Sunday, October 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

That's Show Business?

Self-proclaimed psychic medium offers comfort to paying audience

Photos by Samantha Clemens/Review-Journal Over the past year, Australian Margaret Dent has conducted several seminars at Sunset Station, during which she provides psychic readings for audience members. Here, Dent sits in her friend's home, where she stays while in Las Vegas. Margaret Dent, a self-proclaimed clairvoyant, performs a reading for a guest. Margaret Dent also has books for sale.

Margaret Dent sees, and occasionally talks to, dead people.

That's what she tells about 60 people who have come to see her at the 300-seat Club Madrid in Sunset Station, many hoping that Dent will talk to their loved ones to find out how they're doing.

The audience stares transfixed at the grandmotherly figure center stage as she tells them that today, because the audience is small, she will give every person a reading.

Usually, for the $19.95 show, people watch the self-proclaimed psychic medium from Australia stand onstage and answer questions submitted by the audience. An individual reading with Dent costs $200.

After a short introduction and a 10-minute break, Dent spends the next two hours working her way through the guests clustered around small cabaret tables, providing slivers of what she calls insight or knowledge of their deceased loved ones.

A few just want to know if they will receive a promotion or make it through a tough financial or legal situation in the coming weeks. Dent gives them hope by telling them that yes, they will get what they want, and she knows this because she can foretell the future.

Audience members, mostly women, couldn't be more different from each other. Some sit with friends or relatives, even strangers. Two are schoolteachers, one is a massage therapist and electrician, another a psychologist. There's a disc jockey, a hotel worker and a marketing rep.

They gathered on a recent Sunday only because they share a desire for proof that, though Mom or Dad or husband or wife has passed over, they're not suffering in the afterlife. They're all right and they still go on, despite being dead.

Steve Froisland and his sister Wena want to know how their father is doing since he died Sept. 9. It has been only 12 days and even though they knew he was dying of lung cancer, his death wasn't expected on that day. Things were left unsaid.

Dent says she sees a man with a cigar. "Who is that, please?" she asks.

The brother and sister give her confused, but eager, looks. Maybe it's their grandfather, he smoked cigars, Steve Froisland answers.

Their father is with him, Dent continues.

"He's quite emotional because it's been only (12) days," she says, adding that their father is always around them and he's proud of them, but he wants Wena to not play her music so loud, like she did when he was living.

The pugnacious grandmother finishes their three-minute reading with her universal question -- "Do you understand this?" -- before moving on to the next person and the next spirit.

Among the audience: a man who wants to know about his dad and a woman who asks if her father committed suicide. A grieving mother needs to know if her son was killed by his friend. Several daughters seek messages from their fathers to give their mothers.

Dent asks questions: How long has he been gone? Was his death sudden and unexpected? Who is Eddie Bishop? Was he a cobbler?

She doesn't go into much detail, just that Dad or cousin or son is fine, handling the afterlife and oh, it's so great, wish you were here kind of messages.

But for most, that is enough.

"I went in there a skeptic. I left not convinced but curious," Steve Froisland says during a later interview. "Margaret was right on the money with everything she said to us. She definitely has a talent."

Talent is a good way to describe it, according to Michael Shermer, director and creator of the Skeptics Society, an organization devoted to separating fact from fiction in psychic and other paranormal matters.

"They're like comedians and magicians," Shermer says of the psychic mediums he has studied for more than 10 years, including best-selling authors and television gurus John Edward and James Van Praagh. "They watch each other and steal lines. It's an act."

People claiming to converse with the dead have been around for more than 100 years, Shermer says. Magician Harry Houdini devoted much of his life to exposing mediums as charlatans and con artists who spent more time dreaming up ways to fool people than trying to converse with the spirit world.

James "The Amazing" Randi offers a $1 million reward to anyone "who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." The prize has never been claimed.

There is no proof that psychic ability is real or possible. As Shermer puts it: "Anybody can talk to dead people. It's getting them to talk back, that's the hard part."

Dent, Edward and Van Praagh use a variety of techniques, none supernatural, to do what they call communicating with deceased people, Shermer says.

The most common one is a cold reading, in which the medium asks questions, makes suggestions, and guesses and offers general statements that can apply to most people. Essentially, the subject does all the work because he provides answers to the questions. Believers end up thinking the psychic gave them accurate information, forgetting that they were the source, Shermer says.

For the most part, psychics give vague, unimportant statements they claim to receive from spirits, such as "I see some photographs" or "You have a piece of jewelry from your mother," Shermer says.

Those who are grieving may get comfort from these kinds of statements, says local psychologist Mike Sullivan, but psychics can present a danger.

During Dent's September show, she gave people mostly general, positive statements: "Your husband is fine. Your mother is happy. Your father loves you."

Taken alone, these are harmless and even helpful to an extent, Sullivan says, but if a person believes enough to take a private $200 reading, that could add up to trouble.

"The upside is that people are given something helpful and hopeful," Sullivan says. "I think the risk is that people will make decisions about their lives based on false pretenses. I think there are people who would suck you dry."

In a recent interview, Dent says she has been doing psychic readings full time since she was 19. As for critics or skeptics who say psychics aren't real, Dent says she keeps one thing in mind: "Those who believe, they need no proof. For those who don't believe, there is no proof."

Steve Froisland was so impressed with Dent that he considered a private session with her, but couldn't afford it. He says he will go to her October 19 show to find out more about his father.

"He was such a great man there's no way he could die and that's just it. I was looking for a definite answer that there is life after death," says Froisland, adding that he isn't handling his father's death very well. He says he thinks he's 99 percent certain Dent did communicate with his father but he wishes she had told him more.

"I really think he would have chosen better things to say that would have had more of an impact, instead of saying, `Stop playing loud music,' " Froisland says. "But Margaret really has something."

Sullivan wonders why, if Dent is truly psychic, she would choose to leave her native Australia to live, even part time in Las Vegas. But he says he knows all he has to do is "follow the money."

"Who benefits from this? How many people request individual sessions and how much money are they making on those books?" Sullivan asks. During the show, Dent's helpers man a table stacked with copies of her two books and one compact disc about conversing with the dead.

"If you're going to do something like this, Las Vegas would be a great place to do it," Sullivan adds.

In the interview, Dent says she started doing local shows in March, because "I like Las Vegas. It has a fabulous energy. It's a real spiritual hub with a lot of like-minded people here."

Her October show will be her last for the year, as she is returning to Australia to do shows for six months. Dent then plans to come back to Las Vegas. While in town, she stays with friend Garry Douglas, who helps stage the shows at Club Madrid. Dent rents the space at Sunset Station and the casino sells tickets to the shows.

However, Dent refuses to talk about her private readings.

"I've been booked for two years in advance so I don't want anything published about private readings," she says. "It's an impossible situation, I get overrun."

And she bristles at calling her fans followers, saying "they've all got minds of their own."