Cool 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 yeah, 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 from you for your aware of you for your career in film and television and your time in the Obama White House. But you are now a podcaster here, You've you've gotten dragged into the into the the podcasting trenches.
Your life has been upgraded.
Some might say, yeah.
Yeah, there there weren't enough podcasts until I had one too.
That's right. It was a real problem. We were we were all all worried about it. But thankfully you've you've you've you've filled the gap. You want to talk about the show you.
Do before we get into our episode, Thank you, Thanks for the shameless plug opportunity. It's a 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 Andy the science guy, to talk about things like the space race, had on Mehdi Hassan to talk about the lack of trust in uh mainstream news even like
still my one of my favorites. UH. Right after he was done being Transportation Secretary, we had Pete Booda Ja John And technically I was supposed to talk about infrastructure, but I really wanted to understand why when your flight is early there's not a gate available, Like it's almost never early. But if it's early, what's the problem here? They always say that they didn't know we were coming. Yes they did, That's how it works.
How do you not?
So, so now that I have a podcast, I get to ask all of those, uh, 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 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.
I totally agree, Yes, yes, exactly.
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.
Do you believe? Yeah? Have you ever heard of a famous TV psychic named Sylvia Brown?
Yes, of course she was. She had all those daytime talk shows.
Everywhere, everywhere. She was on Larry King, Montell was the big one, she was.
Oh yeah, all those viral clips of her.
Yes, she's been going viral with the the gen z or Gin Alpha. I'm split as to which Jin has rediscovered her, but one of the younger ones, so Suri discovered her in clips on TikTok, and she's has a I think a lot of people like when you when you get little clips out from someone and maybe she sounds like kind of motivational in that one or 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, and 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 in 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 psych kind of played that idea for laughs. But I think it like psych probably wouldn't exist if Sylvia Brown hadn't hi been around in the nineties, like you know, making that into a thing. Otherwise it would be like, well with psychic detective, that's like that's just a weird concept.
You know.
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 ads harmed 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 pains herself as a very sweet and re 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 two thousand and four, Sylvia Brown made one of her many appearances on The Montell Williams Show. At the time, Amanda Barry, a seventeen year old girl, had been kidnapped
about a year earlier. Amanda goes missing in two thousand and three, and the last time Amanda had been heard from was at eight pm on April twenty. First, 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 we'll 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 decides 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 two thousand and four, she decides to get on the Montel Williams show. For years, Montel Williams 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 built herself. She was brought in to do a reading on Amanda's distraught mother, Lawana Miller. Sylvia very bluntly tells Lawana, your daughter is not alive
based on my psychic advent. 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 inner 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 gonna play to give you an idea of how Sylvia is talking to this woman.
Don't think I'll ever see her in yeah, in heaven on the other.
Side, so she's like, am I gonna 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 is 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 Montell Williams 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 we're 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 twenty thirteen. 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 ten years earlier that her daughter was dead, and when Lawana goes home after appearing on The Mantel Williams Show, she tells a friend
that she has been devastated by Sylvia's prediction. She calls Sylvia ninety eight percent credible, and she accepts that her daughter has died. Her friends and family 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 that like awful, I mean just yeah, 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 of what you're inserting yourself in a missing person's 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 seventies 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, and nighteen teen thirty six. In our 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 into 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
we'll come to 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 Boozier and in trash in the streets of New
Orleans after Marty Grass. We pick all of that when we're in the when we're on the other side, Like, it's the kind of thing I guess if you're 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'd be great having like a crippling substance dependency and working a series of marginal jobs until I die at age
twenty nine from meningitis. And then another guy spirit's like, yeah, you know what, I'm going to grow up in the congo and get maimed by a landmine at age eleven. That sounds awesome, Like that's literally what she believes.
That's like such a crazy level of like privilege and entitlement.
It's it's kind of inherently victim blame me. Yeah, 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 forty five, 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 picked their life, So then like how does that all work? Right? Like what enjoys there for you?
I enjoy that you're trying to rationalize this, Yeah, you have to think about these things, right, Yeah, Like the math is.
Not mathing's 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 traffic like sat down at some sort of celestial D and 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 seventies, 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 seventies to meet the real mister 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, Celestia, 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 it seems pretty believable to me that they had a really fraught 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 light. She's 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 for.
Yeah, really doesn't like her mom. 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 just kind of like it happens at random. Seems to be more or less how she's saying it. 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 at before birth. So how much anger, kid, you really have. I don't know. Her earliest childhood memories are all about her mom being me 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 story of Sylvia's mom sucking her, a story of like a mother getting distracted during bathtime.
I was three years old. It was bathtime. What I distinctly remember his 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 is 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 her life is your 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 three
hundred 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's 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 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, seemed 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 hit some second sources for pieces of this, but no from her, like when she's eight. I don't have a secondary source actually, 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 are kin to her that, like, Sylvia was not always like this, but nobody else like writes about her as a little girl. So this, 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. Well, we're a a 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 scripture 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 and was like Okay, I'm gonna do this, and he must have gotten like eighty 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 for my chart. This will be cool like how well? Like what? 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 no 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?
Yeah, who? Right now? Sylvia's spirit guide, Sylvia's.
Mom, that's right.
Yeah, that was the first incarnation of Sylvia's mom Jesus. 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 like 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, like listen to this.
She lived her one incarnation on earth as an Aztec Incan who, at the age of nineteen, was killed by a spear in fifteen twenty while protecting her infant daughter during the Spanish invasion of Columbia. She told me her name was Elena. I apparently either didn't care for or couldn't remember it, because I promptly renamed her Francene and have never called her anything else. That's kind of offensive, right, You're like, spirit's a genocide victim, and You're like, I'm gonna call you Francine.
It's kind of bung. 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 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 into the backstory of her spirit guide to see is like any of this even plausible? So, first off, she claims that Elena is an Aztech Incan name. Elena 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, but there's not a ton of cross pollination. And I haven't found any evidence of like as tech Incan people, Like that's not
like a 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 Tehronas and the Muiscus peoples. Right, so none of this makes sense. Like this, this is like a This is a white lady who doesn't know anything about Astec 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 a Lena a Greek name or is it a name someone might have had from this period?
Yeah, she just wanted an ayahuasca trip pre internet.
Right, Oh yeah, she would have 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 Francene 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 fancy. She gets in trouble because she talks up in class and because Franccene 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 Franccene. Years later when her grandmother gets sick because Francecene 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 Francene 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 sixteen, 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 eighteen. 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 hand all the hell out of that marriage very quickly. Wow Via graduates and gets accepted to Saint Teresa's College in Kansas City. She majors in education in theology, and it's 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 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 literally, 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 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 advertisers of this podcast right now, And.
We're 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 nineteen 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 one of those things, And I'm kind of wondering, like, Okay, you can't predict your
own future, but shouldn't you been able to psychically tell that this guy had a secret family. Yeah, that seems I love.
When 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 your 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, and she signs up for a class in abnormal psychology, which, like, who didn't she takes me to? Yeah, a lot of people do this. She also starts taking classes and 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 professionals. There's an I've found an article in the Journal of the APA by Kirstin Weir that notes hypnosis is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself, but today advocates, pointing to its evidence, say it deserves a fresh look and a much wider audience. Hypnosis has a certain historical mystique that can sometimes make it difficult for pracnitioners to understand its modern relevance, said David Goodo, 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 a this is like a real thing, and there's very real evidence that hypnosis has impacts on people, which is part of what It's 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 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 starts reading that things like hearing voices in your head are potentially symptoms of like
mental illnesses, and she writes it this quote. Some of these illnesses quote described me too 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 like actually like talk this out and see, am I crazy? Like that's the way she writes. She comes in collusion, 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 like
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 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 all 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 doctor Rennick and she tells him what happens, and for some reason, this psychologist and professor is like, oh it is all perfectly normal.
The fact that you're scared that your psychic powers might make you crazy means that you're definitely saying 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 for you good, 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 fifteen year old, Like, there you go, There you go, Sylvia. You've got like
your backup from a professional. Now go out into the world and mess with people.
That was, sir Robert. That really door.
It's not great. This professor seems to really give her like a wide purview. He lets her channel Francecene in class for her classmates in the Abnormal Psychology class question. In the s 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. And hey, this I'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot
of what she says. If you think back to like the sixties and like the science fiction of the sixties and seventies, 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 cl in like the sixties and seventies 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 fifty 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 nineteen, 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 two thousand and seven, 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 it. 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's all lies. She never teaches kids.
I'm pretty glad she never worked with children, because I can't even imagine, can't even imagine the harm she would have caused.
Yeah, yeah, like especially imagine like somewhat with as wrong as she was about things her just like going up to a random kid with a normal hold 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 yeah, 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 husband who later reveals that she didn't graduate college, who is a police officer at the time, a guy named Gary Dufraine. So she meets this cop and they start dating and they get hitched on October nineteenth, nineteen fifty.
He's a cop.
Yeah, he's a cop. It's a start foresel who gets fired for 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. Yeah, this is fifty eight. Okay, in fifty eight.
You gotta be pretty bad to get moved as a cop in the fifties.
Yeah, in fifty eight. Yeah. Now, And she also says that almost 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 for. You not know, it's not just that it's the fifties, but like you know, forty percent of police 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, 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, Like you didn't figure that out during the walk there? 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 it, because She's like, we're 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 mid air? 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 occult books like Helena Blovotsky'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 there now two children with her. She meets a new man shortly thereafter, a guy named Dal, 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 Dal 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 adds 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 thirties. Francine informs her that this spirit was really Grandma Ada and got her read this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book.
I gotta read this to you, guys. I impatiently pointed out to Harry that Grandma Ada's hair was white. It was blonde when she was thirty. She said, all spirits on the other side are thirty years old? Why are they thirty? Considering all the years I had been communicating with her, I should have seen this answer coming. Because they are. I couldn't argue with that.
Thirty thirty.
Thirty because they are, because they are.
God was like, you know what the right age is? Thirty thirty thirty?
Yeah, I mean it's giving jonnither Gardner, it's giving thirteen going on thirty thirty thirty and thriving thirty.
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 if you're not gonna bother to justify it with anything other than they said, because it's just 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 now in their early twenties when you could like drink like a sieve or whatever, like thirty. 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 is very offended at how we 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 has quote a whole audience sitting there looking for answers, looking for comfort about their deceased loved ones. All no they got back was a bunch of double talk lies in 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 left 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 nineteen seventy four.
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 it. She wants to like correct the other religions. She thinks they all got pieces right, but they don't know that you're thirty forever when you're dead. You know, that's not in the Bible. We gotta pencil that in, right.
Sounds like so he didn't want to pay their taxes.
Oh yeah, Oh yeah, that's right, you've hit the nail on the head whenever someone wants to start her religion. So she starts running ads in the newspaper for classes, and it being the nineteen seventies, people show up. Sylvia gets so many students that regrettably, and she hates this. She hates to do this. Oh, she has to start charging the money. It breaks her heart. She has to get money from these people.
Oh my gosh, I have to scam the people I'm scamming.
There's just too many of them for me to not take your money.
Oh 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 we 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 every virtually every career you can name, 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 fifty years. We have now that's a sign of prospers threshold. Yeah, and she 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 Foundation, And by nineteen seventy five or so, she is a full time psychic teaching classes and extrasensory skills like dream interpretation, and becoming increase in like prominent within like the kooky world of New Age thought as that starts to kind of
explode in the mid seventies through the early eighties. She's one of these people who's like in Southern California giving obvious 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 knew I grew up in the nineties, so I remember, like when you were stick 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 Montella especially. I don't remember what I would watch back in the day, but I remember that, and I remember just there was like the gap obviously a 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 whether she actually believes this or whether it was
a 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 twenty year old or whatever, mapping out and then I'm going to light at people about their kidnapped relatives. Yeah, right, this is 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 experiences like an older and though I'm a little touched, I've got a little bit of of the gift or whatever. And her grandma probably 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 you like breaking bad is a more gradual experience for a lot of these people. You know, they're not all l Ron Hubbard who came out of the gate like I'm gonna con as many people as I can. We can't all be LRH, though we might
wish we could. Well, cal you want to plug your show again before you're all 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 bit of a 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 twenty twenty six, 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 and like a day or so. You know how this all works. We've been doing this for almost ten years.
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