Truth behind viral 'world's worst psychic' Sylvia Browne from 90s talk show and her wildly wrong predictions

Daily Mail​

a day ago

TV psychic Sylvia Browne, who gained nationwide infamy for her wildly inaccurate predictions to the families of missing children, has gone viral yet again.
Thanks to a steady flow of appearances with Montel Williams and Larry King, she was massively popular, with a years-long waiting list for phone consultations and fans willing to pay thousands of dollars to go on a cruise with her.
Browne died in 2013 at the age of 77, but during the COVID-19 pandemic she became a phenomenon again online, where no less than Kim Kardashian shared a quote that many readers regarded as prophetic.
'In around 2020,' Browne had written in her bestselling 2004 book End of Days: 'a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.'
Now social media users are sharing clips of her, this time mocking her as an alleged grifter who said the 'wildest nonsense' that she pulled 'out of thin air.'
But who was Sylvia Browne, the smoky-voiced, platinum blonde media magnet whom one critic branded the 'world's worst psychic'?
Born Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker in 1936 in Kansas City, she claimed to have seen visions since she was three years old during the Great Depression.
After she spent 18 years teaching at a Catholic school and trained as a 'trance medium' on the side, she became a professional psychic in 1973.
By the 1980s, she had fashioned herself into a charismatic media figure, thanks to her blunt sense of humor, her gravelly voice and her distinctive appearance: a fuller figure topped by an extravagantly made-up face and platinum hair with fringe.
In the 1990s she was a regular on The Montel Williams Show, and she also frequently appeared on Larry King Live and the late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM, which specialized in conspiracies and the paranormal.
Her sprawling enterprise included several bestselling books in which she professed an ability to see into the future and the afterlife, plus cruise ship appearances, 30-minute phone consultations costing $750 a pop, her own gnostic church and even a murky gold-mining venture that led to her conviction of securities fraud in 1992.
But she was most notorious for the jaw-droppingly incorrect predictions she delivered to frantic families about the fate of their missing children.
In 2004 on The Montel Williams Show, Browne told Louwanna Miller that her vanished daughter Amanda Berry was 'not alive, honey,' adding: 'Your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call.'
Miller said she believed the medium '98 percent,' and died of heart failure in 2005 - eight years before her daughter escaped years of captivity by Ariel Castro and was found alive, in a case that inspired a media frenzy.
'Only God,' said Browne in her defense: 'is right all the time.'
In 1999 on The Montel Williams Show, the grandmother of a six-year-old Texas kidnap victim called Opal Jo Jennings pleaded with Browne: 'I can't stand this. I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?'
'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.'
Kokouro, Japan does not exist, and Opal's remains were discovered in Texas, with the pathologist saying she was killed the night of her abduction.
In 2002, Browne told the mother of a missing woman named Holly Krewson that her daughter was working as a stripper in Hollywood.
Four years later, the dental records from human remains that had been found in San Diego in 1996 were used to identify the deceased as Krewson.
In 2003, four months after 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck disappeared in Missouri, Browne told his parents on The Montel Williams Show that their son was dead after being abducted by a dark-skinned man who had dreadlocks.
Shawn Horbeck was discovered alive in 2007 in the apartment of one Michael J. Devlin, who is white and had short hair.
The incident prompted the first of Browne's four husbands Gary Dufresne, whom she divorced the year before she became a professional psychic, to give an interview to a website called stopsylvia.com and openly accuse her of being a fraud.
He recalled a tarot party she gave during their marriage, after which he supposedly asked her: '"Sylvia, how can you tell people this kind of stuff? You know it's not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe it." And she said: "Screw 'em. Anybody who believes this stuff oughtta be taken."'
After his interview, Browne shot back that he was 'a liar and dark soul entity, but at least the a**hole gave me children,' via Jon Ronson's profile of her in the Guardian.
Disgruntled exes aside, she was a persistent target of the skeptic movement, particularly one of its best-known figures, retired stage magician James Randi, who made a crusade out of debunking psychics.
In response to his criticisms, Browne audaciously announced that she would accept Randi's million-dollar challenge to submit to a scientifically controlled experiment in which she would have to prove she was a real medium, but she later backed out.
The Skeptical Inquirer released a study of 115 of her predictions about murder and missing persons cases, and found that out of the 25 instances when the truth had been discovered at all, Browne had not been right even once.
Fans have also sniggered at her false predictions online, including one who posted a 'fraud montage' of some of her lowlights to YouTube several years ago.
One woman on The Montel Williams Show told Browne that she 'lost my boyfriend tragically' and he was 'never found,' to which Browne said: 'The reason why you didn't find him is 'cause he's in water.'
'Well, it was September 11. He was a fireman,' the woman explained.
Now clips of Browne are once again flying around social media, and a new crop of viewers are reacting with incredulity to her onscreen antics.
One showed a woman discussing her mystery illness, and without even hearing any of her symptoms, Browne confidently advised her to 'look for lupus.'
An Instagram user posted a clip of a woman almost crying as she discussed a childhood dream that had stalked her thoughts into adulthood.
'Can you tell me the dream, honey? 'Cause I can't read your mind,' said Browne.
'I've recently started rewatching Sylvia Browne, and I swear, this woman would just stare at you and say the wildest nonsense,' wrote an X user over another video.
That footage showed Browne confronted by a woman who said: 'Almost a year ago my little nephew had a very violent death. Can you tell me why?'
'Honey, I just got through telling you, it's because it was his time to go,' Browne said, deploying her reputed powers of farsightedness. 'It was his time. He was like an angel that came passing through and then went out.'
She then gruffly asked: 'What is this about, that he couldn't breathe? What is that?' and the woman fought back tears as she replied: 'His lungs were blown out.'
'Well, that's why he couldn't breathe,' Browne managed to divine.
Browne died of heart failure in San Jose, California in 2013 at the age of 77, a decade after she predicted on Larry King Live that she would live to be 88.