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I'm definitely on the fence when it comes to psychics. I've seen Edwards thoroughly debunked as a warm and even hot reader, and not even a very good one at that. His skill is in disorienting the client with a particularly quick flurry of questions, combined with some skillful editing that makes him look pretty good on tape. As the client tends to ignore the misses and grab onto hits, he and others in his niche get more leeway with their customers.
As with psychicckick, it was a book that turned me away from cynicism (which I think has far more overlap with skepticism than the skeptic crowd is willing to acknowledge). A series of books, actually, written by Beth Scott and Michael Norman, starting with Haunted Heartland. Unlike so many other "true account" compilations I've come across, Norman and Scott soberly investigate each phenomenon like professional journalists. There's no campfire cheesiness, no wishy-washy New Agey stuff (not that New Age material is necessarily "wishy-washy," of course), and no sensational speculation, unlike Hanz Holzer, who almost always places himself egotistically in the middle of the action, in my experience.
The cover art for all of Norman's and Scott's Haunted series is unfortunately extremely heavy-handed, which is why I think their work has been mostly overlooked, as it would immediately be categorized by a bookstore browser as being on the opposite end of the non-fiction spectrum, and hardly worth a serious peek.
So, although I still do not believe in physics as a profession and don't think I ever will, I think there's a lot more going on than most of us are aware of, and some people are definitely able to tap into that.
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