Psychics and COVID: Predicting the future in a pandemic world

I won't say you need to be in the know. With some 13,200 followers, it's hardly a secret. You do, however, need to be approved, as if it's reserved for VIPs.

In reality, the mother-daughter duo that runs the page, known as Karen and Charley to their followers, are welcoming to everyone. The approval process just helps weed out any fake accounts.

As the Instagram account's name suggests, Karen and Charley are witches who offer psychic readings and spell candles, among other things. It was only partway through the pandemic that they decided to venture into the world of Instagram - a new way of presenting an old craft, if you will. But while the social media presence is new, their practice is a lifetime in the making.

Just before we meet to talk, Karen squeezes in a quick live video. It becomes clear people are eager for Karen to get the tarot cards out and do quick readings at random. Some are even regular enough that the host recognises them by name.

"Has that ginger prince come along yet, Charlene?" Karen asks one viewer.

There is another reason she has jumped online, however. It's evening in the United Kingdom, where Karen is based, and what's more, the full moon is out. It's a night where the duo will not only charge their candles under the moonlight, but in this instance, Karen uses it - with the assistance of her followers - to manifest help for a little girl with cancer.

"Earlier on this year, I had a message from this lady called Angelica who had a little girl called Eliza, who has just turned one and Eliza had cancer," Karen tells me over video chat.

"Angelica asked me to make a spell candle for her little girl. So I started making candles every couple of weeks to send to her and going on my Instagram Lives and getting the people to come in to manifest with us because then we have more success with it.

"Three weeks ago, she got to ring the bell ... which means she's clear of cancer.

"Tonight I got a message from another lady who's got this little girl Florence and she's met Angelica in hospital. So she asked me if I would be able to manifest for her little girl as well."

From an observer's point of view, manifesting looks simple enough. Effectively you light a white candle and say what you want repeatedly.

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Karen has been manifesting her entire life. So has Charley. They credit the success of their Instagram page - which attracts thousands of new followers every week - to their manifesting. Well, that and the pandemic.

"People need something positive," Karen says.

"There's a lot of negativity around and we always try to think about what's positive. And I just think that mainstream religion, people are going away from it. But they still want something and they need something. This has always been there, but it's having a rise in popularity at the moment."

But, back to the manifesting.

While anyone can manifest, the mother-daughter team say there are some rules. You need to believe that the universe will deliver on your request, you need to keep taking actions towards what you want (i.e. if you want a new job you still need to apply) and you need to not obsess over the outcome.

To go hand-in-hand with this, Karen and Charley also make spell candles for different outcomes. Each is custom-made and filled with ingredients that for the most part are secret. There is the obvious - the crystal sticking out of the top is a giveaway, and you can smell the rose scent. But the duo says the candle can also have ingredients such as fingernails, teeth, herbs and hair - depending on what the candle is for.

"Candle magic has been around for a long time," Karen says.

"When you illuminate, the universe sees you. The universe hears everything. And that's why I tell people to be specific with what they're manifesting.

"The reason being is that we've had people contact us and go, 'Oh, I've manifested the man of my dreams, but he's five-foot-two, and I'm five-foot-eight.'

"You have to be specific, because the universe has a bit of a sense of humour.

"If you're not specific with what you ask for, it will give you it but it will give it to you with a twist."

It's hard to chat with someone about predicting and manifesting the future without curiosity taking over about what it may be bring for you. And it seems on the other end of the conversation, Karen and Charley can be just as curious about their clients. Throughout the interview, both chime in with different observations. And for the most part, they do so without any tools of the trade.

They comment on how ambitious I am, and how I prefer animals to humans. They note the strong influence of science I had growing up (my dad is a physicist) and also tell me that there will be a new work contract soon. (As they say this, I think of the updated contract sitting in my emails waiting to be signed).

People see the duo - or any psychic for that matter - for different reasons. Fertility, money, success, work, you name it. Of course, one of the more popular reasons is for matters of the heart.

"I can read anything but I love to read relationships," Charley says.

"I love the love side of things. I love telling people when they're going to meet someone. I've just designed a soulmate candle that took me ages."

According to a 2009 Nielson poll, 49 per cent of Australians believe in psychic powers. Fifty-one per cent also believed in angels and 41 per cent in astrology. Beyond that, little data in Australia is available but if you look further afield, a more recent Gallup Survey in the US found that almost three-quarters of Americans (73 per cent) believed in the paranormal.

As for the types of people who visit a psychic, they're most likely to be female.

For Canberra psychic Nikki Scarlett, not only are her clients mainly women, she says 60 to 70 per cent of the people who come to see her are in toxic relationships.

"Some of them don't even realise that's the case yet and I just try and open the idea to them a little bit," she says.

"Others are a bit further along and I help them to see that this is as much as they can do about the relationship so it's time to move on.

"You get them at different stages, but I never tell them what they want to hear in that circumstance, which is, he's going to have an epiphany, and he'll change overnight."

After noticing the trend, Scarlett researched where to direct women who are in toxic relationships. For domestic violence cases, for example, she provides details about organisations that can help.

But it can be a minefield. Scarlett says you need to navigate between what people want to hear and what she should tell them.

A mother of Scarlett's friend went to see another psychic after her husband passed away a few years ago.

"This psychic told her that the husband had an affair early on in the marriage, and he was going to leave her for the other woman but decided to stay with her," Scarlett says.

"She traumatised this woman. She went home and threw out everything that he ever owned, every remembrance of him. Even if that was true, if I had someone that came to me and that's what came up, I wouldn't tell them that. How does that benefit them hearing that information?"

As Canberra comes out of lockdown, Scarlett's practice is starting to move back to in-person readings. While she says she has always offered readings over the phone - and that there is no difference in the result - the in-person appointments have always been more popular.

People like to see what Scarlett is doing. They want to see her pulling the tarot cards - which the psychic uses but says she doesn't require for a reading. But as Scarlett says, the only person who needs to see what the cards say is her.

"They feel that they need to be in the room with me for me to pick up their energies because most people don't know how this works," she says.

Of course, in light of the pandemic, the obvious question is whether anyone saw it coming. For Scarlett, she says in the months leading up to it, the effects of the pandemic kept coming up left, right and centre, particularly when it came to people's travel cancellations.

The same thing happened for Nell Archer - who is also a Canberra region psychic. Up until the end of 2019, Archer ran the Canberra Psychic Centre, but when she realised the pandemic was coming, she closed it down and moved to the country for a year. The psychic now does readings exclusively over the phone and video calls, as well as posting videos on YouTube.

What's more, while these last two years have been hard for a lot of people, Archer says there is more to come.

"I predicted the pandemic amongst a lot of other things, and in January 2019 ... I ran a class called Armageddon because I like stirring people up a bit," she says.

"In it, I talked about the virus and some other stuff as well. And we stopped doing our shadow work [which involves getting in touch with your darker side] because from 2020, we were pushed into fear, and we've got seven years of fear."

Archer's journey to realising her psychic abilities is an interesting one because she comes from a scientific background. She says she always found it easy to connect to animals and plants as a kid, but it was her time working as an ICU nurse where she noticed she had weird effects on some of the patients.

She remembers distinctly this one time, when she sensed the back pain in one of the patients. Even though it wasn't her patient, Archer went in to give them a back rub.

"I just really put this compassion into her because I just felt how much pain she was in," she says.

"The next day, they said, Dr so-and-so wants to talk to you. And he called me in and the patient was all packed with her bags ready to go home even though she had waited ages for this surgery. And he said, 'What did you do?' And I'm like, 'I just gave her a back rub'."

Even so, it wasn't until she had her first son, 26 years ago, that Archer started to look into psychic abilities. Her son had severe epilepsy which caused psychic phenomena and Archer's research was initially all about helping him.

"He was that kid from Sixth Sense," she says.

"You go to visit someone, and he'd be like 'Bob's sitting over there', and 'Your mum's over here'. He could see every dead dog, and he would tell you everything that was going to happen. He was a child so it was very disturbing for him."

One of the biggest things Archer says she had to learn was to trust her readings as sometimes they don't make logical sense. For example, she was reading for a friend who was about to spend three months in the Amazon.

Despite this, the reading said he was going to meet someone from Sydney and they were going to move to the northern beaches in those same three months. Low and behold, Archer's friend was back in town for one day which is when he met his new girlfriend from Sydney.

"One of the ways that helped with trust was I used to read for private detectives," she says.

"That was fun because you go, 'OK, this person is in this building. There are four storeys and they are going to be there at this time' or whatever it may be. And then within hours, they tell you whether it's right or wrong. So that is validating and you learn to trust your intuition."

Listening to these women speak it's easy to see why they have repeat business. It's almost as if they're a form of counselling whether that's for a client in a toxic relationship, or simply someone trying to find some hope for the future.

As for the readings they gave me, the information given about the past and present had some truth in it. All four of them, for example, picked up details about a past relationship with spooky accuracy. When it comes to predictions for the future, however, only time will tell.

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