THE front door of 35 Stonegate isn't painted bright purple by chance.
The colour is supposedly linked to psychic enchantment and, as the address is home to what is billed as the world's first Psychic Museum, it seems quite apt.
It's called a museum, but is more of an exploration centre for the study of parapsychology and unexplained phenomena, where visitors can try their hand at everything from telekinesis to dowsing.
The idea for the museum, on one of York's most historic streets, came from the North Yorkshire-based astrologer Jonathan Cainer, who bought the former bookshop six years ago.
The museum is already open to the public, with each 90 minute tour, led by the curiously-named tour manager Andy Dextrous, taking visitors around a building which wouldn't look out of place in an Edgar Allan Poe tale.
The story behind the idea, perhaps not surprisingly, is rather odd.
"I'd always been interested in doing something along these lines, and I thought a museum dedicated to telepathy and telekinesis hadn't been done before, and then this very strange thing happened," Cainer says.
"I sat down and was fishing in the psychic pool. I believe that when you're being creative it's as if you can fish something from above your head, so I'm fishing in the creative pool for my idea and this is the first time I've had an idea I've picked up from the creative pool and seen written on the bottom of it 'property of Uri Geller'.
"It was the strangest thing, I've seen people take ideas and try to copyright them, but I've never seen somebody have an idea and put it back but leave it with the name still stamped on it," he says.
"And the minute I had this idea for a psychic museum I thought 'I must ring Uri', I felt like I'd been hypnotised."
Cainer and Geller had met only twice before but when they discussed the idea they both felt it could work.
It has taken several years to get the project off the ground (not even psychic powers can rectify the problems that beset a 15th century building), but the pair believe they are offering something unique.
"This is about encouraging interest in psychic phenomena," Geller says of the museum.
"It's about teaching people and making them understand that there is a sixth sense and it's not magic; this is not Derren Brown territory.
"We truly believe that people going through the museum will come to the conclusion that we do all have some kind of sixth sense, extrasensory perception, maybe even telekinesis."
Cainer agrees.
"I'm convinced these powers exist and it's time we stopped being so cynical and try to understand and develop these powers, so with that in mind I wanted to try and make this place happen.
"If we wanted to make people think they were psychic by using tricks and techniques we could have been open years ago, but we're trying to be genuine about what everybody experiences."
It is a hands-on experience and people get to take part in telepathy games and visualisation experiments.
Cainer admits, though, that the nature of parapsychology means the results can be hit and miss.
"The problem with all this is sometimes they can work like a treat and sometimes they just don't work at all.
"Even people who are very psychic say there are days when they haven't got it or it won't come to them, it's not a phenomenon that many people have control over," he says.
"But we are trying to refine the experience so that everyone who comes here at least walks away thinking that they did something."
The whole notion of the paranormal comes in for a fair amount of stick, especially from the scientific community, but Geller believes attitudes are changing.
"What's happening around the world now is that people are beginning to validate psychic phenomena, whether it's the power of healing, the power of prayer or the power of positive thinking. It does work otherwise people wouldn't be interested in it.
"We've all experienced at some time in our lives a feeling of déjà vu and this, like ESP (extra sensory perception) are tangible forces of the mind, we just don't know how to activate them. I mean I don't know why I can bend spoons, my kids can't bend spoons," he says.
Geller has been a celebrity since the early '70s when he bent a spoon live on television and helped some viewers restart watches that had apparently stopped.
"For years I thought that I did it, but it wasn't my powers, I was only acting as a catalyst, a trigger to the people who were watching," he says.
Although they conduct experiments at the museum, it isn't a laboratory and at £15 a head, visitors get pretty good entertainment value.
The "aura machine", which shows the energy field around a person, is already proving popular, along with the Egely Wheel – a small metal disc which can be moved by people using the power of their minds.
Geller claims he discovered his psychic powers when he was just four years old.
"I was eating soup when the spoon bent in my hand. Being related to Sigmund Freud, my mother thought that I inherited them from him but I don't believe that. I think we all have these energies but they're dormant in most people."
He has been subjected to some harsh criticism over the years and admits he used to be on an ego-trip. "Show me a successful man and I will show you controversy," he says.
Nowadays he spends his time lecturing, writing and helping terminally-ill children.
He hopes, too, that one day he and Michael Jackson can become friends again, and has no doubts about the pop star's innocence following his recent court case.
"It was always inconceivable for me that he would molest a child," Geller says.
"Yes Michael Jackson could be bizarre at times, strange and maybe to some people weird, but he is not a child molester, not the Michael Jackson I know.
"I once asked him in my house 'Michael, are you a lonely person?' and he looked up at me, for 10 seconds he stares at me and suddenly he says to me: 'Uri Geller, I'm a very lonely man, I lost my faith in people, I can only trust children.'
"And when he said that I thought 'how sad' and that said it all to me."
chris.bond@ypn.co.uk

For more information contact 0800 138 9788 or visit the website at www.psychicmuseum.com