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Sylvia Browne and the Living Amanda Berry

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added2004

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.

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Carlos at the Sydney Opera House

In 1988 Carlos arrived in Australia — the channel of a two-thousand-year-old spirit, worked by José Alvarez, with press releases, forged clippings and stories of people fainting in New York auditoriums. The press took all of it on trust, no newsroom rang the American telephone numbers supplied, and the tour ended with a full house at the Sydney Opera House. It was a production by James Randi, designed as an experiment on journalism: Alvarez was his student, the spirit an invention, the documents forgeries, and the whole itinerary planned in advance. That same evening 60 Minutes showed how it had been done.

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