Just another Sylvia Browne victim

This is the heartbreaking story of what is now sadly known as just another Sylvia Browne Victim.

Psychics/mediums are doing harm. They may wrap up their lies and fraud in a false justification of helping people, but to believers their words are so strong, to them its real. And all it takes is one wrong word from a psychic, and you are left with an eternity of hurt and regret.

Here is a news story from KMOV on just such a victim.

KMOV's hidden cameras capture self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne making bold predictions about a mother's dying son. Not one of Browne's predictions came true. The woman's son died two days later. This story was on KMOV-TV in May 2010.

The Most Haunted Mole Finally Revealed

I originally wrote the following article just before I closed down the original BadPsychics website, since then it simply sat in a small section of the forum dedicated to Most Haunted. Since I have decided to update this blog on a more regular basis I thought it would be good for archival purposes to republish this piece with just a few edits, basically a few things that at the time of the original article I chose not to publish. Nothing major.

Anyway to give a brief history before you read on, BadPsychics was the worlds first website to expose popular cable paranormal tv show Most Haunted. And by exposing this tv show, it undoubtedly helped make BP what it was, a world famous website exposing psychics and paranormal based tv shows.

One of the so called sources of our world exclusives were information obtained from a "Most Haunted Mole". Here is the story of the MHM and the truth behind how we obtained our exclusives.

From pretty much the very beginning of Most Haunted, the good folk here at BadPsychics have exposed the show at every turn, from cover ups like Coingate to the most famous incident of all the Kreed Kafer incident, but we could never have done this all on our own.

We had help!

But who helped us all these years? We have affectionately reffered to this person as the Most Haunted Mole, but who is the Most Haunted Mole and what was their motivation in helping us?

Was their motivation money? We we never paid them a penny, so why would they help us, unless something much more sinister was happening.

The tale of the Most Haunted Mole is a tale of ego, fame, bullying and most of all greed!

I will not go over every incident that the mole helped us with, instead I will cover the main incidents, the source of the leaked video clips, the true instigator of the Kreed Kafer set up, and of course who really threw the spoon.

The story starts over 2000 years ago, in a small village in Ethiopia, a wise man would frequently visit, he would tell of times of change. One day the village was a destroyed and this wise man took care of the lone survivor, a small boy.

We now move forward 2000 years, and that small boy from all those years ago has been reborn into this world, his name Derek Johnson, later to be known as Derek Acorah.

But is Derek Acorah the mole? No, Derek is not the mole, although he knows the man who is very well.

You see the Most Haunted mole is a 2000 year old Ethiopian spirit called Masumai, or Sam for short.

Sam approached me many years ago in a dream, he told me of a time of change, he told me that this world needed someone, someone to speak the 'truth' and that man was to be me.

And this is where we get to Most Haunted. We had already written about the show on the site many times, done reviews and so forth, but something was missing. Then one day I received through the post a jiffy bag containing an old style VHS tape.

Written on the tape was simply "Most Haunted - Sam" I knew instantly that this tape was from my Sam, from Masumai.

I quickly put the tape into my DVD player, but then realised that this was 2005 and not 1995, so I quickly ran to the electric store and picked up an Alba VCR for £20!

Back to my house and I played the tape. It showed quite clearly Yvette Fielding faking stuff on Most Haunted. I watched through the tape, there was 8 hours of uncut, unedited material (8 hours cause it was on long play!).

I sat in amazement as I watched Ciaran O'Keeffe measure Yvette farting with a £25,000 thermo imaging camera, then there was the infamous coingate, where by Karl Beattie admitted that they could not air Stuart getting hit in the head by a coin because it was obviously faked.

Then a shocking clip as an ancient spoon flew towards Yvette, as if from the very cameraman's hand, the cameraman being Karl Beattie.

As I sat amazed looking at the tape, suddenly in full colour Derek Acorah, Yvette and Phil Whyman were stood in an underground area. Derek Acorah started speaking to spirit. "Mary Loves Dick, Mary Loves Dick, Mary Loves Dick" indeed whoever this Mary was, she really loved Dick.

But what did this mean? What did it show? It showed that Most Haunted was pre recorded and faked. Over the years we have shown all of these clips and much more on BadPsychics.

The reality is that I didn't receive the tapes in the post, nor did I get them from Sam, they were emailed to me from a man with some Satellite equipment, who simply tuned into the live feeds that Antix were sending back to the editing rooms.

This man who was called John, was doing something that anyone with the equipment could do, you see the feeds were unencrypted. In fact when Karl Beattie was told that this is how BadPsychics were getting the footage, he just smiled. And did nothing to stop it. It is very easy to encrypt such feeds, yet they WANTED us to see.

So every piece of footage that has appeared on-line from Most Haunted, is there because Antix wanted it to be there.

Does this make Karl Beattie the mole? Lets move on.

The single biggest moment of interest and probably the downfall of Most Haunted was the Kreed Kafer incident. It marked the end of an era, and the end of Derek Acorah on Most Haunted.

When the show started, it was a vehicle very much for Yvette Fielding to relaunch her flagging career. Her young acting career was a disaster, and after finishing on Blue Peter and finding herself replaced with a younger more attractive presenter she needed to do something new.

The whole show was to revolve around Fielding, the problem is that Fielding was never the star, the first series of Most Haunted gave birth to two stars, one was a young Jason Karl, and the other was Derek Acorah. Jason Karl was an actor employed to play the part of Para Psychologist. And Derek was already a TV psychic with a decent following.

During the series Yvette soon realised that she was being eclipsed by Jason Karl and Derek Acorah. So after series 1 Jason Karl was gone. Despite being employed to play a part, he actually played that part very well, and was without doubt the most genuine "Skeptic" to ever play that part. But after he was gone, his career would never reach the same level, and to this day he still tries to make a living off the "As seen on Most Haunted" moniker.

But what about Derek? Well the problem Yvette had was that Derek's popularity had soared, it had reached a level where he was basically untouchable. After series two Derek had had enough, many arguments with the crew, jealousy from Karl and Yvette of his fame. Derek wanted to move on.

But Living TV owned Most Haunted, and not Antix as many people assume, so Living TV would convince Derek to stay. As series 5 ended, Derek agreed to one final series, with the knowledge that Living TV would give him his own show (Ghost Towns) at the end. Derek hated his time on Most Haunted, but he had a contract and wanted to fulfil his obligations to the full.

As Series six was soon to start, I received some correspondence from Ciaran O'Keeffe regarding a set up that had been done on Derek Acorah, and that hopefully the final edit of episode 1 would show Derek Acorah being possessed by a fictional spirit. I was excited, I had the main skeptic on the show, the very much respected (at the time) Ciaran O'Keeffe contact me personally with something I had waited for, for years, conclusive proof that Derek Acorah was a fraud.

My article written, I just had to wait for the show to air. And when it did, 30 seconds after Derek was shown to be possessed by the fictional Kreed Kafer (Which was an anagram of Derek Faker), I published my article. Conspiracy theories were thrown about by fans of Most Haunted. Some claimed it was pure coincidence, others claimed I simple lied and made it all up. Many more set-ups were revealed in the following weeks, more anagram names and so on.

But it wasn't until 6 months later that Ciaran O'Keeffe himself went to the newspaper, and the Mirror specifically, and sold his story, that at the very least I would be proven to be 100% right. Unfortunately what happened next was not quite what I or in fact Ciaran expected. The Mirror ran their interview with Ciaran, which basically just repeated what I had published 6 months earlier, but they also reported on the very videos of fakery that I mentioned earlier too.

This was great in theory, until you realised that Matt Roper (The journalist from The Mirror) had failed to make one thing clear in his article, he did not credit BadPsychics one little bit. In fact he even called the article an exclusive despite me personally publishing the same info 6 months earlier. I was happy that a major newspaper had exposed Most Haunted to the masses, but disappointed that credit hadn't been given.

Years later Matt Roper wanted to write an article exposing psychic Gordon Smith, so who do you think he came to for help? Yep, he came to the UK's most famous internet skeptic, no not John Jackson (who?), he came to me instead. I chose not to help him, and for a good 30 minutes ranted at him for ripping off my site and not giving credit, he apologised and we ended the conversation.

Anyway back to the story. Anyone who works for Antix on Most Haunted has a standard confidentiality contract which they have to sign. This basically prohibits them from revealing things that have happened on the show and so forth, this is very standard stuff in itself. Richard Felix was once threatened with legal action due to this very contract, so that is how serious Antix takes things.

So with Ciaran going to the papers, surely this meant not only the end of his career, but also would almost guarantee a lawsuit from Antix.

But neither happened. Why? Well the truth is that Ciaran was not behind the Kreed Kafer set up, and despite picking up a nice pay check from The Mirror, Ciaran actually went to the papers and broke his confidentiality contract with the full backing of Karl Beattie.

What made things worse was that the very correspondence I had had with Ciaran before episode 1 of series 6 aired, was directed by Karl Beattie. I had in fact been the one used by Karl Beattie, and yet again I had fallen for it.

So not only did Karl know about the so called leaked video tapes, he was also instrumental in the setting up of Derek Acorah.

I then started to get a very nasty feeling in my stomach. It became obvious that I had been used, used to create a kind of anti-publicity for Most Haunted, that would only help make more people watch. You see to Karl Beattie it didn't matter if people thought the show was genuine or if they thought it was faked, as long as they were watching.

One final point about the Kreed Kafer incident, as some of you may remember, the day the newspaper came out with the revelations, just happened to be the day of a Most Haunted Live show and even more "coincidently" the last Most Haunted Live that Derek would ever do before leaving Most Haunted and going off to do is own show Ghost Towns.

Obviously this was done on purpose to cause the most impact, to totally destroy Derek Acorahs career, and also create a ratings boost, after all, people would be dying to tune in to see the reaction to the allegations in the paper.

The problem was that Karl had expected the Mirror article to purely be about exposing Derek Acorah. Whereby instead they had taken info from BadPsychics, seen the video clips I had uploaded on-line, and made the article a more general exposure of the whole of Most Haunted.

Before that nights live, Karl and Ciaran were called into the Living TV offices, where they received a dressing down from the higher ups at Living TV

As you can imagine they were furious, not only had their flagship show been exposed by the very people involved in it, their big star in Derek Acorah had had his reputation ripped to shreds in a tabloid newspaper right before his new show would air.

Karl was told in no uncertain terms that if Derek Acorah did not appear on the Live show that night that there would be no Most Haunted Live at all.

Living TV spoke to Derek, and left the decision to him. He could refuse to appear which would signal the end of the show, and most likely the end of the careers of the very people who exposed him. Or he could be loyal to his contract, grit his teeth and do the show.

In an incredibly move, Derek went ahead and did the show. He appeared on camera, stood next to Ciaran, Karl and Yvette, and Derek held his head up high, and did what he does best, pretend to talk to the dead.

After that series of MHL shows, Derek went on to do the Ghost Towns series, and my personal favourite Paranormal Egypt. Derek continues to appear on TV, has his show on Sky Real Lives, and still performs in theatres around the country. His career and name value still as strong as ever. (at the time of writing this article these points were true. As you will know Dereks TV career has now ended other than in repeats, he still sells out shows around the country although days of the big theatres are long gone.)

Most Haunted did continue, but since Derek left it was never the same, guest mediums were brought in, but none ever captured the imagination of the audience, whether that be the believers or the skeptics.

As soon as I found out I had been used by Karl Beattie, I then refused to be used any more, which is one of the reasons why we stopped covering Most Haunted on the BadPsychics site. Other than the odd viewer submitted review here and there.

I would like to touch on one final thing before I finish, a while after Derek finished from Most Haunted, he appeared on an on-line radio show called White Noise Paranormal Radio. A rather small time rag tail band of nobodies presenting a show to just tens of people. But during the interview Derek went on to reveal much much more than I have ever done.

Now unfortunately I cant repeat Derek's allegations, in fact at the time I did just that, and quickly received a very strongly worded letter from Shillings Solicitors who were working on behalf of Antix. In case you don't know Shillings are a London based, £500 per hour top law firm. You simply don't mess with them.

So I happily removed my copy of what Derek has said. All other sites who had reported on Derek's allegations were also threatened and quickly removed any mention. And of course White Noise Radio themselves were forced to remove the interview.

However the reason I was happy to remove my repetition of the allegations was that I knew them all to be true, and I knew that Shillings would have to then sue Derek, who I also happened to know could prove everything he had claimed.

So I waited, and waited, and eventually they sent the letter to Derek. They told Derek to make a public apology and pay damages to Antix or face legal action.

Derek Acorah basically replied with "See you in court" A bold move from Derek for if he were to lose the case, he would lose everything.

Shillings under instruction from Antix backed down. The court case never happened. Make of that what you will.

So here we reach the end of my little tale of merriment. The video clips came from a normal bloke with some fancy satellite equipment, we published those clips and all the clips of Most Haunted you will find on-line, whether it be of Yvette pushing a glass around on a table, kicking a door, or faking spirit noises, all are on-line with the full knowledge and acceptance of Karl Beattie.

The Kreed Kafer story was told by Ciaran (as you all already know) but was directed by Karl Beattie.

The rest well, if you keep your ear to the ground, everyone talks, yep, everyone who has ever appeared on Most Haunted has at some point literally been the mole. You see the one thing I have learnt about Most Haunted and the people who appear and have appeared on the show is that they cant help themselves. For being on that show was the highlight of their pathetic lives, it was the true peak of their careers.

And these people will talk about it over and over again.

Whether it was a 1 episode appearance, a whole series run, or from the beginning. You are all as bad as each other.

So to end, the identity of the mole is....

Karl Beattie, Yvette Fielding, Derek Acorah, Gwen Acorah, David Wells, Richard Felix, Ciaran O'Keeffe, Phil Whyman, Jason Karl, Richard Jones, Leslie Smith, Cath Howe, Stuart Torrevill, and all the rest of them.

Well either that or it really was Sam who told me everything I know!

Psychic 101: How to be the Best Psychic in the World

This is a student-made video, created for Dr. Michael Shermer's course, "Skepticism 101: How to Think Like a Scientist (Without Being a Geek)" at Chapman University during the fall 2011 semester. This video serves to educate the audience on how to become the best psychic in the world. Students draw from Dr. Richard Wiseman's book, "Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There".


Written and Directed by: David Ruby &; Hollie Hooper
Starring: Luis Chavez, David Ruby, Hollie Hooper &; Allison Orr

Colin Fry was nearly on Derren Browns Experiments show about Luck!

Remember the TV show that Derren Brown did The Secret of Luck? You will remember a brief appearance of Sally Morgan on the show where she was totally humiliated after claiming she could pick up psychic feelings from the so called Lucky Dog in the village. Well what she didn't know (despite claiming to be psychic) was that the dog was not lucky, and instead was a gimmick set up by Derren Brown. As usual Sally ended up making a fool of herself and further cementing her reputation as one of the worst psychics in the country.


Well did you know that Channel 4 and Derren Brown had originally put psychic Colin Fry in the position to be setup!


I recently sat down to speak with Colin Fry about a number of topics and Sally Morgan came up. Colin told me

"Last year I was approached by channel 4 to appear in a program about luck , I booked two days to cover filming they sent confirmation day before I was due to go up a researcher called me to ask me my angle on this, I explained I did not believe that luck was a force or power but people create their own luck by thinking positive , they asked me if I would do my "thing " over a supposed lucky bronze dog in a park up north!"

Colin goes on to tell me...

I burst out laughing and said if there was any luck it was only because people had convinced themselves their good fortune was down to the bronze dog and it was bullshit, but harmless if it gave them the feel good factor, the researcher said she was surprised and I had not given her the respounce she had expected. 

Later that evening she phoned back and cancelled me - I was f*cking furious as I had cancelled two days bookings to accommodate them, we invoiced them for 50% of the agreed fee for wasting my time! 

However in my fury I told them they had played the typical channel 4 tactic of trying to stitch up a medium and the only reason they had cancelled me was that I was too clever to be made a fool of and if they wanted a someone they should call Sally Morgan, which is what they did.

Colin finished by making a very astute observation

I dispair we idiot mediums will do anything to be on TV.

And there you have it. Colin Fry was the original person chosen to be stitched up by Ch4 and Derren Brown, but "luckily" he didn't play along and instead Sally Morgan ended up being humiliated.



Funny how Colin Fry ended up being quite lucky with regards to a show about luck!

ipadio: Skeptically Irish