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Does the supernatural have a place in Alternate History?

I always felt that alternate history is less a genre and more of a canvas whereas anyone can write down on it so yeah, i think it would be pretty interesting and i had no problems with the supernatural.
 
@David Flin the idea was that in WW2 everyone was using psychics and superpowers of various kinds, and afterwards Smuts, being the clever guy that he was and with increasing worries about the future of his country, seeks advice from a whole bunch of psychics about what happens if South Africa continues on the course that it was on.
 
David Flin said:
The two elements I personally (others may differ) would look at would be:

1. Are the psychics and superpowers real or merely believed they might be real? If the latter, there's no problem.
2. If the former, is the story consistent in how it handles it. If yes, then there's no real problem.
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They are real; and I like to think that I've portrayed them consistently. It was certainly my aim to do so.

I did some thinking about this, and the conclusion I came to is that the ability to predict the future or astral project or such-like wouldn't actually be very useful because a) the way it works in-universe is that you basically view a scene from the future; often devoid of context or any such. How would someone in say 1900 react to witnessing the Castle Bravo test without context? How would that help? And b) related to that, if you for instance manage to project yourself into say Hitler's bunker and see a map of his planned invasion of the Soviet Union, without knowledge of strategy or tactics or hell, understanding of the German language, what good is it?

So the conclusion I came to was that the best way to use such powers (and psychic powers are but a small subsect of available in verse powers) is to ask a lot of psychics a lot of questions to get the broadest possible understanding of possible futures and also don't take what they at face value.

Part of the reason the Nazis still fought and lost WW2 in this TL is that Himmler, who in real life was obsessed with the supernatural, had a habit of a) taking what seers and pyschis said at face value and b) only really hearing what he wanted to hear.

Which reminds me I need to write a scene of Alan Brooke dealing with psychic shenanigans.
 
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A specific variant of the supernatural that has been used to often good effect in literature is magical realism. In the WIAF setting, "Trance Junkie" by @Bruno assumes that conjuring the spirits of the dead actually works--or at least, it does as far as the main character is concerned.
 
"General Brooke, this chap has foreseen that if we land in Greece that the war will be over by Christmas!"
...
"Did he say which Christmas, Prime Minister?"

This before the Strategic Super(powers and abilities) Reserve was created and psychic, trans-human and other abilities rationalised.
 
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