Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  I don’t know anything about my fellow travelers. They mainly look like retired Americans. But then Sylvia draws names out of a hat. If we hear our name called, we are allowed to ask her a single question. Only one.

  “Julie Harrison . . . Joan Smith . . . Pamela Smith . . .” says Sylvia. And, one by one, they walk to the microphone in front of the stage.

  “Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” asks the first woman.

  “What?” Sylvia says. The woman is crying so hard, Sylvia can’t understand her.

  “Why did my husband decide to take his own life?” the woman repeats.

  “He was bipolar,” Sylvia says.

  The next woman walks to the microphone.

  “I have a strained relationship with my daughter,” she begins. “And I want to know—”

  “Your daughter is strange,” interrupts Sylvia.

  Sylvia doesn’t pause. Other psychics will often reach around for some inner voice, but Sylvia answers each question instantly, in a low, smoky growl, sometimes before the person has even finished asking it.

  “Your daughter is stubborn,” she says. “She’s selfish, narcissistic. Leave her alone.” The woman reluctantly nods. Tears roll down her cheeks.

  “Don’t get too involved with her,” Sylvia says. “She’ll hurt you. Leave her alone. I don’t like her.”

  “Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says.

  “Am I ever going to have a better relationship with my father?” another woman asks.

  “No,” Sylvia replies. “He’s narcissistic. He has sociopathic tendencies. Forget it. There’s a darkness there.”

  “Thank you, Sylvia,” she says.

  Sylvia seems to be psychically diagnosing a lot of people with narcissism today.

  “Will you tell me exactly the time and place my father died?” the next woman asks.

  “Ten years ago in Iowa,” Sylvia says.

  “Iowa?” says the woman, surprised.

  “I’m the psychic,” Sylvia snaps. “I’m telling you. Iowa.”

  “Thank you, Sylvia,” the woman says, cowed.

  The next woman asks, “What happened to my dog? Is she still alive?”

  “No, honey,” Sylvia says.

  The woman bursts into tears. There are no parents of missing children on this cruise, but every other human tragedy is well represented.

  “My son . . .” the next woman says. She stops, choking on her words. “My son met a violent death,” she says.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Sylvia says.

  “Is he around me?” she asks.

  “Yes, he does come around you,” Sylvia says. “In fact, he rings the phone. He also drops coins around you. When the phone rings and no one’s there, that’s him. People have said to me, ‘That’s telemarketers.’ Have you ever heard of a telemarketer that didn’t talk? No.” (Actually, telemarketing companies use an auto-dialing machine called the Amcat. When your phone rings and there’s nobody there, it’s because the Amcat has inadvertently dialed your number on behalf of a cold caller who is still pitching to someone else. I feel bad mentioning it here, but it’s the truth.)

  “He’s around you,” Sylvia says. “He has beautiful eyes, an oval face. Why is he holding his head?”

  “He was shot in the head,” the woman says.

  “That’s why he’s holding his head,” Sylvia says.

  Sylvia says this to the mother but also to us, as if to say, “See, everyone! That’s my psychic gift!” It is an impressive moment.

  It’s dinnertime in the Vista restaurant. I sit with others from the group. Sylvia is nowhere to be seen.

  “Those stories were really sad,” I say.

  “That’s nothing,” says a woman in her seventies whom I’ll call Evelyn. “Three years ago I saw Sylvia give a talk in Tampa. A girl in her thirties stood up, really young. She said, ‘I haven’t been feeling well. What do you think is wrong with me?’ And Sylvia replied, ‘Do you want the truth, honey? You’ll be dead in two years.’”

  Everyone around the table gasps.

  “The girl had to be helped from the room in tears,” Evelyn says.

  “I wonder if I should try to track the girl down,” I think out loud.

  Evelyn looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “She’ll probably be dead,” she says.

  DAY 2: DUBROVNIK

  Sylvia is having the day off and so her co-psychic, Colette Baron-Reid, entertains us in the Vista lounge. She’s not grouchy and monosyllabic like Sylvia. She’s bouncy and eager to please. She makes us do a “get to know the group” exercise. We have to turn to our neighbor and tell them a lie about ourselves. My neighbor is Evelyn. I really like her: She’s a funny and kind old lady from New York who does amateur dramatics. She’s looking forward to directing a big musical next year.

  I say, “My lie is that I don’t have any children.”

  Evelyn replies, “My lie is that I don’t have really bad stomach cramps and I’m not scheduled for a colonoscopy when I get home from this cruise.” Evelyn looks scared. “If Sylvia calls my name out tomorrow,” she says, “I’m going to ask her about the stomach cramps. They’re really bad. They shouldn’t be this painful.”

  Later, in the Jacuzzi near the dolphin sculpture on the lido deck, I bump into the woman whose husband committed suicide.

  “Did Sylvia help you last night?” I ask.

  She smiles sadly and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He wasn’t bipolar. He had excruciating physical pain in his legs.” She falls silent. “Sylvia didn’t help,” she says.

  She’d been too polite to say anything at the time. I think Sylvia survives in part because her audiences are often too polite to say anything.

  I feel the need to escape the group. I sneak off to the ship’s casino and pump money into a slot machine. From the corner of my eye I see a flash of red and gold approach in a wheelchair. It is Sylvia. Her golden hair cascades down her red dress. She starts pushing money into the machine next to me. I momentarily overhear her conversation.

  “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 assiduously 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 washing 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 entity, but at least the asshole 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 documentary, 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 cocktail 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 bump 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 cocktail party?”

  I spot Nancy, Sylvia’s nice-looking assistant. 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 hell. 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 Cassie (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!” Cassie said.

  “When I said it, Sylvia looked up with a start,” Cassie 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 pushing 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?”

  Cassie’s story resigns me to the obvious: There isn’t a chance in hell Sylvia will grant me an interview.

  DAY 4: SOME OTHER GREEK ISLAND

  Sylvia’s assistant, Nancy, rushes up to me in the lido restaurant. Sylvia has agreed to an interview. Five p.m., the Neptune lounge.

  It’s time for our next two-hour lecture with Sylvia. She seems in a far better mood today.

  “I want to know if my son will come back safely,” one woman asks.

  “Yes, honey,” Sylvia replies.

  “I’m having cardiology work done soon,” asks the next person. “Am I going to get better?”

  “Yes, you are.” Sylvia smiles.

  “Will my daughter live past twenty-five?” asks the third.

  “At least into her fifties,” Sylvia says.

  And so on. All this is in stark contrast to the other grouchy evening when it seemed that nobody’s sick relative was going to make it past 2009. I can’t help wondering whether, if Shawn Hornbeck’s parents had gone to Sylvia today, she would have told them that their son was alive and well.

  At 5:00 p.m., I knock on the door of the Neptune lounge. It is swanky and invitation-only—reserved for guests staying on the rarefied seventh floor. Sylvia is there to greet me, along with one of the four men who seem always to surround her. I tell her what Cassie said about her being rude in the shopping arcade. It’s a relatively trivial allegation, but I’m curious to see how she’ll respond.

  She denies it. “You can approach me anywhere, anytime,” she says. “I’ve never, ever been rude to anyone, anywhere. No one could ever accuse me—when I’m eating dinner and they come to me, or if I’m in the casino—I have never, ever been hateful. Never! That’s one thing I’ve been so much against. These people put you there! To be rude to them is just terrible.”

  The thing is, just before the interview, I bumped into Cassie’s two companions from the shopping arcade. They both told me Sylvia had been startlingly rude to them and now they’re really off her.

  I’ve wanted to interview Sylvia for years, but I suddenly wonder if it is pointle
ss. I think she’s a consummate pro who will just say anything.

  “There are times,” I say, “when you’ve got it wrong in a very bad way with missing—”

  “The kid,” interrupts Sylvia. She means Shawn Hornbeck. “Yeah, I believed the kid was dead.” She shrugs. “What I found out later—Larry King wanted me to come on and explain but I said I’m not going to explain anything—is there were three children missing. I think what I did was I got my wires crossed. There was a blond and two boys who are dead. I think I picked up the wrong kid.”

  “Shawn Hornbeck,” I say. “Were the other kids missing from the same area?”

  “Absolutely,” Sylvia says.

  “At the same time?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Sylvia says. “I have a tiny newspaper cutting about them back in my office.”

  (I later realize that, of course, “three children missing” in the “same area” is annoyingly too vague to be checkable.)

  “Then there was Opal Jo Jennings,” I say.

  Sylvia looks blankly at me.

  “Back in 1999,” I say.

  Sylvia still looks blank.

  “You said she was sold into white slavery in Japan but actually she was dead,” I prompt.

  “I don’t remember that case at all,” Sylvia says.

  “Little girl,” I say. “She’d been killed but you said she’d been sold into white slavery in Japan.”

  “No,” Sylvia says. She shakes her head. “Don’t remember that. Not at all. All I remember was that kid Van.”

  “Shawn,” I say.

  “Van Hornwell?” Sylvia says.

  “Shawn Hornbeck,” I say.

  “Yeah. Hornbeck,” Sylvia says. “I don’t remember the Japanese girl at all.” She pauses. “Look,” she says, “no psychic—and this is what they don’t understand—can ever be one hundred percent. That’s God.”

  By “they” she’s referring to her two biggest critics, James Randi and Robert Lancaster. She says she doesn’t care what they say about her: “The whole thing about my job”—she pauses and corrects herself—“God-given career, is if you’re right, you’re right. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And the people that are gonna love you will love you and the people that won’t, won’t.”