The Psychic Abilities of James Van Praagh - Unsolved Mysteries

James Van Praagh

A psychic claims his paranormal abilities enable him to contact the spirits of the dead.

James Van Praagh

Can James communicate with the dead?

CASE DETAILS

On April 24, 1994, in Burbank, California, a collage of photographs celebrated the brief life of a young man named Don Raskin. One week earlier, the 32-year-old brilliant attorney and accomplished outdoorsman had fallen to his death while climbing Mount Fuji in Japan. Doug’s parents, Sue and Don Raskin, were shattered by his untimely death.  Sue searched for answers:

“It just seemed like nobody could comfort us, and one of my relatives had mentioned James Van Praagh, who was a medium, and I kind of picked up on it real fast because I was looking for anything or anybody who could help Don and I at this time.”

But Don wasn’t so sure:

“I couldn’t imagine anybody having the ability to be able to see somebody in another place, and I was very, very skeptical.”

Before their meeting with James Van Praagh, the Raskins gave the psychic no details whatsoever about themselves or their son. Throughout the reading, the Raskins were impressed with Van Praagh’s knowledge of their son’s death, but that wasn’t all that amazed Don:

“When he told us about these events and named all the people that had been gone for many, many years, he was able to get their personalities so right-on. There’s just no possible way.”

James Van Praagh says he’s a clairsentient and clairvoyant:

“I’m an individual who senses feelings and emotions with spirit people, people that pass to the other side. I’m a sensitive. I’m able to pick up their thoughts, and I feel their emotions when they come through. And that’s what I relate to people.”

For the Raskins, any residual doubts that they may have had were erased when Van Praagh spoke of another family tragedy that had occurred 33 years earlier:  Sue’s miscarriage:

“I had completely forgot about that, because I was there only for Doug, and I said, ‘What?’ I made him repeat it. He said, ‘Your daughter’s all grown up today.’ I said, ‘Oh, my god, he knows about our daughter.’ Then I became a believer.”

The session brought enormous comfort to Sue and Don, even though Van Praagh was not 100% correct. In fact, Sue felt that he had completely missed the mark when James told them that Doug liked the picture of himself taken at the base of Mt. Fuji. According to Sue, they knew of no such picture:

“Two months after we had been to James, I went to the mailbox and saw an envelope from Japan. I came running into the house…”

As it turned out, Doug’s climbing team had gone back to the spot where their friend perished and found his camera. Inside the package was the exact photograph James Van Praagh had talked about.

Does James Van Praagh have genuine psychic abilities that allowed him to communicate with the dead? Unsolved Mysteries invited 10 people to a session with Van Praagh.  None had ever seen or talked with him before. They all hoped, however, to make contact with specific loved ones who had passed away. The session lasted several hours.

Van Praagh was unaware that a skeptic had been planted in the group. The man, Professor Michael Shermer, investigated claims about psychic phenomena:

“Van Praagh is a mentalist. A mentalist is a magician doing an act. He’s doing what we call “cold reading.”  You meet somebody you’ve never seen before and you tell them things about them. You start general, you throw things out rapid-fire, you watch their facial expressions to see if you’re getting hits or misses. When you get a miss, you go right on to the next thing. When you get a hit, you follow that ‘til the end, until they start saying no again. And then you go to the next thing.  And you keep doing that.”

Van Praagh explained how his abilities worked:

“The reason I ask yes-or-no questions is, number one, I am also very human. I have to validate that what I’m getting from the spirit is indeed on the right level with this individual I’m speaking with. I want to make sure the spirit person is coming through right. The information is correct.”

Stan Wheel attended the séance with his wife, Theresa. They intentionally sat on opposite sides of the room.  The Wheels came to the session hoping to find out about their 19-year-old son Kevin, who had been innocently gunned down by gang members in a drive-by shooting in 1991. Though Stan was skeptical, Theresa was amazed by the reading:

“He said, ‘I see a big K.’ And the first name he said was Kevin. You can’t get that off of  just being in a room. It was just amazing. I think he’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful.”

Skeptic Michael Shermer explained how Van Praagh knew about the Wheel’s son:

“First of all, she had her son’s ring on. Big black ring with a K in diamonds on this ring, on the necklace around her neck. Now, maybe he saw that, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know.  I was watching her eyes. She starts crying. Her eyes are like saucers. And he already knows it’s her son that died. The two most common names for boys starting with a K are Ken and Kevin. He says, ‘Ken or Kevin?’ she says, ‘Kevin.’ Bingo, Kevin.  Now she’ll run home and tell everybody, ‘He got my son’s name right just like that, and I didn’t tell him.’  No, he didn’t get it.”

However, Theresa claimed Van Praagh could not have seen the ring because she kept it hidden in her dress. But perhaps disagreements about details are beside the point. Six of the ten participants felt Van Praagh correctly identified the people that they had hoped to contact, and most felt a sense of comfort and healing. For Van Praagh, that’s enough:

“When one realizes there is a life after death, it indeed will change their life and how they live on the earth and how they treat each other. And that is really my most important belief, my mission.”

Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season seven with Robert Stack and in season eight with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

 

4 Comments

  1. Nick

    James van Praagh is a snake oil salesman. Like all alleged “psychics” who claim to talk to the dead, he’s doing a technique called “cold reading”, wherein the “psychic” asks a bunch of vague questions waiting for the clients to feed him information which he then turns around and uses to guess what to say. Often he relies on information fed to him before his reading. It’s all a combination of being able to read people’s body language and blind luck. It’s a magician’s trick.

    The episode of USM that features him was back in the day before his “gift” got him his television show so you can see how often he gets things wrong. On his show, Van Praagh uses pre-gathered information from the audience via application forms, bugged studios (so he can overhear audience members talking about who they hope to reach). Then, through deceptive video editing, he can make himself look like he is getting “hits” more often than not.

    This guy is making money off the grief of others and perverting their memories of their loved ones.

    Anyone who wants to get in touch with this charlatan should really think twice. If there was anyone in this episode of USM that you should have been listening to is Michael Shermer, the skeptic that USM planted during a seance. He’s been exposing these phonies for decades.

    Reply

  2. Tiffany Horton

    Hello, I wanted to know if there’s anyway I can contact James VanPraagh or if he could contact me to see if he could answer a few questions for me?

    Reply

  3. Dyann Olson

    I have a close personal interest in this case, as Doug was a friend of mine. I was also his secretary when he was a new associate attorney at Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison in Palo Alto, California. He was the nicest person you could ever meet. The claims that Mr. Van Praagh has made are are believable to anyone who knew him well. The claim that Doug traveled world wide and helped people is true. I have photos that will attest to this. In fact, in the months preceding his death, he sent me photos of his trip to China and Tibet. He was a spiritually sensitive individual and his loss was felt by many. Doug spent many evenings at our home and my husband and I became good friends with him. I believe there is much to this thing we call life that we do not understand and I wouldn’t dream of possessing a certainty of knowledge on the mysteries of life – but I do believe the human spirit does not die when the body stops functioning. Unfortunately, speaking the truth about paranormal experiences often fails to translate well. No matter how articulate our attempt to explain an experience is, we just end up coming off a little fruity to someone who has not had a similar experience. I think Mr. Praagh is a brave man to go public with his gift and I’m glad that Doug followed his parents to their meeting with him. I hope they have found peace; for losing a son is a very heavy matter and Doug was a good son who held his family close to his heart.

    Reply

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6.1 We may use your IP address to administer our Website, to help diagnose problems with our server, to analyze trends, to track users’ webpage movements, to help identify you and your shopping cart, and to gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.

ARTICLE 7. Cookies
7.1 This Website may use a standard technology called a “cookie” to collect information about how you use the Website. Cookies reside on your computer and help our Website to recognize your computer’s browser as a previous visitor. This information allows us to customize delivery of information. For example, our Website may use cookies to save and remember registration information or preferences that you may have set while browsing the Website, to keep track of your shopping cart, to ensure you don’t see the same ad content repeatedly, to deliver content specific to your interests, and to save your password so you do not have to re-enter it each time you visit our site. We use cookies only to gather information as indicated in this policy.

7.2 In addition, on occasion our site may also set a “session cookie” which helps us administer the Website. The session cookie expires when you close your browser and does not retain any information about you after it expires.

7.3 Finally, we may also use an ad network provider to help present advertisements on this and other Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. websites. This ad network provider, like other advertising service vendors, uses cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies on the hard drive of your computer to serve you advertisements tailored to interests you have shown by browsing on this and other sites you have visited, and to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and to avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. In doing so, the provider collects non-personal data such as your browser type, your operating system, web pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed, and other clickstream data. The use of cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies by these ad network providers is subject to their own privacy policies, not ours, and Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. assumes no responsibility for the collection or use of such information.

ARTICLE 8. Banner Advertising
8.1 We have contracted with an ad-service to place banner advertising on our Website. All of the data provided and generated by the ad-server software remains in our possession. This feature of our Website may, on occasion, set “cookies” on your computer. Any information collected or stored by the ad-service or the cookies is treated in the same manner as other information described in this statement.

ARTICLE 9. Children’s Personal Information
9.1 Consistent with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act:

9.1.1 This site does NOT collect, use, or disclose personal information (including online contact information) of children under the age of thirteen (13).

9.1.2 In the event that a child under the age of 13 attempts to register on our site, we will NOT accept the registration and will delete information received from the child.

9.1.3 In the event that a child posts personal information in a public forum such as a chat room, we will attempt to delete that information once we become aware of it.

ARTICLE 10. Security of Your Personal Information
10.1 Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. employs reasonable security measures consistent with standard industry practice, for information collected through this Website. We believe that we have adequate security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of the information we collect on our Website. We also use internal protections to limit access to users’ personal information to only those employees who need the information to perform a specific job.

ARTICLE 11. Sale or Merger
11.1 If this Website is sold to, or merges with, another company not owned by Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc., you should expect that some or all of the information collected from this Website may be transferred to the buyer/surviving company. If so, CMP will seek to obligate the acquiring company to use any personal information transferred by this Website in a manner consistent with this statement, but cannot guarantee that it will be able to impose that requirement or that the acquiring company will comply.

ARTICLE 12. Legal Process
12.1 You should be aware that Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. may be required to disclose your personal information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, such as in court or regulatory proceedings.

ARTICLE 13.  Contacting the Website

13.1        If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement, the practices of this Website, or your dealings with this Website, please contact us at: unsolved@unsolved.com.

ARTICLE 14.  general information

14.1        Choice of Law:  This Agreement and the Additional Terms shall be governed by, construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of California , as it is applied to agreements entered into and to be performed entirely within such state, without regard to conflict of law principles.

14.2        Choice of Forum:  You agree that any cause of action you or Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. brings to enforce this Agreement and/or the Additional Terms, or in connection with any matters related to this Website and/or the Privacy Statement, shall be submitted to arbitration in the County of Los Angeles, State of California, United States of America in accordance with the commercial rules and regulations of the American Arbitration Association then in effect (as amended herein), provided that said arbitration shall be heard before a single arbitrator, who shall be a retired judge, selected pursuant to such rules and regulations, and shall be conducted on an expedited basis and in confidence. The arbitrator’s decision shall be controlled by the terms and conditions of this agreement and any other agreements I may enter into with you, and shall be final and binding, and shall provide for each party to bear its own costs of arbitration and attorneys’ fees.  Each party expressly waives any right to a jury.  Judgment upon the award of the arbitrator may be entered or enforced in any court of competent jurisdiction. 

14.4        If any provision of this Agreement, or the application thereof to any person or circumstances, is held invalid or for any reason unenforceable then such provision shall be deemed superseded by a valid, enforceable provision that matches, as closely as possible, the original provision, and the other provisions of this Agreement shall remain in full force and effect.  The failure of either party to insist upon strict performance of any provision of this Agreement shall not be construed as a waiver of any provision or right.  Unless expressly provided otherwise, this Agreement is the entire agreement between you and Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. with respect to the use of this Website and shall not be modified except in writing, signed by an authorized representative of Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc.

ARTICLE 15.  European Union and Other Foreign Nations

15.1        This Website is governed by and operated in accordance with the laws of United States of America and is intended for enjoyment of residents of the United States.  Cosgrove Meurer Productions, Inc. makes no representation that this Website is governed by or operated in accordance with the laws of other nations.  By using this Website and submitting any personal information, visitors from outside of the United States acknowledge this Website is subject to U.S. law, consent to the transfer of personal data to the U.S., and waive any claims that may arise under their own national laws.