“I’m sorry, honey,” Sylvia says.
“Is he around me?” she asks.
“Yes, he does come around you,” Sylvia says. “In fact, he rings the phone. He also drops coins around you. When the phone rings and no one’s there, that’s him. People have said to me, ‘That’s telemarketers.’ Have you ever heard of a telemarketer that didn’t talk? No.” (Actually, telemarketing companies use an auto-dialing machine called the Amcat. When your phone rings and there’s nobody there, it’s because the Amcat has inadvertently dialed your number on behalf of a cold caller who is still pitching to someone else. I feel bad mentioning it here, but it’s the truth.)
“He’s around you,” Sylvia says. “He has beautiful eyes, an oval face. Why is he holding his head?”
“He was shot in the head,” the woman says.
“That’s why he’s holding his head,” Sylvia says.
Sylvia says this to the mother but also to us, as if to say, “See, everyone! That’s my psychic gift!” It is an impressive moment.
It’s dinnertime in the Vista restaurant. I sit with others from the group. Sylvia is nowhere to be seen.
“Those stories were really sad,” I say.
“That’s nothing,” says a woman in her seventies whom I’ll call Evelyn. “Three years ago I saw Sylvia give a talk in Tampa. A girl in her thirties stood up, really young. She said, ‘I haven’t been feeling well. What do you think is wrong with me?’ And Sylvia replied, ‘Do you want the truth, honey? You’ll be dead in two years.’”
Everyone around the table gasps.
“The girl had to be helped from the room in tears,” Evelyn says.
“I wonder if I should try to track the girl down,” I think out loud.
Evelyn looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “She’ll probably be dead,” she says.
DAY 2: DUBROVNIK
Sylvia is having the day off and so her co-psychic, Colette Baron-Reid, entertains us in the Vista lounge. She’s not grouchy and monosyllabic like Sylvia. She’s bouncy and eager to please. She makes us do a “get to know the group” exercise. We have to turn to our neighbor and tell them a lie about ourselves. My neighbor is Evelyn. I really like her: She’s a funny and kind old lady from New York who does amateur dramatics. She’s looking forward to directing a big musical next year.
I say, “My lie is that I don’t have any children.”
Evelyn replies, “My lie is that I don’t have really bad stomach cramps and I’m not scheduled for a colonoscopy when I get home from this cruise.” Evelyn looks scared. “If Sylvia calls my name out tomorrow,” she says, “I’m going to ask her about the stomach cramps. They’re really bad. They shouldn’t be this painful.”
Later, in the Jacuzzi near the dolphin sculpture on the lido deck, I bump into the woman whose husband committed suicide.
“Did Sylvia help you last night?” I ask.
She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He wasn’t bipolar. He had excruciating physical pain in his legs.” She falls silent. “Sylvia didn’t help,” she says.
She’d been too polite to say anything at the time. I think Sylvia survives in part because her audiences are often too polite to say anything.
I feel the need to escape the group. I sneak off to the ship’s casino and pump money into a slot machine. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of red and gold approach in a wheelchair. It is Sylvia. Her golden hair cascades down her red dress. She starts pushing money into the machine next to me. I momentarily overhear her conversation.
“Do you think they liked it?” she asks one of the four large and quite frightening-looking men who are always around her. They look like the Sopranos.
“What?” he replies.
“The thing,” Sylvia says.
“You mean the lecture?” he says. He sounds surprised, as if this isn’t a conversation they have very often.
“Yeah,” Sylvia says. She sounds quite sweet and anxious. “Do you think they enjoyed it?”
“They loved it,” he says.
“Good,” Sylvia says. She catches my eye and smiles warmly. In this moment, she seems likable, though a suspicious part of me wonders whether she knew I was overhearing and said something sweet for my benefit.
There’s a website called stopsylvia.com. A computer programmer called Robert Lancaster created it as a hobby. He does it because, he writes, “I found her work with missing children to be incredibly offensive.” The site assiduously details many of the notable occasions she’s got it wrong. In the FAQ section, Lancaster asks:
Q: Do you think Sylvia believes she is psychic?
A: No, I do not.
Famous skeptics such as James Randi say Sylvia is not a silly, deluded person who believes herself to be psychic. They say she’s a callous fraud. She’s just a good cold reader.
Cold reading is the stage art of convincing a stranger you know more about them than you actually do. Good cold readers are brilliant observers. They make high-probability guesses about their subject based on their clothes, race, age, etc. They quickly pick up on signals as to whether or not their guesses are in the right direction, and alter their spiel accordingly. Of course, cold reading is easiest to spot when the psychic does it badly. This morning, Colette, Sylvia’s co-psychic, seemed to be cold reading badly. She said to a man in the audience, “Why do I see a hospital around you?”
“I’m a doctor,” he replied.
“That’s why I see a hospital!” Colette exclaimed to the crowd.
“I’m a chiropractor,” he added. “I work out of an office. I stay away from hospitals.”
“I meant medical . . . uh . . . lab,” Colette said. “You know the expression, to ‘lab’ something? To research something? That’s what I meant. Are you researching anything at the moment?”
“Yes,” he said.
And so on. My guess is that Colette genuinely believes herself to be psychic and doesn’t realize she’s actually dabbling in the dodgy art of cold reading. I think she thinks she’s tapping into her psychic impulses when she picks up on her audience’s inadvertent clues.
But then, perplexingly, Colette had a moment of seeming psychic brilliance. Apropos of nothing, she told a woman called Jean that her recently deceased husband loved to ride around on his all-terrain bike and enjoyed eating tuna sandwiches. Jean practically shrieked that the bike and tuna were indeed her dead husband’s two very favorite things. Colette looked thrilled and you should have seen the smile on Jean’s face. It lifted everyone’s spirits.
Now I watch Sylvia playing the slots. She is a truly enigmatic person. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1936, to a salesman father, and has been a professional psychic for fifty-three years. In 1959, when she was twenty-two, she married a man named Gary Dufresne. They divorced in 1972. A few months ago he gave an interview to Robert Lancaster of stopsylvia.com. He said he couldn’t remain silent any more after hearing about the Shawn Hornbeck incident: “I try to get her out of my mind as much as possible, but the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious.”
He said that one evening back in the early seventies, Sylvia held a tarot party at their home in San Francisco: “I said to her as we were washing dishes and she was wiping, I said, ‘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.’”
In return, Sylvia has called her former husband “a liar and dark soul entity, but at least the asshole gave me children.”
In 1992, 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 two hundred hours of community service.
Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticized for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins’s last television documentary, The Enemies of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. But Sylvia isn’t harmless. In 2002, 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 1995. 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 customers, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.