9 Signs Hollywood Medium's Tyler Henry Is Fake

Tyler Henry has had a rapid rise from childhood clairvoyant to Hollywood medium. He's no doubt America's most famous living-beyond-the-grave barter. In 2024, the guy had 700,000 people on his waiting list for a reading, per Them. If you watch television, you'll no doubt recognize Henry's face from a talk show or scrolling past his Netflix shows "Life After Death With Tyler Henry" and "Live From the Other Side With Tyler Henry."

"Time isn't a big focus on the other side," said Henry when speaking to Your Teen in 2016. "Spirits can come through differently depending on how long ago they passed. Sometimes, if someone's passed recently, they won't know how to communicate and have to learn." However, we have reason to believe that E!'s "Hollywood Medium" doesn't know how to contact the other side either. Regardless of whether you're a believer or a skeptic, there's a lot that the cameras don't show you on "Hollywood Medium" and the practice certainly isn't backed by science. Even those who are psychic believers don't believe in Henry's mediumship. "I dislike his readings. Inconsequent, full of loose information. There is a background of truth in him, but his readings are weak," as one user on Reddit put it. "But hey, he does Hollywood, land of fake and phony, so good for him!" From using props to work out information to changing his own origin story, here are signs that Hollywood's Tyler Henry is actually fake.

First things first, being a medium is less a profession and more of a belief. Should you choose to be one tomorrow, you can wake up, decide you've missed a vocation, become a medium, and contact the other side — all before you've rolled out of bed. Although there are some quasi-legitimate courses online, it's certainly not going to get you any college credits. If you're looking for a simple career path or accreditation, you won't find it in the world of the psychic. Some even believe that it's the spirit that controls who and how someone is a medium. "When you open yourself to spirit, they will often take a close look at your natural skills/talents and determine the best way to help you communicate with them," wrote a Reddit user on a thread about mediumship. "They will often 'nudge' people in that direction."

So, why have the likes of Tyler Henry decided to get involved with something that — as far as hard evidence is concerned — is definitely dubious and probably not real? Well, it's an industry worth over $2 billion a year, and four in every 10 Americans believe their loved ones can be contacted beyond the grave, according to a poll by Pew Research Center. 

With no actual legitimate certificate for being a medium, these "professionals" rely on vague and easily guessable claims. As The Guardian noted, Henry's less-than-incisive claims included asking a plus-size person if diabetes ran in their family and if a man whose father drummed was a cool guy. It doesn't take a genius to ask you that, much less a medium.

Tyler Henry had an unorthodox route to becoming a medium. He was homeschooled because it allowed him to finish at 16, and after graduating, the A-List medium had plans to work in hospice care. He enrolled in West Hills College in Coalinga, but never got his degree. By the time college rolled around, Henry was already contacting talent agents to follow his dreams of mediumship. But do you really need a TV credit to be a medium? Well, no, not at all. It seems Henry may have had ulterior motives.

In fairness to Henry, he had shown a keen interest in mediumship since high school. "He was 16, and he'd come in and linger, listen, watch. A very, very intelligent young man," as Tom McGuire of the now-closed crystal boutique Cosmic Corral: Gifts for the Soul told The Outline in 2016. He'd also do readings for $40 a session and taught "grieving classes." Not your average teenage weekend job.

However, it's important to note that as long as he's been a medium, it's been a business opportunity. For Henry, it seems, contacting those beyond the grave is less a passion and more a path to the glitz and glam of Hollywood. They don't call him the "Hollywood Medium" for nothing.

The guests on Tyler Henry's "Hollywood Medium" are, indeed, very Hollywood and have a lot of information about their lives on Google. "I don't watch much TV," is a frequent refrain of Henry's, as per The Outline. However, that doesn't mean he can't use the internet. Moreover, Henry's TV viewing habits (or self-proclaimed lack thereof) are strange, considering that he wasn't discovered, he himself reached out to talent agents. Why would someone who claims not to watch TV be so keen to feature on its screens? Nonetheless, Henry went on to read everyone from the scandalous Bella Thorne to "Days of our Lives" actor Ross Mathews, and even rapper-turned-HGTV design star Lil Jon.

Let's take Henry's interview with Moby, for example, where the so-called medium regurgitates information accessible on sites like Ancestry, the musician's much-publicized struggle with alcoholism, and his mother's cancer that he spoke about in The New York Times. Lots of jobs have been made redundant due to advancements in technology, and mediumship should be joining that long list. If Henry is anything to go by, you don't need to contact the other side when you have access to the internet.

"I went to the eighth page of Google ... I wanted to find someone totally unbiased who didn't know me," psychic medium Cael O'Donnell said when speaking about how to find a good medium (via Body + Soul). "They brought through information about my life, they didn't need to know my first name. Go with an alias, if they're a real psychic, they'll still pick up information about you without knowing your name." With the celebrities that Henry reads, they have no such luxury of anonymity.

As many do, Tyler Henry started out with noble aims of helping grieving parents. "My goal is ultimately to work with parents who have lost children to suicide," he told Out in 2015. "Because that's something I've seen through clients and I've known people affected by suicide. For me, that's a huge subject and something that needs to be discussed more. A huge part of my work revolves around being an activist and being able to create a conversation."

However, Henry is far more famous for being a right-hand man to celebrities who help him increase his clout. You'd expect someone who has a Netflix show, charges anywhere between $60 to $140 for a live show ticket, and has over a million followers on Instagram to have enough influence and income to prioritize his work with grieving parents. But take a look at his Instagram or X, you won't find much information about his activism. Instead, he chooses to be a grief vampire, reading about celebrities on television who have a lot of available information about them and a lot of money to throw at him. He notably works with celebs rather than the average Joe who might have a few details about themselves on Facebook and not so much disposable income.

"Why does Netflix give these grief vampires an audience to broadcast their pseudoscientific garbage?" asked one Reddit user. "Tyler Henry is just another dime-a-dozen huckster similar to the ones James Randi made fun of in the 1980s."

They say a picture paints a thousand words; well, so does a well-loved family heirloom — as Tyler Henry uses to his advantage. Henry asks celebrities who attend his readings to bring an item with them, from which he gets vital clues to aid his psychic powers. However, this suggests that Henry has missed a vocation as a detective rather than having naturally gifted supernatural abilities.

Let's take his aforementioned interview with Moby, for example, who brought a painting to the "Hollywood Medium". "What's interesting is that I have two distinct energies that I need to kind of highlight," Henry said during the reading (via E! Entertainment). "One that I view as being very maternal and the other is very paternal, but they come through separately, not together." Moby then asserts that Henry is right. However, the "Porcelain" songwriter has told the story of his father's death when he was just 2 years old in many interviews. Moreover, 50% of American marriages end in divorce, as per statistics from Wilkinson & Finkbeiner. So Henry's guess had pretty good odds of being right.

In another notable interview, former NBC man Matt Lauer brought a pocketknife to the spiritual reading. Henry suggested that he got it from his father, who had passed. At the time of the interview, Lauer was 60 years old. It's no shock his father had passed. Henry is very much accessing information from this realm via his subject's props, not from any other realm.

Every good brand or celebrity has a compelling origin story, from the surprising tale of Victoria's Secret or the story behind Punky Brewster's name. These stories win over hearts and minds. It's an important act of self-mythologizing that has been a staple of Hollywood for decades. So, it's no surprise the "Hollywood Medium" himself, Tyler Henry, uses it to his advantage.

As he recounts it, Henry's mediumship began aged 10 when he had a premonition. "It felt like a memory, almost as though it had already happened. It was really weird," he told the Asbury Park Press. The premonition was a dark one. It told him his grandmother was going to die, and a saddened Henry tried to tell his mother what he knew. Indeed, his father rang shortly after and told him his grandmother had passed. "So that was really the catalyst," he continued in the interview. "But at 10 years old when something is happening, you don't call it a premonition. It took some time to really understand what was happening, I still don't entirely understand." Indeed, Henry's lack of understanding goes so far as to change important details about this story. Did Henry keep his first vision to himself or tell his mother? Not even he knows.

This origin story has been repeated in publications like Vanity Fair, Today, and even his own memoir. However, in an interview former RHOC star Heather Dubrow, he claims he, in fact, did not tell his mother about the premonition, as per The Outline. Now, we don't expect Henry to remember every minute detail from his childhood. However, an event like that is something you wouldn't forget.

"There's very distinctly a father reference. Has your dad actually passed? Mom's still here though, right? And do you know if all the family was around him when he passed? Who was missing?" No, these are not questions asked on a particularly awkward first date when the conversation is running particularly dry. Rather, they are from Tyler Henry's "Hollywood Medium" show. It's questions like these that give the impression Henry gets all his information from his subjects, not the other side.

Not only are these questions vague and applicable to almost anyone of a certain age, but they make a medium like Henry redundant. When one Reddit user asked "What are the basics of having a good medium experience?" the replies detailed the direct opposite of Henry's approach. "When they are struggling for words, stay quiet. Don't give them the answers," said one commenter in response to the post. "You shouldn't have to make pieces fit or think maybe they are misinterpreting your loved one." Henry should be taking notes, as he so often does in his readings.

"I liken my job to that of a mailman," Henry told Tudum. "In the sense that I don't write the letters, I just deliver the message. My priority is to ensure that I'm doing the message justice. I'm not responsible for what I get, but I do feel responsible for how I deliver it. I try to be tactful, diplomatic, thoughtful of the person's feelings, but it's very much an interpretive process."

For the uninitiated, a cold reading is when a medium "tells a person whom he or she has never met before facts about that person and that person's life," as per the ICSA. However, perhaps a vague reading is a better phrase. Because during these readings, the medium will use likely guesses, sweeping statements, and psychological tricks to create the illusion they have exclusive access to the deceased.

Henry uses universal topics to make it seem he's privy to the most personal information. These topics include enquiring into dead pets (over 100 million people have pets in the U.S., as per the AVMA), if the subject knows someone who has died tragically young (the U.S. sees higher mortality rates for ages under 25 than other high-income countries, according to Population Bulletin), and even telling Kris Jenner her eyesight might get worse as she gets older (it's a natural part of aging). The more sweeping the statement, the larger the goal posts, and the easier his job becomes. 

"A lot of people do almost drown when they're kids. We're not ready for water when we're kids, so it's millions of people," says Carrie Poppy of the "Oh No Ross and Carrie" podcast that looks into psychics' claims (via The Outline). "If you hear that and you think that you're extraordinary for having almost drowned, it lands on you like a pile of bricks."

In a world where endless information is at our fingertips, you can find almost anything online. But in this ocean of information, you'll struggle to find any hard data or empirical evidence that supports mediumship being a real science. That's not to say it hasn't been tested. A 2022 study screened 3,000 people to locate those who claimed either they or their family members had psychic abilities, yet it "did not yield significant results when probing coding sequences in DNA" (via EXPLORE). However, in an attempt to buck scientific trends, Tyler Henry underwent an experiment of his own during the Season 4 finale of "Hollywood Medium."

On the show, Henry wore a swimming cap-esque hat to take a quantitative EEG, courtesy of TV M.D. Dr. Drew Pinsky, during his Steve-O reading. It all looked very scientific. Pinsky's observations showed that Henry was in an abnormal neurological state, as the medium was dripping with sweat and his blood pressure had plummeted. But these findings weren't enough to convince Pinsky completely. "It's not like I'm saying, 'I'm a believer' or 'I'm a disbeliever,'" said the "Celebrity Rehab" doctor (as per E! News). "I'm creating a hypothesis ... I think something interesting might be going on here, let's collect some data!" So, despite the results making for interesting reading, the jury's still out. Moreover, Pinsky isn't the most impartial of observers, having had a revealing reading from Henry less than two years before the experiment.

Skeptics and fans alike will have to take Henry's word for it until we get that data. But it's also worth noting that Henry himself couldn't even remember how he got into mediumship in the first place. So, his words are not exactly gospel.