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It seems that South Florida is a hotbed of psychic misadventures. Recently, we wrote here about a Fort Lauderdale-based Rom family and their methods of scamming unwitting clients, including a bestselling romance writer, who was duped out of millions.

Now comes a new story of a psychic taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, caught up in a series of negative events in her life, including the death of her mother and the breakup of a relationship. In her case, money was not an issue – at least not initially. She had inherited $100,000 from her mother, money that she would soon lose to a 23-year-old psychic, named Stephanie Thompson.

Probably the young psychic thought ‘easy come, easy go,’ regarding the inheritance. Once she knew about it, she told the unwitting woman, who remains unnamed, that the money was cursed and needed to be cleansed. Amazingly, the ‘victim’ got the cash out of the bank and turned it over to the psychic. I put victim in single-quotes because really there are no victims, only people playing roles.

In this case, the woman even admits that she knew better, that she was aware of fraudulent psychics operating in South Florida when she walked into the Psychic Boutique on U.S. 1 in Boca Raton. But she says she was so caught up in her travails that she thought maybe she was cursed.

Apparently, she initially thought she would pay $50 for a psychic reading, but was told she needed to pay $2,000 to determine the cause of the ‘negative energy’ around her. The price grew to more than $20,000 after the psychic said she meditated and discovered the woman was cursed. Thompson even told the woman that she might get cancer just like her mother if she didn’t get the inherited money cleansed. Supposedly, she would get it back after the ritual.

But that didn’t happen, as the woman should’ve known. Does the money ever get returned in these ‘money laundering’ schemes? The woman says: “In my logical mind, I probably would have said, ‘Get the heck out of here, you’re crazy. But I was distraught. I had gone through a string of very difficult things. And you think, maybe I am cursed. Maybe there is something going on here.”

Indeed there was. She was about to lose $100,000. Actually, when you think about it, it turns out that money was cursed and both women would pay the price. The so-called victim lost her inheritance and Stephanie Thompson lost all the money in a casino – so she says – and was arrested and is facing a prison sentence when it comes to trial. That would be a double-trickster synchronicity. You think that money is cursed…just watch what happens.

Another synchronicity occurred when the woman went to the police. She was reporting the misdeed to a detective when Thompson called her and said that she could get her about $75,000 back. So they agreed to meet outside a CVS in Boca and the cop came along. When questioned by the detective, Thompson admitted she had lost it all at a casino.

Years ago, I used to be annoyed when newspapers, such as the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel where this story appeared, featured these psychic scams on their front page. It seemed an attempt to show that all psychics were frauds, that there was no such things as psychic abilities. I no longer think that way. The reason people get caught up in these scams is that there are indeed people who can foresee events, who can read you as if they’ve known you all their lives, some who can even heal. But there are the scammers, and some of these people no doubt also have talents. It usually takes at least one good psychic hit to hook a potential victim.

We’ve encountered such psychics over the years. For us, it has been people who attempted to psychically manipulate us into writing their books or who wanted some control or influence over a part of our lives. That was the case in one instance a few years ago when a psychic told Trish that she was in contact with Trish’s deceased mother. A good ploy, but Trish didn’t buy it. She knew her mother too well. Nothing the psychic said provided any proof that she was in contact with her mother.

There can be a fine line between a good psychic reading and one intent on manipulating and altering a person’s actions. Then there are the Stephenie Thompsons who step way over the line into the world of fortunetelling fraud and make front-page headlines for their criminal behavior.

Daughter Megan was home for a visit over the weekend and pulled us away from our computers for a couple of hours to watch a movie – one that we would never have picked out ourselves. She likes to do that, previously exposing us to strange, raunchy satires, such as Super Bad and Pineapple Express. And now This is the End. The latter involves several actors from the earlier two movies  –  Seth Rogan, James Franco, Jonah Hill, among others – playing themselves as they getting together for a party at Franco’s new house when an unexpected event occurs—the apocalypse. Hence, the title.

Turning the apocalypse into a comedy, including a reading from Revelations, might seem chancy. In fact, the studio that produced the movie was wary and cut the budget. So the actors agreed to take smaller pay than expected. We found the movie pretty hilarious, in a gross sort of way, and noted that it even maintained a moral about personal behavior – self-serving vs. self-sacrifice. The self-serving tended to fall into a sinkhole to hell in James Franco’s front yard, while those willing to sacrifice themselves were ‘rapturized’ in a blue beam of light accompanied by Whitney Houston’s, “I’ll Always Love You.” Ultimately, only two of the actors playing themselves made the trip up the beam, the others succumbed to the whims of a well-hung, red-eyed, horned beast.

After This is the End ended, I turned to Trish and smiled. “Now why don’t you write a post about that.” Little did I know that events the following day would lead me to writing the post.

When the snail-mail arrived, I found a small envelope with my name on it, written in a shaky scrawl. There was no return address, but it had been mailed from West Palm Beach, a few miles away. Inside was a photocopy of a newspaper or magazine clipping. It was a Q&A column and the question of the day was: What is the Rapture of the Church?

Of course, I immediately saw the synchronicity. Silly movie was soon followed by serious  column, which I also found silly. Maybe it was the way that the question was phrased that bothered me  – Rapture of the Church. I had the feeling that it wasn’t put that way to avoid confusion with say, rapture of the deep. No, the implication, of course, was that you best be a member of the Church if you’re going to make it out of this world alive.

The answer to the question was stated this way. “The Rapture of the Church is the time when Jesus Christ returns in the air to bring the Church home before the beginning of the Great Tribulation.”

The column went on to include a quote from scripture, which in part read: “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven and with a shout, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the cloud to meet the Lord in the air, and thus shall we ever be with the Lord.”

The author of the column, said to be Hal Lindsey, author of The Rapture and The Late Great Planet Earth, concluded: “I believe that the Rapture could occur any moment. The signs of the times indicate it will certainly come in the lifetime of those who are reading these words.”

According to Wikipedia, Lindsey earlier had predicted the Rapture would take place by 2000. Well, timing has always been a problem with prophecies about the end times. Although maybe the Great Tribulation is already underway – ahead of the Rapture – and it’s taking place in the U.S. Congress. Certainly, there are members of Congress who deserve to be rapturized out of Washington ASAP.

The third book in my Hungry Ghosts trilogy was published today! Before I knew the pub date, I was worried that it would be published during Mercury retrograde, which ended on 11/10. It turns out that astrologically, today is one of the luckiest this year, with the transiting sun and transiting Jupiter forming a perfect beneficial angle to each other.

An excerpt is here.

The cover is scary… I think it’s supposed to be Ricardo, one of the brujos – hungry ghosts – but he never looks like this in my descriptions of him. He doesn’t wear face paint. When we first see him, his host is a Q’ero Indian. By the end of the book, his host is a black man, whom I imagine as Denzel Washington!  I didn’t have any input on the cover!

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On another note: every disaster and mass event not only has synchros, but also has miracles. In the midst of utter devastation that may have killed more than 10,000 people, a baby was born. She was named after her grandmother, who is among the missing.

Some storms you can write about with a kind of detachment, as an exercise in synchronicity. But the typhoon that slammed into the Philippines is in a league apart.

This storm had gusts up to 170 miles an hour, which puts it in the Category 5 niche for hurricanes. In a country where 96 million people live in what is basically abject poverty, there’s little hope that devastation will be minimal. When the first casualty reports came through as 1,000, it seemed incomprehensible to me. I figure it would be in the tens of thousands. Then this evening, November 9, the reports were putting deaths at around 10,000.  But when your rescue teams are finding bodies in the roads, in standing water, in buildings, you can bet the death toll will exceed 10,000. And as of today, November 10, it does.

I suspect there’s a synchro rolled up somewhere in this castastrophe. I tried to find out what the word Haiyan – the name of the typhoon – means. I found a number of different meanings and among them was that yan is Chinese for angry or annoyed if uttered in one tone of voice and means respect if spoken in another tone.  Hai in Chinese supposedly means angry ocean. Respect the angry ocean?

The people are friends or colleagues. They gather at a bar  for a couple of drinks, then don aprons and approach their assigned easels, paint brush in hand. It’s paint night at the bar in Orlando and the young blond master artist smiles and begins her instructions.

Over the next two and a half hours, the artists – most who have never painted a picture in their lives – will re-produce a selected painting using 5 acrylic paints. They’ll go home with their art, hopefully happy painters. The motto for Paint Nite is: Drink Creatively – No Experience Required.

Paint Nite is a new thing in Orlando. It began in Boston and has been catching on across the country as an ‘alcohol ad-on.’ Our daughter Megan happened to see an ad on Craig’s List for artists and applied. The timing was perfect. Her galley show was underway and the same day she was contacted about her application, she was interviewed by FOX-35 about her art work. Needless to say, she was hired and became Orlando’s first Paint Nite master artists.  Eventually, she could be working five nights a week as the company expands.

The synchronicity here is that days before finding this job that fits so well with her background and downtown Orlando lifestyle, she had undergone an extensive interview and swim test to get a job at Sea World. She thought she had it. After all, they had hired her a year earlier, but because of speeding tickets she was dismissed before she even began. The job would’ve entailed driving a golf cart on rare occasions. While corporate policy prevailed, they told her to apply again. This time she was only one of two applicants who completed the swim test successfully. She thought she was in, and was very disappointed when she didn’t get the job.

But if she had been hired for the part-time minimum wage job at Sea World, she wouldn’t have seen  the ad for Paint Nite master artist. Now she is earning approximately four times the salary paid by Sea World and is her own boss. Meanwhile, she continues with her downtown dog-walking business, which is expanding.

So it’s an example of a big disappointment turning into something very special and rewarding. Good going, Megan!

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Here’s the painting Megan will be teaching others to paint:

To practice teaching people how to paint the painting below, we held a practice session this weekend. Here’re some photos from that. Two of Megan’s friend, Bill and Stephanie, were there and so was Maddie, our 10-year-old neighbor, and me. What fun it was!

This video is amazing.

 I’ve often wondered about places and people that disappear under mysterious circumstances.  Take the Roanoke colony, founded in 1587 on the coast of what was then Virginia and is now North Carolina.

The colony was settled by a hundred men and women, who intended to farm and to pay for supplies from home by selling wild sassafras, then used in England for medicinal purposes. The governor of the colony, John White, sailed back to England for supplies that would help the colonists live through the winter.

But he was detained in England by the war with Spain for more than three years. He was able to gain passage back to Roanoke on a private expedition that agreed to stop at the colony on the way back from the Caribbean. White landed on August 18, 1590, his granddaughter’s third birthday, but the settlement was deserted. Evenm his daughter and granddaughter were gone.

All the house and structures had been dismantled, there was no sign of a struggle, and no trace of the 90 men, 17 women, and 11 children. The only clue found in the deserted settlement was a word carved into a post of the fence around it: Croatan, the name of a local Indian tribe. White supposedly had instructed the colonist that if anything happened to them before he returned, a Maltese cross should be carved onto a nearby tree  and it would indicate that their disappearance had been forced. Since there wasn’t any cross, so White assumed they had moved to Croatoan Island – now known as Hatteras Island.

Inclement weather prevented him for searching Hatteras for the missing colonists and he returned to England.

 What actually happened to the lost colonists remains a mystery. One theory is that they assimilated into some friendly North American tribe. Another theory is that they were slaughter by the Spanish, who were colonizing Florida.  

 This kind of strange disappearance is a great what if premise for fiction. In fact, Dean Koontz, in his novel Phantoms, delves into it and Roanoke is mentioned. But what about people who suddenly vanish?

 On September 23, 1880, David Lang, a farmer living near Gallatin, Tennessee, supposedly set off across a field and vanished in full sight of his wife. His disappearance was allegedly witnessed by two arriving visitors, who had waved to him as they passed him in their buggy.  After Fate magazine wrote about the case in 1953,  a search was conducted of the 1880 census records for Sumner County where the Langs had supposedly lived, but the name Lang wasn’t found.

 In 1873, an English shoemaker named James Worson accepted a friend’s bet that he couldn’t run from their town of Leamington Spa to Coventry and back, a distance of  about 16 miles.  Worson set out with three friends following him in a cart. After a couple of miles, he stumbled, pitched forward – and vanished.

His three buddies knew what they’d seen and frantically searched the area. They couldn’t find him and eventually went to the police, but stuck to their version of the story – their friend had simply disappeared.

There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands of stories like these. Some may be explicable, but how many may be attributable to something else? To something science doesn’t understand yet?

Take a look and draw your own conclusions!

 We have a lot of grocery stores in our town. Publix, a chain, is the closest to our  house and is where I usually shop. It’s where I met a Cuban woman, Marina, who bags groceries.

In Cuba, Marina was an emergency room physician, a woman accustomed to dealing with a crisis rapidly, efficiently. She made a good living, her mother and sister lived nearby, but life was never easy.  In the 1990s when the lottery opened up for Cuban residents to immigrate to the U.S., she tossed in her and her husband’s names. And then she lit a candle to St. Jude, the Catholic patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes.

St. Jude’s day – October 28 – is widely celebrated in Cuba. Candles are lit, prayers are uttered, meals are dedicated to him. For days and weeks and months, Marina supplicated St. Jude to let her and her husband’s names be drawn in the lottery. And when her name was drawn, she felt certain that St. Jude had intervened on her behalf.

This is the sort of stuff Marina and I talk about in the Publix parking lot, while we’re unloading my groceries from the cart and putting them in the trunk of my car. During our last conversation about St. Jude, she told me that Publix carries St. Jude candles, with the prayer written in Spanish on the back. I said I would buy one and light it for her sister, who is undergoing treatment for leukemia.

Around this same time, Jane Clifford, a healer in Wales, wrote that she had invoked St. Jude on several occasions and the saint always had come through for her. In one instance when her son was younger, she needed a lot of money for Harry’s tuition – more than 30,000 pounds – and it had come through.

 I began to think about this, about St Jude’s name appearing twice in a short period of time, and knew that if there was a third occurrence, it would count as a cluster synchro and I’d better pay close attention. Sure enough, mid-October rolled around. My friend Hilary arrived for a week of intense writing, in which we intended to finish a screenplay for my novel Ghost Key, that we started last spring. We put in more than 70 hours, with a break for a couple of dinners out and a trip one afternoon to a hair salon.

During that drive to the salon, we talked about philosophy, UFOs, metaphysical belief systems. Hilary is a Hemingway, the niece of Ernest, and she wrote a screenplay with Andy Garcia about Hemingway’s last days in Cuba that will go into production next spring. She’s married to Jeff Lindsay, the creator and author of the  Dexter books. Before Dexter, they were struggling as writers. So I said, “For your lives to have changed so radically, there had to be a dramatic change in your beliefs. What was it?”

She thought for a moment, then said, “I can think of only two things. We went to Key West one weekend and there’s this big ceiba tree  where people write down their wishes and places them in the gigantic roots. I wrote my wishes for Jeff, that his new book would sell and succeed  separate from anything Hemingway. The other thing was that Jeff lit a candle in honor of St. Jude and kept it lit for a year.”

Bingo. Three references, a cluster synchro.

As a long lapsed Catholic, the only thing I find seductive about the Catholic church and its beliefs is the mystical element – the belief that certain things are powerful.  It’s no different than a belief  in a particular nutritional program that will help you lose weight or a belief in lucky numbers that will attract your soul mate. Belief, it all boils down to belief. This type of thinking is often referred to as magical – and usually in a disparaging way – but I figure, well, why not? What do I have to lose? Yet, we aren’t in desperate straits, its not as if one of us is dying of some terrible disease or that we’re going to lose our house tomorrow. But, why not? Why not?

We have a number of pending projects, so today I wandered over to Publix to find the St. Jude candle. There weren’t any. I could have made the hike to a botanica in downtown West Palm Beach, a shop that stocks all the tools uses in Santeria, a Cuban-mystical religion. I knew it would have the candles. But I realized the power of St. Jude lies in the ritual, the lighting of the candle, the invocation, the intent of the person who is asking for intervention. So I bought this beautifully scented candle that is probably used in the rooms of model homes.

During checkout the cashier sniffed it. The person bagging my groceries sniffed it. The customer in front of me took a whiff. All of them approved. Sniff, sniff, nod, nod, very nice.  Yeah, it was a weird moment.

When I got home, Rob had already looked up prayers for St. Jude, which were too overtly religious for us. So we made up our own invocation.

Stay tuned.