Episode 6. Psychic Sylvia

The Effect

It is 11th March 2020, and a deadly new contagion is spreading from country to country, the likes of which has not been seen since the Spanish Flu outbreak, over a century earlier. As countries around the world start falling into lockdown, an unlikely commentator shares a surprising post on Twitter. This post consists of a photograph of a book extract, circled in red. The extract reads: “In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes, and resisting all known treatments.” The person sharing this post is none other than the reality TV star and fashionista Kim Kardashian, a regular consultant of psychics. The extract she has shared, which appears to predict the global coronavirus pandemic with an eerie and astute accuracy, comes from the 2008 book ‘End of Days’, published a full twelve years before anyone had ever heard of Covid19, and written by the American psychic Sylvia Browne.

Surely, Sylvia’s prediction about the coronavirus outbreak was too precise to put down to mere coincidence? After all, she was seemingly able to foresee, not only the exact symptoms of the disease, but also how it would spread across the planet, over a decade before it actually did. But Sylvia’s keen and accurate predictions did not begin and end here, as before her death in 2013, she’d had a forty-year career as a high profile possessor of psychic powers, with some striking results.

In the early 1990s, Sylvia Browne and her extraordinary powers of perception were called upon to assist with a very different kind of event to a worldwide pandemic, at a secluded and windswept cove 20 miles south of San Francisco. The owners of the Moss Beach Distillery, located in this cove, were being plagued by a series of unexplainable paranormal events, from cold breaths on the backs of waitresses’ necks, to the names of staff members being chillingly whispered… from the owners finding themselves unaccountably locked in various parts of the building, to them witnessing objects levitating from one end of a room to the other. When Sylvia Browne visits Moss Beach to conduct a psychic reading, a name instantly makes itself known to her from the other side. It is: ‘Mary Ellen Morley’, and a vision accompanies it, the vision of a woman who, Sylvia says is (and I quote): ‘swarthed entirely in blue’. Sylvia goes on to state that Mary Ellen Morley met with a premature end, and identifies the cause of her death as having been: ‘crushing blows to the head and chest’. The owners of the distillery take the information Sylvia has provided them with to the local records office, and to their astonishment discover that there was indeed a woman named Mary Ellen Morely living in the area and, not only that, but her death had made front page news. Mary had been in a car with her husband Fred, just fifteen miles from Moss Beach, when Fred had lost control of the vehicle, resulting in a devastating crash. Moreover, her cause of death was given as severe trauma to the head and chest, the same injuries Sylvia Browne identified following her psychic vision. Due to Sylvia’s amazing accuracy in pinpointing both Mary Ellen Morley’s name and cause of death, she is invited back to Moss Beach, this time to conduct a seance. During the seance, Sylvia again claims to make contact with Mary’s spirit, telling the distillery’s owners that Mary has a warning for them. That, before long, there will be a fire in the distillery. And, sure enough, a few days later, a fire does indeed break out in the restaurant. Due to the unbelievable incisiveness of Sylvia’s predictions, the distillery’s previously-sceptical owners are now convinced: some psychics really do have the gift of second sight, after all.

And Sylvia Browne’s prophecies, it seems, have already been bearing fruit at this point for two decades. In March 1979, a private client visits her for a psychic reading. During this appointment, Sylvia has an instant and vivid vision of the wreckage of an aeroplane, and warns her client not to fly anywhere during May. Just two months later, that same year, Sylvia’s client finds himself at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, rushing to catch a flight to San Jose. Her previous warning pops into his head and, on the spur of the moment, he decides to take a later plane. The plane he was supposed to be travelling in takes off as planned, but shortly into its journey, it crashes, killing a total of 275 people. Sylvia had been right again.

And if she’s not helping to prevent her clients from meeting sticky ends, Sylvia Browne is assisting in the capture of dangerously violent criminals. When a man begins terrorising the San Francisco Bay area, Sylvia is again called in. This man has been committing a series of violent rapes and robberies, yet there are no sightings of a vehicle to trace at the scenes of his crimes, and neither does he leave any fingerprints. He simply forces his way into houses wearing a blue ski mask, tying up and assaulting his victims before making off with their bank cards and cash. In a time before DNA databases, dash cams and ring doorbells, the authorities are exasperated by the lack of evidence, and ask Sylvia to help. Sylvia tells them that the perpetrator they ought to be looking for is a stocky, dark-haired man with a last name beginning with the letter ‘s’. Not only that, but he works on the streets in some capacity, something, she thinks, to do with straight lines, running in a network across the city. Lastly, Sylvia offers a key piece of evidence: the man will strike next in Redwood City, so that’s the area the police should target. And, sure enough, a man is soon arrested breaking into a home in Redwood City on the San Francisco peninsula. When his possessions are searched, a blue ski mask is discovered, together with various stolen items. He has a last name beginning with ‘s’: Sanchez, and he also works as a sewer repair man, carrying out maintenance on the network of drains that crisscross the city. He is branded ‘arguably the most vicious and horrific serial rapist’ in history, and sent to prison for a total of 406 years.

And Sylvia’s predictions keep on coming. She predicts that Arnold Schwarzenegger will go into politics eleven years before he is elected as the governor of California. She predicts that Madonna will go on to have a second child, just not with the same man who fathered her first child. And she also predicts, a whole year prior to Barack Obama’s election in 2008, that the United States would have its first black president within eight years.

But who was Sylvia Browne, this unusual woman with a most unprecedented gift? Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, with parents who had a tempestuous relationship, Sylvia had begun experiencing psychic visions at the tender age of three. As a child, if there was a knock at the door of the family home, Sylvia always seemed possessed of the ability to know who was there before the door was answered. She could give a physical description of whomever her parents were talking to on the phone, even if they were complete strangers. She was apparently able to predict deaths by witnessing the face of the person who was close to death melting before her eyes. She was also adamant that she had been poisoned in a past life, insisting that her father taste her all her food before she ate it. She called this clairvoyance ‘the unwanted knowing’, and would allegedly see parades of spirits regularly file through her childhood bedroom. She was 8 years old when she first met her spirit guide, Francine, an Amerindian woman from Colombia with a full historical backstory dating from the 1850s. Sylvia’s connection with Francine became the most enduring relationship of her life. It is said that whenever she communicated with this spirit guide, Sylvia’s physical appearance would change markedly, her face broadening, her eyes becoming more hooded. And it’s little wonder that psychic readings and spirit guides featured so prominently so early in Sylvia’s childhood. In later books and interviews, she claimed to be from a long line of psychics on her mother’s side, dating back a remarkable 300 years.

After a few failed relationships, Sylvia Browne dabbles with the idea of becoming a nun. In 1986, she starts up her own religion: a brand new Gnostic Christian church called Novus Spiritus, which she claims is an innovative world religion that will provide: ‘answers to what we thought were mysteries’. As early as the 1970s, Sylvia begins contributing to well-known television shows, and from 1991 she is a regular on the popular Montel Williams show, as well as putting in frequent appearances on programmes like Larry King and Unsolved Mysteries.

As Sylvia’s notoriety increases, she starts to command fees as high as $700 for a 30 minute reading. She writes a dizzying total of 46 books, 22 of which make the New York Times bestseller list. And as well as consulting with the police, she also puts her psychic abilities to work with the FBI, revealing during her daytime TV spots that she has even worked with the FBI on such high profile cases as the Ted Bundy murders in the 1970s and the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001. Ted Gunderson, a retired senior special agent with the FBI in Los Angeles, is effusive about her outstanding powers of clairvoyance. He states in an interview: ‘I’ve worked with numerous psychics in the past and very few are really on target, but Sylvia Browne is probably one of the most accurate psychics in the country.’

But what Sylvia comes to be especially famous for are her predictions surrounding missing children, and it is as a result of her spots on the Montel Williams show that these predictions make a lasting impression. In 2004, Sylvia appears on Montel to talk to Louwanna Miller, mother of Amanda Berry, who had vanished the previous year in Cleveland, Ohio while walking home from work, one day shy of her 17th birthday. When Louwanna Miller asks whether she will ever see her daughter again, Sylvia replies: ‘Yeah, in heaven. On the other side. She’s not alive, honey.’ It was a bold claim to make at all, let alone on national television to a grieving mother visibly struggling with circumstances that would be any parent’s worst nightmare. It was a claim that surely nobody would be comfortable making in such a situation, unless they were absolutely convinced that they were correct. But Sylvia Browne wasn’t correct, as on 6th May 2013, following a frantic phone call to the emergency services, Amanda Berry sensationally reappears, a whole decade after she first vanished.

The Method

In May 2013, emergency services receive a frantic phone call from a young woman. She claims she is Amanda Berry, and that she has been the subject of news reports for the past ten years. When Amanda is picked up by police, it is revealed that she was abducted by a serial kidnapper, rapist and abuser in 2003, and has been imprisoned at his house ever since, together with her six year old daughter fathered by her abductor, plus two other young women. Sadly, by the time Amanda escapes to safety, her mother Louwanna has passed away, dying of heart problems just a year after her appearance on the Montel Williams show, the same appearance during which Sylvia Browne had frankly informed her that her daughter was dead. When Amanda Berry watches a clip of the show after she is freed, and witnesses the exchange between her mother and Sylvia, she breaks down in tears.

Despite largely refusing to comment on the grossly incorrect claims she made about Amanda Berry, Sylvia Browne later backtracks, proclaiming that she’s not always right, only God is, and that she told Amanda’s mother during her appearance on the Montel show that if there was ever going to be a time that she was wrong, it was this one. Yet she went ahead anyway, informing a heartbroken woman on national television that her daughter was dead.

When news spreads of Sylvia’s tragically incorrect ‘psychic’ prediction regarding Amanda Berry, the predictions she made during television spots - particularly on the Montel Williams show - about other missing children are revisited.

In 2002, a couple of years before her assertion that Amanda Berry was dead, Sylvia makes some equally-inaccurate claims to the parents of another missing child, 11 year-old Shawn Hornbeck. Shawn had disappeared earlier that year while riding his bike near his home in Richwoods, Missouri, and his parents, Pam and Craig, desperate to find their son and with few other clues to go on, appear on the Montel Williams show to ask for Sylvia’s help. In response, Sylvia makes an extraordinary series of pronouncements. She says that Shawn Hornbeck had been kidnapped and offers a very distinctive physical description of the perpetrator. The man police should be looking for, Sylvia says, is dark-skinned and hispanic, with long dreadlocks and a height comparable to that of a basketball player. She adds that Shawn remains within a 20 mile radius of his home, somewhere near a landmark of two jagged boulders. Crucially though, she informs Shawn’s parents that their son is dead. But, like Amanda Berry, Shawn Hornbeck is later found alive. One of the key breakthroughs in this particular case, though, wasn’t any clue Sylvia Browne provided, but evidence pieced together by blogger and amateur sleuth Michelle McNamara, who would later become known for her work on the Golden State Killer. Through detailed research, Michelle identified the links between Shawn’s disappearance and the case of another missing child who had disappeared from a location not too far from Richwoods, drawing attention to the fact that the two boys had very similar physical statistics. Michelle also compiled intensively-detailed reports on the abductions, plus reports on similar abductions of boys that potentially linked back to the man police eventually arrested. He was Michael Devlin, a white man of average height who had never had dreadlocks. Indeed, none of the details Sylvia had provided about the case were correct. When approached about this, she responded by saying she couldn’t possibly be right every time. Shawn Horbeck’s parents commented that having to listen to what Sylvia had told them on Montel’s show had been one of the most painful things they’d experienced.

The serial inaccuracy of Sylvia’s predictions, coupled with the unethical way in which they were delivered, led people to probe into her background. And it was discovered that Sylvia Browne was a compulsive liar. The degree she claimed to have been awarded, for example, did not exist. But previous convictions for fraud and falsifying loan applications did, offences which led to her being ordered to undertake 200 hours of community service. Furthermore, when a Freedom of Information request was made for the FBI records relating to Sylvia Browne, there was no evidence of her ever having worked on those high-profile cases that she said she had. There were no records of her having been consulted for the Bundy crimes, no records of her having been consulted following the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Moreover, there were no records she was officially involved with the FBI whatsoever. And that FBI agent, Ted Gunderson, who was so quick to sing Sylvia’s psychic praises? He’d been discredited for being a far-right agitator and conspiracy theorist, known to promote a succession of claims just as weird and wacky as Sylvia’s.

Over the years, Sylvia Browne’s purported prophecies irritated more and more people, people who made it their mission to expose her as a fraud. Armchair sleuth Robert Lancaster, who was particularly offended by the claims he’d watched Sylvia make about missing children on the Montel Williams show, even established a website called stopsylvia.com. Another critic was the magician and sceptic James Randi, co-founder of the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry. Randi spent decades of his life debunking fakers and scam artists using his knowledge of stage magic techniques. In 2001, he challenged Sylvia to demonstrate her incredible psychic powers under test conditions, a challenge she accepted on Larry King Live. However, years later she had still not undertaken Randi’s proposed test, or even set a date for it, stating she ‘had nothing to prove’.

Ultimately, the seemingly incredible psychic predictions of Sylvia Browne might all boil down to something very ordinary: humble coincidence. There was a potential reason Sylvia was such a prolific writer of her prophecies: throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick. Sylvia wasn’t the only person, for example, to forecast the 2020 pandemic. Author Dean Koontz had written about a deadly disease known as ‘Wuhan-400’ (correctly foreshadowing the Chinese city where the virus originated), as early as 1981. An episode of The Simpsons also predicted the Covid outbreak and, in fact, this isn’t the only prediction the writers of the popular animation have gotten right over the years. Across a total of 35 seasons, The Simpsons has predicted election results, the outcomes of Super Bowls, the Seigfried and Roy tiger attack, and a maths equation strikingly similar to the one underpinning the Higgs-Boson particle, an amazing 14 years before it was discovered. Indeed, the writers of The Simpsons seem to have an even more impressive array of psychic powers than Sylvia Browne. Or does this, too, just go back to coincidence? After all, a lot of content has gone into making the 768 episodes aired to date. Like Sylvia’s copious predictions, some of it was bound to happen.

Superficially, that coronavirus prophesy of Sylvia’s, made in 2008 and kept up by the Kardashians in March 2020, seems to be too accurate to ignore as mere coincidence. And yet, breaking down the statement - “In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes, and resisting all known treatments” - provides a glimpse into how even spookily accurate sounding predictions are not everything they seem. Firstly, Sylvia predicts that the pandemic will happen ‘in around 2020,’ not ‘in 2020’, providing a handy date spread of potentially well over half a decade. Secondly, although Covid19 can lead to pneumonia in some cases, it is not a ‘pneumonia-like illness’. Sylvia tells us that the illness ‘attacks the lungs and bronchial tubes’, though rather than providing more information about this mysterious disease, this statement merely restates the fact that she believes it to be a ‘pneumonia-like illness’. Although Browne claims this illness will ‘resist all known treatments’, Covid-19 is treatable. Furthermore, there was a second part of Sylvia’s extraordinary coronavirus prediction, and that was, quote: ‘The illness… will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely.” Obviously, this hasn’t happened, as Covid is still with us today, well over four years after the original outbreak.

Despite her raft of inaccurate and unethical predictions, coupled with her history of criminal activity, Sylvia Browne continued to be popular right up until 2013, when she passed away aged 77. Ironically, her death at this age disproved yet another of her prophecies: that she would live to the age of 88. But, as she asserted during her life, her powers didn’t extend to making accurate predictions about herself. The question is: did they really extend to making any accurate predictions at all?

© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.