M. LAMAR KEENE: A LESSON IN FRAUDULENT MEDIUMSHIP

By Emma-Louise Rhodes

In his book, The Psychic Mafia, M. Lamar Keene goes into explicit detail in his description of the fraudulent Spiritualist activity at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana, in the 1960s and 70s, along with the trickery and lies which pervaded the Spiritualist scene in America during his thirteen years as a medium.

Materialisations of spirit forms, automatic writing, voices of the dead speaking through a spirit trumpet and spirit faces ‘precipitated’ on silk, were just some of the deceptive activities Keene engaged in, whilst earning thousands of dollars a week.

THE SHUT-EYES AND THE OPENS

Experimenting with Spiritualism in his early twenties when he innocently attended a church in his hometown of Tampa, Florida, Keene soon found the practices of the husband and wife couple who ran it to be fraudulent. However, his view of their services where ‘physical’ phenomena would occur, was that:

‘.. the mediums were acting basically in good
faith and simply wanted to strengthen belief
in what they knew to be true: namely the
philosophy of Spiritualism.’

Keene later discovered that mediums ‘are divided into two classes: the “shut eyes” and the “opens”.’ In describing the shut-eyes, Keene depicted them as ‘sweet old ladies’ who genuinely believed that they had a psychic link and could pick up on the spiritual world and offer people advice based on this fact. They were kept in the Spiritualist circles due to their ‘transparent sincerity’ which, Keene stated, was good for public relations.

Nonetheless, the open mediums were a completely different entity, being:

‘… those who knew they were frauds and
admitted it – at least in the secret circles of
the fraternity.’

The open faction was divided into two groups – ‘open to themselves’ or in the words of Keene ‘only half fake’, and the ‘wide-open’, who were happy to let all the mediums around them in on their pretence. Although never being able to fathom his initial fraudulent Spiritualist mentors, Keene soon associated himself with another medium, Viola Osgood Dunne, who was undoubtedly ‘wide-open’.

After being shown her ‘files’ (notes on former sitters who had attended her séances) Keene soon learnt that, in order to be successful, he must employ deceit and trickery.

CORRUPTION IN THE NAME OF GOD

Keene and his boyhood friend, who he referred to as ‘Raoul’, soon took over a local Spiritualist church, managing to extort a huge amount of money from a grieving woman who had lost her only son. Pick-pocketing small items from sitters and then materialising them as apports weeks later, covertly searching through personal belongings in order to obtain information and relying on the numerous files to present clients with exact information, were among the tactics employed by Keene during his time as a medium.

Soon the pair became resident at the Mecca of Spiritualism, Camp Chesterfield, which was run at the time by the medium Mabel Riffle. In 1960, Chesterfield had been exposed (whilst Keene was working there) by Tom O’Neill the editor of the monthly pro-Spiritualist newspaper, The Psychic Observer. Going into a darkened séance room, O’Neill had filmed the proceedings using infrared lights and caught the mediums Edith Sitwell and Riffle dressed up as materialisations, wrapped in chiffon, entering the room through a supposedly hidden door. The next week O’Neill ran the headline ‘WE ARE IN MOURNING, THE TRAGIC DECEPTIONS IN MATERIALIZATION’, writing that the revelation ‘… just about tears my heart out of its socket.’ However, miraculously the mediums at Camp Chesterfield recovered from the scandal, with Viola Osgood Dunne stating “if we don’t hang together we’ll all hang separately”.

Keene continued his fraudulent mediumship at Chesterfield, involving himself in scams such as building projects (where the camp officials would collect money for additional facilities that were never built) and near grave-robbing (where, after hearing that an old man had died, a group of mediums ransacked his house at night, stealing almost $23,000 in cash, along with diamond jewellery). He also made frequent use of the huge vault under the cathedral at Chesterfield where files on every visitor who had ever had a reading at the camp were stored and exploited accordingly.

The Psychic Mafia described aspects of Chesterfield that not even Keene would involve himself in, such as the bereaved going to mediums for ‘spirit sex’. Such practises were disclosed to him when Keene stepped in for a fellow medium at the camp and was asked by the female sitter for her dead husband to “make love to me in his materialised body …”. Keene later found out that her usual medium:

‘ … offered unique spirit consolation to that
woman and several other sitters like her who
were willing to pay special prices for the
special services they demanded.’

Another depraved occurrence recounted by Keene and one which he wrote ‘symbolizes the utter cynicism of the psychic mafia’ was when tragically one of the camp guests’ son was killed in a car accident whilst she was at Chesterfield. The woman in question was in the cathedral at the time, and a medium’s wife who was working in the camp grounds took the call. She immediately hurried to the cathedral, where the medium William Ward was about to take the platform and ‘connect’ with spirit. The information was transferred to him and he broke the news to the unsuspecting mother in the guise of a spirit message. Keene noted that:

‘The woman went into hysterics, and
everybody else who heard the message
gasped at this marvellous proof of
spirit communication.’

Keene’s personal psychic swindles at Chesterfield were many, including hoisting a chair with a 130-pound woman sitting in it up into the air so that she felt she was being levitated by the spirits, smuggling live animals into the séance room and then producing them as apports and making spirit precipitation on silk with pictures from magazines ironed in to impregnate the image onto the material. On one occasion, when Keene became careless with his spirit precipitations, he used the cover of Life magazine, which was immediately recognised by the sitter who received it. Near disaster was averted, however, when he assured her that the spirits did mischievous things and enjoyed a joke with those on the earth plane.

Keene wrote of his psychic miracles:

‘Many of the wonders I purveyed I created
myself. But later, after leaving mediumship,
I discovered that there actually had been
many precedents. The motley crew at Camp
Chesterfield, and my phoney spirits, are
nothing new to Spiritualism.’

Having thoroughly established himself in the Spiritualist field as one of faith’s greatest mediums, Keene continued to monopolise the industry by investing in a Florida church with his partner Raoul, which they renamed the New Age Assembly. Imported crystal chandeliers, original oil paintings and gilt columns adorned the church, along with two large Dresden urns from the estate of William Randolph Hearst. Keene recollected that:

‘The idea was to hook the newcomer’s interest
to bring him back again. Eventually he would
become one of the true believers who felt
pride in belonging to such a church and – the
name of the game – gave freely.’

Keene’s plans to open a second even more luxurious church were still in progress when he decided to cease his lucrative career as a Spiritualist medium. Raoul, however, continued with the new church, advertising it as ‘South’s largest psychic-metaphysical congregation … Demonstrated in a setting of classical art and beauty’.

PSYCHIC TO SCEPTIC

The personal transformation that Keene cites in his book was prompted via a female sitter who later decided to adopt him. Florence Hutchinson’s husband had died in an accident and she had approached Keene at Camp Chesterfield desperate to find out where he had left the original copy of his will. After several sittings with Keene, she was delighted by the results and, when a broach given to her by her brother over fifty years before materialised as an apport, Hutchinson decided that Keene should replace her son who had been killed in the Second World War. Keene describes both ‘psychic’ incidents as pure coincidence (he had made a guess regarding the will and bought the broach in ‘a bunch of junk’ that had been bought specifically for apports).

After the adoption, Keene decided that the lifestyle he was living as a fraudulent medium could go on no longer.

‘Every day the contradiction between the lie
I lived, and the truth my mother embodied,
became uglier to me. Séances were
approached with increasing revulsion; they
were no longer fun and games but a ghastly
parody of which I was sick to death.’

A meeting was convened with the board members of the church and Keene confessed that he had no psychic powers and had been living a lie. He also exposed Raoul as fraudulent, who momentarily agreed that what Keene was saying was the truth. Nevertheless, the majority of board members stuck by Raoul and his refusal to leave the church regardless of what had been uncovered:

‘One of the board members, who … had given
generously of both cash and property, had said
to Raoul, “Do you mean to say that you duped
me?” and got the reply, “That’s right.” Yet
even after that, he stayed … and is still active
in Spiritualism to this day.’

Keene referred to such persons as ‘true believers’ who carry on their Spiritualist commitment regardless of what they are told or the well-publicised exposures of fraudulent mediumship.

After Keene’s rendering of Spiritualism, he reported that he was bombarded with threats from, what he termed the ‘psychic mafia’. However, he continued to write and lecture, appearing on programmes such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and demonstrating the techniques of fraudulent mediums. Outward criticism of Keene’s revelations about the Spiritualist industry in America tended to be based on the fact that in The Psychic Mafia the Spiritualists mentioned by name were dead at the time of publication (1976) and that Keene had not targeted those who were living and therefore could speak out against him.

Regardless of Keene’s hard-hitting approach, the damage caused to Camp Chesterfield did not lead to its closure. Scandal hit the camp again in 1985 when one of its resident mediums was exposed for producing fraudulent spirit precipitation by Joe Nickell, Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Nickell, in an article published in 2002, wrote of twenty-first century Chesterfield:

‘Even today, Spiritualist friends of mine roll
their eyes accusatorially whenever
Chesterfield's name is mentioned, and they are
quick to point out that the camp is not
chartered by the National Spiritualist
Association of Churches … in its 100 years of
recorded history, Camp Chesterfield (states)
“There have been cries of "fraud" and "fake"
And, of course, the "exposes" came along with
the regularity of a well-planned schedule. Oh
yes! We have been damned and downed - but
the fact remains that we must have been doing
something right because: CHESTERFIELD
LIVES!!”

Visited by thousands of ‘pilgrims’ every year, regrettably Chesterfield does indeed live on, populated by ‘true believers’ who deem M. Lamar Keene’s exposure as nothing more than a conspiracy fabricated purely to try and destroy the Spiritualist faith.

REFERENCES

Keene, Lamar M., The Psychic Mafia, St Martin’s Press, Inc, 1976
Nickell, Joe, ‘Undercover Among the Spirits: Investigating Camp Chesterfield’, Skeptical Inquirer, March 2002.

© Emma-Louise Rhodes, 2007