After years of visiting a sequence of five psychics who shared as much as $25,000 (U.S.) of his money, Jack, a single father seeking to fix a broken relationship, resolved to quit the habit. But that proved far more difficult than he anticipated.

“It becomes an addiction,” says Jack, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity to protect his family. “It’s like gambling; it’s like drugs; it’s like alcohol — you want more.”

Last November, normally aloof New Yorkers were shocked to read that a 33-year-old Internet consultant paid psychics $718,000 to reunite him with a woman who no longer wanted to be in the relationship — even after the woman died.

Niall Rice, a British citizen who made his fortune in search engine optimization, gave one psychic money for a 130-kilometre bridge of gold in another dimension that was to serve as a reincarnation portal.

Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, 26, was sentenced to four years probation for grand larceny after she admitted taking more than $550,000 from Rice.

More in this series:

Inside the secret world of Toronto’s fraudulent fortune-telling industry

What it’s like to see a psychic

Rice told police that he paid Delmaro, whose psychic name was Christina, amounts of $80,000, $90,000 and $100,000 — for the bridge of gold and a $30,000 Rolex — as she promised to find him the reincarnation of “Michelle,” the love of his life.

Rice had previously paid another psychic, Brandy, almost $149,000, including $40,000 for a ring from Tiffany.

“I’d go to Christina and talk about Michelle for an hour and go back to the office. She wouldn’t leave me alone. She was like family,” Rice told the New York Times.

His former roommate, Lauren Horton, told the Times that Rice seemed like a normal guy but she was alarmed when she learned the money he was shelling out.

“It was insane to me,” Horton said. “I told him many times he was out of his mind. He was convinced that if he didn’t pay her for the work she was doing for him, bad things would happen to him,” said Horton, who described Rice’s visits to the psychic as an addiction.

Psychologists concede science still knows little about the reasons why people addictively spend thousands of dollars on psychics. But there is growing interest.

“It certainly has some parallels to the classic addictions — drug addiction and also pathological gambling,” says Dr. James MacKillop, an addiction researcher at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. “Starting small, escalating, developing what we would consider a tolerance, and then feeling that loss of control, engaging in what feels like compulsive behaviour.

“They can offer an almost magical way to restore a relationship. I think even more powerfully, connect with a person who was loved and. . . has now passed away . . . I think that that’s one of the things that makes it so exploitative.”

In a recent scholarly article on behavioural addictions, a French psychologist presents the case of Helen, 45, who, after her divorce at 37, spent up to eight hours at a time on psychic hotlines. She became unable to make trivial decisions without first consulting a fortune teller. According to Marie Grall-Bronnec, Helen’s relationship to fortune telling displays every symptom of an addiction.

Dr. Christian Smith, a brain tumour researcher with the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, has a deep fascination with the psychic realm dating back to childhood. He grew up watching his mother, a renowned psychic in the 1970s and 1980s named Geraldine Smith, give readings.

At age 14, he became a believer as he watched his mother from backstage at Massey Hall as she worked a large audience.

“I’m behind the scenes. I know everything that’s going on and it was that moment when she’s in the crowd of 2,000 people . . . and she’s talking to this one person,” he recalls. “She said the name of the loved one that’s going through this very specific situation and I’m going, ‘Oh my God, how did you know that?’ And then I started paying attention.”

Even today, as a product of rigorous scientific inquiry, he believes psychic intuition is real and even measurable. We just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

“Science is about looking at questions and this is a big question for a lot of people,” he says. “If we start looking in further and trying to find tools, such as functional MRI, that you can actually scan the brain while psychics are doing readings, I think you’re going to start to see this evidence start to emerge over time. So I think it’s a fertile ground for scientists to really think about.”

Smith acknowledges there are plenty of charlatans in the psychic industry.

But he also believes there are those who have developed genuine gifts of psychic intuition. One psychic he consults with has an accuracy rate of as high as 85 per cent, he says.

“It’s a gifted minority that are out there.”

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What they offer, he says, is the hope of answers to our most vexing questions.

“We kind of want to know if there’s something more out there,” he says. “I don’t know that answer.”

Miki Corazza has been in the fortune telling business for 42 years and many desperate people end up at her door with stories of exploitation. She tells them to run.

Corazza draws a clear line between what she offers — counselling, not instructing — and the work of fraudulent fortune tellers who push their victims to pursue a lost love by implying that reconciliation is just around the corner.

“There are people in this business who are not legitimate, and there are people, a lot of people like myself, who are legitimate that have gifts and varying degrees,” she says. “Part of my service is providing empathy and support to people. I’m not in the business of false hope. I’m in the business of truth, whether you like it or not.”

The final straw for Jack was when his savings and line of credit had been gutted. He was behind on child support payments and had to borrow money from his 74-year-old mother, forcing her out of retirement. Even now, she doesn’t know why he needed the money.

Jack gathered everything his fortune tellers had sold him — the oils, herbs, bath salts, crucifixes, candles and charms — and threw it in the garbage.

He met with his fifth psychic one last time.

“I’m tired of this,” Jack recalls saying. “I’m not giving you any more money. Tell me, is she coming back, or not?”

“No,” the woman said. “It’s time for you to move on.”

Among the most common techniques psychics used on clients interviewed in the investigation was the curse of the “evil eye” — a dark spirit that undermines their hopes for love, wealth or success. Such spiritual traditions remains widely practised in Toronto across a wide range of cultures.

“In China, people from all walks of life in their lifetime, including myself, will go to see a fortune teller at least once,” says Donald Chen, founder of Toronto’s Chinese Cultural Association. “We have different perspectives . . . because of our environment.”

Horace Thorne, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Association of Ontario, says people go to psychics for the same reason they go to church — to make their lives better.

And those casting a spiritual lifeline shouldn’t be judged by people who don’t understand them, he says.

Jack, a second-generation Italian was raised Catholic and married into a family of devout, conservative spiritual believers.

The notion of the “evil eye” wasn’t new to him.

“With an ethnic background such as myself … there is the belief … that there were people that could read your future and predict your future,” he says. “I think that does kind of get carried on from generation to generation.”