‘My gut feeling saved me from a plane crash’: The people who think they’re psychic

Two years ago, Clodagh Morgan, 35, was working as a nanny for an Indian family based between Mumbai and London. She would regularly travel to India as part of her job. One day she received an email saying that from then on, the family would be using Air India rather than British Airways.

She didn’t think much of it, but, at around the same time, Morgan’s day-to-day experience of life started changing as she went through what she describes as her spiritual awakening. “I used to think people who were like I am now were very weird,” she says.

Morgan initially worried she was going mad as strong, insistent voices started reaching her. One particularly powerful voice told her very firmly to never board an Air India flight again. Morgan asked her employers whether she could possibly fly a different route and they said no. Reluctantly, she gave up the job.

Months later, when an Air India flight crashed with mass casualties, Morgan realised she had originally been scheduled to return from Mumbai at almost exactly the same time. “That was an insane day for me,” she says. “I loved my job and didn’t want to quit, but I do believe in this gift I have.”

In isolation, an incident like this might seem like an odd coincidence. But more and more people are starting to feel that they are a regular occurrence. A recent study showed that 19% of adults now claim they are “basically psychic”, a figure that increases to 30% for respondents in their 20s. In the same survey, people in their 20s reported roughly two “psychic moments” a month, more than double the rate experienced by baby boomers.

When we think of psychics, most of us tend to imagine someone draped in scarves, with a ring on every finger, speaking to the dead or visualising past lives. But in this survey, many people who call themselves psychic seem to be describing a feeling that is closer to intuition, or even hyper-vigilance, than anything supernatural. A third of respondents say they “know when something feels off” and a further quarter say they either “sense dishonesty” or “know when to walk away from a person or situation”.

Alexandra Dudley, who is a chef and food writer living in west London, believes her own powers lie mostly in the ability to predict when something is about to go wrong. One night, years ago, she woke up and found herself unable to get back to sleep. As she tossed and turned, she started thinking about her old boss, Catherine*, whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. Dudley reached for her phone, saw it was nearly 5am and decided to text her, not expecting the message to be read until much later. Immediately, Catherine replied, explaining that she was wide awake because her husband was missing and the police were searching for him.

“I honestly believe there was an energy telling me I had to support her through the terrible thing that was about to happen,” says Dudley, 36, who knew immediately that Catherine’s husband had died. She was right. The two women stayed in touch all morning – and a few hours later, the police found him, lifeless.

Now, as a married mother of one, Dudley’s predictions are often centred on her own family. For a few weeks last summer, she became fixated on the idea that she needed to register her baby daughter with a dentist. “She only had five teeth at the time, but I felt urgent about it,” says Dudley. “A few days later, she was at the playground and got pushed over and knocked her teeth out, leaving her root canal exposed.” Dudley, who hadn’t in fact found a dentist beforehand, frantically tried to locate a practice that would take her on, and eventually found a dentist willing to help.

Historically, people have been more likely to believe that they and others have the ability to predict the future during periods of instability. There was a marked rise in spiritualism after the horrors of the First World War, and millions of grieving families in Britain and America found themselves fascinated by séances and mediums. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has written about how his obsession with communicating with the dead grew after he lost friends during both the war and Spanish flu pandemic.

Similarly, astrology, New Age spirituality and occult publishing surged in popularity during the economic and cultural instability of the 1970s, as inflation combined with declining religious certainty and social upheaval.

Covid followed the same pattern. During the pandemic, as ordinary routines collapsed and people lost jobs and even close relatives, the future felt unpredictable. Soon, larger swathes of the population started turning to psychics, astrology and “manifestation” for structure. Google searches for tarot and birth charts rose sharply, while apps such as Co-Star and The Pattern saw huge growth. TikTok’s “WitchTok” community also exploded into billions of views.

Lizzy Smythe’s belief in her own psychic powers began in this period. She was living with her then-boyfriend in a flat in south London and became convinced that something bad was going to happen to the woman upstairs, despite the fact she was a healthy 30-something. “I would bore my boyfriend by going on about it,” she says. “He kept saying she was no more at risk from Covid than we were, which was true. But I just knew, so eventually I told her I’d had these premonitions.”

In February 2021, Smythe’s neighbour did nearly die – not from Covid but from an ectopic pregnancy. Later, the woman, who lived alone, told Smythe that she had only called an ambulance when she felt a pain in her side because of what Smythe had said, and that it had likely saved her life.

In the years since then, Smythe, 29, has noticed that in certain houses or buildings – particularly those that date from the Victorian period or before – she suddenly feels cold and tense. “I sense this heavy energy in specific rooms,” she says. “I start shivering and have this strong instinct to leave.”

Often, she will research the property in question and uncover a distressing story. Earlier this year, she had a short relationship with a man who lived in central London. She hated his apartment and later discovered the building had once housed a brothel for underage girls, and the now chi-chi passage filled with coffee shops had been known in that time as “Murderer’s Alley”.

While research consistently shows that women are more likely to believe in the supernatural, a number of men also say they have psychic powers. Nate, 27, lives in Brighton and has developed what he describes as the ability to understand someone’s core character as soon as he meets them.

Once, he correctly predicted that a very friendly-seeming man would later break his friend’s heart in a callous way, all within seconds of being introduced. He also knew that a new staff member – who everyone else liked initially but who would later be accused of bullying – would cause a great deal of unhappiness at the restaurant where he worked.

“It’s like I can see into their souls even when they are presenting themselves as kind, lovely people,” says Nate. “It’s very useful but it also makes me wary of people, because if my gut tells me not to trust them then I find it very difficult to disregard that.”

Psychologists would argue that rather than tapping into a psychic energy, many of these experiences are examples of pattern-recognition: we remember the one eerie coincidence and forget the hundreds of instincts that led nowhere.

Human beings are also natural pattern-seekers, especially during periods of stress, when our brains make constant predictions based on tiny cues we barely register.

But for Morgan, her ability to connect to a higher power is also a way to feel present in an increasingly siloed and digital world. Recently, she has been getting messages not just via voices, but also from trees and animals.

“Everything is changing so fast, and I feel the current culture is very judgmental and fear-based,” she says. “But talking to nature like I do creates that sense of awe that takes you out of your body and into the present moment.”

That being said, the trees have also given Morgan an uncanny ability to predict major news events. In early April this year, she was walking in her local park and leaned against an old oak trunk and believes it told her that someone was going to attempt to assassinate US President Donald Trump. Weeks later, shots rang out at the Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington as a gunman tried, and failed, to enter the dining hall.

Morgan was largely unperturbed, as she expected the prediction to come true, but she emphasises that she isn’t special. “Everyone has the ability to do this,” she says. “Some people just don’t want to engage. For a long time I didn’t – but once you do, you discover an extraordinary world out there.”