Grief and vulnerability targeting

What it is

The deliberate direction of spiritual services, recruitment or sales at people in acute distress — the bereaved above all, but also the terminally ill, the infertile, those in addiction, and families of missing people.

The reason this concentrates there is not mysterious. Grief produces an overwhelming desire for one more conversation, and a temporary suspension of ordinary scepticism that most bereaved people are perfectly aware of afterwards. It is not credulity. It is wanting something badly enough that the usual guards come down.

What is offered ranges across a wide spectrum, and the spectrum matters:

• A medium or practitioner who sincerely believes they are doing what they say
• A practitioner using cold reading technique, aware of it or half-aware of it
• Deliberate fraud, sometimes escalating into extended extraction of money over years
• A group offering genuine community and support, which also happens to recruit

Where it came from

Modern Spiritualism has an origin date: 1848, when the Fox sisters in New York State produced rapping sounds they said were communications from the dead. Forty years later Margaret Fox publicly confessed the raps had been produced by cracking her toe joints, demonstrated the method on stage, and later retracted the confession. The movement continued regardless.

Its two great expansions followed mass bereavement — the American Civil War, and then the First World War and the influenza pandemic, which left an entire generation in Europe grieving simultaneously. Arthur Conan Doyle became Spiritualism's most prominent advocate after losing his son. Harry Houdini, who had gone to mediums after his mother's death and concluded they were using conjuring methods he recognised professionally, spent his last years exposing them — and the two men's friendship broke over it.

That episode is the whole subject in miniature: two intelligent, grieving men, reaching opposite conclusions, neither of them a fool.

The modern form is quieter and better targeted. Online advertising can reach people searching for funeral services or terminal diagnoses, and grief-related search behaviour is commercially legible in a way it was not before.

How it is used

The technique most often involved is cold reading — high-probability guesses, statements vague enough to fit many situations, careful attention to the sitter's reactions, and the letting-go of misses while hits are remembered. It works without any intent to deceive, which is why sincere practitioners can produce convincing readings and believe in them.

The commercial escalation pattern is worth naming: an initial reading that goes well, followed by the disclosure of a problem — a curse, a blocked spirit, an unresolved attachment — which requires further and more expensive work. Prosecutions in several countries have involved sums in the hundreds of thousands.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the historical record is unambiguous: bereavement has been a market for well over a century, and the periods of greatest expansion followed the periods of greatest loss.

We can say cold reading is well documented and reliably produces convincing results under controlled conditions with no information about the sitter.

We can say the practical markers of exploitation are recognisable, and they are about money and escalation rather than about metaphysics. Does the cost rise after the first session? Is a problem introduced that only they can fix? Is there urgency? Are you discouraged from discussing it with family? Is payment requested in cash or by transfer?

And this needs saying carefully. Grief is not a pathology, and wanting contact is not a weakness or a failure of rationality. A great many bereaved people have found comfort in a reading, in a community, in a ritual, or in a belief that they will meet someone again, and have gone on to live well. This site is not in the business of telling anyone that their comfort was foolish, and the sceptical literature is often needlessly cruel on exactly this point — treating the bereaved as marks rather than as people doing something entirely human.

The line this article draws is not between believing and not believing. It is between comfort freely offered and certainty sold at an escalating price. A practitioner who does not charge more when you are desperate, does not manufacture a problem, and does not mind you talking it over with your family is doing something different from one who does — whatever either of them believes about what they are doing.

We cannot say what any individual experienced in a reading. We can say that the structural conditions for exploitation are unusually strong here, that the people affected are usually the last to be believed when they realise it, and that no one who fell for it was stupid.

Further reading

• Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) — a professional's account of the methods, and unexpectedly compassionate about the people who wanted to believe.
• Ian Rowland, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading — the technique set out in detail.
• Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters (2006) — on the serious scientists who investigated Spiritualism, treated with unusual fairness.