The science of the supernatural: Psychics, cults and why we believe

Episode 23: Supernatural Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: San Diego has many supposedly haunted places, and Presidio Park is near the top of the list. It's the site where Father Junipero Serra established San Diego's first mission. It was marred by conflict and violence. Just six years after the mission was founded, it was burned to the ground and abandoned leaving a Presidio Park that today — at night — feels pretty spooky.

Cora Lee: I think that Presidio Park's probably the scariest place you can go alone at night. My boyfriend was there once at night and saw like cloaked hooded figures, like hiding behind trees.

Evans: This is Cora Lee, a San Diego writer and journalist with a funny and fascinating Substack called “Dispatch From Paradise.” It explores…

Lee: … the hidden stuff or the underbelly of San Diego.

Evans: We're celebrating Halloween by taking a look at some of that underbelly, so back to Presidio Park.

Lee: So I drove over there. It was probably midnight Tuesday or something, the weeknight.

Evans: She set her sights on a lonely illuminated tower in the distance, a recreation of the old mission built about a hundred years ago.

Lee: There's like a big cross — statue or something else. Like I'll go wander over to that and I mean it's like kind of walking into this wooded-ish area, which should have given me a rush but I just wasn't feeling scared and I kind of felt like “The Polar Express,” like I can't hear the bell anymore, you know, like I'm too old to get scared.

Evans: But Cora was about to find out that wasn't true. She reached the top of the mission tower and spotted a small arched open-air window overlooking I-8. She thought it would make a nice photo for her Substack piece on the haunted park, which at this point seemed like kind of a dud.

Lee: I take the photo and it's a little point and shoot digital camera, so you know the photo will pop up on the screen for a few seconds and disappear. And what popped up on the screen wasn't the photo I took, it was this really zoomed in version and then it was a slideshow where it went through these different images and they were different tints and it was doing it on its own seemingly.

I was scared shitless. I turned the camera off, shoved it in my bag and ran down the hill, got in my truck and drove away. My heart was freaking out. I mean, I wanted to be scared, you know? And I was, I genuinely was like, oh, 'cause I don't know if I really believe in ghosts. I don't even think any of this is real. And then I was like, oh man. It was scary in the moment and I did not want to look at the photos until the next day, during daylight.

Evans: So why do we want to see ghosts even if we don't particularly believe in them? Part of it might be thrill-seeking, but there's something deeper that could explain it too. Here's Joseph Laycock, Professor of Religious Studies at Texas State University.

Joseph Laycock: So I think if we look at the long duration of human history, I think it's totally natural and normal for humans to want to encounter ghosts.

Evans: About two-thirds of Americans believe in some kind of supernatural phenomenon, like ghosts, aliens, psychics or witches. Those numbers have actually gone up in recent decades. The trend defies centuries of predictions from researchers and writers who assume that in the so-called age of science and reason, belief in the supernatural would fade away. So what's going on here? What is it about the paranormal — UFOs, Bigfoot, the spirits of the dead returning — that draws people in?

With Cora, we'll dig into San Diego's underground psychic empire and visit some of the many new religious movements, most often known as cults, based in California — one of the cultiest places in the country. And we'll probe into the psychological and sociological reasons why ghosts, aliens, fortune tellers, and other supernatural phenomena persist in our minds no matter how science or culture portrays them.

Laycock: I think that for most people living in a totally secularized world where they only believe in things that can be proven by science is kind of inherently unsatisfying.

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: When Producer Anthony and I spoke with Professor Joseph Laycock, one of the biggest questions on our minds was why are we drawn to ghosts and spirits? Joseph has studied and written books about paranormal beliefs, exorcisms and cults — all kinds of things that fall under our broad category of spooky. One thing that unites many of these is the concept of presence.

Laycock: Presence is the idea that there are kind of supernatural or invisible entities around us, right? There was a religious studies scholar named Robert Orsi who said that humans seem to have kind of a need for presence, right? And if it's not the presence of Jesus during the Eucharist, you know, it might be the presence of your ancestors, presence of the gods or the spirits, or whatever.

Evans: That raises an interesting question. If the Eucharist — the transformation of communion wafers and wine into Jesus's flesh and blood — and seeing a ghost are both experiences of presence, why do we classify one as religion and the other supernatural?

Laycock: The Baylor Religion Survey is this massive religion survey. They asked about a thousand questions and there were certain questions that they set aside as paranormal: Do you believe it's possible for a house to be haunted? Do you believe in aliens? Do you believe monsters like Bigfoot and the Lochness monster exist somewhere in the world? And what they finally decide is this, that when we say paranormal, we mean ideas that have been rejected by science and also rejected by mainstream religion. But what this means is it's a moving target, right?

Evans: So if a mainstream religion adopted the idea of Bigfoot, it would no longer be considered paranormal. But there's another way that a phenomenon can shed that label. It can be proven true.

Laycock: We can look at some scientific examples. So when European explorers went to the island of Borneo, everyone said there are wild men that live in the forest. And they said, well, this is obviously some silly superstition. These people believe in ogres or something like that. And then they saw their first orangutan and said, oh, they weren't just making it up, right? These things really exist.

Another example concerns sleep paralysis. For a very long time — and I mean until, you know, the late 20th century — most people in Western culture didn't know what sleep paralysis was. And in Newfoundland, which is kind of a rural island in Canada, they talked about the hag and everybody said, well, there's this night hag, and it comes and it sits on your chest. And this medical doctor named David Hufford said, well, this seems to be just the superstition. Then he realized, no, this is a real medical phenomenon. And these people have a way of talking about it, and because they can talk about it, we can actually document it and begin to understand it.

Evans: Sleep paralysis started as folklore, but it's now a well understood medical condition. Paranormal beliefs then are really just those that at a given time fall outside accepted knowledge. And the share of Americans with paranormal beliefs has risen in recent years. Belief in UFOs, especially, has risen considerably. And a Pew survey shows that 65% of American adults believe in quote, “spirits or unseen spiritual forces.” Joseph theorizes this trend is connected to who defines accepted knowledge.

Laycock: So it is true that less people are going to church regularly even if they may identify as Christian. The kind of institutional authority of the church has waned. And what appears to have happened is the church was the main force in our society telling people this talk of aliens, this is nonsense, right? Astrology is forbidden in the Bible. Talking to ghosts is forbidden in the Bible. So in a weird way, the decline of organized religion or organized Christianity has kind of opened the floodgates to people becoming very fascinated with the paranormal.

Evans: In many ways, belief in the supernatural — the presence of spirits or something more on earth — is actually quite natural, spanning as far back as anthropologists have studied, and one longstanding belief that's thrived from the most ancient times to today is the psychic.

Laycock: People who use their abilities to talk about your future, right? This has always been a part of human civilization, right? Going back to the Bronze Age, there were soothsayers and fortune tellers that you could go to if you wanted some kind of assistance. So I think it's a permanent feature of human civilization.

Lee: The craziest topic I've ever written about was the psychics.

Evans: Cora was fascinated by those big neon psychic signs all over the city and just thought it'd be fun to get her palm read and write about it, but she stumbled onto something much bigger.

Lee: I figured it out because I was, I love to read Yelp reviews and the Yelp reviews will be like, either people are being like, this woman changed my life, or they'll be like, I lost $100,00.

Evans: Those online reviews were so extreme, so many people getting ripped off that Cora couldn't shake the feeling something more was going on. Her breakthrough came from the phone numbers.

Lee: Like every psychic you drive past, if you reverse search the phone number using truepeoplesearch.com — free by the way — if you reverse searched the phone number, it's all the Marks family.

Evans: That is M-A-R-K-S, Marks — and it's very real. We looked through some of Yelp's listings for psychics in San Diego. There are hundreds and found more than a dozen with phone numbers tied to the last name Marks. The family is known across the country, but they're especially notorious in San Diego.

Lee: And then I found an article talking about them getting shut down and talking about the family. And then talking about other locations.

Evans: In 1995, the LA Times published an article about the Marks family's alleged scams in San Diego and local law enforcement's attempts to stop them. It described a fortune telling empire dating back to the 1940s with psychic shops all over the county and more than $10 million in real estate. Back then, prosecutors charged them with theft by false pretense, basically lying to take someone's money. One older man gave the family more than half a million dollars in a supernatural attempt to quote, "rekindle his romantic spirit." Eventually, he suspected he was being scammed and went to the police, and that was far from the only time the story played out with the Marks family.

ABC10 News segment: Paige says April convinces her both she and her father are cursed. And that's why he can't go to heaven, that's why he's stuck. For $300, the psychic would order blessed candles from Jerusalem that would help unleash her father's soul and the curse. Paige pays up.

Evans: In this 2010 story from ABC10 News in San Diego, the psychic — linked to the Marks family dynasty — ultimately convinced a young woman named Paige to pay her $5,000, her entire inheritance from her late father. ABC10 had been chasing the family for a while. So had the cops. They are tough to pin down.

ABC10 News Segment: The Marks family keeps their victims from pursuing legal action. They agree to pay some of the victim's money back in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement that they won't talk or sue. The I-Team obtained a copy and we had an attorney review this. He says it is pretty tough to break

Lee: And so you know, it has been on the news, but it's just that, it's just still going.

Evans: Nothing has changed.

Lee: Nothing has changed. No, they have so many, they have so many.

Evans: So naturally, Cora had to visit the Marks psychic shops herself.

Lee: I just got like the $20, I think $25 palm reading, you know, the cheapest option. I was like, I can't invest too much money into this. No, but the first girl I met, she was probably like 21 or something. She was pretty young, and in North Park, and she told me I was gonna have three kids. She told me that my boyfriend is not my soulmate, but he instead is my twin flame, kind of controversial. She told me I have endometriosis.

Evans: Wow.

Lee: Which I actually think that I do. The other guy I went to was a little less, you know, perceptive. He told me that there's a lot of people jealous of me. And I was like, tell me something I don’t know. But yeah, they didn't try to scam me. The both of them were super nice. I would give five star a Yelp review. But I do have a friend who had went to one of them and they did tell her that she had a generational curse and that she had to pay them a bunch of money. And I was like, oh, so they saw you and they were like, she's a chump. I can get her. They're good at what they do.

Evans: It's a pretty classic psychic scam: I have detected a curse on you and if you pay me, I can remove it.

Laycock: There's always been fraud with mediums and psychics. We've known about that for years.

Evans: Here's Joseph Laycock again.

Laycock: In the United States, there was a movement called spiritualism. It started in 1848 with these two girls who seemed to have this ability to talk to the dead. And after the Civil War, spiritualism kind of exploded to millions of followers. And the psychologist William James at Harvard created the Society for Psychical Research because he thought, what if this is real? Can we find scientific evidence that these mediums can talk to the dead? And mostly what that organization did was debunk frauds, right? Everyone that they studied turned out to be a fraud.

Evans: But there have also been serious inquiries into psychics, ones that allow for the possibility that there is something to it.

Laycock: We now know the CIA invested a lot of money to train psychic spies through things like Project Star Gate, which has been declassified.

Evans: And as Joseph pointed out earlier, it's tough to draw the line between fraudulent paranormal practitioners and acceptable religion, especially in the eyes of the law.

The Marks family are part of the Romani, where fortune telling is traditionally considered a form of healing. In 1995, their defense attorneys framed the case as one about freedom of religion.

People spend money on all kinds of unproven practices: astrology, alternative therapies, spiritual services. While we try to sort out what's legitimate from what's illegal, the Marks and others like them continue on, business as usual.

While researching for this story, we saw this headline from a week ago, “2 arrested in ‘fortune telling scheme’ that duped victims out of $600,000, officials say.” It was the same old curse-removal trick. The story was from Pennsylvania, but we recognized one of the defendant's last names: Marks.

Laycock: People tend to be very anxious, right? We want to know what will happen in the future. And so if you believe that psychics are real and someone has the ability to tell you it's going to be OK, I can tell you what's happening, that can be really appealing for people.

My wife wrote a book about religious practices during COVID, and one thing that she found was spirit mediums. And these are not exactly psychics, but these are people who say that they can communicate with the dead. Grew in popularity during COVID, right? Their loved one, their family member got sick, went to the hospital and they never ever saw them again, right? So there's no closure. And so some of those people thought, gosh, if there's any chance that a medium can communicate with my dead loved one, I wanna give it a try.

Evans: Psychics fulfill our desire to know the future and mediums our desire to find spirits among us, and people will pay big money to satisfy those needs. In the search for meaning, presence and connection sometimes leads people into groups that, in American society, have become the ultimate taboo.

After the break, we visit the cults that live among us. We'll explore why there are so many in California and why Joseph and others who study the topic don't like calling them cults at all. Stay with us.

Cora's been into cults since she was a kid in school. She did a history report on Heaven's Gate while other kids were talking about Abraham Lincoln. Heaven's Gate, a group that believed they would ascend into a spacecraft that was trailing a passing comet, is certainly San Diego's most famous cult. But it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Southern California cults. Cora took a little road trip to visit some of them in person.

First stop: El Cajon, home to the global headquarters of the Unarius Academy of Sciences. They're big into Past Life Therapy and the belief that advanced interplanetary civilizations once inhabited our solar system. It's kind of like a sci-fi religion.

Lee: Anyone should go visit Unarius, they'd be happy to have you. They're like begging people to come in there. But it is aesthetically so gorgeous in there, like big kind of Grecian pillars, a lot ofmurals of Atlantis mosaics and star maps and all this stuff. And for some reason, like a ton of statues of Rodin’s The Thinker. He's all over that place. I think they have like 12 local members or something left. So if you, if any of this is like resonating with you as a listener, you should go join because they need, they need people. It makes me sad. It does, it makes me feel a little like tender

Evans: Out in Ramona, there's the Lemurian Fellowship.

Lee: They believe in a philosophy that supposedly originated on the Lost Continent, Lemuria. They call it Mu.

Evans: For short?

Lee: Yeah, they shortened it. That's cute, I guess. They call it Mu. It's kind of like Atlantis, and someday it will rise again. I went out with some friends and visited them. The lady was super nice, like she grew up in the faith, if you will. So it was like, I was like, oh, your whole life has been in this world and she seems happy and honestly to be an older person and to be in a community, that's not a bad thing, really. You know what I mean?

Evans: There are also, bizarrely, several restaurants tied to organizations deemed cults. There's the Yellow Deli in Vista run by the Twelve Tribes, a New Christian Movement.

Lee: The Yellow Deli is awesome. Like the food is good. The prices are pretty decent. It's so whimsical, and it's open 24 hours.

Evans: Then there's Jyoti-Bihanga in Normal Heights, a vegetarian restaurant — shout out to their Neatloaf Sandwich. It's operated by followers of an Indian spiritual leader and meditation teacher, Sri Chimnoy, who teaches mindfulness and peace, though there have been abuse allegations against him. And that's the case with more than one of these groups.

And this is just scratching the surface of all the cults that exist in our area. Why do we have so many here?

Laycock: You know, the first groups to begin to be labeled as cults in the late 1800s were in California and had members who were from China and Japan. So I think the biggest single factor here is just that California is the gateway to the Pacific and the gateway to Asia, right? And so if you were interested in different religions — religions that Americans don't know much about — you go to California.

Evans: So California is a bonafide cult capital. Let's back up for a minute and talk about the word cult because Joseph is not a big fan of it.

Laycock: So in my field of religious studies, we don't like the term cult.

If you call something a cult, all I really know is that you do not like it. The word cult, it comes from the Latin cultus, which is related to our word, like cultivate, like to care for something. So if you were a pagan, you know, you would go to the temple of Zeus and you would cultivate Zeus, right?

And it's really around the very end of the 1800s when this word cult comes to mean what it does today of being something that professes to be a religion, but is in fact illegitimate and corrupt and evil and also smacks of insanity, right? But now people will say, well, multilevel marketing groups are cults and MAGA supporters are in a cult, fans of Taylor Swift are cultists.

So we wanted a term to replace the word cult, and they came up with this term new religious movement. But this term has its own set of problems. It's not much better, right? So when I teach a class called New Religious Movements, I talk about Scientology and Wicca and the Branch Davidians and Satanism, and the students love it 'cause they love all these groups that they never get to talk about. But these groups have almost nothing to do with each other. The only thing that they all have in common is they freak out mainstream Americans.

Evans: That problem becomes clear when we look at the groups Cora visited in San Diego. It's hard to draw much of a connection between them. Some, like the Twelve Tribes who run the Yellow Deli, have disturbing allegations of child abuse. But others, like the Lemurian Fellowship with their fantastical Atlantis City of Mu and the Unarians with their Rodin sculptures, seem harmless. Yes, their beliefs might seem strange, but through a certain lens, all religions do.

Laycock: Yeah, so all major world religions start off as weird persecuted cults. So kind of like the paranormal, the category paranormal, this is also a moving target. You know, these new religious movements, these are alternative ways of organizing your life, organizing society. And they're kind of laboratories. These are different ways of prioritizing what really matters in your life. And I think part of the kind of shock and anxiety about cults comes from an assumption of, no, no, no, no, the only legitimate way anyone could possibly live their life is go to college, get a middlec-lass job, start working on your 401K, have 2.5 kids, get a mortgage, right? And if you're not doing that, you're just insane. Right? But it may so happen that for some people, you know, organizing your life around spiritual advancements or mystical states or feelings of connection to other people or to the universe or to God or spirits, that that is easily as fulfilling as a sort of traditional American life path and perhaps more fulfilling. When someone says, I'm really, really happy in this group, we should also, you know, consider the possibility that that might be true. This might be a good choice for them.

Evans: Psychics, ghosts and cults are all outlandish ideas. In many situations, the safest social move is to denounce them to say, of course you don't believe. But they're also deeply natural — and old — human ideas. As producer Anthony and I learned in our conversation with Joseph, for him, a professor, an academic, the right approach is not to reject these ideas completely.

Anthony Wallace: It's kind of like a personal question, but you know, as someone that's spent so long studying this, do you believe in presence? Do you believe there are spirits with agency among us on Earth?

Laycock: I believe in — well, so we're talking about epistemology. Epistemology is how do you know what's real? And I believe in what we call epistemological modesty, right? Which is, it's hard to know what's real. It's certainly hard to prove things. So I'm not sure, you know, the answer to your question is: It depends on the day.

But my father-in-law passed away January 1 of this year. And the nurses said, we need your help to open the window, because this person just passed. And I said, is this like hospital procedure? Like why do I have to do this? It's a nurse thing. Just open the window. And they didn't say it, but this was to let the spirit out, right? To let the spirit escape. And then my father-in-law was a golfer. And as I pulled into the hospice right on the day that he died, I got this text message from an unknown number and it said, what time are we golfing tomorrow? And you know, it may have just been some phishing scam, right? But certainly I had the experience of feeling presence, right? Being there in the room when my father-in-law died, right? And I think that that's a very human way to experience the world.

Wallace: Yeah, I'm in the exact same place as you: depends on the day, but open to it, but probably mostly not. But I had a similar experience, my grandma was in the hospital with COVID and then, you know, that day that she died, I didn't even know she died yet. I was on a boat in the ocean in the Bay. I was just looking out at the water. I was thinking about her. And then there was a boat that floated by us that had the name Sylvia Ann on it. That was the name of the boat, and that's her first and middle name.

Laycock: Wow.

Evans: The lines between natural and supernatural and between cult and religion can be blurry. There is still so much we don't know about human consciousness. And one thing to keep in mind as you contemplate the strange and spooky this Halloween: Many of the things that we now accept as truth — whether it's sleep paralysis, orangutans, even the concept of gravity — all started out as wild ideas once called the occult.

Laycock: An obstacle to knowing the truth about the world is that we like to feel that things are settled and we don't like to be open-minded. We don't like to consider the idea that we might be wrong, but unless we're open to the possibility that we could be wrong, we never make any progress.

[Music]

Evans: Special thanks to Cora Lee and Joseph Laycock for their help with this episode.

Next week on The Finest, a century ago, Alice Barnett was a famous San Diego composer known across the country. Today, she's almost entirely forgotten. We dive into the dynamics of fame and legacy. Why are some famous people remembered for centuries while others fade away? And the stars of today, will they still be known generations down the line? We asked experts on fame and memory, and their answers might surprise you. And we talked to a local historian and musicologist who is bringing Alice Barnett's lost music back to life.

Katina Mitchell: So I started researching her and decided to bring back her music because I liked it. I thought it's worth knowing. People should know about her.

Evans: I'm your host Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.