My last post on the recent and ongoing backlash and criticism of the psychic medium, Sylvia Browne, brought on more discussion and comments than we’ve seen here at the Big Séance in a while. It’s still a hot topic among bloggers and in online paranormal and spiritual circles.  

Since that post I’ve discovered that Sylvia responded in a statement. 

“For more than 50 years as a spiritual psychic and guide, when called upon to either help authorities with missing person cases or to help families with questions about their loved ones, I have been more right than wrong. If ever there was a time to be grateful and relieved for being mistaken, this is that time. Only God is right all the time. My heart goes out to Amanda Berry, her family, the other victims and their families. I wish you a peaceful recovery.” – From the Huffington Post. 

Regarding the other similar highly publicized case involving Shawn Hornbeck in 2007, Browne’s publicist told CNN “She cannot possibly be 100 percent correct in each and every one of her predictions. She has, during a career of over 50 years, helped literally tens of thousands of people.”

Psychic Medium Sylvia Browne

Since it is highly unlikely that Sylvia Browne would pop in to defend herself on my blog, and since I own many of her books, I decided I would highlight just a few of her statements that seem to fit this situation. 

“I have never used a ‘ringer’ in my life, or participated in a hoax. I would never forfeit my credibility, my career, and my life’s work for the sake of a cheap trick.”
From Life on the Other Side: A Psychic’s Tour of the Afterlife

 

“Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made some mistakes along the way — and I mean some real whoppers — that if you don’t know the whole story could make it look as if my integrity was a little blurry from time to time. Again, ask me and I’ll tell you exactly how stupid I’ve been, how naive and inappropriately trusting of the wrong people I can be, and just how incredibly unpsychic I am about myself. But accuse me of ever being deliberately dishonest, or indiscreet, or greedy and ambitious at someone else’s expense, or careless about the issue of integrity, you’ll have a fight on your hands, and that includes the subject of celebrities, both past and present.”
From Visits from the Afterlife: The Truth about Hauntings, Spirits, and Reunions with Lost Loved Ones

 

“I love being right. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. My career depends on my being right a lot more often than I’m wrong, and I’ve been tested at somewhere between 85- and 90-percent accuracy as a psychic. Averaging, let’s say, twenty clients a day for fifty years, plus another forty years of lectures, print interviews, radio and television appearances, added to several decades of very private pro bono work with the medical and psychiatric communities and various law enforcement agencies, and my own extensive research and writing, I wouldn’t have the strength, the skill, or the courage to try to calculate the number of hours of information I’ve transmitted in my sixty-six years on earth this time around, and I’d be ecstatic to find out that 95 to 90 percent of that information has been accurate and give all the credit to God where it belongs. 

There’s no doubt about it, either, that when I miss something, I miss it, and when I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to point it out. The terrorist attacks of September 11? Not one inkling. The sniper killings that held the Washington, D.C., area hostage in the fall of 2002? I called Lindsay and recorded detailed descriptions of the two suspects several days before any arrests were made. They turned out to be very accurate descriptions of the two alleged suspects who were mistakenly surrounded by the authorities at a gas station and completely exonerated several hours later. I’ve been thrilled to hear it when I turned out to be wrong about the outcome of a missing-persons case or two, and heartbroken on more occasions when I turned out to be right.”
From Visits from the Afterlife: The Truth about Hauntings, Spirits, and Reunions with Lost Loved Ones

 

“Psychics don’t solve crimes. Law enforcement solves crimes. We simply bring another set of tools to what’s usually a long, exhaustive, difficult process of identifying criminals and putting them behind bars. We’re no different from the criminal profilers, the geographic profilers, the forensic anthropologists, the sculptors and other experts who were viewed with initial skepticism until they proved their worth, as any participant in an investigation should be expected to do.”
Included in her section on “Psychic Forensics” from Phenomenon: Everything You Need to Know About the Paranormal

 

“However, Mr. Randi and other anti-psychic skeptics have called me a liar and a charlatan numerous times, and there are even entire Websites devoted to trying to stop my work for God. How miserable is it that instead of helping others, some people choose to start atheistic or skeptical societies and ridicule, or even try to destroy, the men and women who are trying to help others?”
From Mystical Traveler: How to Advance to a Higher Level of Spirituality

 

Update for 5/13/13

I have been reading Prophecy: What the Future Holds for You by Sylvia Browne and had actually started it just before the women in Ohio were found. Today I came across a passage that I sure wish I would have found before I put this post together. In this particular section she was discussing the prophesies of Edgar Cayce. It’s the perfect response to this situation. I probably wouldn’t have even needed the passages I included above. Here it is.

“There are prophesies of Edgar Cayce’s that haven’t come true. I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but my guess would be that his explanation for that would be similar to mine when I find out I was wrong about a reading or a prediction. Any prophet, psychic, clairvoyant, medium or other paranormalist who claims to be accurate 100 percent of the time is a fraud and a liar. Only God is right 100 percent of the time. All the rest of us can do is receive and transmit information we’re given, and stay out of the way as best we can. We can’t take credit for any of the information, but blame for inaccuracy falls justifiably on our shoulders, because it means that somewhere along the line we misspoke, misunderstood, misinterpreted and/or somehow involuntarily interfered, and the messages suffered in the translation.”