Psychics and the city

Amaryllis Fraser lives in a penthouse flat in Kensington, an eyrie with views not of the pavements but the sky; a magical place, as befits a girl who see things that most of us do not, and hears the voices of the dead, whispering in the ether.

She's beautiful, as you might expect from a former Vogue model, but it's her soothing voice, one would imagine, that has helped her establish a career as a successful 'sensitive': the contemporary term for a psychic medium. ('A psychic is someone who can see into the future,' explains Amaryllis, 'whereas a medium is in contact with the spirits of the dead.'

Not all psychics are mediums, and vice versa; but some, like Amaryllis, believe themselves to be both.)

Recently, it's become acceptable to admit to an interest in these matters - everyone from the novelist Jeanette Winterson to Madonna has sought guidance from psychics (Madonna consulted the psychic Susan King as well as a number of palmists, while Winterson has seen a 'psychic astrologist').

More surprising still is the emergence of a discreet new breed of psychic consultants working in the City and Wall Street. But when Amaryllis was growing up (which wasn't so long ago, because she's only 28), there was a far greater stigma attached to anything seen as 'paranormal'.

'When I was little, I saw shimmering people --or children, more often - in period costume,' she says. 'They'd vanish after a few seconds, and I never found them scary, but I soon realised that no one else could see them.'

She learned to keep quiet about what she saw, and did not discover until much later that this was something of a family tradition: her great-great-grandfather was Gerald Balfour, the second Earl of Balfour, who founded the College of Psychic Studies in 1884; an institution which continues to flourish just around the corner from where Amaryllis now lives.

It was not until she was recovering from a car crash, at the age of 19, that Amaryllis found herself unable to ignore the voices and faces of the dead that assailed her wherever she went. 'I was like the little boy in The Sixth Sense,' she says. 'Sometimes I could see how people had died, which was petrifying.

The doctors thought I was hallucinating, that I had post-traumatic stress syndrome, so they gave me tranquillisers, which made me feel like a zombie.' But despite the medication, her clairvoyance did not disappear. 'It wasn't just the spirits,' she says, 'I was hearing what people were thinking all the time - which was incredibly invasive, and I used to get very sick, as if I was open to catch anything.'

In desperation, she visited a healer who advised her to go to the College of Psychic Studies, and it was there, she says, 'that I was taught how to shut off when necessary'. (Interestingly, Amaryllis also discovered that a number of her fellow students had developed intuitive skills after some kind of trauma, physical or otherwise.)

By then she was working as a Montessori teacher, but started giving occasional psychic sittings to friends (some had specific traumas they wanted to discuss, others were simply curious); word travelled so fast that she gave up her job to meet the growing demand for her uncanny counselling.

In this, she says, she uses her 'spirit guide', her great-grandmother, Lady Ruth Balfour, daughter of Gerald; who helps with what is known as 'house-clearing', where Amaryllis persuades recalcitrant ghosts to give up squatting rights. (Grateful clients include the property tycoon Anton Bilton and his girlfriend Lisa Barbuschia, who describe Amaryllis's service as 'like a spring-cleaning'.)

At this point, the rational reader will be snorting with disbelief; and if I'm honest, I counted myself as a sceptic until several years ago, when my sister died of breast cancer aged 33. Overwhelmed by grief, I began to visit the College of Psychic Studies myself: secretly at first, because I was brought up to believe in reason and science, neither of which gives any credence to the notion of life after death.

I wasn't interested in looking into the future - that seemed far too bleak a place without my sister in it - but I was desperate to fill the silence that had descended after her death; longing to hear her voice again.

My search for my sister in the underworld of mediums is too long to tell here (though I charted it in a book called If The Spirit Moves You). But what I can say is, having met dozens of psychics and mediums, although the majority may have good intentions and believe in what they're doing, very few are at all convincing.

Even when they are, it is impossible to prove that what they do is 'real' - and maybe reality is not what we're looking for here (not all the time, anyway). Yet when one does stumble across an apparently genuine 'sensitive', the effect can be startling. Fiona Golfar, for example, who works as an editor-at-large for Vogue, describes with awe the telephone conversation she had with Rita Rogers, who was Princess Diana's psychic medium at the time.

'It was years ago, but I still remember it as astonishing,' says Fiona. 'I'd got in touch with her during a phase of my life when a lot was happening very quickly - I was a new wife, a new mother, living in a new house - and I wanted to talk to Rita after two of my friends told me that she'd really helped them.

I was in London and she was at home in Derbyshire, but she told me everything - from the smallest details, like the fact I was phoning her from a red room - to very important stuff, like saying that my brother needed to be tested for diabetes, and that I would have a daughter within a year. True enough, my brother was diagnosed as diabetic two months later, and I had a baby girl.'

Or take my conversation with Mo Elliot, who I interviewed on the phone several months ago, having heard of her extensive City and corporate clients. ('She's got people consulting her from every continent,' said one of them, a hugely successful businesswoman herself. 'Big financial institutions, major high-street retailers - like me, they listen to her advice because it works.')

I'd just introduced myself to Mo - who was over a hundred miles away - when she said, suddenly, 'There's a man on your roof.' I went to investigate and there was indeed a builder, who was working on our house at the time, on the roof. 'Tell him to mind out for the flashing,' said Mo, when I returned to the phone. She's a former surveyor, a practical type; but I don't even know what flashing is, and despite my surprise about her rooftop vision, I thought no more of it.

Until, that is, the winter rains caused a leak in our attic, and when the builder returned to remedy the damage, he remarked that the flashing must have been dislodged when he had been up on the roof before.

Yes, I know my small story will fail to convince rationalists (nor would I want to persuade anyone to believe in what they feel to be unbelievable), but it's that kind of direct 'hit' that has made Mo successful in the corporate world, particularly among those clients who say she has provided profitable advice, such as on the timing and pricing of share issues. 'I have a very logical mind,' she says, 'and the word "psychic"

has unfortunate connotations' - which is perhaps why at first she chose not to talk much about her emerging sense of intuition, which developed after her son's death in 1980.

But sitting in a train one day, she found she could not help but tell the stranger beside her what was on her mind. 'I just knew he was an engineer of some sort,' she says, 'and that he was working on something and it wasn't right. So I drew him a diagram of how I thought it should be, and he took my number because the drawing made sense to him.

Four days later he rang me, and said, "You're exactly right." It was an electronic piece - and I don't know anything about electronics - but I'd told him he was a hundredth of a millimetre out in his calculations.'

The chairman of the engineer's company was so amazed by Mo's accuracy that he asked her to come in and see him: and such was the success of subsequent word-of-mouth recommendations that, like Amaryllis, she ended up working as a psychic full-time.

It's the same route taken by Deirdre Morgan, an American who describes herself as an ' intuitive counsellor' (she is also a trained Jungian therapist). Immensely successful in the US --she sees clients from Wall Street to Hollywood - she has come on several working visits to this country (brought here by Unlisted London, an upmarket company which organises appointments with a range of health and wellbeing practitioners).

Deirdre, like Mo, is now in her fifties --a Bostonian with the professional, smartly dressed look of an Ivy League professor.

'I do a lot of corporate work,' she tells me, when we meet in the Knightsbridge townhouse where she is staying, 'usually because my name has been mentioned when a chairman was out playing golf with a friend.

Metaphysics has always been a closet science - but there's certainly a great deal more willingness in the corporate world these days to pay close attention to what I might say.' Intriguingly, she also has political clients in America - including someone she will describe only as 'a very senior politician'; as well as her work in the film industry. 'Hollywood clients are the worst,' she says, laughing.

'They want answers now, about casting and schedules and budgets - all the technical stuff.' But despite the demands for instant predictions, she says, 'In some ways the corporate psychic work is the easiest --it's all about numbers, and numbers are a piece of cake.'

As to why intuitives don't use their skills to win the lottery: well, according to Colette Baron-Reid (a 'psychic's psychic', who comes highly recommended by ES's astrologer Shelley von Strunckel, herself much in demand by high-flying clients): 'We're not meant to use our gifts in that way. We can make a living, sure, but anything else is immoral - so it would never work anyway.' Colette is a straighttalking Canadian who points out that she didn't choose to be psychic.

In fact, at 44, she's got a successful career as a singer-songwriter, and is currently recording her second album for EMI. 'But since I was a child, I knew I had something odd about me,' she says. 'We were raised as Christians - as far as I was concerned, we didn't have a drop of Jewish blood - but I always had terrible nightmares about a grandfather I didn't know in a concentration camp. My mother had been orphaned and raised by Christians - and it wasn't until much later in my life that I discovered her father had died in Dachau.'

Like Amaryllis, Colette grew up not talking about the strange things she heard and saw, but such was the effort involved in this denial that she started drinking to obliterate the unwanted clairvoyance. Eventually, having recovered from alcoholism in her twenties, she was forced to accept 'that even though I wanted to be a rock star, I was a reluctant intuitive'.

Such is the demand for her advice that she is booked up for months in advance, in Toronto, London, New York and Los Angeles. An articulate, intelligent woman, she sees this growing need as symptomatic of our times. 'People are starving for a connection to the numinous,' she says. 'We're big, gaping mouths, trying to feed ourselves with something that isn't consumerism, that isn't hard science - we've gone as far as we can with that.'

Nevertheless, she sees some suggestion in quantum physics as to how her apparent ability to see into the future might work. 'I believe time expands and contracts,' she says. 'When I do a reading, I can see the likely flow, the probable manifestations, the fluidity of experience. If I'm seeing you as a client, it's like I'm remembering you, even though I don't know you, and we've never met before - I'm remembering your past and your present and your future.'

But she emphasises, too, that we all have free will. 'We do have choice and control,' she says, 'as we make our way around the obstacle course we are given in life.' Like other good psychics, she emphasises the importance of not becoming addicted to their services; she speaks instead of the need to develop our own intuition about what surrounds us; to learn to make sense of things for ourselves. And what could be a clearer message for the coming year than that?

Wish I May, a novel by Justine Picardie (Picador, £16.99), is published on 16 January