Lost At Sea Part 51

"Do you think they liked it?" she asks one of the four large and quite frightening-looking men who are always around her. They look like the Sopranos.

"What?" he replies.

"The thing," Sylvia says.

"You mean the lecture?" he says. He sounds surprised, as if this isn't a conversation they have very often.

"Yeah," Sylvia says. She sounds quite sweet and anxious. "Do you think they enjoyed it?"

"They loved it," he says.

"Good," Sylvia says. She catches my eye and smiles warmly. In this moment, she seems likable, though a suspicious part of me wonders whether she knew I was overhearing and said something sweet for my benefit.

There's a website called stopsylvia.com. A computer programmer called Robert Lancaster created it as a hobby. He does it because, he writes, "I found her work with missing children to be incredibly offensive." The site a.s.siduously details many of the notable occasions she's got it wrong. In the FAQ section, Lancaster asks:

Q: Do you think Sylvia believes she is psychic?

A: No, I do not.

Famous skeptics such as James Randi say Sylvia is not a silly, deluded person who believes herself to be psychic. They say she's a callous fraud. She's just a good cold reader.

Cold reading is the stage art of convincing a stranger you know more about them than you actually do. Good cold readers are brilliant observers. They make high-probability guesses about their subject based on their clothes, race, age, etc. They quickly pick up on signals as to whether or not their guesses are in the right direction, and alter their spiel accordingly. Of course, cold reading is easiest to spot when the psychic does it badly. This morning, Colette, Sylvia's co-psychic, seemed to be cold reading badly. She said to a man in the audience, "Why do I see a hospital around you?"

"I'm a doctor," he replied.

"That's why I see a hospital!" Colette exclaimed to the crowd.

"I'm a chiropractor," he added. "I work out of an office. I stay away from hospitals."

"I meant medical ... uh ... lab," Colette said. "You know the expression, to 'lab' something? To research something? That's what I meant. Are you researching anything at the moment?"

"Yes," he said.

And so on. My guess is that Colette genuinely believes herself to be psychic and doesn't realize she's actually dabbling in the dodgy art of cold reading. I think she thinks she's tapping into her psychic impulses when she picks up on her audience's inadvertent clues.

But then, perplexingly, Colette had a moment of seeming psychic brilliance. Apropos of nothing, she told a woman called Jean that her recently deceased husband loved to ride around on his all-terrain bike and enjoyed eating tuna sandwiches. Jean practically shrieked that the bike and tuna were indeed her dead husband's two very favorite things. Colette looked thrilled and you should have seen the smile on Jean's face. It lifted everyone's spirits.

Now I watch Sylvia playing the slots. She is a truly enigmatic person. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1936, to a salesman father, and has been a professional psychic for fifty-three years. In 1959, when she was twenty-two, she married a man named Gary Dufresne. They divorced in 1972. A few months ago he gave an interview to Robert Lancaster of stopsylvia.com. He said he couldn't remain silent any more after hearing about the Shawn Hornbeck incident: "I try to get her out of my mind as much as possible, but the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious."

He said that one evening back in the early seventies, Sylvia held a tarot party at their home in San Francisco: "I said to her as we were was.h.i.+ng dishes and she was wiping, I said, 'Sylvia, how can you tell people this kind of stuff? You know it's not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe it.' And she said, 'Screw 'em. Anybody who believes this stuff oughtta be taken.'"

In return, Sylvia has called her former husband "a liar and dark soul ent.i.ty, but at least the a.s.shole gave me children."

In 1992, she was indicted on several charges of investment fraud and grand theft. She pleaded no contest to "sale of security without permit"-a felony-and was given two hundred hours of community service.

Famous anti-psychics, such as Richard Dawkins, are often criticized for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Dawkins's last television doc.u.mentary, The Enemies of Reason, was roundly condemned for making silly, harmless psychics seem too villainous. But Sylvia isn't harmless. In 2002, for instance, the parents of missing Holly Krewson turned their lives upside down in response to one of Sylvia's visions. Holly vanished in April 1995. Seven years later her mother, Gwen, went on Montel, where Sylvia told her Holly was alive and well and working as a stripper in a lap-dancing club on Hollywood and Vine. Gwen immediately flew to Los Angeles and frantically scoured the strip clubs, interviewing dancers and club owners and customers, and handing out flyers, and all the while Holly was lying dead and unidentified in San Diego.

DAY 3: CORFU

I'm sitting next to Evelyn, the woman with the stomach cramps. "My heart's racing to see if she calls out my name," she whispers. Evelyn has come onto this cruise specifically to ask Sylvia about her stomach pain.

"Evelyn," Sylvia calls.

She walks to the microphone.

"Uh," she stammers.

"Speak up, honey," Sylvia says.

"Um," Evelyn says.

Sylvia looks impatient.

"I-uh-think I've got a poltergeist in my house because things keep moving in my dishwasher," Evelyn says quickly. "Can you tell me the poltergeist's name?"

"The poltergeist is an older relative called Doug," Sylvia says.

"Thank you, Sylvia," Evelyn says.

She sits back down. I look at her. She shrugs.

IT'S THE EVENING of the c.o.c.ktail party. We all put on formal wear and bustle around the Queen's lounge, excited about our opportunity to mingle with Sylvia. But she doesn't show up. We wait for an hour, then disperse, confused and disappointed. I b.u.mp into Evelyn on the way out. She's looking maudlin.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"This whole Doug business has really knocked me for a loop," she replies. "Who's Doug? I don't have any older relative called Doug. I don't know anyone remotely like that." She pauses. "I used to idolize Sylvia but now I'm kind of off her. And those one- and two-word answers she gives ..." Evelyn screws up her face. "She's so cold. And why didn't she turn up at the c.o.c.ktail party?"

I spot Nancy, Sylvia's nice-looking a.s.sistant. I decide to tell her I'm a journalist and I'm on this cruise because I want to interview Sylvia.

"Sylvia doesn't like to give interviews," Nancy replies. "She says, 'Journalists can go to h.e.l.l. I'm famous enough. All they do is turn on me.'" Still, Nancy says, she'll give it a go.

In the Explorations coffee bar I find Ca.s.sie (not her real name), a very likable young German woman and a huge Sylvia fan. I sat next to her on the transfer bus from the Rome airport.

"The most bizarre thing just happened," she says.

She says she and two others from the group were just in the shopping arcade when they spotted Sylvia.

"Look! There's Sylvia!" Ca.s.sie said.

"When I said it, Sylvia looked up with a start," Ca.s.sie says. "Her face immediately contorted into a kind of horrified grimace that she'd been spotted by some fans. Honestly! She looked like a vampire looks when a shaft of light hits them. She hissed 'Go!' to the man pus.h.i.+ng her wheelchair. And-whoosh-she was gone. He spun her around and pushed her away really fast. It was nasty. Something is not sitting right with me anymore. She's not a friendly person. Did she think I was going to jump on her?"

Ca.s.sie's story resigns me to the obvious: There isn't a chance in h.e.l.l Sylvia will grant me an interview.

DAY 4: SOME OTHER GREEK ISLAND