I went to see “An Evening of Clairvoyance” with Simon Peters at the Novotel in Southampton in 2005. My Mum is quite keen on things like this and has had dealings in the past with many honest and far more accurate mediums. She had fairly recently lost a close relative and was obviously hoping to hear from them, so I said I would go with her.
I doubted his authenticity from the minute he began his spiel, though I had never heard of him before. I write to you now as I have only just got around to researching him online (mediums and ghosthunting was something discussed at work today), and found your website. I am glad to see other people found his tone as odd as I did. The only reason I stayed through the whole show was because my Mum drove there and was too polite to get up and walk out.
I don’t think I can add much new information to the posts you already have on your site – the show I saw was broadly the same as the ones described – but I can add weight to your argument that maybe he makes things up and isn’t very good at his cold reading technique. I had never been to a reading before (and haven’t been since, surprisingly enough), so this one sticks out. I will record here only what I can remember, as I have read the email you received from Simon and wouldn’t want to make up lies about him!
Mr Peters himself took money and crossed names off lists as we entered, though we were allowed to sit wherever we liked. The evening cost us £10 each and there were at least 100 seats in the room. There was also no air conditioning and Mr Peters refused to switch it on because it was too expensive.
There was also the suggestion that he had a cold, and he seemed to be overcome by quite worrying coughing fits periodically throughout the show. He told the audience about his microphone interference and that he’d had to spend a fortune on a new system that still seemed prone to picking up strange noises. He made the vibrator joke to us as he explained how to use the microphone, which fell pretty flat, and seemed quite inappropriate for the circumstances.
He made quite a long speech about being able to tell us what the weather was like on the day of a funeral, and what day of the week people died, etc, and how we must only answer “yes”, “no” or “don’t know” to any of his questions. He made a big thing out of how honest he was and how accurate his readings would be compared to other people’s, explaining that he would use a vague sort of seating plan reference to identify who the spirits wanted to speak to. He also went into great detail about how he discovered his psychic powers, but to be honest, by then I had switched off.
He made a total of six readings, and out of the six only one seemed to get “hits”.
There was someone who had died of throat cancer, not claimed by anyone in the audience. I think this one came quite late in the show, by which time most of the audience seemed to have had had enough.
One of the seat references he made (e.g. right side of the room, fourth row, sixth seat) was for an empty seat, which his assistant desperately tried to communicate to him from the back of the room before he said it, but he didn’t notice and then changed his mind and went for sixth row, fourth seat.
One spirit was of a young man who hanged himself, but then might have also died in a motorbike accident – that reading became a little bit hazy!
The one that appeared to be correct was aimed at a middle-aged lady in the front row. I think the spirit turned out to be her father(?) who died of lung disease or heart disease or a heart attack. I seem to remember Simon’s last words to her were “he says he likes your tattoo”, which got the most positive reaction of the night.
Another reading was for a lady who was told that her husband was with her and the reason her feet (or, indeed anyone’s feet) got cold at night was because it was a spirit cuddling up to her.
The final reading of the night seemed to go on forever, as no one was happy about sticking their hand up. He hopped around the room talking to three or four different people. Initially the spirit was claiming to have died from cancer of the stomach (which got my Mum’s hopes up for speaking to a lost relative herself), then when no one said “yes” the cause of death changed to something else.
He ended up talking about secret miscarriages and hidden abortions which quite clearly distressed the couple he was aiming this at (by then he was telling them the spirit was of their daughter, I seem to remember), then went off on a complete tangent asking them whether their microwave played up for no reason. When they said “no” quite emphatically to that and some of the other suggestions he made to them, he finally gave up on them and decided the spirit wasn’t their daughter, but was a spirit trying to reach someone in another part of the hotel (or maybe it was an audience member who wasn’t owning up).
There was quite a lot of that “sends love to the three, split as two and one” rubbish, and those random messages like “she says to look in the attic for what you think you’ve lost” – even though his opening speech had been all about how he wouldn’t repeat any messages like that if the spirits gave them to him.
I think the more details you have on your site about possible (probable?) conning of audiences, the better. I should have researched him thoroughly before my Mum roped me into going. Most of the audience that evening were there hoping to hear from a relative or friend, but even those he aimed his microphone at went home with very little. If I had found your site beforehand I would not have let my Mum go. People who are still grieving are very fragile and he took complete advantage of that the night I went to see him.
If you post this and it stops one person from paying money to listen to him I will feel better.
My thanks go to LizziH for this contribution.
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