The Practical Psychic A No-nonsense Guide to Developing Your Natural Ability with Noreen Renier, Psychic Detective

“Some people seem to want the illusions of mysterious rites and magic potions. They think we psychics hover over a Ouija board, reaching across the border of consciousness into the occult, reaching into the “dark side.” Some think we’re evil. These people find it hard to accept we all possess psychic ability. It’s not a gift a few lucky individuals have acquired through “magic.

Psychic ability has many names, and most people have experienced it or used it unconsciously: those sudden hunches, thoughts or flashes of insight, intuition, and moments of inspiration. It’s all coming from the same place: the right hemisphere of our own 8-pound universe—the brain.” -- Noreen Renier, Psychic Detective, A Mind for Murder

Noreen Renier is not your run-of-the-mill psychic detective. A successful young public relations executive and mother of two, Renier considers herself a born skeptic. But the sudden onset of psychic abilities changed not only her beliefs but the course of her life and career. As she followed her new path to see where it might lead, she found herself with a remarkable career spanning more than three decades and still going strong. Her work helping distraught clients and police with dead-end cases has been the subject of numerous media stories, and her cases have been featured in television documentaries and true crime books. Her integrity has been backed repeatedly by FBI and police officials, and Court TV online recently called her “the most credible psychic out there.”

For Renier, murder, mayhem, and strange forces are not the stuff of fiction, she has experienced them all personally, through reliving the violence perpetrated on others. As Renier is the first to say, she does not solve crimes—the police do that. But she does provide information that has led them to the documented solution of unsolved crimes. She has earned the respect of many law enforcement officials who were hardened skeptics until they met Noreen.

Until the age of 30, Noreen Renier led an ordinary life. A divorced mother of two girls, she worked as public relations and advertising director of an Orlando hotel. Her life was relatively uneventful until one day, at a gathering with friends, her psychic abilities literally burst from her, unbidden, as she began to relay messages from a friend’s dead grandmother.

Until that moment, Noreen firmly believed that all psychics were frauds and charlatans. In fact, she had thrown one out of the hotel for that very reason. Now, confused and disturbed by what she had experienced, she wanted to know more. Characteristically, she began to read every book on psychic phenomena she could get her hands on.

From then on, her life took a powerfully different turn. She found mentors, such as forensic anthropologist Dr. David Jones. Tested extensively at Duke University’s respected Psychical Research Institute, she consistently scored high on tests of psychic ability. Eventually, as she devoted more and more time to her new interest and less and less to her work, she lost her job. “This was no surprise,” she recalls wryly, “as I hadn’t worked in three months!”

With two daughters to support, she seized hold of life and bought what she now laughingly calls a “gypsy” outfit—“including the stereotype round gold earrings”—and reinvented herself as a psychic reader at a rival hotel. Using psychometric techniques, she would hold objects in her hand and receive images from them. Her readings were way above the level of “hotel psychic”—they were unnervingly accurate, and soon her reputation spread.

Still, she continued studying and being studied at a number of universities and scientific programs, and eventually, she began lecturing on the subject of psychic ability. One day, she was asked to help track a rapist who had victimized five women in a small town in Virginia. And that was the beginning of a career that would lead her to clients as nearby as her Florida home and as far away as England and Japan.

The story of her transformation from businesswoman to psychic investigator, and the case histories of some of her best-know and strangest cases form the basis for this first-person memoir of crime and the unknown in her book, A Mind for Murder. Her new book, The Practical Psychic, will be out in August. Her website