Secrets in the tea leaves: Stuart Cahoon on his grandmother, grief and knowing when to say no

The Northern Ireland psychic medium talks about the woman who taught him, the experiences he still cannot forget, and his concern for people who keep coming back for answers.

Stuart had gone to put the milk bottles out when, he says, he saw a man standing in his grandmother’s hallway.

He describes a silhouette beside the doorway. But when he walked past, he felt something physical: the sensation of bumping into somebody. He threw the bottles onto the doorstep and ran back through the sitting room to the kitchen.

“Granny, Granny, the man, the man.”

His grandmother didn’t tell him he was talking nonsense. Her answer was one he still remembers:

“I was waiting for you to come to me with this.”

He didn’t know what she meant. He had already heard things in the house and felt as though someone else was there, particularly when his grandparents were out. Until then, though, he hadn’t understood that his grandmother had experiences of her own.

I wanted to know what happened after that frightened little boy reached the kitchen. Stuart Cahoon, known as Stuart C Psychic Medium, now works with people seeking readings in Northern Ireland and online. We spoke about nearly three decades of that work. But I also wanted to talk about the person coming for a reading, and what happens when they keep returning for reassurance.

His grandmother kept coming into both parts of the conversation.

The woman who taught him

Her name was Mary, although everybody called her Minnie. To Stuart, she was Granny. She became his mentor, helping him understand what he believed he was experiencing and teaching him how to manage it.

I wondered how differently things might have gone if she had dismissed him straight away. Stuart knows other people doing similar work who say that happened to them as children. He felt lucky that she listened.

There was plenty of affection in the way he spoke about her, but she didn’t sound like someone you would get away with much around.

When he began giving one-to-one readings, he wanted her beside him. He was nervous and asked whether she would come in. She refused. There was the other person’s confidentiality to consider, and there was Stuart’s confidence too.

“I can’t hold your hand all the time,” he remembers her telling him.

He could still ask questions afterwards. She wasn’t abandoning him. But if she sat through every reading, she knew he would keep wanting her there.

“I was near sick with nerves,” he said of those early sittings. Many of the people facing him were older women, sitting very straight-faced. Being able to talk to people helped, but he had to get through those first readings himself.

As he described her, I found myself picturing a woman in a navy overcoat, with a much-used shopping bag and a headscarf. I was clear that I wasn’t claiming to be a medium. I wondered whether I was simply imagining someone of her generation.

“Have I just described your grandmother or am I making it up in my head?”

Stuart confirmed the headscarf. She had her hair done every week and wore it on the way there and back. She went dancing on Saturday nights.

We also had a small struggle over her name, with me trying “Millie” before getting to Minnie. By that point, we had spent so much time talking about her that I was thanking her at the end of the interview too.

What are you actually seeing in the cup?

Tea leaves were Stuart’s first way of giving readings. His grandmother used them, and years later he discovered that his grandfather’s sister had read them for people as well.

“So basically, I wasn’t the only psychic in the village,” he said.

For all my interest in spiritual subjects, I told him I hadn’t come across anybody doing tea-leaf readings. I wanted him to explain the ordinary details. Loose tea? A cup and saucer? What was he actually looking at?

In the method he was taught, the person makes and drinks the tea themselves. He considers their handling of the cup important because he believes he picks up their energy from it. Once they have finished, the cup is turned upside down onto the saucer and rotated three times. Then he looks inside.

I was still trying to understand the reading part.

“Are we looking for patterns?” I asked. Did something look like a dog, for example, and did that become part of what he told the person?

He said there can be images in the leaves, but he also experiences pictures in his mind. His description wasn’t especially solemn.

“Sometimes you look into the cup,” he said, choosing his words, “you think somebody had had an accident in the cup.”

He makes a distinction between this and mediumship. In his tea-leaf readings, he says, the focus is the living person: their personality, their circumstances and things they might consider changing. He isn’t describing a conversation with somebody who has died. Mediumship, in his understanding, is that separate work of communicating with spirit.

He was careful to say this is how he was taught. Other readers may approach it differently.

I began suggesting that he should show people on TikTok. He could make a cup of tea and let everyone see what he did.

“I did,” he replied. “That’s what I’m gonna tell you.”

There I was, getting ahead of him. He had taken everything to a friend’s house and given a tea-leaf reading live. According to Stuart, the audience grew to nearly 400, compared with the 50 to 100 he would normally expect. He thought many had never seen it done before.

He had stepped away from tea leaves himself for a while, but now worries about the practice being forgotten. It also carries a very personal connection.

“Even though me and my grandmother were very close, this made us even closer.”

Even a medium can be surprised

Stuart says he still learns from the people who come to him. He also still doubts himself.

One example involved a TikTok broadcast in which he says he began receiving images of a nun. The impression was of a woman who had been unpleasant to people, and of a family secret discovered after her death. He nearly kept it to himself because he thought nobody would recognise the description.

In his account, a viewer identified the woman as an aunt. A letter found after her death, he said, had revealed that she was actually the viewer’s grandmother. He also recalled giving a name which was subsequently found in a Bible, although he couldn’t remember the name during our interview.

Stuart understood the encounter as an apology. He believed the woman wanted to offer spiritual comfort and healing to a relative living with illness and disability. He wasn’t reporting that the person’s condition had been cured.

“Wow,” was my first response to the family revelation. Later, we both became emotional as he explained what he felt the message meant. These are the details as Stuart remembers them; the letter, Bible and family history weren’t independently established in our conversation.

There was another incident I had already seen him discuss on TikTok. During an online reading, he says a dark shape appeared in the corner of the screen and moved across it. He stopped the conversation and checked whether something such as a fly was near the camera.

He interpreted it as a build-up of spirit energy connected with the person they were discussing. He also described feeling nauseous afterwards. That was his experience and his explanation; the cause of the image wasn’t established by the interview.

My reaction to the clip had been enthusiastic. What I wanted to explore with him was how surprised he looked. If this was the work he did every day, why had this particular incident caught him out?

“It never happened before,” he said.

His usual experience of mediumship felt familiar to him. This didn’t. He was also quite particular about my wording: I had said he looked scared, and he corrected me. Surprised was the word he wanted.

As for going on a ghost hunt, he said he would be terrified.

“But I’m human. I am human.”

The person who keeps coming back

His grandmother’s teaching wasn’t confined to spiritual experiences. She taught him to deal with people, including people who were grieving and might arrive with very high expectations.

That is still part of how he describes his work. He tells clients that he cannot promise contact with a particular person. In a psychic reading, he may offer his interpretation or suggestions, but he says he will not dictate how somebody should live.

“I won’t dictate to anybody. I’m not here to do that.”

I wanted to know where that leaves him when somebody returns repeatedly. Is there a point at which he has to tell them that another reading isn’t right for them?

He said this was happening a lot. His own guidance is to leave several months between readings. During our conversation he gave slightly different intervals, but his position was clear: he will refuse someone who comes back too soon.

TikTok has made him particularly aware of people moving between readers. He described one follower sharing 15 different mediums’ live broadcasts in a single afternoon. I needed him to explain how sharing a live worked before I quite followed what he meant.

He wasn’t objecting to people watching other mediums. He does that himself and has friends whose broadcasts he visits. His concern was whether some viewers were constantly searching for an answer they hadn’t yet heard.

“Does it go as far as an addiction? I don’t know,” he said. “Are they just desperate for answers that they’re not getting?”

Watching several broadcasts doesn’t tell us what is happening in somebody’s life. Stuart was describing a worry, rather than diagnosing those viewers. He was concerned about their wellbeing and whether they might spend money they couldn’t afford.

I recognised the pattern he was talking about and described someone I knew who regularly turned to a reader for help through the next part of her life. We were discussing reliance, not suggesting that every regular client was being taken advantage of.

Stuart knows that refusing a booking doesn’t settle the matter.

“I think you have to be firm, but it’s not gonna stop them going elsewhere.”

I connected that firmness with the grandmother who had taught him. She had wanted him to be able to stand on his own feet. Now he was trying to offer guidance without becoming the person someone needed for every decision.

Grief doesn’t disappear because you give readings

Stuart spoke about clients who felt they should be “over” a death by a certain point. He couldn’t understand putting that deadline on themselves.

He described thinking you were getting over it, and then “all of a sudden it just hits you like a ton of bricks”.

“I’ve been there,” I told him. “I call it the blip.”

I talked about a loss in my own life and how, years later, those moments could still knock me down. Stuart wasn’t speaking only from his work with other people. His father had died, and he described his mother living in a unit with a brain injury and no longer recognising him.

“So I’m grieving for someone who hasn’t passed.”

He said he had also experienced grief while his father was living with Alzheimer’s. These were his family circumstances and his feelings about them. His spiritual beliefs hadn’t stopped him missing the people he loved.

That included his grandmother. Although he believes he senses her presence, he said he has never seen her since her death. He doesn’t describe having the sort of ongoing conversation with her that someone might assume a medium could have.

“The comfort of knowing that she is there, that’s all I need,” he said.

When we discussed what he believes happens after death, he spoke about family and friends he missed, and his hope of being with them again. I said I didn’t want to rush out of this life: I have loved ones here too. Our conversation returned to grief, and to the worry Stuart hears from people who don’t know whether a dying relative heard their final words.

“Gone a bit deep on you. Sorry, Stuart,” I said.

He was emotional again, but willing to talk about it. Near the end, he described his purpose simply: he believes he is here to offer comfort and help, and hopes he is doing that as well as he can.

I gave him the question I ask every guest: if he could leave one message with the world, from everything he had experienced spiritually, what would it be?

His answer came from his belief that the soul continues after the body dies. He encouraged people to speak to their loved ones, to remember them, even to express their anger if that was how they felt. Then he said something particularly worth hearing from a man who gives readings for a living:

“Remember the good times, remember the bad times, remember the times that you have had together. ’Cause that’s called validation. And if you validate your loved ones every day, you don’t need people like me to pass the messages on because you’re keeping them alive in your heart, in your soul, and in your mind.”

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Stuart Cahoon, known as Stuart C Psychic Medium, on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. You can watch the full conversation here:

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