I Didn’t Believe In Psychics, Then I Sat Down With One

Known internationally, David the Medium (real name David Stevens) started his career in corporate law before another psychic encouraged and honed his abilities. He started with readings for friends and became progressively busier until he was doing group readings at sold-out shows at the Opera House.

David’s abilities are so astute that he says he predicted Covid six months before it happened, and he called Donald Trump’s first presidential win when no polls thought he had a shot. When I had the opportunity to see David face-to-face (he predominantly does readings over Zoom these days), I jumped at the chance.

And then instantly regretted it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see David, but I was worried about what might come up. What if he says something I don’t want to hear? What if he foretells that something will happen to my children? My siblings? My parents? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

It felt like the slightly irrational fear of overhearing a spoiler at the office about a TV series that you’re behind on: unwanted knowledge that can’t be unlearnt and will take the thrill out of my viewing pleasure – but worse, because this is my real life.

But curiosity won in the end. It would at the very least be a good story to tell my friends. So along I went, thrilled and nervous in fairly equal measures.

When we sit down, David tells me he is going to summon the spirits. He says he might not look at me during the reading and that I can ask him as little or as much as I like. “When the spirits do step forward for me, they replace my thoughts, feelings, memories, emotions with theirs,” he explains. “They can bring up things in my own memories if it’s relevant or special to you. Spirits can also make me feel how they felt when they crossed over, such as ailments or illnesses.”

David tells me the spirits will focus on my life now, and they also have foresight into the future, although he clarifies that it’s not the distant future, more like the next one to two years.

“Your intuition is through the roof, so I’m surprised you haven’t done anything like this before,” he says, adding that two or three spirits are already here in the room.

The setting is comfortable and friendly, and not at all spooky. Even in normal settings I find it hard not to blurt out my entire life story – in this situation even more so. But I just sit and listen.

“You have a few females that have instantly come into the room,” says David. “Now, very strongly for me, you’ve already got a mother energy who’s making her presence clear around you. She’s put her hand right on your shoulder.”

The hairs on my arms go up, but I keep listening.

“There’s also another female who’s come in here,” he continues. “She has unfortunately passed rather recently.”

I know who it is almost instantly. It’s my aunty Jan, my father’s sister, who had died a few months earlier. She was another strong woman who fought a valiant battle with cancer, trying so hard to stay with her family and her brother, who was by her side until her last moments.

“Is her name Jan or Janet or Janice or something like that?” asks David, who has his eyes open but seems to be concentrating on looking inward.

“It’s Janet, but we called her Jan.” My nervous system electrifies at the name.

“She has come in and has put her hand right on you,” David continues. “Kind of like a supportive hand on the shoulder. She’s saying, ‘Well, I may as well get into it, Dave. I didn’t know how I felt about Margaret, but I like her now.’”

Margaret is my father’s partner. She and my aunt had become close friends.

We wander through things that Jan is saying. Kind things, uplifting things and things about my family that few of my closest friends would know, much less a man I’d never met before.

Then David turns his focus to the mother figure in the room. “It’s not your mother,” he says. “She’s come in and put her arm around you, but she’s apologising for …” He trails off. “Linda? Is that her?”

He had picked her name and it jolts me – tears prick my eyes.

“Yes, Linda. My stepmother,” I say.

The apologising makes sense, too. It was Linda’s default,  saying sorry for things that were far beyond her control. She had done so from her hospital bed, days before she died: “I’m sorry about all this, Sal.”

David describes the timing of Linda’s death, the cause, how many siblings I have. Things I said to her. Things I said to my brother the day before. He tells me that Linda will send me a sign in the form of a magpie. Not 45 minutes later, I see a magpie standing at my car. The bird looks at me and walks around me in a way I’ve never seen a magpie do before.

Yes, I know it’s just a magpie. But it also could be a sign that my stepmother is still around me, looking over me. Guiding me, maybe, when I need help, just as she used to when alive. And whether it’s true or not, it gives me comfort. I feel buoyed and protected and not completely without her.

Mostly, I feel like I am travelling on the right path. That the things that I am doing, for myself and for my children, are the right things. That I should not doubt myself.

When I ask David to explain how this all works, he says it’s energy. “Once energy is created, it doesn’t cease to exist, it just changes form,” he says. “Why would our consciousness, our thoughts and what makes us us be any different? We believe in wi-fi, we believe in radio and TV signals. Why don’t we believe that energy is also there, passing on information and messages?”

Since the reading, people have said to me that David could have looked up things about me. In this digital age, they argue that anything and everything can be researched. But the way my father-in-law used to call out my mother-in-law’s name? That stuff just isn’t readily available on the internet. “Ninety-nine per cent of what gets brought up isn’t stuff that you post, or even ever say to anyone,” says David.

Sceptics will say that a medium will tell you what you want to hear. They’ll say that you tend to go to a psychic when you are at a crossroads (although when are we ever not at a crossroads?), which makes you malleable. Or you’re bereaved, making you more likely to buy in.

And I am not saying that vulnerable people can’t be manipulated in this unregulated space. But David told me that I was iron deficient (I checked, I was), and that I’d had three miscarriages between my sons, something I rarely talk about. He told me things about my marriage, both during and afterwards. Things about my sons (he says they’re all fine for the immediate future, thankfully). Things about work.

David made predictions about things in my orbit – I will just have to see if they come true or not.

Perhaps it’s a matter of manifestation: someone tells you something, you believe it, you go ahead and make it happen. After all, David says there is a bit of mystic in all of us. We just have to be receptive to it. “I believe every single person can do what I do,” he says. “We are all souls having a human experience.”

It’s true that unlike traditional therapy, which cannot tell you what will happen, only what you can do about it, a psychic can prophesise your future. (No wonder actors use mediums to predict a project’s potential.) Having that knowledge can feel like being given the key to your future self, a way to feel certain about the bits we haven’t got to yet. You also get the comfort of loved ones being there to guide you when you need a hand.

“The spirits are always around whether or not David the Medium is doing a reading,” David tells me.

In the end it comes down to choice. You can either pick holes in the experience, think up ways that a medium like David might have cheated the encounter with forensic-like research and a photographic recall of everyone and everything in your life. Or you can just accept that he is exactly what he says he is.

And I choose to believe.