Hello Lovelies,

 

I am honored to be part of the mystery thriller cold case blog hop. While many in the hop are sharing sad and unfortunate stories of crimes that were never solved, I wanted to take a moment to talk about psychics solving cold cases. In part because cold cases break my heart, but also because they break Clear Angel’s heart too. These are the type of stories that will get Clear to come out from hiding her gifts and risk ridicule and spite to help people in need.

Are Psychics Real

While there have been a lot of studies done on telekenisis, mediums, paranormal behavior, and psychics the general scientific consensus is that there is not a significant amount of proof to say that psychics are real. But they also don’t say that psychics aren’t real either. Science, so tricky like that. But we’ve all seen those scammy psychics who go on talk shows and if you really scrutinize, you can see how they play a clever guessing game using probability and people’s desire to believe to make people believe that their skills are real. Penn and Teller did a fascinating review of this process on their show Bullsh*t that really dug into the science behind psychic con artists.

But are all psychics, even good ones, just con-artists like Patrick Jane from The Mentalist?

And, if one can consistently get results then do we care if they are using otherworldly abilities or an abnormally powerful skill of logic and deduction?

The logical, grounded, real person in me says that truth matters, and knowing how truth was achieved matters too. Being married to a certified genius, I totally get how some of his mental leaps seem like mysticism or magic to us lowly normal-brained people. He can’t tell you half the time how he arrived at it. But he has never claimed that he came to it supernaturally.

At the same time, I have spoken with ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences. I myself have had crazy experiences where I couldn’t have known something and yet I did know. Some attribute those experiences to God, others to loved one’s who’ve passed on. Others because the tragedy was so great that it created something akin to a disturbance in the force. Some acknowledge that it is a sixth sense/ women’s intuition/ a gut feeling that are all scientifically attributed to our brain processing seemingly innocuous details that our conscious doesn’t realize matters, but our subconscious is able to make the connections and we just know.

And some truly believe that those experiences are because they are uniquely attuned to otherworldly sources.

Self-proclaimed Psychic Solves Cold Cases

Have you ever heard of Fionna Johansson, commonly known as “The Persian Medium”?

She is a psychic and a licensed private investigator, among other things, who has reportedly aided in solving many cold cases specializing in sex trafficking recovery, countermeasures, IT forensics, stalking, domestic abuse, skip tracing, fugitive recovery, and helping thousands with her gift. Her site is full of stories where she has been in the news for predictions in some high-profile cases.

She tells personal stories about experiences she has had getting messages from an unknown source.

She is kind of the new Sylvia Brown.

But how many of her experiences are from another side, how much is guided intuition, how much from detective skills and unknown resources? How many predictions has she made that haven’t played out? We don’t have a way to know that.  And it is possible that she doesn’t either.

She seems sincere in her desire and ability to help others. Does it matter if she is truly psychic?

 

The Birth of Clear Angel Chronicles

I started writing the Clear Angel Chronicles based on a reluctant psychic who only gets involved in cases when she has no other recourse. She has hidden away to the wilds of Montana to avoid being triggered by events she cannot explain. Her story was inspired by a few strange experiences I had that I never felt comfortable talking about until one day as an adult my mom and I were watching Ghost Whisperer and there was a scene with a plane crash. My mom paused the show and told me about an experience she had, possibly before I was born or maybe while she was pregnant with me. She had a horrible nightmare about being in a plane crash. When she woke up the next day there had been a plane crash nearby during the night and it was all over the news. The experience haunted her to that day.  That got my brain going. How many people have these strange experiences and write them off or dismiss them because our society in large part has stopped believing in such things?

As a kid, I grew up with X-men and I remember thinking how much it would suck having abilities. I guess I always felt that it was tough enough controlling my slightly larger than normal self. I couldn’t fathom something like mind-reading or telekinesis.

So that was the start of Clear Angel. Imagining how difficult it would be to have these experiences all the time, not just on occasion. How would one even be able to function in the world when one couldn’t determine what was or was not real? How would others look at you, treat you, knowing what you could do? If you couldn’t control it, how would you get a moment of peace? (That last part, deeply inspired by being a full-time student, mother of two kids not even in school yet, working full time, married and living with my mom while we tried to go to school. I empathized with the struggle to find a moment of peace!)

Then I had to decide what kind of cop would be willing to even entertain a discussion with such a woman? And that let to Detective Grant Anderson.

Not your typical buddy cop story, but a compelling tale of redemption for both.

 

Don’t miss out on the next stop in the cold case tour The Boy in the Box and the Girl in the Closet.

 

Until next time,

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