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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.