Browne was not a psychic; she was a cold-reader, which means she guessed a lot. She'd use a person's physical appearance to make guesses. Instead of providing psychic insight, however, she often made mistakes.
Her passage, which reads that a possible "pneumonia-like" disease would vanish quickly is also quite flawed, if this was , in fact, intended to describe the coronavirus.
The point of this? If you make enough guesses, even those who are so often wrong might eventually get something a little right — but not because they're psychic.
In , she was indicted on several charges of investment fraud and grand theft. She pleaded no contest to "sale of security without permit" - a felony - and was given hours' community service. Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticised for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins' last television series, The Enemies Of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous.
This criticism might be true were it not for the fact that, when the likes of Sylvia Browne make pronouncements, the police and desperate parents sometimes spend serious time and money investigating their claims.
In , for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and punters, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.
The Leicestershire police called the Spanish police who went and kicked a few doors in. Clarence says that none of this should come as a great surprise. Her body was discovered six months later. Cruises are depressing places. They're like lots of old people floating around waiting to die. Twenty years ago, I'd have looked at my fellow passengers and thought, "You're all so old. They're just weighed down by life's sudden, inexplicable tragedies and they've got it into their heads that Sylvia might offer some explanation.
We are a tragic lot. I'm sitting next to Evelyn, the woman with the stomach cramps. Evelyn has come on this cruise specifically to ask Sylvia about the pain. The blood drains from Evelyn's face. She looks at me, scared and vulnerable, like a child, and walks unsurely to the microphone.
It's the evening of the cocktail party. We all put on formal wear and bustle around the Queen's lounge, excited about our opportunity to mingle with Sylvia. But she doesn't show up. We wait for an hour, then disperse, a bit confused and disappointed. I bump into Evelyn on the way out. She's looking maudlin. I don't know anyone remotely like that. And those one- and two-word answers she gives And why didn't she turn up to the cocktail party?
I spot Nancy, Sylvia's nice-looking assistant - I decide to tell her I'm a journalist and I'm on this cruise because I want to interview Sylvia. I'm famous enough. All they do is turn on me. In the Explorations coffee bar I find Cassie not her real name , a very likable young German woman and huge Sylvia fan. I had sat next to her on the transfer bus from Rome airport. She looks ashen. She and two others from the group were just in the shopping arcade when they spotted Sylvia.
She looked like a vampire looks when a shaft of light hits them. She hissed 'Go! And - whoosh - she was gone. He spun her around and pushed her away really fast. It was nasty. Something is not sitting right with me any more. She's not a friendly person.
Did she think I was going to jump on her? Cassie's story resigns me to the obvious: there isn't a chance in hell Sylvia will grant me an interview. Sylvia's assistant, Nancy, rushes up to me in the Lido restaurant. Amazingly, Sylvia has agreed to an interview: 5pm, the Neptune lounge. It's time for our next two-hour lecture with Sylvia. She seems in a far better mood today.
All this is in stark contrast to the other grouchy evening when it seemed that nobody's sick relative was going to make it past I can't help wondering whether, if Shawn Hornbeck's parents had gone to Sylvia today, she would have told them that their son was alive and well?
At 5pm, I knock on the door of the Neptune lounge. It is swanky and invitation-only - reserved for guests staying on the rarefied seventh floor. Sylvia is there to greet me, along with one of the four men who seem always to surround her. I tell her what Cassie had said about her being rude in the shopping arcade. It's a relatively trivial allegation, but I'm curious to see how she'll respond.
She denies it. No one could ever accuse me - when I'm eating dinner and they come to me, or if I'm in the casino - I have never, ever been hateful. That's one thing I've been so much against. These people put you there! To be rude to them is just terrible. The thing is, just before the interview, I'd bumped into Cassie's two companions from the shopping arcade.
They both told me Sylvia had been startlingly rude to them and now they're really off her. I've wanted to interview Sylvia for years, but I suddenly wonder if the exercise is pointless. I think she's a consummate pro who puts up an impregnable wall between herself and her critics, and will just say anything.
She means Shawn Hornbeck. I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blonde and two boys who are dead. I think I picked up the wrong kid.
I later realise that, of course, "three children missing" in the "same area" is annoyingly too vague to be checkable. She shakes her head.
Not at all. All I remember was that kid Van. Hornbeck," Sylvia says. That's God. By "they" she's referring to her two biggest critics, James Randi and Robert Lancaster. She says she doesn't care what they say about her: "The whole thing about my job God-given career is if you're right, you're right. If you're wrong, you're wrong. And the people that are gonna love you will love you and the people that won't, won't.
Then, just as I think how self-assured she must be not to let their attacks eat her up, she says, "I've had a private investigator on Randi and Lancaster, and I know enough on them to hang 'em. That's vengeance, see? Who cares?
Randi is an evil little man. When I told him he was going to have a heart attack, and then he did - ha! In the end it is a short interview, just half an hour. What was I thinking? That she would admit to being a fraud? I will give her this, though: I believe that she is genuinely passionate and knowledgable about spiritual things. The only times during the interview when she becomes really animated are when she talks about Mother Goddess this and that.
So I don't believe that part is fake. But there is no doubt that she makes a fortune saying very serious, cruel, show-stopping things to people in distress, especially, it seems, when she's in a grumpy mood. I jump ship in Athens, two days early. I miss Sylvia's final lecture. The next day I receive an email from Cassie, the German fan who went off her after she was rude in the shopping arcade.
I wrote everything down she said! She said, 'I had an interview with this pale little man and he said I was rude to some of you in the shopping arcade. You must have seen him around.
He's a creepy little worm She just went on and on about you. It lasted for about 20 minutes! All this proves one thing to me. People we lost in — Actor Allan Arbus poses for a portrait with his daughter photographer Amy Arbus in Allan Arbus, who played psychiatrist Maj. People we lost in — Folk singer Richie Havens , the opening act at the Woodstock music festival, died on April 22 of a heart attack, his publicist said.
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Lip, whose real name was Frank Vallelonga, was Born Clara Ann Fowler, Page was the best-selling female artist of the s and had 19 gold and 14 platinum singles. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Great Depression, Browne first became aware of her psychic abilities at age 3, her bio says.
It was a "very scary thing" for her when she realized as a youngster she could tell if someone was going to die, she told King in After moving to California in , she moved from helping people privately to doing so publicly to help "thousands of people gain control of their lives, live more happily, understand the meaning of life and to find God in their unique way," her website states.
She founded The Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research in , and went on to publish more than 50 books. Browne also trained ministers to help spread her thinking through the Society of Novus Spiritus organization, and created The Sylvia Browne Hypnosis Training Center to teach her hypnosis methods.
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