While many scoff that clairvoyants are a bunch of hogwash, the plethora of palmists and card readers testifies to their enduring popularity. Their names run the gamut from the familial (Sister Bess, Sister Teresa and Sister Lisa) to the matronly (Mrs. Lee, Mrs. White and Mrs. Williams ) to all-out alliterative (Miss Millie Miller, Sister Susan and Madam Mary, whose shop is, perhaps appropriately, on Wise Avenue in Dundalk.)
As Miss Betty consults her cards and murmurs advice to her clients, it is apparent that she is part psychiatrist, part tough big sister and part concerned mother to her clients.
"You going down the ocean?" she asks Mandy Geyer, a 30-year-old store manager from Baltimore. "Check your tires before you go."
To Joyce Wilson, a 57-year-old waitress at the Glen Burnie Golden Corral, Miss Betty has this to say: "I've told you, you've got to get rid of this man, Joyce. You wait every day for that phone to ring, don't you? Every time that phone rings, you think it's him calling."
Having a resident psychic keeps things interesting at the little restaurant and bar by the train tracks on Hammonds Ferry Road, says Pete Panselinos, who owns the Lansdowne Inn with Gus Kimos.
"I've seen people that they leave here and they cry and other people that are very happy leaving here," says Panselinos, a portly man with laughing eyes and a thick Greek accent. "One time there was a woman crying in the bathroom. It took hours to get her out of here. I said [to Miss Betty], 'What you tell that lady? Don't tell people bad things. Only tell people the good things.' "
But Miss Betty says that, in most cases, she shares her predictions whether they are positive or not. Visions of death or illness can be terrible, she says, adding, "Sometimes it feels like a curse, hon."
Although she believes that all people have some ability to foretell the future, Miss Betty says that she believes she has a God-given gift. When she was born, she says, a caul, or a portion of the amniotic sac, was covering her face, which some believe portends psychic ability.
At the age of 4, she left the tiny town of Moorefield, W.Va., to live with her grandparents in Baltimore's Otterbein neighborhood.
When she was 13, she watched a friend's uncle read cards, then picked them up and startled him with her own predictions. But it wasn't until she divorced her husband, the father of her five children, in 1972 that Miss Betty began to read cards regularly. Over the years, she has read cards in a number of bars, restaurants and private homes.
