CAN A MEDIUM CURE GRIEF?

It’s not until I approach the house that I wonder what the hell I’m doing. Inside, my stomach twists and turns. I take a breath and open the iron gate before ringing the doorbell. “Come in,” he says, leading me to his front room. We’ve never met before, but he feels strangely comforting. “You look so much like your father,” he says. But he has never met my father. Not really. And there are no photographs of Dad in this white-washed room with creaky wooden floorboards. This man knows nothing of my family, or my past. Yet he also seems to know absolutely everything.

Turning to a medium for answers, as I have, is becoming increasingly common. Spiritualism, the religion that is based on the belief that the spirits of the dead exist and want to communicate with us, is booming these days. Over on TikTok, there’s @kendallthemedium who does ‘collective readings’ for her 760k followers, while an interview with spiritual medium and psychic clairvoyant David The Medium is the most downloaded episode of grief podcast Good Mourning (@goodmourningpodcast).

I’ve long been interested in spiritualism as a practice and have found it