way. Miss Cleo – or Ms Cleo, as she is now known – came out in The Advocate in 2006, and now describes herself as a lesbian activist. Danielle Agnew, host of Haunted Playground, is also openly gay, as are psychics Terry Iacuzzo, James Van Praagh, and Colin Fry. The correlation between psychic gifts and homosexuality, however, remains open to speculation. Could it just be one of those things that, in the words of HP Lovecraft, “man was not meant to know”?