Sylvia Browne | America's Favorite Psychic

Crimelines True Crime

True Crime

4.6 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 72 minutes

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Summary

Sylvia Browne made a name for herself in the true crime world on talk shows, giving psychic readings to the families of the missing and the murdered. But an evaluation of her success rate shows that she was probably just guessing and she wasn’t that good of a guesser.

Skeptical Inquirer articles:

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/03/psychic-defective-sylvia-brownes-history-of-failure/

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2020/03/the-psychic-defective-revisited-years-later-sylvia-brownes-accuracy-remains/

Guardian article by Jon Ronson:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/27/usa.jonronson

Pretend Podcast Grave Detector Part 1

https://player.fm/series/pretend-1846581/ep-1602-the-grave-detector-part-1

See me at the True Crime Podcast Festival! https://www.truecrimepodcastfestival.com/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Audible brings your wildest adventures to life, delivering heart-pounding thrills at the touch
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0:07.0	Take Richard Osmond's The Thursday Murder Club, where four retirees turned amateur sleuths
0:11.8	solve crimes in the most unexpected ways, brilliantly performed by Leslie Manville.
0:17.1	Ready to unleash your adventure aside, from pulse racing suspense to epic quests, from supernatural
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0:28.5	Explore exclusive audible originals, chart-topping new releases, and unforgettable bestsellers
0:34.4	that transport you from the very first word, because the next great
0:38.2	adventure is just a listener way.
0:40.8	Start your free 30-day trial at audible.com slash Wondery UK.
0:45.7	That's audible.com slash Wondery UK. Sylvia Brown made a name for herself in the true crime world on talk shows,
1:04.0	giving psychic readings to the family of the missing and the murdered.
1:08.4	But an evaluation of her success rate shows that she was probably just guessing,
1:13.1	and she wasn't that good of a guesser. I'm Charlie and welcome to Crime Lines.
1:21.0	Hello and welcome to Crime Lines. It is summer break for my kids, which means episodes may not be weekly for the next few months, and I might be leaning a bit on research that I have done for my other podcasts and bring them to crime lines.
1:41.2	None of those podcasts are currently in production. Crime Lines and Beyond the Files are my only
1:46.0	two podcasts right now. I actually have a list of those old episodes, and I've barely even touched it,
1:52.0	but they're episodes that I want to redo in my current style and depth, and this is one of them.
1:58.1	Even if you listen to the old episode, I am going to include cases I didn't
2:01.7	discuss in that one, so you're going to get a little bit more out of this episode. The topic of
2:06.7	psychics and the use of otherworldly interventions does come up in true crime quite frequently.
2:13.8	I generally don't mention it when I see a passing mention of the police engaging with the psychic or the family doing so unless it impacted the case or the psychic used was well known.
	...

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