This is the last article in a series of four accounts from Alistair A. McLauchlan who attended four mediumship events in Scotland in 2019. In the first three of these articles, we meet Karen Docherty and David Frances in Dundee, Andrew Lindsay in Perth, and Lisa Williams in Edinburgh.
Note: McLauchlan was discouraged from taking photos; what is included here was taken surreptitiously. I’ve altered the images to remove faces, yet still hold the mood of the event. At the conclusion of each of these accounts, I will add my closing thoughts. Enjoy!
Alistair McLauchlan
ABERDEEN (FRIDAY 5TH OF JULY)
My satnav takes me straight into the heart of Aberdeen City Centre, which is a lot more built up and confusing than I’d anticipated. At 6pm, the streets are not busy so I’m able to traverse the tight roads and follow the baffling street signs with only a couple of beeped horns from impatient taxi drivers in reply. I park outside the church in the Bon Accord area of Aberdeen and enter the small industrial looking building. I ensure I have a reserved ticket from an older woman at the entrance. She’s friendly enough in that gruff, Aberdonian way and passes me my ticket in a white envelope. On her recommendation, I walk to a chip shop down road to get my tea and ignore the Chinese restaurant she slated for being dirty and expensive. Having an hour to spare, I walk around the neighboring streets before sitting outside a high-rise block of flats to eat my disappointing fish supper. With still half an hour to spare, I nip into a barber for a quick haircut then walk back into the Bon Accord Church of Spiritualism.
The church is a simple, small room of about 10 by 30 meters. The walls are bright yellow with the supporting beams painted light blue. Eight large, strip lights hang from the ceiling to illuminate the room, and a deep, royal blue carpet covers the floor. On the walls are a painting of a fallen angel, what looks like a Dali picture, a drawing of a Native American warrior, and a purple tablet that lists the Seven principles of Spiritualism. Up front there is a wooden pulpit behind which are a couple of potted plants, an old CD player, and a small bronze statue of another Native American chief. The room exudes a churchy feel but without the dowdiness of a Kirk or the pageantry of a chapel. There are around ten rows of blue, metal chairs, so I choose one at the back of the room beside a man who’s loudly talking to his wife (after a couple of minutes, I notice he is wearing a hearing aid). There are a few women working the crowd and offering raffle tickets at £2 a strip, so I buy three and then settle down. The room soon fills up, and extra chairs are called for from the adjacent room then positioned in any available space down the aisle. There’s the usual mix of 90 percent woman, 70 percent of which are middle aged to elderly and 50 percent of them are, like me, overweight. There’s no fantastic hairstyles tonight but many homemade dyed jobs of pink or peroxide. Overall, it’s a similar size and makeup of crowd to the previous hotel events but without the booze. Despite this there is a more relaxed and friendly atmosphere with everybody excited and chatty.
The older woman from the reception addresses the audience with little pomp, stopping to playfully, scold one of the still chattering woman sitting in a front seat. Although there seems to be no obvious minister or pastor in this church, this woman is clearly the boss. She welcomes us all to the event then turns to introduce tonight’s performer, who emerges from a wooden door in the corner of the room. Gordon Smith is a psychic/medium who used to be a hairdresser, so he is known as the “Psychic barber.” He achieved celebrity in 2005 after replacing the psychic fraud Dereck Acorah on the popular TV Programme Most Haunted; he’s also a regular guest on UK chat shows and comments in tabloid newspapers. He is wearing a light blue shirt, dark dress trousers, and a purple suit jacket, which alters its color in the light. He looks a bit more bedraggled than his TV heyday, sporting a half-week’s salt and pepper stubble and short, grey hair. He informs the audience in a broad Glaswegian twang of his belief that “nobody dies but just passes on to the spirit world” and stresses that he “knows rather than thinks” there is a spirit world full of friends and relatives ready to connect. Predictably, he asks the audience not to simply sit and nod their head but instead answer in a loud and clear voice. Then he jumps straight into his show first telling the audience that all day he has been hearing an old man sing The Everly Brothers, All I Have to Do Is Dream (an old 1960s ballad that everybody knows) and that this is repeating in the room tonight. Nobody takes the bait and volunteers recognition contributing to a clumsy kick off. Luckily, the old receptionist steps in to smooth over the initial, bumpy proceedings claiming that her long, dead husband used to sing this tune. Smith then describes seeing this man with a lot of children and grandchildren around him and tells the old receptionist that her husband is always looking over her.
Smith then concentrates upon the people at the front, probably because, like the layout of a school classroom, they are the keenest to participate and please their tutor. He uses the standard method of mediumship to an audience: peering into the spirit world, accepting messages from the spirits, then sharing these to the gathered loved ones. He informs the audience that legally he is not allowed to advise anybody about health matters, which, although understandable, is not a caution that any of the other previous mediums advised. He identifies the name of Emma, present or in spirit, which surprisingly, being a common name, is not recognized nor seized upon. Smith then moves on to identify a child with Leukemia, which is offered to the room to which a woman raises her hand to accept. The medium uses considered questioning to gather information from the woman, adding his own related generalities then returning to more questions. There seems to be some genuine harmony in the exchange, but this soon dissipates when the woman admits that it was not her child that died of Leukemia but in fact a neighbor’s. There’s a slew of following misses, but as usual these are ignored by the pace of his delivery. Regardless, the audience is keen to communicate and fill in the many voids of comprehension. The wife of the deaf man sitting beside me also seems to be a keen Spiritualist. When Smith intimates that he is “feeling a link towards Hamilton,” she responds by informing him that she used to stay on Hamilton Road. Smith identifies the surname of Aitken coming through from beyond, but again nobody claims recognition. He moves on to another spirit and offers the audience the number nineteen. A middle aged mystical looking woman with long, blonde hair sitting in the aisle recognizes the number as her dead son’s Spirit Birthday, a term that means the day someone died rather than the day they were born. Naturally, she then helps to successfully maneuver the following conversation and connect the dots to all Smith’s guesses.
Then a younger woman in the middle of the room raises her hand and offers that she is Emma Aitken, which ignites a choral gasp around the room. The medium acknowledges his bullseye with the nonchalance of a grandad solving a long-stuck crossword clue. The woman has pulled the two misses together straight to her name, without bias it appears to be simple coincidence, but to this crowd it’s a clear example of the strength of Smith’s psychic powers. It’s a strong finish, and Smith wraps up his show with the usual guff about remembering connections days or even weeks later. He gets an enthusiastic round of applause and leaves the room through the corner doorway he immerged from. My backside is aching, and my legs are on the verge of falling into cramp, so I rise to leave but before I can sneak out, the receptionist reminds everybody that Smith’s signed books can be bought at a special event price at the back of the room. Then of course there’s the raffle.
A plastic bin filled with the raffle ticket duplicates is passed around the audience and invited to pick a ticket out. The older, deaf man beside me picks out his own duplicate from the raffle bin, of which on the face of it is very lucky in a crowd of hundred or so. However, as the tickets are divided into five different colors, and he of course picked his color, the odds are slashed. At least five other people including couple of the raffle organizers are cognizant of this little cheat and pull their color of ticket from the bin. If it wasn’t carried out in such a jovial manner, there would have been screams of “fix” from the few losers. Suffice to say I win nothing. About thirty prizes, ranging from bathroom and beauty products to living room ornaments and bottles of booze, are passed around to ecstatic raffle winners. The total raffle prize sum must be over £200, which makes me think that this church isn’t as profit concerned as the previous events. The cost of engaging Smith for the night offset against the low admission price means that any profit must be very minimal if anything at all. Unlike the hard sell attitude of Williams and the Conon Doyle Centre, there was no pressure to buy related events or courses, and tonight’s raffle prizes are far better than Docherty’s or Lindsay’s paltry offerings. Although I haven’t believed one word coming from Gordon Smith’s mouth, for once I don’t feel like I’ve been totally scammed.
QUESTIONS
One of the main criticisms I have of these Spiritualism events is the repeated prohibition of any questions from the audience. At each show, the medium asks a massive amount of questions to a chosen audience member, but there is none received in return. Personally, if I believed that I could converse with a dead pal or once cherished relative, I would have a long list of questions to ask. What’s it like over there? Where is over there? What’s the weather like? What’s the food like? These would be the opening questions much like the queries you receive when you phone back home from a holiday. Then there would be the more existential questions, such as Do you age in the afterlife? What age are you? Who else is over there? Are you watching me all the time? I can only assume that there are never any questions asked because they are impossible to answer.
I don’t want to be a skeptic. I don’t want to be so cynical. I want to believe. But in general, there’s precious few concrete examples of the afterlife and spirits to believe in, and there’s been even less evidence at any of the medium shows that have attended. In the end, I hoped to discover some sort of clever ruse or a method of deception, some planted audience actors, a hidden microphone, or covert earpieces, but the reality is far basic and prosaic. These mediums need only be amateur actors to convince their pliable audience of their abilities. It’s all show. And it’s a show that many want to believe in. Most of the time that is all you need.
Gerbic: Well this ends our adventure of mediumship in Scotland through the eyes of our journalist Alistair McLauchlan, and what an interesting adventure that was. I very much enjoyed his impressions of the people, readings, and locations.
So first about Gordon Smith. I was surprised to learn that there is a Wikipedia page for him. I had never heard of him before McLauchlan wrote about him. It’s a sad stub of a page, with many flags on it saying that it might not pass the notability standards that Wikipedia enforces. What is even more sad is that the page was flagged in 2011, and no one has bothered to delete the page; it’s just abandoned.
McLauchlan writes that Smith is a well-known medium in Scotland. Chat shows, tabloid newspapers, and being featured on “Most Haunted” back in 2005 haven’t done much for fame since 2015. Using the Wikipedia page views as a measurement of public and media interest, we see some pretty pathetic numbers. In the previous article, we learn that Lisa Williams’s Wikipedia page in the past five years has received 106K page views, which is pretty horrible for someone that is supposed to be a celebrity. Gordon Smith has less than half those views. Only 50,528 page views in the past five years, an average of twenty-five views per day. Almost no spikes, which would mean media attention. One day in January 2020, he hit his highest spike, which was a day when 180 visited the Wikipedia page.
It’s possible that Smith isn’t interested in fame and has settled into a nice quiet life as a friendly medium, occasionally preforming at the local Spiritualist church and selling one of his books. The Wikipedia page lists twelve books, the most recent was 2016, One Hundred Answers from Spirit. I don’t know if the Wikipedia page has not been updated with his newer books or if that is his most current.
I hope you have enjoyed this trip in Scotland; it sure reminded me of better times when we could be among strangers. I know I’m ready to travel again, and when I get back to Scotland, I’m hoping to look up Alistair McLauchlan and visit more of these events.
Thank you for contacting me Alistair! That was fun.