She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed, and drove off. Her grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. 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?”
Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me—now I’ve never heard of this before—but for some reason she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”
“Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.
“So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery,” Sylvia said.
Opal’s grandmother looked drained and confused. Opal’s body was eventually found buried in Fort Worth, Texas. She had, the pathologist concluded, been murdered the night she went missing. A local man, Richard Lee Franks, was convicted.
Montel Williams was once asked in a radio interview why he has Sylvia Browne on his show. He said, “She’s great! She’s a funny character! She’s hysterical!” Thanks to Montel her books, such as Adventures of a Psychic, are frequently on the best-seller lists. She is the queen of psychics, but there are many others working in her field. “It happens every time a child goes missing,” Marc Klaas told me in a telephone conversation shortly before the cruise began. “I call them the second wave of predators. First you lose your child and then these people descend. Every time.” It happened to Marc. In October 1993 his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, had two friends round for a sleepover at their California home. At 10:30 p.m. she opened her bedroom door to find a man standing there with a knife. He tied up the girls, told them to count to a thousand, and took Polly away. For the next two months, before Polly’s body was eventually found (she’d been raped and strangled), Marc was inundated with offers from psychics. “I was insulated from most of them by family and police,” he said, “but there had to be at least a dozen I personally dealt with. They hope you’ll pay them and they hope they’ll get really, really lucky and make a guess so close to the truth, they can say they solved it.”
Marc did consult a psychic. He says she got it wrong but nonetheless later took credit (on a tabloid TV show) for psychically locating Polly’s body. “You become increasingly desperate and afraid,” he said. “Every day the police don’t find your child, you think they’re not doing their job. So you go elsewhere, and psychics put themselves out there as a very viable solution.”
This is why, Marc said, he’s not surprised by reports that Madeleine McCann’s parents are considering consulting a psychic called Gordon Smith. Friends of the family have already contacted Smith, a host on Living TV’s Most Haunted. According to a Daily Mail article on October 2, the McCanns have received a thousand psychic tip-offs since May.
Sylvia Browne doesn’t solicit. Such is her fame, distraught parents go to her. Most famously, Shawn Hornbeck’s parents went to her. On October 6, 2002, eleven-year-old Shawn disappeared while riding his bike to a friend’s house in Missouri. Four months of frantic searching later, his parents went on Montel.
“Is he still with us?” asked Pam, Shawn’s mother.
“No,” said Sylvia.
Pam broke down. Sylvia said Shawn was buried beneath two jagged boulders.
Four years later, in January of this year, Shawn was found alive and well and living with his alleged abductor, Michael Devlin, in Kirkwood, Missouri. This miraculous happy ending became headline news across the U.S. Shawn’s parents told journalists that one of their lowest points was when Sylvia Browne told them their boy was dead. “Hearing that,” his father, Craig Akers, told CNN, “was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear.”
Sylvia Browne doesn’t give interviews, especially not since the Shawn Hornbeck incident. She’s turned down CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Larry King, ABC, and so on. A few months ago I logged on to her website and watched some of her videos. She looks and sounds like a worldly dame you’d meet in a bar in a Dashiell Hammett novel. Then I noticed an announcement on her news page: Sylvia was to be a guest lecturer on a cruise around the Mediterranean in late September. Fans could sign up for four lectures and a cocktail party.
“She can’t avoid talking to me if we’re trapped on a ship together,” I thought. And so, impulsively, I booked myself on to the cruise.
• • •
IT’S OUR FIRST EVENING aboard and there she is. She’s sitting on the throne on the stage, unexpectedly giving a rambling, grumpy lecture. “I don’t like tofu,” she growls. “I’d sooner eat a sponge.” And: “Try to get a workman! I’ve always wanted to put a little solarium on the back of my house. You know. Glass. They put it on backward. People don’t care anymore.”
The audience listens politely. For all the times Sylvia gets things psychically wrong (which she does a lot: I sometimes think if she tells you your kid is dead, you should probably presume the child’s alive, and vice versa), she still has an enormous following. Hundreds of people have paid thousands of dollars each to be cruising with her this week. This is in part because if you want to pay $750 to have a thirty-minute telephone reading with her, there’s a waiting list of four years. Her critics believe her career can’t possibly survive the Shawn Hornbeck debacle, but there’s no sign of it diminishing on this cruise.
I don’t know anything about my fellow travelers. They mainly look like retired Americans. But then Sylvia draws names out of a hat. If we hear our name called, we are allowed to ask her a single question. Only one.
“Julie Harrison . . . Joan Smith . . . Pamela Smith . . .” says Sylvia. And, one by one, they walk to the microphone in front of the stage.
“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” asks the first woman.
“What?” Sylvia says. The woman is crying so hard, Sylvia can’t understand her.
“Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” the woman repeats.
“He was bipolar,” Sylvia says.
The next woman walks to the microphone.
“I have a strained relationship with my daughter,” she begins. “And I want to know—”
“Your daughter is strange,” interrupts Sylvia.
Sylvia doesn’t pause. Other psychics will often reach around for some inner voice, but Sylvia answers each question instantly, in a low, smoky growl, sometimes before the person has even finished asking it.
“Your daughter is stubborn,” she says. “She’s selfish, narcissistic. Leave her alone.” The woman reluctantly nods. Tears roll down her cheeks.
“Don’t get too involved with her,” Sylvia says. “She’ll hurt you. Leave her alone. I don’t like her.”
“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says.
“Am I ever going to have a better relationship with my father?” another woman asks.
“No,” Sylvia replies. “He’s narcissistic. He has sociopathic tendencies. Forget it. There’s a darkness there.”
“Thank you, Sylvia,” she says.
Sylvia seems to be psychically diagnosing a lot of people with narcissism today.
“Will you tell me exactly the time and place my father died?” the next woman asks.
“Ten years ago in Iowa,” Sylvia says.
“Iowa?” says the woman, surprised.
“I’m the psychic,” Sylvia snaps. “I’m telling you. Iowa.”
“Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says, cowed.
The next woman asks, “What happened to my dog? Is she still alive?”
“No, honey,” Sylvia says.
The woman bursts into tears. There are no parents of missing children on this cruise, but every other human tragedy is well represented.
“My son . . .” the next woman says. She stops, choking on her words. “My son met a violent death,” she says.