The Truth About Psychics: What's Real, What's Not, and How to Tell the Difference - Hardcover

Browne is a true professional: she maintains required business licenses, is a member of a national consumer protection agency, and donates a large portion of her time to charitable organizations and also works with police to investigate missing persons and other criminal cases. She has consulted with police and FBI on several high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Currently the president of her business, now known as the Sylvia Browne Corporation, Browne also founded her own church, the Society of Novus Spirit. Her most recent business venture is The Sylvia Browne Hypnosis Training Center, where her unique, proven hypnosis methods for personal and professional use are taught.

With twenty-two New York Times bestsellers, Browne is an accomplished author of more than 46 books. She appeared regularly on the Montel Williams Show for seventeen years, and has been a frequent guest on Larry King Live, travels the country at sold-out lectures, and regularly appears in the print media. Browne continues to do readings, and her son, Chris DuFresne, is also a psychic. She lives and practices in California.

Lindsay Harrison grew up in Massachusetts, and attended Brown University and Columbia School of the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.  This is her first book.

I can’t imagine my life as a psychic without a lifetime equally devoted to God and spirituality.

But then, I can’t imagine any life on this rough earth without the comfort, healing, purpose, and joy to be found in God’s arms and in spirituality, where His infinite mysteries and answers lie waiting.

I was lucky (although I would never have used that word when I was a child). I never had to wonder whether the spirit world existed. I knew it did. I saw it, I heard it, and I sensed it all around me, whether I wanted to or not. Without my brilliantly psychic and deeply spiritual grandmother Ada Coil there to explain what was happening and build a bridge between my unique reality and the sanctity of where it came from, I’m sure I would have lost my sanity. (There are those who would argue that the debate about my sanity rages on, but I stopped listening to them decades ago.) Grandma Ada educated me about the gifts I was born with and helped me appreciate them instead of fearing them. She also taught me never to stop questioning, learning, studying, and exploring every aspect of spirituality that keeps our genetic connection to God thriving and relevant. She inspired the spiritual journey to which I’ve devoted my life and gave me her clear footsteps to follow as I started, just as this book is my way of giving you mine.

As some of you already know, I’m a third-generation psychic. Among my particular gifts from birth were clairvoyance (the ability to see beings that originate in other dimensions) and clairaudience (the ability to hear voices and sounds that originate in other dimensions). For added flair, I was even born with a caul, or fetal membrane, around my head, which according to ancient legend is the sign of a psychic child. So when the spirit world came to me long before I would ever have thought of seeking it out, I didn’t understand it at first, but there was certainly no mistaking it.

I was five years old when I had my first psychic vision. We were at a family dinner when I looked over to see the faces of both my great-grandmothers melting like lava running slowly down their necks, leaving nothing but their skulls behind. The only thing that shocked me even more than this horrifying sight was the fact that no one else seemed to be seeing it but me—either that or they were awfully nonchalant about it. Less than two weeks later, both great-grandmothers died. And with the logic of a child, I was sure that somehow, because I was the only one who’d seen those melting faces, I was responsible for killing them. It was Grandma Ada who explained that I’d done nothing wrong, I’d just been given a visual form of psychic information about their impending deaths.

At around that same time I discovered (or, in my opinion, was inflicted with) the random, involuntary ability to view the insides of people who had serious medical conditions, as if I were looking at an X-ray. A neighbor or family friend or door-to-door salesman would stop by and all I would see was a blocked colon or a diseased gallbladder floating around the room.

I turned to Grandma Ada again, asking how I could go about getting rid of this supposed “gift” so that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life surrounded by melting faces and ravaged organs. She patiently pointed out that God gave me this gift, and gave it to me for a reason, so refusing it wasn’t an option. I could, though, ask Him in my prayers not to show me anything I wasn’t old enough or emotionally equipped to handle. I did that, and my prayers were answered. The visions didn’t go away, but they were never again as graphic and terrifying.

In fact, on a couple of occasions I was grateful for them when they helped to make Grandma Ada very happy. One night she was terribly upset after unsuccessfully searching the house for a steel strongbox filled with important papers she needed. (Like all psychics, she was psychic about everyone but herself. If you lose your keys, I’ll tell you exactly where they are. If I lose mine, I’m as stumped as you are.) We were in her bedroom when she explained what the problem was, and at that moment a petite white-haired woman materialized, whom I recognized to be Grandma Ada’s mother, and pointed to the back of a massive bureau. I reported this to Grandma Ada, frankly proud to be seeing a spirit she didn’t see for a change, and it jarred her memory of slipping the strongbox behind that bureau months earlier where no one (including her, obviously) would think to look for it.

On another evening we were all gathered in the living room when I saw a man’s form take shape behind Grandma Ada’s left shoulder. I was sitting on the floor beside her and whispered, “Grandma, who is that man behind you?”

My parents had long since learned to ignore this kind of thing, so they just glanced over, saw nothing, rolled their eyes, and went back to their reading while Grandma Ada asked, “What does he look like?”

I described him—tall, reddish hair, round wire-rimmed glasses. Then I added, “There’s a string around his neck, and it has a horn on it that he uses to listen to people’s chests.”

I’d never seen quite so much joy on her face as she instantly recognized it as her Uncle Jim, a doctor who’d died in a flu epidemic twenty-four years earlier. She was thrilled that he was there with her, and I was thrilled that I’d facilitated a reunion that made someone I adored so happy. And between those two spirit encounters with loved ones she missed so much, I started thinking maybe this psychic thing wasn’t so bad after all.

I began seeing spirits as clearly as I saw everyone else. They especially filled my bedroom at night, which frightened me, so Grandma Ada gave me a flashlight. (To this day I can’t sleep in a completely dark room. I’m not frightened anymore—it’s just annoying, like trying to lie down and relax in the middle of a convention.) I also began “knowing things” without having a clue how or why I knew them.

I announced my grandfather’s death to my family several minutes before my father rushed in to break the news.

I answered the door before anyone knocked and knew who was going to be standing there before I opened it.

One afternoon I pulled my father out of a movie theater in a panic screaming, “Sharon can’t breathe!” We arrived home to discover that my little sister had collapsed with double pneumonia, and the doctors said later that Daddy had reached the emergency room with Sharon with only moments to spare.

A little classmate of mine came to show me the crepe paper witch costume she planned to wear for Halloween trick-or-treating that night. The instant she stepped in the door, I “saw” her costume bursting into flames. Within minutes, while she was prancing around the room perfecting her menacing witch moves, she whirled too close to the wall heating grate and, identical to my vision, her costume ignited. I’m convinced that “seeing” this before it actually happened allowed me to help rather than panic, as I immediately threw her to the ground and rolled her up in an area rug before she even had time to scream. She left the house, completely unharmed, to go find a replacement for her ruined costume.

I “saw” my friend Joan violently slamming her head against the dashboard of a blue car, and it was such a clear, horrible vision that I told her about it and begged her not to get in any blue cars for a while. Within weeks she found herself climbing into the passenger seat of a blue car to run errands with a family friend, then remembered my warning and stayed home instead. A few hours later the brakes failed and the blue car was wrapped around a telephone pole. The family friend and the driver’s side suffered minor damage, but the passenger seat where Joan would have been sitting was destroyed.

Of course, I was a child, with what I prefer to look back on as “guileless candor,” so not all of my psychic efforts were humanitarian. I remember showing off by telling my mother where my daddy really was when she thought he was at work, for example, and describing with uncanny accuracy the lovely blond woman he was visiting. (If you’d known my mother, you wouldn’t have blamed my daddy any more than I did. As I’ve often said, my theory about why he never left her is that he didn’t want to have to kiss her goodbye.)

And then one night when I was eight years old, my life changed, and it would never be the same again.

I was in my bedroom, under strict orders to go to sleep, so I was wide awake, playing with my flashlight, shining it idly around the room. Suddenly, with no warning, the light began to grow and intensify until all I could see was a white-gold glow. And from its core I heard a woman’s voice, clear and distinct despite a rapid, unearthly, high-speed chirpiness. “I come from God, Sylvia,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

Looking back, I guess I could have found reassurance in the “I come from God” part, or been fascinated that after eight years of being clairvoyant, I could now officially add clairaudience to my list of psychic skills. Instead, I flew out of my bedroom in sheer terror and ran to find Grandma Ada, who was cleaning vegetables in the kitchen. She stroked my hair to comfort me, calmly explained that it was “just” my Spirit Guide, and went back to her carrot peeling.

My Spirit Guide has been a daily presence and a vital part of my life since that night in 1946. She spent her one lifetime on earth as an Aztec Incan and was killed by a spear in 1520 during the Spanish invasion of Colombia. Her real name is Iena, which I apparently didn’t care for, since I’ve never called her anything but Francine.

For those of you who don’t unde...