Behind the Bastards - Part One: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Robert and Kal Penn discuss the life and times of Sylvia Browne, the first famous psychic detective who spent most of her life committing crimes rather than stopping them.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And if you're listening to this, we've had a heavy start to the year doing four episodes on some of the new releases in the Epstein Files. It's been dark. And whenever things get dark, I like to go back to like a lighter kind of fair, you know, something a little more fun. Now, since this is still a podcast about the worst people in history, we're still going to be

talking about horrible things. But this is all a preamble to say we're talking about a kooky psychic today. You're welcome, everybody. I know these are a lot of people's favorite episodes. And to hear about this person, we've got a great guest for you this week. Cal Penn. Cal, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Obviously, people, I'm sure most people listening are very well aware of you for your career in film and television and your time in the obviation and your time in the obviour. White House, but you are now a podcaster. You've gotten dragged into the podcasting trenches. Your life has been upgraded, some might say.

Yeah. Yeah, there weren't enough podcasts until I had one, too. That's right. It was a real problem. We were all worried about it. But thankfully, you've filled the gap. You want to talk about the show you're doing before we get into our episode? Thank you.

Thanks for the shameless plug opportunity. It's a podcast called Here We Go Again that looks at the past, present, and future of things in pop culture. So we've had Bill Nye, the science guy, to talk about things like the space race, had on Medi Hassan to talk about the lack of trust in mainstream news.

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That's how it works. How do you not? So now that I have a podcast, I get to ask all of those, all of those, all of those, all of those, all of those kinds of questions. Yeah, transportation secretary seems like one of those, like, every time I'm in an airport, I'm like, oh, if I had that power, the things I'd change. And then the second I leave the airport, it's like, oh, I can't imagine wanting to think about airports for another second when I'm not in one. Totally agree. Yes. Yes, exactly. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumprite became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good people. What's up? What's up? It's Questlove. So recently, I had the incredible opportunity to have a real conversation with actors and producer, Jamie Lee Curtis, from routines to recovery, true lies, and a certain. Jermaine Jackson music video, Jamie Surreal and Raw, and it's something I really admire about her.

I am so happy that I'm the head bitch in charge at 67, that I have the perspective that I have at my age, to really be able to put all of this into context. Listen to the Questleaf show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the under-explored pockets of F1, including the story of the woman who last participated in a Formula One race weekend,

the recent uptick in F1 romance novels, and plenty of mishap scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Well, Cal, I'm going to start by asking a question that we ask all of our guests. Are you psychic? I am not set.

Well, see, if you were psychic, you would know the answer to that question. Yeah, yeah. I'm not psychic. I knew that. Yeah. Have you ever heard of a famous TV psychic named Sylvia Brown? Yes, of course. She was on all those daytime talk shows?

Everywhere. Everywhere. She was on Larry King. Montel was the big one she was on. Yeah, yeah. There were all those viral clips of it. her, right? Yes. She's been going viral with the gin Z or gin alpha. I'm split as to which gin has rediscovered her, but one of the younger ones has rediscovered her in clips on TikTok.

And she's, it has a, I think a lot of people like, when you get little clips out from someone and maybe she sounds like kind of motivational in that one or optimistic in another and kind of encouraging, you get a different picture of the woman that I think is accurate to her. Because Sylvia Brown is she was like the first crime fighting psychic. That's how she built. She didn't actually fight crime. She committed them. But she was like the first TV psychic to be like, I work with police and the FBI to

help like solve missing persons cases, right? She was the one who kind of turned that into a trope. And in fact, I think you could probably argue that she's like, you know, the TV show Syke kind of played that idea for laughs. But I think it like, psych probably wouldn't exist if Sylvia Brown. hadn't been around in the 90s, like, you know, making that into a thing. Otherwise, you'd be like, well, with psychic detectives, that's, like, that's just a weird concept, you know? Um, what's interesting about Sylvia is that while she's this person who claims to be

helping the police, who claims to be finding people with her powers, she's not just bad at it. She's so bad that she, like, adds harm the situations that were already disastrously dangerous. And we're going to start these episodes, as we usually do with her early, life and childhood. I've got her, she wrote an autobiography, thank God, which I always love when a grifter writes an autobiography. You learn so much about how they want to be seen. But part of the problem is she kind of paints herself as a very sweet and reasonable person in that. And it might seem like as it goes through, we're kind of being unfairly mean to her. So before we get to her autobiography, I want to actually open with a later chapter from her life to kind of set the stage and

make sure people knows there's a reason why we're talking about this lady, right? This isn't just like a harmless, a harmless crank. In 2004, Sylvia Brown made one of her many appearances on the Montel Williams show. At the time, Amanda Barry, a 17-year-old girl, had been kidnapped about a year earlier. Amanda goes missing in 2003. And the last time Amanda had been heard from was at 8 p.m. on April 21st. She'd called her sister to say she was getting a ride home from her job at Burger King. and then she's just gone.

The FBI initially describes her as a runaway, which I think is generally what they do in cases like this. But a day or two later, an anonymous person calls Barry's mother using her daughter's cell phone and says, I have Amanda. She's fine and will be coming home in a couple of days. Amanda was not fine. She was not home in a couple of days. And as the months go on, her family gets understandably desperate.

And her mother decide she's willing to do anything to keep public interest up about her daughter's case, obviously, right? Like what other, what else can you do in this sort of situation? So she's willing to talk to anybody and she's willing to go on any show to keep Amanda's name in the news. So in 2004, she decides to get on the Montel Williams show. For years, Montel Williams had had a profitable arrangement with Sylvia Brown, who was a popular psychic reader and had in fact worked with law enforcement on several missing persons cases, or at least that's how she billed herself. She was brought in to do a reading on Amanda's distraught mother, Luana Miller. Sylvia very bluntly tells Luana, your daughter is not alive based on my psychic event. She's like, I looked into it psychically.

Your daughter's dead. And she says, your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call. Basically, because she hasn't contacted you, like, she's definitely gone. So she's very blunt about this. And the whole interview is pretty brutal. It's hard to find full episodes of the show from that period of time online. But we've got a little segment, just a couple of seconds, Sophie's going to play, to give you an idea of how Sylvia is talking to this woman.

Don't think I'll ever see her again? Yeah, in heaven on the other side. So she's like, am I going to see her again? And Sylvia says, in heaven, which is pretty, you can see on her mom's face, like, just how devastating that is. And this is really fucked up because Amanda's not dead. She is, in fact, alive. And aside from being kidnapped and locked in a basement, she is in good health at

the time of this Montel Williams' brink. broadcast. It turns out she was one of three women, or I mean, they're women after a period of time, but I think they're mostly girls when they're kidnapped. By a maniac, you've all heard of this case, a guy named Ariel Castro, kidnaps three women and imprisons him in the basement of his Cleveland home. This is the, you know, that guy gets like recorded talking about the case when they escape and it gets like auto-tuned and stuff and turned into like, it's an early meme. Like, this is that case, right? I mean, I don't mean to distract from the severity of it, but this is the, yeah, this is why, I mean, it's a very famous story. And Amanda actually escapes in May of

2013. She's the one who gets out of the prison that he's built for them and calls for help and gets them all rescued. This is a story you've heard, obviously, it's fairly famous, but what you probably hadn't heard is that Amanda's mom had been told by a TV psychic 10 years earlier that her daughter was dead. And when Luana goes home after appearing on the Montel Williams show, She tells a friend that she has been devastated by Sylvia's prediction. She calls Sylvia 98% credible, and she accepts that her daughter has died. Her friends and families say that she kind of stops her efforts to find Amanda. She basically gives up.

She's hospitalized a year later with pancreatitis, and she dies, believing her daughter was dead. So that's bad, like, awful. I mean, just, what can you say? other than I think that sets the stage of like this is not a harmless psychic this is not someone who's like playing around and pretending to have powers and talking to aliens and not doing any danger at the time at which you're inserting yourself into missing persons cases you've become a monster kind of right this is terrifying Yeah, it's terrifying. It's interesting how she gets to this stage because it's not kind of what I would expect. Like the version of her life that she told people is not very accurate to like how she actually gets on television because she portrays herself as like someone whom the police come to and start using in the 70s as a resource. And that's very much not true. So let's talk about the reality of Sylvia's life.

Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker, she's not born Brown, was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1936. In her autobiography, psychic, she states that she believes. This is like, because she lays out in this book kind of her, it's almost a religion that she's kind of trying to put out. She has her own, like, set of spiritual beliefs that she's trying to get people to embrace. And based on that, she believes that when we're born, we come from the other side and we plan out our new incarnation before, like, we come in. to the world, so our spirit laboriously plots out every step of our future lives to, quote, help guarantee that we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves. So Sylvia says we choose our families, which I'm sure will come to a surprise to people with abusive relatives. We choose

our enemies, which I'm sure is a real shocker to the victims of genocide. And we choose our careers, which I assume will at least come as a surprise to the guy I saw mucking out the slurry of old booze urine and trash in the streets of New Orleans after Marty Gras. We pick all of that when we're on the other side. Like, it's the kind of thing, I guess if you're happy with your life and who you are, that's a comforting thing to believe. But like, you have to imagine somebody sitting back in the spirit world being like, what am I going to do with this next life?

You know, it would be great, having like a crippling substance dependency and working a series of marginal jobs until I die at age 29 from meningitis. And then another spirit's like, yeah, you know what, I'm going to grow up in the Congo and get maimed by a landmine at age of That sounds awesome. Like, that's literally what she believes. That's, like, such a crazy level of, like, privilege and entitlement. It's kind of inherently victim-blamey, right?

Like, how can you, if that's what you believe, how can you sympathize with people who are suffering? Yeah, yeah. You chose this before you even got here. You pre-ordered your meal. Right. Yeah, it's like you're picking an in-flight meal, but it's like, hmm, pancreatic cancer sounds good. like age 45, you know, right in the middle there. I was like, you know what?

Podcaster. Yeah. That makes sense. I think podcasters are picked before birth. Anointed. And there's also like some inconsistencies that I just can't like square out in here. Like, for example, she says that you pick your parents, right? And you pick their good and their bad traits.

But presumably, didn't your parents also start off as spirits that, like, that, like, like picked their life. So then like how does that all work? Right? Like what room is there for you? I enjoy that you're trying to rationalize this. This is good thing. Yeah. Yeah. You have to think about these things, right? Yeah. The math is not mathing is what you're saying. No, exactly. Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty like hard to kind of draw a logical line between all of this. And obviously, you know, religion is never perfectly consistent with what we'd call human logic. That's kind of the point. God works in mysterious. ways and all. But I think we can all agree this is pretty incoherent, right? Like when you're saying,

like, victims of human trafficking, like sat down at some sort of celestial D&D table and like picked that out as a trait, like that's just kind of messed up. Even in her own autobiography, which opens with her wedding to husband number five in her 70s, kind of makes funny about how silly this idea is. She writes, quote, obviously, when I was on the other side writing my chart, it seemed like a great idea to wait until I was in my 70s to meet the real Mr. Wright. I repeat, what the hell was I thinking? Yeah, because maybe that's a really dumb way to think about life. Oh, man.

Back to her story. Sylvia has a good relationship with her dad. She really likes him. She kind of describes him as a scumbag, but she has a good relationship with him, I guess. Like, he's constantly cheating on her mom, but she hates her mom. So she winds up sympathizing with her dad over it. Well, look, she chose. it. She shows it.

Right. Yeah. And her mom must have chosen to have a bad husband. She describes her mother Celeste as basically the devil herself. Quote, she was physically abusive when my father wasn't around, and she delighted in telling me about lying awake at night, trying to figure out if she could kill me and get away with it. And it's hard when you're dealing with an autobiography of someone who is like talking about their horrible child abuse and then talking about like the fact that they can see the future or talk to aliens and you're like, well, I know a lot of this isn't true, how much of it is true, right?

I tend to try to take some of that, like the stuff about her, the basics of her life at face value just because usually even when people are kind of like manufacturing a backstory for themselves, they don't make everything up out of whole cloth. And this is all like fairly consistent. The consistency of her anger towards her mother means that I, it seems pretty believable to me that they had a really fraught relationship. relationship. Sylvia has concluded that her mother is something called a dark entity. Dark entities are those who, because they've turned away from God and abandoned his light, choose to spread

nothing but darkness in their lives. By their own choice when they die, their spirits don't transcend the sacred perfection of the other side. Instead, they enter what's known as the left door, plunged through a godless, joyless abyss, and cycle right back into some poor, unsuspecting fetus again. If one of these days you read about someone in their late teens, triggering a violent uprising in some historically peaceful country. You can confidently say to yourself, oh, look, it's Sylvia's mother. Is that from Perado biography? Yeah, really doesn't like her mom.

Wow. It's interesting, too, because that's like, she's basically saying that, I guess, kind of the normal way, like, reincarnation is what happens, like, if you're a bad person and the good people get to sit down as spirits and pick out what they're going to do. Otherwise, you're just kind of like, it happens at random, seems to be. be more or less how she's saying it goes down. Yeah.

Her earliest childhood memories. Also, she's angry at her mom, but she also says that her spirit picked the bad traits of her mother before birth. So how much anger could you really have? I don't know. Her earliest childhood memories are all about her mom being, like, just terrible. And she tells one story in here called The Time She Tried to Burn My Foot Off. And I'm not actually sure if this is just like a,

a story of Sylvia's mom sucking or a story of like a mother getting distracted during bath time. I was three years old. It was bath time. What I distinctly remember is mother putting me into the tub, turning on a full blast of scalding hot water and leaving the room. My feet had to be treated for some second degree burns. And yeah, like that is the kind of thing I can believe happened.

Her mom says it was like a maintenance issue. She didn't realize the water heater was broken. Sylvia's convinced from an early stage that her mom tries to murder her. I kind of wonder if maybe this all she starts feeling about her mother this way just because of like a fuck up with like the heating. But it's really impossible to say. Sylvia's main positive female influence in her life is her grandmother, Ada Coyle. It was Ada who seems to have first told Sylvia that she was a psychic and not just a psychic, but one of a very long line of psychics. She was in fact, quote, another link in a 300 year psychic family history.

So she's got like, she's like the mayflower of psychic families. Grandma Ada doesn't tell her about this history at first because she doesn't want to unfairly prejudice the baby into thinking she was psychic because not all the kids in the family get to be psychic. If your grandma Ada, you know that you don't want to disappoint the ones who wind up not being psychic. This is the way Sylvia writes it at least. And then kind of at age six, Sylvia predicts the birth of her baby sister and the death of her grandfather. and then the deaths of several other family members in short succession. And this starts to freak her out because she's worried she's causing these deaths until grandma sits her down and tells her it's not your fault and talks to her about her gift.

After this point, she starts to see ghosts on a regular basis. And she'll begin like warning, stopping strangers on the street and saying like, your gallbladder has a problem. You need to go to a doctor about your liver. I don't, you know, I don't think this is real. I think this is her working backwards and inventing, a psychic backstory for herself. But this is at least what she wants us to believe about her life,

that, like, as a child, she's trying to, like, save people, you know, warn them about, like, their random health issues and whatnot. She tells several stories of her powers saving the day. Like, the time she made her dad leave a movie with her, and they got home just in time to save her sister who had come down with pneumonia and get her to a hospital. Oddly enough, none of her relatives, beside her grandmother, seems to find this in any way noteworthy.

They don't seem to realize that she's psychic, even dad, just grandma. When she's eight, Sylvia says that she's visited for a spirit for the first time. And this is going to be her spirit guide. And all this information is coming from her autobiography. There isn't like a second source on this? We had some second sources for pieces of this. But no, from her like when she's eight, I don't have a secondary source. Sure, sure.

Other than that, a lot of her family members don't seem to have believed this stuff, right? Like there's some evidence from people who were kin to her that, like, Sylvia was not always like this. Okay. But nobody else, like, writes about her as a little girl. So this spirit guide comes down in a beam of light and it tells her not to be afraid. And Sylvia is, of course, afraid until her grandmother finds her and explains what all this is about. Quote, a spirit guide, it turns out, is someone who, when we decide to come to Earth for another incarnation, agrees to be our vigilant companion and helpmate will we're away from home.

They've studied our charts and know what we intend to accomplish here. and it's their assignment to support and advise us along the way without depriving us of our free will. And, you know, I find the whole script your life before birth thing to sort of rob people of free will. And it also doesn't, if you think about like the history of it, like, so theoretically, Hitler, like, scripted out being Hitler back before he was born. It was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And he must have gotten like 80 million other people to be like, oh, great idea, Hitler's soul. And we're all going to die in the horrible war that you start. That's what I'm writing out from my chart.

This will be cool. Like how else could it possibly be functioning? Unless all of the people who suffer in wars are these dark souls like her mother, and then they kind of deserve it, right? There's a kind of sinister side if you think too much about what all this stuff means. Yeah, who was Hitler's spirit guide? That's my question. Right.

Now, Sylvia's spirit guide used to be a real person. That's who. That's right. I forgot. That was the first incarnation of Sylvia's mom. Jesus Christ. So what's interesting to me is she talks about who her spirit guide was in life because her spirit guide had originally been a person.

And Sylvia praises this guide for its wisdom and whatnot and talks about her throughout the entire book and also shows no respect for her guide's past life and identity. Listen to this. She lived her one incarnation on earth as an Aztec Incan who at the age of 19 was killed by spear in 1520 while protecting her infant daughter during the Spanish invasion of Colombia. She told me her name was Elina. I apparently either didn't care for or couldn't remember it because I promptly renamed her Francine and have never called her anything else.

That's kind of offensive, right? You're like, Speer's a genocide victim and you're like, I'm going to call you Francine. It's kind of bonk. A whole thing is bonkers. Yeah. And this is supposed to be enticing to people. You're supposed to read this and be like, wow, this is my. how the world works. Like, you're really, you've convinced me, I want to believe the things you

believe, Sylvia. Now, because I'm me, I had to dig in to the backstory of her spirit guide to see is like any of this even plausible. So first off, she claims that Elina is an Aztec Incan name. Alina is a Greek name. It's a variant of the word Helen. So right off the bat, we're having some trouble. Also, the fact that Elena was apparently an Aztec Incan woman makes no sense, because despite the fact that both the Aztec and Incan empires existed contemporaneously, they were very far from each other. And there's very minimal evidence for direct contact between the two empires. There's indirect trade between them.

There's not a ton of cross-pollination. And I haven't found any evidence of like Aztec Incan people. Like that's not like a thing that really happened. Also, when I looked into like Columbia during this period of time, the area we now call Columbia was not settled by the Aztec or the Inca. It was primarily settled by the Tehranus and the Moiscus peoples, right? So none of this makes sense. Like this is like a, this is a white lady who doesn't know anything about Aztec or

Incan history, trying to, wanting to have a connection to like shamans and like the mystique of like South America. And so she's just like bullshitting and made it, didn't even bother to be like, is Alina a Greek name or is it a name someone might have had from this period? Yeah, she just wanted an ayahuasca. trip pre-internet. Oh, yeah. If she'd come up a little later, she would have really been a big advocate of the ayahuasca therapy, I suspect. So Sylvia grows up, you know, talking to Francine in her head. She goes to Catholic school, and she gets in trouble with the nuns, because nuns don't

like it when you claim that you're channeling spirits. Not a thing nuns tend to be huge fans of. She gets in trouble because she talks up in class, and because Francine has a lot of disagreements about the way God works. And so when the nuns will say something, she'll be like, well, actually, the voice in my head says something very different. And this does not go over well. She tells the nuns that hell doesn't exist. They're not thrilled about that. Nuns are kind of big on hell. So she has a tough time in her early school career. Sylvia herself actually gets pissed at her spirit guide Francine a few years later when her grandmother gets sick, because Francine refuses to fix the illness. She just keeps telling Sylvia, everything will work out as it's meant to work out.

So she kind of will go dark on Francine for periods of time as a kid when she gets angry at her. She, in general, doesn't seem to have had a super happy, like, early childhood. She doesn't like living at home. She doesn't get along with her sister because she thinks her mom programmed her sister into being sick and introverted. I think maybe she just had a different personality than you, Sylvia. So at age 16, she decides to free herself from her family via a full-proof plan. She's going to get married. She convinces one of her male friends to get hitched with her, and she doctors her birth certificates that it says that she's 18.

Then she and this guy, Joe, cross state lines and get married by a justice of the peace. This works as well as you'd expect when she comes back home and is like, I got married. Her dad says, the fuck you did. And they annull the hell out of that marriage very quickly. Wow. Sylvia graduates and gets accepted to St. Teresa's College in Kansas City. She majors in education and theology. And it's at around this time that her grandma takes a final turn for the worst and passes on in the hospital.

Francine assures Sylvia everything's fine, but she doesn't believe her spirit guide until she and her boyfriend are driving home. And her boyfriend sees grandma's spirit in the car, which convinces her that not only is everything fine, but that her psychic gifts are definitely real. So she comes into adulthood, she goes to college, and she's training to be a teacher. She's never wanted to do anything but teach. Her spirit guide tells her she's there to be a teacher. Her grandma says she's there to be a teacher. And she takes that very literary that she's meant to like teach kids in a school. So she's on her own now.

She knows she wants to be a teacher, but she doesn't really know what kind of, like, she thinks she wants to be, like school teacher is the thing that she's supposed to be. But her grandmother had always told her that like she needs to use her gifts to speak to large groups of people. And she's not sure like which direction. to go in, and you might say, wouldn't a real psychic know what the future held in store for her, but Sylvia's come up with a workaround to that. As Francine informed her, none of us is allowed to read our own charts while we're here on Earth, which is why there's not a psychic on Earth who's psychic about themselves,

which is an extremely convenient way to work this out. Yeah. It's kind of a load-bearing part of Sylvia's narrative that she can't read her own future. But I can read your future, listeners, and it's going to send you to the advertisement. of this podcast right now. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them.

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Back. Back. Back again. Yeah, back again talking about Sylvia. So she falls in love and almost gets married, wants to drop out of school to get hitched with this guy, right? She's about 19 at this time. But he tells her he wants her to move to a farm and, like, give up her career and raise children with him. And she's down to do this until she finds out that he has a wife and children back. She's not.

One of those things. And I'm kind of wondering like, okay, you can't predict your own future, but shouldn't you've been able to psychically tell that this guy had a secret family? Yeah. That seems. I love how often you're bringing up this flawed theory of hers. You're like, ah, girl. It's very inconsistent the way these powers are supposed to work. Yeah.

You can tell a guy's got liver cancer, but not that like a dude who's hitting on you has a wife and kids back home. Yeah. So during her time in college, she becomes increasingly fascinated with the workings of a human mind. she signs up for a class in abnormal psychology, which like, who didn't? She takes this evening. Yeah, a lot of people do this. She also starts taking classes in hypnosis. And just so we're clear, because I don't think a lot of people know this,

hypnosis is like a thing with, like, demonstrable effects that's written about by, like, actual, like, mental health, like, professionals. There's a, I found an article in the journal of the APA by Kirsten Weir that notes, Hypnosis is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself. but today advocates pointed to its evidence say it deserves a fresh look and a much whiter audience. Hypnosis has a certain historical mystique that can sometimes make it difficult for practitioners to understand its modern relevance, said David Godot, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Long Beach, California. In fact, clinical hypnosis has clear benefits in psychotherapy, improving outcomes

in areas such as pain management, anxiety, depression, and sleep. And there's, so what I want to say is that, like, this is like a real thing, and there's very real evidence that hypnosis has impact on people, which is part of the point is very dangerous when people get trained in it and, like, fuck around with it. Because you can actually, like, really mess people up by screwing with this stuff. It's a, it's a potentially, like, dangerous thing to mess with. And I'm not qualified enough to go into, like, the weeds of how all this works. But it's enough for you to know that it is a potentially powerful tool for therapy.

And Sylvia decides she likes this, and she's enthralled with her abnormal psychology course. But once she gets further along in the course, she starts to get scared, too, because she's, She starts reading that things like hearing voices in your head are potentially symptoms of, like, mental illnesses. And she writes that some of these illnesses, quote, describe me much too closely for my own comfort. And I might be like, ma'am, maybe this is time to, like, self-reflect a little bit more. This is actually the only self-reflection she does in this book. She writes out that she knows all the things she's described experiencing the voices, the seeing people that aren't there, are classic signs. of schizophrenia. And she decides to go to a psychiatrist to actually talk this out and see,

am I crazy? Like, that's the way she writes. She comes to a conclusion, maybe I'm nuts. And so she sits down with one of her professors and engages her professor, like, as a psychiatrist to analyze her. Which you're not supposed to do, I looked around a little bit. And per the liaison committee on medical education, health professionals who provide psychiatric and psychological care to medical students must have no involvement in the academic evaluation or promotion of students receiving those services. You are not supposed to teach someone and be their psychiatric analyst. It's considered a very bad idea. And I think this anecdote really makes the case as to why, because this teacher clearly likes Sylvia that she makes the appointment with, and he's not going to be very critical

towards what she says to him. So right before she meets with her professor about this, Sylvia says goodbye to Francine. She's like, look, I've decided you're just a figment of my imagination, and I'm going to cut off contact because I don't want to be crazy. But if you're not a figment of my imagination, I'll give you one last chance to appear in person before me, which had not happened before. And she starts to, like, show up in person in front of Sylvia and her whole family,

Sylvia claims. And Sylvia runs out of the room because she gets so scared by this. And unfortunately, none of her family members were alive by the time of this book being published for me to like, did anyone else see this lady? Has anyone else told this story? But this convinces Sylvia that Francine is real. So she goes to her appointment with Dr. Rinnick and she tells him what happens.

And for some reason, this psychologist and professor is like, oh, this is all perfectly normal. The fact that you're scared that your psychic powers might make you crazy means that you're definitely sane. And he writes down a diagnosis on a piece of paper, normal, but has paranormal abilities? Question mark. Sir?

I don't think you're supposed to do that. Good for you. Good for you. Yeah. Sir? She's going to keep this diagnosis her whole life. Like this is he just, this is like handing liquor and a loaded gun to an angry 15-year-old. Like, there you go.

There you go, Sylvia. You've got like your backup from a professional. Now go out to the world and mess with people. That was dark, Robert. That was really dark. It's not great. This professor seems to really. give her like a wide purview. He lets her channel Francine in class for her classmates in the

abnormal psychology class. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? Genuinely. They question her spirit guide for hours on end while Sylvia is apparently insensate. Quote, there was unanimous agreement that even though it was my voice they were listening to, the speech patterns, the terminology, the rhythms and everything else that came out of my mouth sounded absolutely nothing like me at all. And gee, here's the good news. Everyone loved her and wanted her to come back soon. everybody clapped. It's a great experience for them. Okay.

This, I'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot of what she says. If you think back to like the 60s and, think back to like the science fiction of the 60s and 70s, even like early Star Trek episodes and stuff, there was this fairly widespread acceptance, even from very scientifically minded people, that there was something to psychic phenomenon, that this was real, that there was some reality behind claims of psychic powers. And so it's not actually weird. to me that like a college class in like the 60s and 70s would let someone get up and channel

and people might take it seriously. Like that kind of stuff wasn't as kooky then as it seems now in part because we've had another like 50 years of psychics trying to prove their psychic powers and like not doing it on television. So maybe this really happens. Sylvia claims in her autobiography that she graduates shortly after this at age 19 and starts teaching at a small school near Kansas City. This is a lie, and it's here that I can bring some outside evidence finally into her autobiography, because in 2007, one of her ex-husbands made a public claim that she had lied about her higher education experience and her teaching experience. In order to kind of disprove his lies, she sends her college transcripts over to a critic who had published his claims, and the

transcript she sent accidentally reveals that, like, she did attend college, but she never graduates and she never gets a teaching degree and she probably never works as a teacher, which is good because I don't have to go through the long section of the book where she does like a stand and deliver and she talks about, I knew which kids were being abused and I would like secretly help them and talk to them and like, you know, maneuver to help them out of it. It's all lies. She never teaches kids. I'm pretty glad she never worked with children because can't even imagine, can't even imagine the harm she would have caused. Yeah. Yeah. Like, especially, I imagine, like, somewhat with as wrong as she was about things,

her just, like, going up to a random kid with a normal whole life and being like, your dad's hitting you, isn't he? I can see it psychically. Yeah. Miss Brown is really scary, dad. I don't understand what she's saying. Teacher comes up to, did you know that your mother murdered that man? And you're like, what?

There's a dark vibe to your house. There's a ghost in it. By the way, the dog did not get sent to a farm. Yeah. So the next thing we can verify in her life is that she starts dating. In fact, the ex-husband who later reveals that she didn't graduate college, who is a police officer at the time, a guy named Gary Dufrain. So she meets this cop and they start dating and they get hitched on October 19, 1950s. Where's a cop?

Yeah, he's a cop. It's a start for. That doesn't feel compatible to me. He gets fired presumably for being a crooked cop. She doesn't say that, but they like have to move. Oh. It's bad. What year is this?

Yeah, this is 508. Okay. In the 58. You got to be pretty bad to get moved as a cop in the 50s, bro. In 58, yeah. In 58, yeah. Now, and she also says that he's very sweet when they're dating, but as soon as they get married, he starts becoming physically and mentally abusive, which I have no trouble believing.

It's not just that it's the 50s, but like, you know, 40% of police. least households experienced domestic violence. This is a credit. And also, he publicly hates her, like, her whole life. Now, she's also pretty bad, but I don't doubt that he abused her in any way, shape, or form. Like, everything she writes here seems very credible. And, yeah.

Brutal. That's that what I will note is that Sylvia gives us some hints that she herself was not an easy partner, which doesn't justify anything. But she tells a story that is incredibly frustrating if you put yourself in the other person's shoes where they buy a house. They go through the whole process of buying a house, the huge expense, all the nightmare of signing all the paperwork. And the day they move in, she panics and says there's an evil spirit in the house. And like, something's wrong. We can't live here. And like, you didn't figure that out during the walkthrough. Yeah, exactly. During the inspection that there's a ghost.

So they have to live in the house for a while because, like, they can't just leave. They don't have enough money. She concludes the house was built on an old native burial ground. And when she, I do, Gary's a bad guy, but I love his response to this because she's like, we built, this house was built on an Indian burial ground. And Gary says, so what? I'm sure someone's buried pretty much everywhere. Where are we supposed to live in midair?

Not a bad response. So, per Sylvia, there's a bunch of storms that hit the house. And then Gary loses his cop job and the family moves to California. Her parents move with them and they, like, live next door in a duplex, but the marriage continues to degrade. Sylvia has an emotional affair with a creative writing professor who's into the occult and who starts giving her a cult books like Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy Books to read and tells her like, you're a great psychic and you have to use your powers to change the world. And then he dies very suddenly and tragically.

I have no idea. I can't verify this guy's existence. so I don't know if he was real or if she just invented him because he was narratively convenient. But after this point, she leaves Gary, they get divorced, and she takes their now two children with her. She meets a new man shortly thereafter, a guy named Dowell, and they move into a house together while she completes her hypnotism classes to become a master hypnotist, and she's starting to practice primarily as like a psychic. She's not doing a lot of professional hypnotism right now. She's doing readings on people, and she's sometimes giving like speeches and stuff to,

classes. And that's kind of how she's making her living. I think Dowell is primarily supporting her at this point, but she's starting to build up her career. And we'll talk about what comes next, but first, ads. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

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would change Saskia's life forever. I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. So keep this secret for so many years.

He's like a seasoned pro. This is a story about the end of a marriage. But it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark. You're a dangerous person who prays on vulnerable and trusting people. You're creditor, Michael Leavengood. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.

Late one night, Bobby Gumpbright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Germain was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth.

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I feel like pulling the curtain back is important. Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So my favorite detail from this period of time after she moves in with her new husband is that one day Sylvia's cooking dinner for her family and she starts a massive grease fire that nearly kills her

and she's rescued from the grease fire by a spirit that looks to be a young woman in her 30s. Francine in her. informs her that the spirit was really Grandma Ada. And I got to read, this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book, I got to read this to you guys. Okay. I impatiently pointed out to her that Grandma Ada's hair was white. It was blonde when she was 30, she said, all spirits on the other side are 30 years old.

Why are they 30? Considering all the years I'd been communicating with her, I should have seen this answer coming because they are. I couldn't argue with that. 30, 30, 30. All dead people are 30. 30? 30. Because they are.

Because they are. God was like, you know what the right age is? 30. 30. 30. Yeah, I mean, it's giving Jennifer Gardner. It's giving 13 going on 30. 30, flirty and thriving.

30. I think that shows us that she actually believed this. She has to have to some extent, right? She must have believed that because if you're not going to, bother to justify it with anything other than they said because just because that's how it is. Like, damn, you're in deep. Yeah, that's such a, it's also just objectively like, you know what age people want to be when they're on the other side forever?

The age when their knees started to give out. That's the perfect age. Not in their early 20s when you could like drink like a sieve or whatever, like 30. Yeah. So not long. after this, she and Dal go to see a famous psychic give a lecture. Sylvia very decently doesn't name this psychic because they were still practicing at the time the book came out and she didn't want to start beef. But Sylvia's very offended at how ignorant this psychic is. And she's particularly

offended because the psychic takes credit for her gift for having for their gift, right? That like, this is my gift. I'm special as the psychic. And Sylvia believes that you have to give God credit for everything, right? So she's kind of offended at that. And she's just in general angry that this woman's getting a lot of important details wrong. So she turns to her husband Dal and she expresses fury that this woman has, quote, a whole audience sitting there looking for answers, looking for comfort about their deceased loved ones. All in all they got back was a bunch of double talk, lies and half-truths, which is a very ironic sentence to come out of the lady whose whole career is going to be lying to people about their dead loved ones later. And sometimes they're a lie of loved ones who

aren't dead. Her husband, Dal, I don't know, maybe he just wanted to like get her to stop yelling, but he's like, why don't you do something about it? If you're so much better of a psychic in this lady, you know, why don't you become a big psychic and start giving psychic lectures? And so Sylvia does. She founds the Nirvana Foundation of Psychic Research, a registered nonprofit in California in 1974. Her stated goal with this is to create a new religion, right?

To like, or at least to augment the existing world religions. You get the feelings. Part of, she wants to, like, correct the other religions. She thinks they all get pieces right, but they don't know that you're 30 for, forever when you're dead. You know, that's not in the Bible. We got to pencil that in, right?

Sounds like somebody didn't want to pay their taxes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's right. Cal, you've hit the nail on the head whenever someone wants to start a religion. So she starts running ads in the newspaper for classes, and it being the 1970s, people show up. Sylvia gets so many students that, regrettably, and she hates this. She hates to do this.

Oh, my goodness. start charging the money. It breaks her heart. She has to get money from these people. She's like, oh my gosh, I have to scam the people I'm scamming. There's just too many of them for me to not take their money. How can I not take advantage of these people? Quote, I had been offering for free for so many years, but for one thing, it was the only way that could afford to make a full-time commitment to the foundation. For another thing, as more and more people have been pointing out to be, making a living putting one's gifts to work, is pretty much the definition of virtually every career you can name. So long as I devoted by gifts to

God's greatest good, I had no reason to apologize. I don't know that that is the definition of virtually every career you can name. No. Like putting, like, we all like to think that that's the case, but I don't know if I think, like, most of the people I know who like worked as a bank teller weren't like, I'm putting my gifts to work. They were like, well, I needed a job while I was in college, you know? Yeah. I need something to do. I can teach acting classes for free.

Yeah. So, true to her word, though, after this point, Sylvia is not going to apologize for anything she does over the next 50 years. We have now crossed the threshold. Yeah. And she is going to be from this point forward making money full time off of her psychic research. She's going to start hiring people, bring them in, and expanding the nirvana. the foundation. And by 1975 or so, she is a full-time psychic teaching classes in extra-sensory skills

like dream interpretation and becoming increasingly, like, prominent within like the kooky world of new age thought as that starts to kind of explode in the mid-70s through the early 80s. She's one of these people who's like in Southern California, giving class, it's always in Southern California, like giving classes and putting out books and pamphlets. on like how the psychic world is supposed to work. And there's very much this idea that like we're treating this like a science. And so we'll see how this science develops, Cal, in part two. How are you feeling at the end of part one about our friend Sylvia?

Yeah, what do you think of Sylvia so far? I appreciate this backstory because I grew up in the 90s, so I remember like when you were sick home from school, like with a flu on the couch watching just bad daytime shows. she was a fixture of a lot of them. I guess Montel especially, I don't remember what I would watch back in the day. But I remember that. And then I remember just there was like the gap,

obviously, college after, once the internet comes around YouTube and then obviously now social media, like these clips that circulate of her, I have that weird memory of remembering that as a kid, but then not knowing anything else about her. So all of that was very interesting.

And I guess I didn't, realize how troubled she was from such an early age. And I'm trying to use that term generously instead of saying that she was a fraud or whatever. Like it just sounds like whether she actually believes this or whether it was a calculated fraud, she doesn't sound well from the beginning, right? No. No. And I think it's probably accurate to think that this doesn't, nobody starts, or at least very few people start, you know, the way she would say mapping it out. She's not as a 20-year-old or whatever mapping out. And then I'm going to lie it to people. about their kidnapped relatives.

Yeah. Right? This is a kid who she's got a difficult home life. You know, she's got a grandma who makes her feel special. I don't have trouble believing because a lot of people could have experience like an older, no, I'm a little touched. I've got a little bit of the gift or whatever. And her grandma certainly didn't say everything that she puts in her grandma's mouth,

but she probably said a few things. And then Sylvia expands the lore over time because it makes her feel special and comforted. And, you know, things snowball. and eventually you get a lot less ethical. You start making compromises to keep it going. You find opportunities. And I do think Breaking Bad is a more gradual experience for a lot of these people. You know, they're not all El-R-H who came out of the gate, like, I'm in a con as many people as I can.

We can't all be L-R-H, though we might wish we could. Well, Cal, you want to plug your show again before we roll out here? Sure. I'm the host of a podcast called Here. we go again where we look at the past, present, and future of specific topics. You can think of it as like a place where you can have fun, make some jokes, but at the end of the episode, feel like you've actually learned a little bit of something, a little, maybe like a little, just tiny, tiny bit of hope about the topics that we cover. A tiny bit of hope sounds incredibly

generous for 2026. So I am looking forward to that. You all should be too. All right, everybody, until Thursday this has been Behind the Bastards we'll be back in like a day or so you know how this all works we've been doing this for almost 10 years

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For clips in our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop. What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.

I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing. And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.

Late one night, Bobby Gumpbright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until, a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Good people. What's up? What's up? It's Questlove. So recently, I had the incredible opportunity to have a real conversation with an actress and producer, Jamie Lee Curtis, from routines to recovery, true lies, and a certain Jermaine Jackson music video. Jamie's surreal and raw. and something I really admire about her.

I am so happy that I'm the head bitch in charge at 67, that I have the perspective that I have at my age to really be able to put all of this into context. Listen to the Questlove show on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than no grip. a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series.

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