Why? Thanks to a knowledge about things like cellphones and the light from distant stars, Schwartz says, people have a new understanding of the power of energy. And, he says, there is a pressing interest to find the meaning and purpose of life -- the events of Sept. 11 have only served to deepen that yearning.

Michael F. Brown, a Williams College anthropology professor who wrote a book titled "The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age," says an interest in the afterlife is nothing new. Since the 1850s, when two sisters in New York wowed crowds with their purported ability to communicate with the dead via mysterious tapping noises, Americans have been fascinated, on and off, with spiritualism.

Brown says interest in the phenomenon (which counted a million followers in the 1850s) has coincided with struggles for individualism. During the 1980s and '90s, he says, fascination with after-death communication moved from ashrams into homes and offices. Today, it has become even more commonplace, courtesy of television and the Internet.

The Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera of the psychic world, Edward and Van Praagh have different styles and fan bases, but their talents and their tales of how they came to realize and develop their gifts are quite similar.

Both were raised Catholic in New York. The youngest of four children, Van Praagh had a carpenter stagehand father and an alcoholic mother. Edward was the only child born to a police officer father and an executive secretary mother. Both say they experienced psychic phenomena -- premonitions, visions of dead people, out-of-body experiences -- as young as 4 and 6 years old. Both tried to ignore those things, which frightened and puzzled them. Both claim to have been uninterested in the paranormal until psychics told them (Van Praagh at age 24 and Edward at age 15) that they had unique gifts and would work to help people make connections with the spiritual world.

Both spent years studying and developing their psychic abilities while pursuing mainstream careers. Van Praagh has a degree in broadcasting and moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. Edward has a degree in public health and administration (and a side passion for ballroom dancing) and after college went to work in a hospital. Both worked as mediums in their spare time until the demand for their psychic services became overwhelming and they dropped their day jobs.

Both men claim everyone has psychic abilities that can be honed. They say they merely tune in to the frequency at which the spirit world communicates, then try to interpret and pass on those messages to the person being read.

Critics -- who are just as vociferous on the Internet as the mediums' supporters -- say Van Praagh and Edward are nothing but scam artists who take advantage of people's grief. They claim the two can merely edit out their mistakes on TV, use hidden microphones or employ other methods to learn about audience members, and rely on "cold reading" techniques, which include talking fast, making safe guesses, and picking up on unwittingly offered clues. Worse, detractors say, the two are making millions of dollars using such fraudulent tactics. (Skeptics need only to point to those who lost gobs of money to Miss Cleo, the dial-a-psychic who advertised heavily on late-night TV, to show the gullibility of the paranormal-hungry public.)

And so when Edward and Van Praagh both went to Arizona -- in a rare confluence of their schedules -- it provided a chance to examine each man, his followers and his techniques in person. I hoped to see whether I could spot any trickery and in the process to learn whether either or both of them were for real.

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For my ticket to Van Praagh's sold-out seminar in Scottsdale I paid $45 -- a bargain compared to the hundreds of dollars charged for his weekend seminars around the country. I was joined by 1,300 others, about 90 percent female and 99 percent white. They were eager for an otherworldly contact. In line for the bathroom before the show, two ladies behind me leaned against a wall and chatted about why Van Praagh quit doing personal readings in favor of larger groups and cruises. "That's where the big money is," one offered.

Suddenly, the restroom door swung open.

"Oh my God! Did that door just open by itself?" one of them asked. Later, I spotted an earthly explanation -- a wall-mounted door-opening device for the handicapped.

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