Beware New Year woo-woo… listening to psychics and clairvoyants cost me thousands

With social media overrun with wild predictions for the year ahead, Charlotte Cripps – who once paid to keep a fortune-teller on speed-dial – knows better than most the price of believing what the mystics who look into your future tell you…

I’m lying in bed, doomscrolling through all of the prophecies and predictions for the terrible events that will hit us in 2025… and it’s making me question my sanity. Can I – or anybody else for that matter – really take any of it seriously?

The most famous seer of them all, 16th-century physicist Nostradamus – who wrote mystical four-line rhymes for later generations to interpret – is reputed to have declared that 2025 will see a devastating war in Europe. A “fireball from the cosmos” will devastate the Earth, while a “mysterious leader” will rise from the sea to form an “aquatic empire”.

Oh, and England will fight an ancient plague. Lucky, then, that there will also be pioneering advances in medicine, so swings and roundabouts.

Our medieval French apothecary wasn’t the only one to have seen into the 21st century. Renowned blind Bulgarian psychic Baba Vanga, who correctly predicted when she would die in 1996 – having also foreseen the untimely death of Diana, Princess of Wales, 9/11, and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami – also had thoughts about our year ahead: a crippling war in Europe (again), catastrophic earthquakes, and success for Vladimir Putin. “Russia will not only survive,” she proclaimed, “it will dominate the world.”

According to Vanga, this is the year we will make contact with extra-terrestrial life – during a major sporting event, apparently. If that’s not tantalising enough a prospect, she also prophesied that the world will end in 5079.

Trust me, it’s easy to get hooked on this stuff. But it’s a bit of harmless fun, right? Yes, up to a point. But I’m what happens when you get so sucked in to the world of precognition that we take things just a little bit too far, and end up paying clairvoyants and psychics to tell how our own futures will play out?

When I think of how much attention I have paid to such people over the years, I look back and gasp. My dependence on personal prophecies – there have been times that I’ve needed consultations on a weekly basis – has cost me thousands of pounds.

I don’t beat myself up about it any more because I’m not alone in having sought “help”. Those who claim to have the power of foresight have existed for thousands of years – and more than a quarter of Brits believe in the existence of “gifted people”, while 23 per cent admit to visiting a psychic in person or having a consultation over the phone. On TikTok, business is booming for tarot card readers, as people long for romantic and financial assurance.

During one particularly turbulent point in my past, I couldn’t function without talking to a clairvoyant – which got costly when she began charging me £60 per chat.

Admittedly, she had got a few things right over the years. That’s why I hired her.

She once predicted with bullseye precision a significant date in my late partner’s life – the day his dad died.

When she told me she couldn’t ever see my father living in the studio we had built for him in the garden, I took it to mean he would die before it was completed. Instead, me and my two kids moved into it, letting him take over my entire flat. So she was right again.

Now, I’m waiting for the financial windfall I’ve been promised, the move to the United States for three months – and the man who’s waiting in the wings.

Over the years, I had her on speed dial, sometimes spending up to £120 a week on her prophecies. She was on tap for all my dating dramas, when I was desperate to have a baby, and when my biological clock was falling off a cliff.

As I spent my life saving on IVF, I would phone to ask in despair, “Are you sure you see me with his baby?”, before another round failed.

She felt exasperated by my lack of belief in her prophecies. But her great line was: “I wish I could be as accurate for myself as I am for you”, which, in my darker days, gave me great hope.

Eventually, it was she who cut herself off from me. She later admitted it was over something she had foreseen, but not felt able to warn me about. Midway through our IVF journey, my partner killed himself. I was in disbelief that she could possibly have known about an impending tragedy and kept quiet. But, in her defence, she said: “How could I tell somebody something like that?”

My partner had no idea I had been seeing a psychic. I was dependent on her – there were three of us in that relationship.

I’d say to myself: “She can’t be right!” But so often, she was.

I’ve always been heavily influenced by physics. There was the one on Blackpool promenade who told me that I’d live to a ripe old age, and that I’d marry somebody I already knew, which has made me question all sorts of inappropriate people as my future husband.

Another medium prophesied that I’d have a house in France, and my name would be “up in lights”. On both counts, I’m still holding my breath.

At a séance in Torquay, after my partner’s death, I was told that I would have two children with him – I only had one at the time. However, the physic medium was quite adamant about the size of my family.

When I went on to have my second child – who had been on ice for years as an embryo in a Russian IVF clinic – was it the medium’s words that gave me the courage to proceed with the pregnancy?

Perhaps – because I’m certainly invested. When she also told me that my late partner wanted me to move on, I felt dumped from the afterlife.

The last psychic I spoke to was in New York, who claimed to have communicated with both my late father and late partner, she mentioned I needed to be more open to a romantic relationship. “It doesn’t have to be lightning bolts,” she advised. But the thing with psychic mediums is that there are always men waiting in the wings; I just can’t fathom who they are.

Could it be the handsome single dad I fell out with over Cluedo with the kids on New Year’s Eve, while arguing over the rules? I’m sure we’ll make up, but in the meantime I’m wondering if it’s time for another psychic medium session? Because I just need to know what the hell happens next…

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