Quote:
Originally Posted by Veeger
Cold reading, if I understand it at all, may be a unique skill which can be refined through training and experience and permits one to recognize very subtle cues from the "readee" (or whatever the one being "read" is called). Your brother may actually believe he has some special "power" granted him from a spiritual source, but it may be an inherent capability that many have lost due to our dependence on spoken language.
As for ghosts, never seen one, never had an experience with one, and like alien visitors, I think belief in them requires a particular bias which I seem to be lacking.
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In all my years of being interested in the subject, I have never heard of anyone who used cold reading to get a persons surname. As I said earlier, cold reading is the art of craftily asking questions indirectly to get your answers. I know for a fact that my brother does not do this.
Let me give you a few examples.
A couple of years ago myself and my brother went on a ghost hunt with one of my friends and his wife, and another guy who writes for my website. My friends father-in-law owns quite a bit of land and there is an ancient burial ground dating back to the civil war on it. The weather that night was very windy and overcast. We walked down the country lanes to the place where the burial ground was. It felt very eerie as we walked through the trees as the wind was howling.
Anyhow, after about an hour of walking around and taking pictures, which many featured orbs, we made our way back to his father-in-laws house. As we neared to top of the drive, my brother all of a sudden said that he was picking up on something. He stopped at a spot and then all of a sudden said to my friends wife that an old man with a flat cap had just materialised behind her. He went on to say that he thought the man had died from a heart attack.
At this point my friend was standing there with open mouth. After 5 minutes of my brother giving a description, my friend said ' Your not going to believe this, and I haven't told you this before, but this is the exact spot where my dad died of a heart attack and how you described him is correct.'
His dad had died about 8 years ago. He was at the other father-in-laws house cutting wood when he suffered a heart attack.
Another good example is when the other guy from our website returned from holiday and said that his family had had a paranormal experience in the hotel they had stayed at. They invited my brother around to his house, and, being a sceptic himself, had put 3 objects on the table and simply said 'right, see if you can get which object this phenomenon happened to'.
Not only did my brother pick out the plastic bottle top that was correct, he also went on to accurately describe the hotel and hotel room they stayed in - right down to the 'towers' and the hotel looking like a 'castle.' My brother had no prior knowledge of where they were going or of the object that was involved in the incident. What basically happened was they were woken up in the middle of the night by a strange sound. The next day they found that a bottle top from a water bottle had been removed and throw across the room. It had been crushed too. Neither my friend or his wife had done it and the only other people in the room were their very young children who wouldn't have had the strength to crush the top.
Another interesting instance happened during a spiritual circle where anyone from the general public is invited to attend. It wasn't long in the evening until my brother noticed that there was the ghost of a motorcyclist standing in the room. When it was his time to tell the room what he was getting, he went on to describe how this motorcyclist had lost his life in an accident and even the exact area where it happened. His father was one of those in the room - the first time he had ever visited the church. He approached my brother at the end of the meeting to say how incredibly accurate the reading was.
So, I dont think any of that can be attributed to cold reading, can you?