Sue Nicholson at the Petone Spiritualist Church
Mark Honeychurch - 17th August 2026
Last night I went to see Sue Nicholson at the Petone Spiritualist Church along with Bronwyn, frequent skeptical partner in crime Tim, and two of my children - as well as one of their friends. Sue was appearing at the Spiritualist Church as a fundraising event, with the church charging a $5 entry fee. We figured that this amount was a lot more palatable for a skeptic to pay than the $50 to $70 she usually charges for her public events.
Although the event was slated to start at 7pm, at 5pm I found a Facebook post from the church saying that doors opened at 6, and that it was first come-first served.
Sue Nicholson - Diving into your Soul
We invite you to a very special evening with medium Sue Nicholson, on Sunday, 16th August, at our usual service time of 7.00 pm. Sue is a Sensing Murder and Morning TV Celebrity Medium.
This is a fundraiser for the Church, and an entry donation of $5.00 per person will be collected at the door. Everyone is warmly welcome. We look forward to sharing this meaningful and uplifting evening with you.
Doors open at 6. Door sales only and limited seats
Petone Spiritualist Church, 88 Richmond Street, Petone.
As I’ve been to the Petone location before, and know that it’s quite small, I messaged Bronwyn and Tim and sounded the alarm that we’d be best off getting there ASAP.
When we arrived, at around 6:10pm, the room was already almost full. I guess this is the consequence of Sue Nicholson being pretty much New Zealand’s most famous psychic medium - mostly due to her appearances on Sensing Murder (and I just realised when checking out the Sensing Murder wikipedia page that the picture of Sue on that page is from our 2013 NZ Skeptics conference!). Sue was already waiting at the front of the church when we arrived, and the event thankfully started half an hour early, at around 6:30 - as by that point there were no seats available.
After the usual singing of a couple of songs (Welcome Home by Dave Dobbyn and Lean on Me by Bill Withers), we pretty quickly got down to the business of Sue talking. She was first invited to do a reading, and chose to read a poem she’d written and had published in a book of poetry. I’ve previously written, in my review of Sue’s autobiography, about how this book of poetry was a well-known scam from the ’90s where people would pay money to have their poem published in a book that was generally only ever sold to those who had their poems featured in it.
What was funny last night was that I’d been talking with Tim in the car about this book of poetry, and although I said it was a scam he suggested that maybe, if she’s getting her money’s worth out of boasting about it, she’s not been scammed after all. So to see Sue, half an hour later, pull out her copy of this decades old book and read it to the audience made me wonder if maybe I have a psychic connection to Sue.
After the reading, Sue started us off with a guided meditation. I have to say that she wasn’t half-bad at doing this, and her voice was calming as she had us close our eyes while she talked us through a journey into the “spirit realm”, where we saw butterflies and met one of our guiding angels. Sue described the angel giving us a piece of paper with a single word on it, and we had to think of and remember what that word was. The word was something Sue would use for the rest of the psychic show.
After the meditation Sue moved to the classic psychic reading patter, throwing out names (like Doris), medical conditions (amputated leg, emphysema, aneurysm, breast cancer, glass eye) and other vague connections that the audience was invited to latch on to (pet bird, meat works). Then, once she had a bite from an audience member, she would cold read them, throwing out vague statements that would be likely to resonate with most people, as well as some more specific claims that ended up being a mixture of hits and misses. And, of course, the misses were all explained away as being random spirits visiting her, things that hadn’t come to pass yet but that would happen in the future, or things for the audience member to ponder over and figure out the significance of later on.
Each person who received a message from the “other side” was asked what word their guiding angel had given them in the meditation, and Sue would weave that into her narrative, making it feel like it was all somehow spiritually connected. It was funny to see her get frustrated when the fifth person that night told her that their word had been “love” - she commented that she wanted to hear some different words. As well as the five people with “love” as their word, there were others such as “harmony” and “peace”. Although Sue never talked to me, my word was “cromulent”.
Part of the reason why I wasn’t one of the lucky few was probably because I was at the back of the room, hiding behind a large woman in the seat in front of me. Because of my history with Sue, and her distaste for me (I’m still blocked from viewing her Facebook page), I figured that I didn’t want to risk the off-chance that she’d recognise me and have me removed.
As an example of the kind of daft nonsense that falls out of Sue’s mouth, at one point she was talking about the doubters and said that she’d bumped into someone in Newtown who challenged her to tell him something she couldn’t possibly know. She said that she’d replied by telling him that she knew he was a murderer, and that she knew where he’d buried the body. With that, he quickly ran away.
Why the hell wouldn’t Sue have immediately phoned the Police, telling them that she’d just talked with a murderer and that she knew where a dead body could be found. I think I know why she didn’t do that - because it’s very likely that this story is either totally made up, or that it’s at least partially fabricated. If she’d actually learned of a murder - psychically or otherwise - and then done absolutely nothing about it, that would have been unconscionable.
And this wasn’t the only ethical issue that came up on the night. One thing that was interesting to notice was that Sue seems to be happy crossing ethical boundaries that many psychics are reluctant to go near. She told a man that he shouldn’t go to the UK to be with his partner, and told us a story about how she’s been telepathically communicating with a boy with Bell’s Palsy, learning telepathically from him that he keeps trying to commit suicide by holding his breath. Apparently she has let the parents know that their child is unhappy and wants to die, even though she has no evidence that this is true.
Speaking of which, at the end of the evening Sue asked the audience if we had any questions for her. One person asked her about assisted dying, and the depth of ignorance that was apparent in her answer was staggering. She had no idea that we have legalised assisted dying in New Zealand, and she thinks that the major ethical issue with assisted dying is that people are being accidentally killed against their will because they’re unable to communicate.
After all the psychic cold reading was over and done with, Sue thanked us in the audience for supporting her by coming out to see her. Without mentioning any names, she said that she’s spent the last two years not running any public events because she’d been emotionally damaged by a run-in she had with a fellow psychic. Of course, us skeptics in the room knew exactly who she was talking about - Kelvin Cruickshank. Craig Shearer wrote about the feud back in late 2023, where Sue had apparently tried to get the venues she was appearing in nationally to agree to not allow any other psychics to book events in a six week window either side of her booking. To me it looks like Sue was the aggressor in this spat, but of course she sees herself as the victim.
As is usual for an event like this, we headed to a pub as soon as it had finished for our debrief - this time to the Sprig and Fern on Jackson Street in Petone. Although the three of us seasoned skeptics had a lot to say about the event, what was really interesting was listening to the three children I’d taken along with us talking about what they’d just witnessed. They’d spotted many of the tricks Sue used to make her psychic readings appear genuine, and were just as incensed as us adults were about some of the unethical things she’d said. Although sadly none of them was asked by Sue for their angel words, I asked them and started to feel that maybe I’m failing as a parent when my own two children told me that they’d been given “poop” and “six-seven” by their angel guides.