The psychic entertainer

Craig Browning is a busy man. By day, he’s the house psychic at Beneath a Wizard’s Moon, 1980 Mill St. By night, he’s a “psychic entertainer,” doing events including 12-person séance dinner parties at a new restaurant on West Street, the Antiques Café. The 42-year-old was a self-described “Army brat,” and therefore moved around a lot as a kid, although he considers Ohio his home. He’s been in the entertainment biz for 30 years, and he says that things such as his séance parties are just that—entertainment. However, he says his psychic readings and premonitions are the real deal. He can be reached at 324-4211.

I hear that you predicted the World Trade Center tragedy somewhat correctly.

Yes. Me and about five other psychics I’m associated with all had the same premonition of the ground moving, of seeing smoke and fire in the sky and of it being more of a national tragedy. We jumped to conclusions, thinking it would be a volcano or something like that. In the prediction, I stated it would be three to four weeks after that interview [with Bob Garrison] on KBZZ. It was almost four weeks to the hour.

When you predict something like that, how do you feel? Do you get creeped out?

Yeah. I am dealing with one [alarming prediction] right now.

Can you say what it is?

I saw a federal building of some sort. I believe it’s in this region or Northern California. I saw it as a car bomb of some sort. It was an older building with 1950s-type architecture, about eight stories tall.

That’s creepy. Any other predictions you can tell us about?

That’s hard to clarify. In the immediate future, I am not seeing a whole lot of major calamities in this area. I do believe that before the year is out, we will see retaliation [for the bombings in Afghanistan]. I think the West Coast will get hit pretty hard. When I say “West Coast,” I mean San Francisco.

Eek. On a hopefully lighter note, are you picking up anything about [photographer] David Robert or me?

Actually, there’s a lot of mixed energy between the two of you. You two give off complex energy. It’s not a bad thing. You’re opposites in some ways, but you work well as a team, kind of like a battery.

When you talk about energies, what exactly do you mean?

It’s hard to pinpoint. You can see a connection between people and how the energy flows through them, like a current.

Halloween’s coming up. How does that affect you?

It’s my busiest time of year. There are the séance dinners I am doing at the Antiques Café. They’re $35 per head for exactly 12 people. It’s purely entertainment with a macabre twist. I also do a lot of private parties. One of the most popular ones I do is a dinner show called "Murder and the Psychic Detective." As it implies, it’s a murder mystery that works backwards. An audience committee creates the mystery, and I come in as a psychic and solve the crime, including finding the hidden murder weapon.