She’s young, attractive and smart — and she says she communicates with the dead
By: Michael Redmond
She’s young, attractive, smart, hip, talented and charismatic and she says that she communicates with the dead. She believes this sincerely, it appears and it’s pretty certain that the dozens of people who turned out at the Nassau Inn on Thursday evening for a gallery (a public "psychic reading" session) believe it, too.
Meet Marisa Liza Pell, M.A., founder and president of Knowledge for Living and Connection Beyond, enterprises through which she markets intuition training courses, motivational programs and reading sessions. Ms. Pell, a resident of Collingswood, describes herself as a "psychic medium" and a "medical intuitive."
In case you haven’t been paying attention, psychic mediumship psychic, as in extrasensory or meta-sensory perception; mediumship, as in a channel between visible and invisible worlds is a very big deal in America today. Two major networks present weekly dramas whose lead characters are psychic mediums "Ghost Whisperer" on CBS and "Medium" on NBC. Presented as fiction or nonfiction, psychic topics are all over cable, all the time. Next time you’re browsing Barnes & Noble, check out the New Age section, or whatever they’re calling it these days. Yes, indeed a very big deal.
Let’s establish a spectrum. At one end is Ms. Pell, the psychic, who is firmly convinced of her gifts and can provide testimonials to their truth and accuracy from tomorrow morning to next week. At the other pole is Joe Nickell, Ph.D., the investigator, otherwise known as senior research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a hardball independent foundation that "encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public."
Between these two poles is, well, this writer.
I don’t know that I can say that I believe in psychic mediumship, but I am open to the possibility and willing to consider the evidence, such as it is. Compared to Mr. Nickell, who says "there are two kinds of psychic mediums those who believe they can talk to the dead, whom we call ‘fantasy-prone,’ and those who know they can’t talk to the dead, whom we call charlatans," I’m halfway in Ms. Pell’s camp already. The faith tradition of my church explicitly holds that not only do we survive death, we survive death as the persons we are, not as some nebulous billow of swamp gas, and that church members on the other side, "the communion of saints," can hear our petitions and intercede in our behalf.
Now I strongly suspect that Mr. Nickell would dismiss these beliefs as childish (many people do), but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an enormous expanse of reality where I’m totally on Mr. Nickell’s side. Yes, there is, because my religious beliefs support my conviction that human beings have intelligence for a reason which is, to use it. Cohabiting side by side inside my head, like Fox Mulder and Dana Scully on "The X-Files," is a traditional believer and a stone-cold rationalist. As far as I’m concerned, the dialectical tension between the two faith and reason is one of the things that makes life really interesting.
What Marisa Liza Pell does is powerful stuff. In the course of two hours of standup reading shared, by the way, with fellow psychic medium Joseph "Spirit Man" Tittel, a resident of Levittown, Pa., likewise young, good-looking, smart, hip, talented and charismatic people gasp in surprise, dab their eyes with Kleenex, nod knowingly, laugh out loud, all in the embrace of a community of feeling that’s palpable, even to a newspaper writer committed to remaining objective. This experience is part church service, part therapy session, part lounge act. People get their money’s worth of some or all of those things, according to their needs and if they leave feeling that they’ve "connected" with a departed loved one, the experience must be beyond price. As it was, advance admission cost $38.50, with tickets going for $45 and $52 at the door.
But have they connected, really? I’m not convinced. Yes, there were some surprises, but surprisingly few over the long haul. Ms. Pell and Mr. Tittel had a number of direct "hits," including the facts confirmed that one woman’s mother had been a lesbian and that another woman spoke five languages. Almost all other hits, if hits they really were, concerned information that was highly probable for recipients of a certain age or station in life, or easily deduced from preceding information.
Something that was inexplicable to me is how commonplace this "communication" turned out to be. I mean, your loved one has crossed the Great Divide, and all he can talk about is pretty much the same stuff he talked about here? Nothing was said, nothing, about the next world, about all those cosmic imponderables that vex people’s imaginations when they consider the prospect of eternity. If the existence of God came up, for instance, I must have missed it.
To Mr. Nickell, there are no mysteries here. He attributes most results to a technique known as "cold reading," which he defines as "an artful method of gleaning information from a sitter, then feeding it back as mystical revelation," and the remaining results to luck. "Cold reading," he says, is a technique than can be taught to anyone, and it works especially well for people who are intelligent and perceptive.
Here’s an example. The cold reader will ask, Do you have a sister? Why, yes, you say, a little surprised. Later, you will tell a friend, The reader knew I had a sister but the reader "knew" no such thing until you opened your mouth. Or if the answer is No, I don’t have a sister, the reader will say, But a spirit with strong ‘sister energy’ is coming through. Don’t you have somebody on the Other Side, a friend who was as close to you as a sister? Odds are, again, the answer will be yes.
"People tend to count the hits and ignore the misses," says Mr. Nickell, a former resident magician at the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame who has been investigating "hauntings and psychic phenomena" for more than 30 years.
"Anything that can count as a hit will be counted, even if it’s a long shot and has to be substantially ‘interpreted’ to be accepted as a hit. And people misremember what was actually done and said. It’s surprising when you get a transcript of what actually took place. Only then do you notice how quick the play is. This is sleight of tongue, not sleight of hand," Mr. Nickell says.
OK. In fairness to Ms. Pell and Mr. Tittel, it has to be said that the Nassau Inn audience was repeatedly cautioned against providing the psychics with more information than "yes" or "no." But a lot of people did so, anyway. It also has to be said that recording devices were strictly prohibited.
What, then, is a hit? That’s a valid question and I can’t answer it. The fact is, though, all of our lives are full of names and numbers. If you hear, "I’m getting a 24 that could be Feb. 4, or the 24th of the month, or age 24 … ," how many "hits" on the 2-4 combination are probable among dozens of people? If you hear, "I’m getting an ‘M’ name Mike, Mickey, Mark, Martin, Marie … ," again, how many hits are probable, especially when Michael and Mary rank high among the most common names in America? Or, "What does (any object, fill in the blank) mean to you?" Or, "I’m getting a neck problem … "?
Ms. Pell is totally up front about the nature of the other side’s communication. "I don’t get sentences and words. I don’t hear things. I get images and symbols …," which then require interaction with a sitter in order to yield meaning. Various things happen when the interaction goes nowhere or runs out of steam. Perhaps this is actually about the person next to the sitter. Perhaps this is something the sitter should write down because "when you get home, you’re going to remember everything I said, and it will be a direct hit." Or maybe it’s because the psychic is "switching," which means she is being drawn by the spirits to another person in the group, so there’s a little temporary confusion to be worked through.
What’s odd about all this is that it differs radically from the kind of thing psychics have historically done. Once upon a time, there was table-tipping and slate writing and ectoplasmic manifestations. In Victorian times, and well into the 20th century, spirits were so garrulous and literary you had trouble getting them to shut up.
"The problem with physical mediums was that they kept getting caught red-handed. Magicians like Houdini would booby-trap and expose them," Mr. Nickell says. Quite right. The great Harry Houdini (1874-1926) spent the final years of his life on a mission to expose frauds, a tradition that continues today with the popular stage magicians Penn and Teller. But exposing a fraud doesn’t prove that all psychics are frauds any more than convicting a politician proves that all politicians are criminals.
Believers in psychic mediumship may complain that I’ve slanted this column in Mr. Nickell’s favor. I honestly don’t think so. Including the time spent reading their material, I gave Ms. Pell and Mr. Tittel my complete attention and about three hours of my life. I encountered them on the same level as everybody else who attended the Nassau Inn gallery, with no special attention just because I’m press. I didn’t walk in there with my mind made up or any intention to make trouble. Nor did I walk in there with my mind so open that my brain had fallen out.
As for Mr. Nickell: The time I spent doing some research on the Skeptical Inquiry Web site and talking to him on the phone adds up to about one hour, tops.
Besides, psychics and their supporters are getting their message across loud and clear through numerous avenues of American popular culture. That’s definitely not the case for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry I mean, have you ever heard of this organization? It has a list of associates as long as your arm very serious and creditable people, including physicians, psychiatrists, physicists, biochemists, anthropologists, mathematicians and cognitive scientists, representing major universities and research centers.
So where’s the truth to be found? It all depends on what we mean by "truth" and what we’re prepared to believe …
Marisa Liza Pell on the Web: www.connectionbeyond.com. Joseph Tittel on the Web: www.spiritmanjoseph.com.
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry on the Web: www.csicop.org. Joe Nickell on the Web: www.joenickell.com.

