ALL I really could remember of Sylvanus Reed was the office at the back of the house with the old black phone and the sprawling desk and the faded sepia photograph on the wall of a man in shorts, taken while he was fighting in the First World War in Iraq.

I knew he built that office. He built that house and he built his own small building business from nothing. I knew by the time he died he was a short, rounded, bald man, though I didn't even remember what he died of. I was five years old. He was my grandfather.

These last few weeks, I have learned a lot that was probably true about him, and a lot that was not true. My journey into the world of Sylvanus Reed started with the psychic on the phone who told me I had a man with me, an old man from the maternal side of the family. Fastidious was the word he used for him. "A clean and fastidious man."

I put this to my mother.

"No. That's not him. He was a mess. There was only one seat in the living room he was allowed to sit in because he always came in so dirty."

The psychic, I inform her, told me I had got my own fastidious cleanliness habits from him.

My mother looks at my dust-caked floor. "Maybe you did."

These days, it is almost as common to talk about going to see a psychic as it is to talk about going to church. A survey conducted in 2003 found that more people now believe in the paranormal than in God. The official mainstream acceptance of each, however, does not reflect this.

One is considered a belief system, the other mere superstition, a strange lunacy of the credulous, the trash end of spirituality. On television, programmes like Colin Fry's The Sixth Sense, a show in which one man communicates the words of the dead to an audience, are preceded by the message, "This programme is for entertainment only. Different opinions exist as to the true nature of clairaudiants and clairvoyants." Yet Christianity and mediumship share many of the same basic beliefs - that there is an afterlife and that our spirit continues after death. They respond to the same desires, seduce us with the same promise.

Psychics and mediums have made a recent shift into the mainstream.

Perhaps they were always there, lurking in the background of conventional religion. Now psychic fairs, events like the one taking place in Glasgow next weekend, have replaced the fairground caravan as a venue for tarot-card reading. The television studio stands in for the spiritualist meeting hall or Victorian parlour room. Perhaps the biggest sign of the popularity of mediumship, is the success of Living TV, which doubled its audience when it introduced its Paranormal Zone and has now become one of the most watched channels on satellite television. It is mediumship-based shows such as Most Haunted, John Edwards Crossing Over, and Colin Fry's Sixth Sense, that are reminding us how much we like the idea that the dead live on.

Many are cashing in on the trend. This February, Vince Stanzione, CEO of TV Commerce, launched Your Destiny TV, an interactive psychic channel on Sky Digital. He recalls how he was looking for an interactive concept that would work on live television. "Obviously the telephone line services have been around for a long time and it was the next step on. It was an idea I'd had for a while." So successful have these shows been that there is now even a BBC Three spoof, High Spirits With Shirley Ghostman. Chris French, professional sceptic and lecturer in anomalistic psychology at Goldsmith's College, was invited to appear on this and he was told he was being filmed talking to a psychic for a documentary on spirituality. "Shirley kept saying things like, 'I feel your pain. I feel your shame. From your back she did look very like your wife.' I got quite angry at this point, not realising this was

a spoof. It just shows what you can get away with. A good cold reader and a good psychic will fool more people than a poor cold reader or a poor psychic, but you have to be really terrible for everyone to say that you're just rubbish."

Not everyone, of course, who tunes in to paranormal shows, necessarily believes. Watching either Edwards or Fry, the immediate impression is that the shows are over-edited, and that a great deal of psychic misfires have ended up on the cutting room floor. There are, however, those who do believe - enough to want a reading themselves.

But how do they work out who to go to? It is, of course possible to look a few numbers up in the yellow pages, but most names in the psychic world develop by word of mouth. I chose to visit four Scottish psychics who have developed some credibility within the field. I should probably start by saying I'm fairly sceptical, but then, who isn't? Each of the four psychics I interviewed told me they were also sceptical. "I'm quite a sceptical person, " confirms Katie Coutts, who writes a column for the Sun. "I need to see it myself to believe it."

"Nobody can be more sceptical than I am, " says Gordon Smith, also known as the psychic barber. "But you try making this up in front of 5000 people."

"I'm a typical Aquarian. I'm a sceptic, " says Seonaid Peat, who works in Livingston under the name of Francesca.

As psychology lecturer Chris French says, "That's a standard kind of line and when you think about it what else could they say? They're not going to say, 'Me? I'm really gullible'."

I begin my trail. Scottish psychic Katie Coutts tells me that I can't record my reading because it will interfere with what she is picking up from the spirits. From her home near Dundee she conducts readings for pounds-85 a time. She was, she says, the first psychic to have her own column in a newspaper, and it has been running in the Sun for just over ten years. She is now in the process of launching her own psychic magazine.

She receives many approaches by letter. "I'm fat, fed-up and divorced, " said one she received recently. "Five years ago I was fat, fed-up and divorced. In ten years' time I will be fat, fed-up and divorced." The job, she says, is a bit like being a psychic therapist. She does not aim to tell a person's fortune, but to extract as much information from them as possible and then tell them what they should be doing. She tries this on me and I immediately get the feeling that her advice is no better or worse than I could get from any stranger at a bus stop. The most interesting thing she tells me is that I have been abused or was an abuser in my past life. I feel we are fumbling around blindly. Perhaps my problems are not exciting enough for a Katie Coutts reading. On to the next one.

I have a man and a dog with me, Margaret Solis says mid-way through an explanation of what a clairvoyant really is, and already I assume it is Sylvanus Reed. I almost want it to be him. But this man is a tall man. He died of a brain haemorrhage. He is a Taurus. None of my grandparents were Taurus.

Solis is the full package. If you want the woman with the crystal ball and wind chimes, the modern-day equivalent of a Gypsy Rose Lee, then this is it. She is also very funny. Her clairvoyant nights, performed in front of a group of several hundred people, each paying pounds-20 a time, to have the opportunity to come up and ask a question, are half-comedy act half-reading.

As for my own reading, edited highlights include: "I think your last eight years have been complete and total shit."

"I actually see you around Lancashire. Way back around another time.

If you went to Lancashire, you would get feelings."

"He's got a slight accent. He might be from here but I don't think so.

You don't really like British men anyway. They don't work out for you. Try another country."

Solis had her big revelation about her psychic powers while she was living in Spain. Before that she'd had glimmerings of powers; as a child she saw her dead grandmother in a wheelchair. She has also done tarot readings for friends, but never really took it seriously. Solis grew up in Dennistoun in the east end of Glasgow, the daughter of a Protestant, and throughout her childhood thought she would never leave the area. Yet somehow, she ended up in Barcelona with a splitting headache that wouldn't go away. "I was in denial, " she says.

She went to see a group of healers. "These three women were illiterate; they didn't know how to read or write, they only knew how to heal. I walked in and I was sitting there waiting. I said 'My head's worse'. I said, 'I can't stay'. All of a sudden the doors opened and the three women came out. They looked at me and said, 'You with the light round your head, we've been waiting on you. Come in.' The middle one came over and she said, 'Get into that room. Do you know who your guide is?' I said, 'He looks like a priest or something but he hasn't got a collar'. She said, 'It's St Anthony of Padua. He's come with you and he told us you were coming'."

For me she delivers a little of the love and career routine: MS: Does he travel?

VA: To be honest I wouldn't say there's a single man in my life.

MS: See the last man, did he travel?

VA: Maybe just in his mind.

MS: Has there been a Virgo in your life?

VA : No.

MS: Right, you wait for Virgo and the sign of Cancer and you've to stop spending on your credit card as well.

A session with Solis costs pounds-70 a time.

Number three: Seonaid Peat. When Peat first contacted her husband Jamie, it was through a personal ad on the internet. When the email from him arrived, she almost didn't open it. When she did, she replied, "I'm going to pre-empt you right now. I'm one of these people who, as my children put it, speak to the dead. Having said that, I might hear funny voices, but when I'm out in company I don't speak to imaginary people."

Peat is an elegant, slender woman with a gentle, whispered voice. She orders a wine then takes me through to a small dining room in the Livingston hotel where she is conducting her readings on a Friday night.

She also does readings in the powder room of Club Earth, one weekend a month. Her manner is warm and intimate. If I ever were to go to a genuine psychic, I suspect it would be her. Even in telling her childhood tales, she seems strangely genuine It was only, she says, in early puberty, she had a series of nightmares over the course of a week, that her parents realised that there was anything strange happening with her.

"I dreamt about a really bad accident. Every night for a week I woke up screaming. It felt as if I was there. It sounds horrible, I felt as though I was splashed with the blood. I could feel it, I could smell it." At the end of the week, a soldier who had borrowed a jeep crashed on the singletrack road near their home and died.

These days, she says she still hears voices. Walking down the street she might catch a name or a vision as she passes someone by. What do they sound like? "They sound just like you or me. I'm never quite sure whether they're in my head or just beside my head, but it's there. I hear them and it's a bit like watching a television screen. I get an impression of them." Halfway through doing a tarot card reading for me she gets one such impression. While staring at the hermit card she starts to smile.

"And with that, " she says, "I'm getting a man." Sylvanus Reed again?

My fourth psychic won't give me a reading. Gordon Smith says he reserves that work for people who need it and are referred to him through spiritualist organisations, people who are bereaved and desperately need to contact the other side. He does not charge for these sessions, though I suspect he does make a comfortable living from his books and columns in the Daily Record. We meet in his barber shop on Byres Road. Again, I am struck by his seeming honesty. Smith grew up one of a family of five children, whose mother always said she didn't have time for church. It was in the spiritualist church, however, through a Mrs Primrose, that he first learned his craft. He is one of the few mediums that Chris French seems to be genuinely mystified by. They met on Richard and Judy. "He is impressive. I don't think that what he's doing is cold-reading. I don't know what he is doing. He's either a brilliant

con artist or he's the real thing, " says French.

We talk about death. Smith has recently been writing a book on the subject. Perhaps, I propose, the reason that mediums are so popular is because, in our culture, we are so bad at dealing with death. "It's just this complete horrendous fear, " he says. "I have a good insight into people's reactions to death. Doing this, you do get a good insight into how some turn their life around and how some are held by death. And the thing is to try to get it through to them that they are holding themselves back, nobody else is. One of the strongest points is to remember the person's life rather than get stuck on their death."

The conventional explanation for what psychics are doing is that it is a form of cold-reading, either conscious if they are fraudulent, or subconscious if they are genuine. Cold-reading is the speaking of general truths that might be applicable to almost anyone alongside acute observations made about the person's age, dress and body language.

Chris French believes this is what happens in most psychic readings.

"One of the interesting things about it, is it depends on how willing you are as a listener to play the game. That's the huge difference between the believers and the sceptics - they are biased in the opposite direction.

If I see a psychic, I'm going to concentrate really hard on those things that were wide of the mark and any that do fit I'm going to dismiss as pretty obvious. The true believer is willing to forgive such a lot, " says French.

Bryan McIntosh sits in a cafe in Edinburgh and tells me he is going to do his Mme Za Za routine on the waitress. I have known McIntosh for just over a year. He is a clever, self-educated man with a hundred-mile-an-hour mind, who made a lot of money, invested in property and now works for a youth charity. People say he is psychic. His girlfriend says this, his sister says it. He says he often guesses the exact date of people's birthdays, though he got mine wrong. But McIntosh says he is not a psychic. He is just reading the signs. "When I am analysing you there are literally hundreds and thousands of things that are happening instantly and I'm just registering them subconsciously. But the ones I am registering consciously I can pinpoint."

Ruth, our waitress, walks over to take our order. She is dark haired, tanned and attractive. McIntosh asks if he can ask a few questions. He uses his favourite device, one that he has practised on me many times.

"Tell me what you had for breakfast."

"I've actually not had breakfast yet."

"What did you have for your tea last night?"

"Last night for dinner? Oh, I had . . . honestly? I had a salad with honeysmoked salmon flakes and pitta bread."

Ruth goes to take her next order.

"Now, " says McIntosh. "You can tell a lot about Ruth from the way she structured her sentences. She was very clear and precise. She is linear.

She was quite self-composed. She never made any inquiry." Language is McIntosh's obsession. He reads the other signs: the clothes, the posture, the hand gestures, but it's the way we speak, he believes, that reveals most. "Language is always crucial because it is the thing that can be least hidden. You can wear Armani, Versace, all the emblems of power, but you will always give yourself away. Most psychics are charlatans but un-self-conscious charlatans because they believe their residual selfimage. A lot of the things I do seem like a gift. It appears like a gift, but it isn't a gift. It is just because it is a technique that has been honed and polished so much."

McIntosh likes to self-mythologise. This is a very different sort of selfmythologising from that of the psychic, almost Derren Brown-like in its elevation of the powers of human observation. He is, however, no conjurer or illusionist. When Ruth returns to our table, he asks her when she is going back to Australia (there had been no mention of this earlier).

She says she is going to Sydney. Later, he tells her that she is a creative person and that she likes to wear silver bracelets all the way up her wrist.

She agrees. He tells her that she is a risk-taker. "Ruth loves beautiful things, " he says. "Actually, I just said that to someone. I really love beautiful things. Oh, now I am scared. I'm very scared."

There is undoubtedly something seductive about psychic readings. I give the transcripts of my sessions with the psychics to my mother and ask her to mark them for accuracy. She sits with her sisters and they indulge in a session of family folklore. They enjoy it. "It felt, " said my mother, "like a mystery we had to solve." My mother is not a superstitious woman and yet she was drawn into this psychic vortex. In particular, she felt Seonaid Peat's reading was "much more right than not". Peat had identified my grandfather as a mason, and my mother as a member of the Order of the Eastern Star. She said he had a message for my brother who was thinking of studying law and that it was the right decision. There were other statements, too, some wide of the mark, some accurate. I learned more about my family through discussing this than I had in years of dinner table stories. The end result is not

so much that I feel my grandfather with me, but that I now know my grandfather better. Sylvanus Reed was one of three brothers and two sisters. He was a sentimental man. He liked his machinery and filled the garage with bits of engines. He was always on the phone at tea-time and it drove my grandmother mad. He was not fastidious or clean.

Euro Body and Soul psychic fairs will be held at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall April 30 and May 1; and at Edinburgh Assembly Rooms on May 28 and 29. For details check www. bodyandsoulevents. com Euro An Audience With Margaret Solis will be held on May 5 at The Hilton Aberdeen Treetops. Tickets on 0141 632 25554 or 0791 521 8116 or email margaret. solis@btconnect. com Euro For more information on Katie Coutts see www. katiecoutts. com or contact 01382542921 Euro For more information on Gordon Smith see www. thepsychic barber. co. uk Euro Francesca (Seonaid Peat) can be contacted on 01506 414845