Virginia–based fortunetellers “Psychic Jess” and Virginia Marks don’t need a crystal ball to tell them that life is difficult for people in their profession.
Both live in counties where they can easily obtain business licenses, but say other roadblocks persist that make it difficult to expand.
Marks, who lives in Alexandria and has three offices in suburban Virginia, says she depends largely on word-of-mouth advertising to promote her business because many area newspapers won’t allow psychics to buy ads in their pages.
“Psychic Jess,” who didn’t want her last name used out for privacy reasons, says psychics are asked to pay up front for ads in phone books, unlike other businesses that can pay through installments.
Neither Marks nor Psychic Jess, who sees clients on a part-time basis at her Manassas office and also helps her husband run their contracting business, are gypsies.
“It’s not the culture, it’s the profession people have problems with,” Jess said. “There are a lot of cynics out there — if you believe in it, fine, if you don’t, fine, that is why we live in good ol’ America.”
Both Jess and Marks have known about Montgomery’s ban on their industry for years. Marks once thought of opening a shop there herself, but decided it wasn’t worth the legal fight.
“Some people think psychics are scary, that we’re all carnival or circus people and they don’t want that around them,” Marks said. “We help the police, many of us are pretty religious ourselves — a lot of my clients liken it to therapy, we talk about things that lie in their futureand the different choices they can make. This is not scary or Halloween-y.”
Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, in light of the pending lawsuit against the county’s nearly 60-year ban on fortunetelling for profit, is taking a fresh look at the statute, per his spokesman Patrick Lacefield, “to see if the old law still makes sense.”
Jess said she thought about the lawsuit over the weekend.
“I’ve got to tell you, I have a good feeling about this,” she said.
