Not only does Van Praagh claim to speak to the dead, he says anyone can do it. Talking to Heaven? Like Hell! The Spirited Trickery of James Van Praagh by D. Trull Enigma Editor dtrull@parascope.com The latest supernatural sensation to hit the top of the bestseller lists is James Van Praagh's book Talking to Heaven: A Medium's Message of Life After Death. Not only does Van Praagh claim the ability to contact the afterworld and carry on conversations with the dead, but he also says that anyone can do it -- and if you buy the book, he'll tell you how. Talking to Heaven spent 13 consecutive weeks at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, bolstered by a publicity campaign that has included appearances on Oprah, 20/20, Dateline NBC and Larry King. Following in the footsteps of blockbusters like Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light (on near-death experiences) and Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code (on scrambled prophecies hidden in scripture), Van Praagh's sales figures indicate that interest in the paranormal is very much a mainstream phenomenon, and not limited to a negligible lunatic fringe. More significantly, the success of a book like this reveals a disturbingly immense gullibility in the public, a widespread willingness to believe in the fantastic on the slightest of evidence. Formerly a theater stagehand and an aspiring screenwriter, Van Praagh has been a professional spirit medium for several years. He explains that our existence continues after death, with our souls transferring into a "different dimension" where our thoughts and feelings continue on a "higher frequency" or "vibration." Through some fortunate circumstance, Van Praagh claims, certain people (like himself) possess a strong sensitivity to these posthumous vibrations and can communicate with the deceased. These dialogues are not really "talking," because they occur at the level of "pure thought," beyond verbal sounds or language. Van Praagh assures us that his ability is not unique, and that anyone who practices at fine-tuning their "frequencies" can achieve some level of contact with his or her lost loved ones. Even though Talking to Heaven has sold well over 600,000 copies, the written word is inadequate to express fully what it is that Van Praagh does. By most accounts, live performance is truly his forte, and there can be little doubt that his TV demonstrations have sold the book. Van Praagh frequently conducts "spirit readings" in front of an audience, searching for the souls of deceased persons dear to a group of volunteers. These groups are supposedly made up of people Van Praagh has never met and knows nothing about, yet he manages to determine personal facts and uncover old memories as if he must be talking to ghosts, often with spectacular flourishes that send his audiences into a true-believer frenzy. But upon close examination, it becomes apparent that Van Praagh is nothing more than a skillful practitioner of the technique of cold reading, a tried-and-true favorite of psychics and mentalists. This involves a barrage of questions, vague statements and occasional jabs at specificity, while the "psychic" continuously gauges the subject's yes/no responses and body language for clues. Cold reading is simply a highly theatrical version of 20 Questions, with conscious and subconscious feedback telling the psychic whether he's "hot" or "cold." A talented cold reader can downplay all his misses and emphasize the few hits, with logical guesses and lucky coincidences lending the performance the appearance of mysticism. Van Praagh is thoroughly dependent on feedback from his subjects in order to score hits. He states vague "impressions" that he is "getting" and continually asks questions like "Does that make sense?" or "Do you understand that?" If the subject says no, Van Praagh quickly moves on; if the subject says yes, and offers further details, Van Praagh grabs the clue and runs with it, as if this information has come directly from the spirit world. In a December 1997 appearance on Larry King Live, Van Praagh performed impromptu readings for live callers. One caller asked about a former teacher who had died, and Van Praagh immediately said, "Very smart lady. She reads also quite a bit, this lady." Not exactly going out on a limb, there. When another caller said her sister had been murdered, he interrupted her question to announce, "It was very violent, yeah." Another safe bet. During an attempt to contact Larry King's father, King mentioned that his father had smoked, and Van Praagh suddenly detected "impressions" of a strong cough and respiratory problems. Van Praagh deftly brushes aside his frequent inaccuracies, and his audience is often charitable enough to ignore them. But sometimes his mistakes get called out, as when he guessed that the father of Larry King caller had been dead ten years, when it had actually been only a year and a half. King stopped and asked Van Praagh to explain why he was sometimes wrong. "What happens is more than likely, because you're dealing with frequencies of energy the spirit might not know how to communicate," Van Praagh answered. "There's a skill to it. They might send thought to my mind very quickly, I might not be fast enough to pick up the exact translation of what they're saying. So that's how that works. I'll hear like Mary and it'll be Marie or Nikki and it'll be something else." In this way, Van Praagh gets to rewrite the rules to suit any given situation that arises during his spirit chats. When he gets a correct hit, it's proof that he really is talking to the dead. When he bombs and gets things totally wrong, well, that's just vibrational interference resulting from misaligned frequencies. Under these conditions, anybody should be capable of communicating with the other side. Maybe that's one thing Van Praagh is right about. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has actually given it a try. A Seattle television station that had previously hosted Van Praagh invited Shermer to attempt a "reading," just for the sake of seeing how well an ordinary person could contact the dead, compared to the expert. Shermer agreed to the test, and did his best at pretending to reach the departed loved one of a woman who had served as a subject for Van Praagh. He later commented that the experiment was much more difficult than he would have predicted, and that it gave him a new respect for the craft of what Van Praagh does. "Van Praagh is an actor playing the part of a medium," Shermer wrote. "Like all acting, it requires practice -- a LOT of practice it turns out. Although I know all of his lines by now, I had not memorized them, nor did I have the deep reserve of backup lines for contingencies he frequently encounters in readings. When we watch actors they make it look so easy it seems like anyone can do it. But of course not anyone can do it." Shermer did a pretty good job, though. By the reckoning of the station's producers, his reading scored the same number of hits as Van Praagh's -- and Shermer even had fewer misses! Shermer got seven hits and 12 misses, while Van Praagh came in with seven hits and 29 misses. "Granted, my reading was not nearly as smooth as his, and it was much, much shorter because I ran out of things to say," Shermer noted, "but I even one-upped him by getting who it was who died, while he demanded to be told before the reading." On one occasion, Van Praagh was caught red-handed claiming that he had obtained some personal information through spirit contact, when he had actually learned it earlier while talking to the subject. During a break in the taping of a demonstration for 20/20, Van Praagh casually asked a young woman if her mother had died. She told him no, it was her grandmother who had passed away. About an hour later, while doing readings for the members of the small group, Van Praagh seized upon the same woman and announced that he was in contact with her late grandmother, speaking as if he had no prior knowledge of this woman. When 20/20 showed Van Praagh the tape of his earlier conversation, he was surprised to learn that the cameras had been rolling at that point, and he defensively insisted that his clue-hunting discussion did not constitute "cheating." That was one of the few times a TV appearance has backfired on Van Praagh or questioned his methods in any substantive way. Most media outlets have effusively praised his "abilities" and delighted in proclaiming him a genuine wonder. Charles Grodin was particularly ingratiating toward Van Praagh on his CNBC program, where he happily swallowed every claim and shut out any challenging commentary from invited guest James Randi. We are all entitled to believe whatever we want about extraordinary claims, but the media often lends unwarranted credulity to extraordinary claims -- especially when it's something we'd all like to believe in, like life after death, and an awaiting reunion with our family and friends on the other side. The truth about paranormal phenomena doesn't always make for great television. Or a real page-turner, either. Sources: Skeptic, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1998; Skeptic Mag Online newsletter, May 1, 1998; Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 1998; The Randi-Hotline newsletter, May 12, 1998; Larry King Live transcript, December 10, 1997; James Van Praagh official web site. © Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc. Enigma: Paranormal Phenomena ParaScope: Something Strange is Happening! The ParaStore: Books on the Paranormal