Sylvia Browne and the Living Amanda Berry
The medium Sylvia Browne spent decades on television answering the families of missing people. In November 2004, on the Montel Williams show, she told Louwana Miller that her daughter Amanda Berry, missing in Cleveland, was dead: in the water, in the rubbish. Her mother died a year later believing it. On 6 May 2013 Amanda Berry got out of Ariel Castro's house on Seymour Avenue, where she had been held for ten years, and called the police herself. A year earlier Browne had likewise pronounced Shawn Hornbeck dead; he was found alive. These two cases are rare in the genre: a checkable statement that refuted itself.
Margery and the Scientific American Prize
Mina Crandon, the wife of a Boston surgeon and known as Margery, was the leading claimant for the $2,500 Scientific American had offered for a genuine mediumistic phenomenon. Harry Houdini sat on the committee; he built a wooden cabinet that closed around her to the shoulders, and after the sittings stated that she produced everything with her head and a foot, ringing the bell box with her knee. Her dead brother Walter left a thumbprint in wax, and that was held to be conclusive — until 1932, when the print was identified as that of the Crandons' living dentist, Frederick Caldwell, who had once shown her how an impression is taken. The prize was never awarded.
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