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The Infamous Story Of Sylvia Browne, The Television Psychic Who Shared Her ‘Visions’ With Grieving Parents
Steve SnowdenThe self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne, pictured during an interview in her later years.
For most people, television psychics are obvious charlatans who manipulate psychological sleight of hand. The power of suggestion and the ability to lure someone along through a threadbare detail are certainly impressive, but not supernatural.
In Sylvia Browne’s case, however, fame and credibility walked hand in hand for a while — at least for her devoted listeners, viewers, and readers. Dubbed “America’s most controversial psychic” by The Guardian’s Jon Ronson, the supposed medium entertained (or fooled) the public for decades.
She was born Sylvia Shoemaker on Oct. 19, 1936, in Kansas City, Missouri. The Society of Novus Spiritus — a Gnostic Christian organization she founded in 1986 — claims she received a graduate degree in English at an unidentified school and worked as a teacher for 18 years before training as a “trance medium.”
YouTubeA publicity still of Sylvia Browne.
Browne’s niche was telling the distraught parents of missing children what had happened to them. The Montel Williams Show would host and facilitate these sessions, in which Browne essentially fabricated entire narratives surrounding missing, and possibly dead, children.
“Your child is dead,” Browne would sometimes say. Alternatively, she told one pair of parents, “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.” Her self-proclaimed ability to see into the past, future, and afterlife ran the gamut.
Inside Sylvia Browne’s Shockingly Wrong Visions
According to The New York Times, Sylvia Browne claimed she was able to glimpse back centuries into the past. She said she could speak to the dead and that her abilities helped various police departments solve numerous murders and locate suspects previously unknown to authorities.
When missing congressional intern Chandra Levy was found dead in Washington’s Rock Creek Park in May 2002, Browne quickly took credit for predicting the discovery. But police had already been searching the area since May 2001 — making it a fairly warranted bet to double down on.
In 2004, Browne directly told the mother of Ohio kidnapping victim Amanda Berry that her daughter was dead. There was a major issue with the psychic’s supposed ability to know this, though, because about a decade later, a very much alive Berry escaped from her abductor Ariel Castro.
After Berry freed herself and alerted police by using a neighbor’s phone, she was devastated to learn that her mother had died of heart failure while she was in captivity. Some partly blamed Browne for Berry’s mother’s demise, with one person claiming, “She literally died of a broken heart.”
A compilation of Sylvia Browne’s five most infamous incorrect predictions.
This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Browne told parents of missing children supposed “facts” like this far more than once. She’d often tell them their child was either missing — which, when parents don’t know where their kids are, is a literal fact — or deceased.
Sometimes, Browne would tell these parents specific places where their dead children were buried. She was mostly wrong.
One time, when another kidnapping victim turned up alive after Browne predicted he had died, Browne justified her wrong vision by saying, “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.”
When Browne wasn’t peddling fabricated narratives about missing children on Larry King Live and The Montel Williams Show, she made her money from fans who spent $700 per 30 minutes to ask her questions over the phone.
That’s $23 per minute.
Sylvia Browne’s Infamous Prediction About Opal Jo Jennings
Perhaps Sylvia Browne’s most shocking choice as a psychic was to tell a saddened grandmother that her granddaughter was sold into slavery in Japan. Browne made this bizarre statement after six-year-old Opal Jo Jennings went missing in 1999, and the girl’s loved ones became desperate for answers.
Opal had been kidnapped from her grandmother’s front yard in Texas in March 1999. She was playing with her cousin when suddenly, a man forcibly grabbed her and threw her into his truck. He hit her as she screamed and drove off before anyone could rescue her. When a month passed with no answers, her grandmother went on Montel’s show in the hopes that Browne could help.
A CNN segment where Anderson Cooper speaks with psychic debunker James Randi.
“This is too much for my family and me to handle,” she said. “We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”
The moment came for Browne to provide arguably the most unexpected and preposterous prediction of her entire career.
“She’s not dead,” said Browne. “But what bothers me — now I’ve never heard of this before — but she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro. So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery.”
The crowd of The Montel Williams Show was completely floored, as evidenced by the moment of baffled silence that followed.
Of course, this didn’t help Opal’s grandmother. Now she had a stranger’s opinion that her kidnapped granddaughter was “put into some kind of a slavery thing,” and not much else to go on.
Wikimedia CommonsAuthor Ben Radford at a Sylvia Browne protest during the annual “The Amazing Meeting 2012” conference of skeptics.
As usual, Browne’s prediction was not only baseless and likely damaging to the woman’s mental health, but also entirely incorrect. Opal was eventually found dead and buried in Fort Worth, Texas. The pathologist concluded that she was killed the same night that she was abducted.
Opal wasn’t put on a boat, nor a plane, nor forcibly taken to Japan, and she certainly did not experience white slavery. Browne simply made it up and fed the misinformation to a family in emotional and spiritual turmoil for televised adoration and a chance at even more fame (or infamy).
The motive was obvious: money and the national spotlight. The moral basis to go through with this required a rare breed of egocentrism and greed. According to Browne’s FBI file, she certainly had plenty of it.
The Damning Evidence That Sylvia Browne Was A Charlatan
Debunking someone’s statements before the advent of the internet wasn’t as straightforward as it is now. When Sylvia Browne claimed to have worked with law enforcement on numerous cases, many people simply took her word for it.
“I remember when I was working on the Bundy case,” she told Montel Williams during a November 2004 appearance. According to The Skeptical Inquirer, which explored Browne’s FBI files through a standard Freedom of Information Act request, she did no such thing.
The Bureau had been investigating the supposed medium for fraud as her roster of books, media appearances, and CDs were raking in millions of dollars a year. Browne even charged the Thibodaux Police Department $400 for a psychic analysis of a murder case in 1997. Ultimately, her “work” had no impact on the police investigation whatsoever.
FBI/Public DomainOne of the many documents in Sylvia Browne’s FBI file.
She also said that the FBI wanted her testimony on the World Trade Center attacks of 1993. There is not a single piece of documentation from the agency to support that claim. The notion that she was a serial liar was further evidenced by her no contest plea with the State of California for “selling securities without a permit,” which she made on March 8, 1993. Notably, this case led to her becoming a convicted felon.
The Bureau itself labeled her a “self-proclaimed psychic,” and had investigated her Nirvana Foundation for Psychic research years earlier for “violations of federal law in applying for loans from federally insured financial institutions” for over $1 million.
Sylvia Browne offering her thoughts on the potential end of the world in 2012.
The government was largely curious about the “fraudulent documents, including income tax returns and financial statements to enhance her net worth in making these loan applications.” The FBI claimed that she used “loan proceeds to support an extravagant lifestyle.”
Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney chose not to prosecute that part of the Bureau’s case, stating there was “insufficient evidence to indicate criminal intent.” The FBI subsequently ceased its investigation.
A Legacy Of Supposed Goodwill And Blatant Deceit
According to CNN, Sylvia Browne published over 50 books — 22 of which reached the New York Times Best Sellers list. She said that her supposed psychic abilities became apparent when she was a toddler and that it was a “very scary thing” for her to know when someone was going to die. Of course, her many incorrect predictions cast serious doubt on her “abilities” as time went on.
So how was she able to maintain such a large audience? Aside from her dramatic personality that seemed to be made for TV, she also made a number of statements about faith, confrontation of death, and general well-being that deeply resonated with people. It’s believed that her more benevolent statements, coupled with her memorable persona, inspired so many people to stick with her — and help make her a millionaire.
A report about Sylvia Browne’s fabricated predictions that a mother’s dying son would regain his health.
“If you’re afraid to die, you will not fully live,” she told her Facebook followers before she died on Nov. 20, 2013 at the age of 77 in a California hospital. “My one prayer every morning that has carried me through my life is, ‘Hi God, it’s me again,'” she wrote a few weeks later.
“It doesn’t matter how you pray,” she added. “It can be just simply talking to God. Remember, God knows your heart and soul.”
In the end, some fans may have felt that they benefited from Browne’s more generic advice to remain positive in the face of difficult moments. The parents of missing, kidnapped, or dead children, however, were irreparably traumatized by a woman — on national television — lying to their faces.
After learning about Sylvia Browne and how she made millions off of supposed psychic revelations, read about pseudoscientific cons that are somehow still legal in America. Then, go inside the real story of “The Conjuring” ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The post The Infamous Story Of Sylvia Browne, The Television Psychic Who Shared Her ‘Visions’ With Grieving Parents appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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