Psychic Sylvia Browne dies; now she can really talk to dead people

Gravel-voiced TV psychic Sylvia Browne, a frequent guest on the syndicated Montel Williams talk show and a native of Kansas City, Missouri (where her “spiritual psychic ability began to manifest at the age of three,” according to her Web page), died Wednesday in California. She was 77 years old.

Browne’s alleged psychic skills were seriously tarnished this year after the discovery, in May, of kidnap victim Amanda Berry, who was found alive with two other kidnapped women in the Cleveland, Ohio, home of Ariel Castro. Browne, who founded her own church, Society of Novus Spiritus, in 1986 (and reportedly earned as much as $3 million a year in fees for her readings and public appearances), had told Amanda Berry’s mother, Louwana Miller, on air on The Montel Williams Show in 2004, that Amanda was dead: “She’s not alive, honey.”

After Berry was freed from the Castro home, Browne attempted spin control: “Only God is right all the time,” Browne told the Huffington Post in May.