{"id":905,"date":"2008-02-01T17:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T17:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2008\/02\/01\/sally-morgan-star-psychic\/"},"modified":"2008-02-01T17:14:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-01T17:14:00","slug":"sally-morgan-star-psychic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2008\/02\/01\/sally-morgan-star-psychic\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Morgan – Star Psychic"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sally is a psychic. She communicates with your dead relatives, who are standing right next to you.<\/p>\n

I watched a bit of two of her shows (ITV2 Wed 11pm) a few weeks back. She had a rather cynical TV presenter celeb on, and proceeded to tell him all sorts of details about his life, including that he was about to sign up for a big new tv deal, that he had a flat in Brighton and was thinking of buying another, etc.<\/p>\n

How did she do it? Most of this information was not, I guess, Google-able.<\/p>\n

The TV celeb was certainly amazed. So was comedienne Rhonna Cameron, who got a reading on a different episode. Rhonna was very sceptical, but ended up getting tearful as Sally scored hit after hit, even being able to say she had two dogs that had died, being able to name dead relatives, the dogs, all of whom were supposedly right there in the room, etc. etc.<\/p>\n

I’d be very interested to get more information on Sally Morgan’s techniques. I believe that psychics do pool info about clients, but these people were new to it, so that wouldn’t explain it. Nor, it seems, was it all down to standard cold-reading<\/a>. Nor, I’m guessing, was much of it down to the TV technique of editing out all the misses (the clients were far too impressed).<\/p>\n

Possibly Sally is relying partly on hot reading<\/a>, i.e. research: e.g. a microphone in the waiting room to overhear what clients are saying, or earlier Private-Investigation-type research. e.g. perhaps Sally’s researchers phoned the celeb’s agent to do a little fishing (we wanted to book your celeb and were wondering whether he is busy next week? Oh really, what’s he doing?). Though, even then, there are obstacles, including that Sally only gets to know who she’s reading a short while before (but is this really true?)<\/p>\n

The wonderful Tony Youens has something on Sally here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The one thing I’m disinclined to believe, of course, is that Sally is a genuine psychic (some of you may consider that a bit premature).<\/p>\n

The really depressing thing is the programme is nothing more than a highly effective advert for Sally and psychics generally. I think this sort of TV brings shame on its makers, frankly.<\/p>\n

Anyone with more info on Sally – do let me know.<\/p>\n

Sally’s website, with some videos, is here<\/a>. I recommend Kim Marsh video (bit of standard cold reading in there, though: “Who’s Joe?” No reply. “And it’s a man”. Blank looks. “So he may have been know as Jack.” Kim and Mum get hysterical “Oh my God! …That’s unbelievable!” [also notice the so-quick-you-miss-it switch with names : “Joe” is short for “Joseph” and “Jack” for “John” – completely different<\/span> names!])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sally is a psychic. She communicates with your dead relatives, who are standing right next to you. I watched a bit of two of her shows (ITV2 Wed 11pm) a few weeks back. She had a rather cynical TV presenter celeb on, and proceeded to tell him all sorts of details about his life, including […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}