In 2003, Sylvia Brown told Pam and Craig Akers that their son, Shawn Hornbeck was “no longer with us.”
Yes, that’d be the same Shawn Hornbeck that went missing in 2002 and was found last week along with another St. Louis-area boy who had been missing for almost a week.
She told them his body would be in a wooded area near two out-of-place jagged rocks (he was found in an apartment). She told them the abductor would be a dark skinned man, not black, but hispanic (he was white). She told them he would have long black hair he wore in dreadlocks (short brown hair). She told them he was really tall (ok, I’ll give her that one). She told them he was driving a blue sedan with fins (it was a white compact truck with a camper shell).
In short, it would have been harder for her to have been MORE wrong.
See stltoday.com for more information about Shawn Hornbeck. Why this woman gets her jollies from adding MORE pain to people’s lives, I have no clue.
Well, to give old Slyvia credit, she’s added some joy to my life right now, hearing about this. No disrespect meant to the Hornbeck family (and I realize that this nonsense must have added to their already substantial pain), but it’s difficult for me not to enjoy watching a famous “psychic” fall on his or her face. Furthermore, I’m really looking forward to Browne’s attempts to refit this spectacularly obvious wrong guess into a ‘hit.’
I often wonder about the mentality of people like Sylvia. Are they truly delusional enough to believe they’re psychic? Or do they lie, knowing it’s all a scam, just to make money and get attention? It’s hard for me to understand how anyone with a heart could prey on the parents of an abducted child like that unless they were mentally ill and truly believed they had some “psychic power”.
There’s a really interesting book called “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer. In it, he postulates that psychics become psychics not out of maliciousness, but because they had an early hit (correct guess/“prediction”) that resulted in positive feedback (“I thought off you when the phone rang.”/“Wow, how could you know that?”) The person then begins to notice the “hits” and disregard the “misses.” With every “hit” that person becomes more and more confident in their innate psychic abilities, and less and less apt to notice all the misses. (This works both ways–the grieving audiences also notice only the hits and quickly forget the misses.) Very popular and skilled psychics probably learned all those “cold-reading” skills unconsciously – they probably don’t even realize that’s what they are doing, but they continue the behavior because of all the positive feedback that results. Thus it’s possible for someone to be a famous, cold-reading “psychic” and be completely genuine in intention.
Well…on the other hand, I don’t think ALL psychics are fake.
I’ve had some pretty weird experiances, like dreams of people that I would later meet. But I do think that many of the big name pyschics are just as much hucksters as Benny Hinn.
When subjected to scientific scrutiny, there has never been any demonstration of genuine psychic phenomenon. You mentioned dreams, but memories of dreams are extremely unreliable and extremely susceptable to “editing” and suggestion. You dream about meeting, say, a female police officer. Then you start keeping your eye out for female police officers. Then you talk to one. Then you subconsciously edit your memory so that the person you meet looks exactly like the woman you dreamed about. People who think they dream stuff before it happens are generally just finding approximations in their waking lives and then “recutting” their memories (subconsciously, it’s not intentional) to fit reality.
I agree with this very strongly - and do so from experience. I have been doing readings for about 5 years now. I am not psychic in any way (nor ever claim to be) and am consciously using cold reading techniques - very much influenced by the SD’s Ianzin’s book, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.
I sometimes get hits that are so accurate they scare me. If I were using any ‘real’ system like tarot or astrology, I would soon be convinced they were real. To be totally scientific, I created my own divination system based on cold reading theory. It is called Tauromancy. There is nothing about this system - the props, the method, what I say - which has not come from rational thinking based on the person I am reading - age, gender, general look, and then eventually, feedback. I name people, diseases, all sorts of things. I always get “there is no way you could have known that”. They are right. i didn’t. But I sure make it sound like I did.
Last night I did a reading on a 40 year old woman. She was very casually dressed, no make-up, no jewelry. The first thing she did when she was supposed to be arranging a set of pretty little masks on a mat was to hand one of them to me saying she did not relate to this mask and wanted to reject it. It was the ‘mask of materialsm’. I took out the hand written book I made up to give validity to the system, opened at the page describing that mask which is headed ‘the mask of materialism’ and showed it to her saying only: “This is what you have rejected”. She was so astounded, she was then fully convinced - saying this is exactly true of her. I reinforced the hit she had just acknowledged by pointing out that it isn’t true of the vast majority of people.
Mind you, had she put it on the mat, I would have interpetted it to get a hit as well.
Had this happened when I was a beginner, and in a system which I hadn’t made up myself, then I think I would have been totally convinced. Tracy loved the hour long reading. I felt really special. Yes, Shermer has it spot on. I would have been convinced of my psychic abilities, and loved indentifying with them and the positive feedback.
By the way, I never perform as a psychic, yet with the right lead in, it still works a treat every time. We always debrief afterward.
I could go on about this for ages. After hundreds of readings, instinct and experience just tells me, without conscious thinking, what will work.
How lucrative is this? We have a psychic in town, complete with a neon sign in her window. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out of the building, but I assume she’s doing readings, and has been there for at least 20 years.
I don’t know of any psychics who work with the police successfully:
‘Most reported successes appear to be like the one that a New Jersey police captain attributed the late Dorothy Allison. Her predictions “were difficult to verify when initially given,” he said. “The accuracy usually could not be verified until the investigation had come to a conclusion.” Indeed, this after-the-fact matching–known as “retrofitting”–is the secret behind most alleged psychic successes. For example, the statement, “I see water and the number seven,” would be a safe offering in almost any case. After all the facts are in, it will be unusual if there is not some stream, body of water, or other source that cannot somehow be associated with the case. As to the number seven, that can later be associated with a distance, a highway, the number of people in a search party, part of a license plate number, or any of countless other possible interpretations. Many experienced police officers have fallen for the retrofitting trick.’
‘Other explanations for psychics’ reputed successes include the following:
Some psychics exaggerate their successes, even claiming positive results in cases that were failures or that never even existed.
Psychics may use ordinary means of obtaining information which they then present as having been psychically obtained. For example, psychics have been accused of impersonating police and even of bribery of police officers in order to gain information. In one instance the psychic, unknown to a detective, had actually been briefed on the case by others. Shrewd psychics can brief themselves by studying newspaper files or area maps, and some make use of the fortune teller’s’ techniques of “cold reading” (a technique in which the psychic fishes for information while watching the listener for reactions that suggest correctness or error).
Another potential explanation for psychics’ apparent successes is faulty recollection of what was actually said. The fallibility of memory is well known, and many stories of psychic success get better as they are told and retold.
Many psychics deal in vague generalities: for example one psychic reported perceiving “the names ‘John’ or ‘Joseph’ or something like that.” ’