Morris Lamar Keene (10 August 1936 – 11 June 1996), was a

spirit medium Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spir ...

Tampa, Florida Tampa () is a city on the Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city's borders include the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and ...

and at

Camp Chesterfield Camp Chesterfield was founded in 1891 and is the home of the Indiana Association of Spiritualists, located in Chesterfield, Indiana. Camp Chesterfield offers Spiritualist Church services, seminary, and mediumship, faith healing, and spiritual ...

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...

, where he was known as the "Prince of the

Spiritualists Spiritualism is the metaphysics, metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and Mind-body dualism, dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century, Spir ...

". He was also the trustee of Universal Spiritualist Association. He is best known for his 1976 book ''The Psychic Mafia'', in which he coined the term "

true-believer syndrome True-believer syndrome is an informal or rhetorical term used by M. Lamar Keene in his 1976 book ''The Psychic Mafia''. Keene coined the term in that book. He used the term to refer to people who continued to believe in a paranormal event or pheno ...

". Keene was the subject of a six-episode series, ''Fake Psychic '', on

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

in February 2022.

Early life

Morris Lamar Keene was one of three children born in Tampa Hills, Florida, to Morris William Keene and Roxie Lucille Jones Keene. He later legally changed his name to Charles Lamar Hutchison, and that was his name at the time of his death.Morris Lamar Keene in the U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007
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''The Psychic Mafia''

In 1976, Keene co-authored ''The Psychic Mafia,'' "as told to"

Allen Spraggett Allen Spraggett (26 March 1932 – 19 July 2022) was a Canadian writer and broadcaster, known for his works concerning the paranormal. Biography During the 1950s, Spraggett was a minister of the Open Door Evangelical Church. He transferred to ...

, a well-known Canadian writer on paranormal topics. The writer William V. Rauscher, himself a believer in psychic powers, contributed a foreword and a bibliography and wrote that he had conducted 75 hours of interviews with Keene, during which Keene admitted that all of his

psychic A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, ...

activities were done by fraudulent means. Keene revealed how he got rich by tricking thousands of people in séances .

James Randi James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Rodrigues 2010p. ...

, a professional magician, interviewed Keene in 1977, and discovered that Keene was quite unsophisticated in fooling people with magic, but Keene explained that his spiritualist clients were easy to fool . Keene described how the victims fell for the most transparent ruses. Keene coined the term ''

'' in the book . In ''The Psychic Mafia'', Keene explicitly professed a belief in

God In monotheism, monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator deity, creator, and principal object of Faith#Religious views, faith.Richard Swinburne, Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Ted Honderich, Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Ox ...

life after death The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving ess ...

phenomena A phenomenon ( : phenomena) is an observable event. The term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which ''cannot'' be directly observed. Kant was heavily influenced by Gottfried W ...

and

ESP ESP most commonly refers to: * Extrasensory perception, a paranormal ability ESP may also refer to: Arts, entertainment Music * ESP Guitars, a manufacturer of electric guitars * E.S. Posthumus, an independent music group formed in 2000, ...

, even after making his case against true believers and renouncing his trade as a phony medium. Keene not only confessed that he himself was a fraudulent medium, but also that many of his colleagues were as well. He wrote that it was common practice for mediums to share information on clients, to help one another fool the clients into believing that the knowledge about them came from the spirit world. The book caused a storm among his former associates in

spiritualist Spiritualism is the metaphysical school of thought opposing physicalism and also is the category of all spiritual beliefs/views (in monism and dualism) from ancient to modern. In the long nineteenth century The ''long nineteenth century'' i ...

circles. There were telephone calls threatening his life and one night, while Keene was walking across his front lawn in Tampa, an unseen shooter fired at him and missed. He later dug the rifle bullet out of the wall of his house.

Later life and death

Keene changed his name to Charles Lamar Hutchison, moved to another city, and entered the warehouse and storage business. In 1979, as he was leaving his office, a car drove up and an assailant fired several shots, hitting him and severing his femoral artery, resulting in an extended hospital stay Joanne D. S. McMahon and Anna M. Lascurain, ''Shopping for Miracles'' (Los Angeles: Lowell House, 1997) 49. He lived the rest of his life as Hutchison and died in 1998 at the age of 59.

Quotation

* ''The true-believer syndrome merits study by science. What is it that compels a person, past all reason, to believe the unbelievable. How can an otherwise sane individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an imposture, that even after it's exposed in the bright light of day he still clings to it — indeed, clings to it all the harder?… No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie.'' — M. Lamar Keene and Allen Spraggett

Bibliography

* M. Lamar Keene (as told to Allen Spraggett), ''The Psychic Mafia'', Prometheus Books, 1997, (Originally published in 1976 by

St. Martin's Press St. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, in the Equitable Building. St. Martin's Press is considered one of the largest English-language publishers, bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under si ...

and published by Dell (publisher) in 1977.)

References

* (Republucation of 1976 edition by

.) * *

External links

about ''The Psychic Mafia''

The Psychic Mafia

also about The Psychic Mafia

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Keene, M. Lamar American spiritual mediums 1938 births 1996 deaths