The $10,000-a-Month Psychic

Day's career as a professional psychic began in the early 1990s. Her marriage had ended, leaving her strapped for cash until she asked a hedge-fund friend if he'd mind paying her for the stock tips she occasionally gave him. He was happy to. Later she spun her abilities into a book, "Practical Intuition," which became a New York Times best seller and formed the basis of Day's thriving seminar business. Today she trains members of the Harvard Business School Network of Women Alumnae to use their sixth sense. In one of the Harvard group's monthly sessions, recalls participant Karen Page, the women were asked to intuit the mystery item in a brown paper bag. Without touching or sniffing it, they came up with "yellow," "sour" and "fruit" for what turned out to be a lemon. She's also advised celebrities such as Jennifer Aniston and Demi Moore. Working entirely by referral, Day says she has earned more than $10 million in the past 15 years (a figure impossible to verify—our psychic powers aren't that great).

The scale of Day's success would have been hard to imagine in the 1990s, when the Psychic Friends Network and a campy Jamaican psychic called Miss Cleo clotted the airwaves with low-rent infomercials, giving the P word a bad public image. Some stigma still remains. "The hedge funds would freak out" if they knew he consulted a psychic, says the Hollywood executive.

But just as there are no atheists in foxholes, a bleak business climate can make believers out of anyone. Carla Baron, the psychic star of Court TV's "Haunting Evidence"—a documentary about her work helping police investigators crack cold cases—says that roughly half the 20 to 30 readings she gives each week are now business-related. Mentalist Jon Stetson says that after years of performing on cruise ships and in the "saddest" comedy clubs, he now has a Rolodex of businesses, including Fortune 500 companies, that call him for Intuition Workshops—which differ only in name, he says, from psychic workshops. "There's a ton of interest," says the Boston-based 48-year-old. "It's a new frontier."

The relationship between psychics and the powerful has always been close. In the Bible, Joseph found favor with Pharaoh by uncannily interpreting the Egyptian leader's dreams. Centuries later, the supposed forecasting abilities of Nostradamus and the "mad monk" Rasputin endeared both men to the upper classes. In America, according to Catherine Albanese, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, belief in metaphysical powers dates back to the country's founding and shows "every sign of flourishing into any future that can be foreseen." That's especially true during times of great change or distress—war and recession—when people are looking to make sense of the uncertainty, Albanese says. Surveys show that two out of three Americans believe in the value of psychic insight, according to Michael Shermer, author of "Why People Believe Weird Things."

Helping to create a favorable climate for intuitionists are the number of politicians and corporate titans who talk openly these days about "gut feeling," intuition's more masculine-sounding counterpart. President George W. Bush has told The Washington Post that he's a "gut player," while Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff last summer warned of an increased risk of a terrorist strike—insight he attributed to a "gut feeling." Like Bush and Chertoff, Day doesn't always make accurate predictions, though she admits as much. "If I were God," she says, "I'd be charging more."

© 2008