Hoyt Robinette or Hoyt Billet Reading or Hoyt Spirit Circles, Hoyt Robinette FAKE Spiritualist Perfoming Parlor Tricks Stealing Over $2000 a Night! Davidson Nationwide

Attended a so called spiritualist spirit circle the other night where a so-called "spiritualist" & "Rev" named Hoyt Robinette performs his self-proclaimed spirit connections for all that were present at this individuals personal residence in Davidson, Maryland near Annapolis.

Hoyt and the "host" go on about the ritual of contacting the dead, setting rules that is perceived to help the energy connection with the spirits and so on.  There are other reports out there on the internet how the process works which I will include below so I will not go into great detail on that.  At a very high level, all that are present (>20) at the host's personal residence (makes one wonder if she/he are in on the scam and gets $$$ as a kick-back)  fill out a "billet card" with 3 "people that are dead", then (1) question you want to ask the spirits and then your name.  Really, if this so called spiritualist is so connected, why does he need all that detailed information?? I played along to see how far he would go.

Hoyt enters the room announced by the Host as the Reverend Hoyt Robinette, he brings with him an old wooden tray with a round woven basket with a lid. The basket with the billets were brought in earlier by the Host and were placed on the fireplace mantle.  Hoyt then goes into great detail after he enters the room about his basket full of pens, felt tips, highlighters, etc coming across as the "rambling foolish professor" type which I see to only disarm those in the room. He talks about how the spirits will "will" the ink into the blank index cards for all of us present to get our very own personal spirit art work!  At this time, Hoyt presents a fresh wrapped deck of white blank index cards that he shares with all of us, allowing an audience member to open the fresh pack of white clean index cards to show that they are new and not some magical prop!  Hoyt proceeds to place the blank cards and pens in a layered format in a tightly woven basket with its lid so as no light gets in to disturb the "spirits" and places this in front of all where it will remain until Hoyt finished his billet card readings.  

Next, Hoyt Robinette picks up a few billets from the basket and explains how he will “channel the energy” through the cards. Now keep in mind this is the first step in his scam.  As he is explaining how he will read the billets he is actually unfolding those previously submitted billets and glancing down to read the content I believe. Hoyt then folds them back up, places them back into the basket and then blindfolds himself with medical tape and a blindfold in such a way to make the audience believe he can not see, and then begins his billet card readings one at a time.  This is the second step in the scam. His line of sight is still possible down through the bridge of his nose and his eyes. He performs all of this while standing behind a "magician" type angled podium with an old looking wood tray with tall sides that limit sight into the tray to allow the audience see what are the actual contents located there. Another parlor trick prop.  

So when Hoyt came to my billet card it was word-for-word what I listed on my billet card! Wow! Imagine that!! At the end of the billet card reading Hoyt opens the spirit card basket "himself", not an audience member, and then proceeds to dump the contents into the “angled” old wooden tray I mentioned earlier with the tall sides, and then calls out names of each of us to give us our very own special card! This is the third step in the scam, the illusion step. Yes!! All of us received our very own spirit card with our own personal art work on it!! Imagine that!! Now I was really surprised that since the card was signed by all of your "loved ones" that surround you, those "loving personal spirits" of mine that signed mine, I never heard of them before --EVER!! And the (2) loving family members that I did list on my billet card that according to Hoyt Robinette were present and YES, did talk to me through Hoyt, well heck, they did NOT sign my lovely spirit card at all!! Did they NOT get a chance to sign because "Mother Teresa" who was one of many that did sign my card wouldn't share her pen?? I heard that "Master Jesus" was there in the room with us as well, he visited a man near me, but why didn't "Master Jesus" sign my card??!! Doesn't he love me too?

Yes, it had all the makings of a magic show, a cheap one at that! Hold that thought though because it was not cheap! Here is the math to consider. At $90 per person, Hoyt made a killing in his week long stay here! I extrapolated that Hoyt potentially scammed over $15,000 during his visit to the Annapolis area last week! Here is the math - over 20 individuals at the spirit card readings at $90/ per person and also $90 / per person per ½ hour for "private" readings. The "opportunity" is here to scam over $15,000 during a 5 day stay and that is very conservative! Now extrapolate that at an Annual return and this “so-called” spirit guidance business has the opportunity to earn over $775,000 per year if worked every day! This begs the question I asked before, is the “Host” that allows their personal residence to be used by Hoyt Robinette part of the scam! There is allot of money to made here people and at over ¾ of Million Dollars, I wouldn’t put it pass anybody!

The sad thing is that allot of the people there actually believed they were talking to their dead pets and loved ones, yes even “Master Jesus” was present, meanwhile Hoyt Robinette and possibly the Host were laughing all the way to the bank!

Buyer Beware!!

http://factnet.org/vbforum/forum/religions-religious-sub-sects-and-religious-or-spiritual-cults/10348-camp-chesterfield-exposed-spiritualist-church

So as I stated, there is all kinds of information out there on billet card readings and how they are fake! Reference the “The Psychic Mafia” by M Lamar Keene and the below.


The psychic mafia

In 1976, M. Lamar Keene came out with an explosive tell-all autobiography titled The Psychic Mafia. It's a book everyone interested in the paranormal should read.

Who was M. Lamar Keene? For years he was a highly successful medium, working at Camp Chesterfield, a spiritualist retreat in Indiana where dozens of mediums plied their trade.  He mastered all the mysteries of psychic phenomena and wowed his clients:

    It was my inexplicable floating trumpet, through which the spirit communicators spoke with their families and friends still here on earth; my shimmering spirit forms, which not only spoke to the living but touched, even embraced them; my shatteringly accurate clairvoyance, which proved that the spirits followed the day-by-day existence of their loved ones, aware of the most trivial things in their lives -- it was these mysterious psychic phenomena that kept the people coming and, most important, the money flowing in. [P. 90., Dell paperback edition, 1977]

But eventually, after collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from his patrons, Keene suffered a crisis of conscience. He abandoned mediumship and told his story to psychic researcher Allen Spraggett, who wrote it up in book form. The Psychic Mafia was the result.

Why the crisis of conscience and the need to confess? Well, because all of Keene's mediumistic abilities, without exception, were fraudulent. He was a showman, a magician, and a con artist, nothing more.

In The Psychic Mafia, Keene details his trickery, exposing the embarrassingly simple deceptions that fooled so many people. The heart of the book is Chapter 5, "Secrets of the Seance," which methodically runs through the strategies used by fake mediums to bilk their clients.

Keene was often able to produce detailed information about his "sitters," astonishing them with his clairvoyance. In actuality, he had merely done advance research:

    To get information on sitters, we had a variety of methods, all devious. I've already mentioned pilfering purses and billfolds and picking pockets in the darkened séance room to dig out such data as social security numbers or bankbooks. We also made a rule that anyone wishing to be at a private or group séance had to attend three public church services [at Keene's spiritualist church] beforehand. That way they could be observed and we could gather information on them from the billets they wrote. Each billet was stamped at the top: "Please address your billet to one or more loved ones in spirit, giving first and last names, ask one or more questions and sign your full name." One billett thus made out gave us enough leads to come up with a file on anybody ...

    Also, I had an electronic sound collector -- a device for picking up sounds at a considerable distance -- positioned in a house we owned across the street from the church. By aiming this at the church before a service, we harvested delicious bits of conversation that later were woven into startling messages. [Pp. 91,92]

Notice that Keene's clients were naive enough to give him their full names and the names of the deceased persons they wished to contact. This violates rule number one when testing a medium: Give out as little info as possible.

The information gleaned by one medium was shared with others in a network of information that spanned the whole country. By this means, a medium in California could give a startlingly accurate reading to a first-time visitor from New York , provided that the New Yorker had gone to other mediums in the past. Enormous numbers of file cards listing clients' names, family histories, medical problems, and purported spirit guides were collected and catalogued in a large basement underneath the church at Camp Chesterfield. (One can only assume that computers and the Internet make the whole process much more efficient today.)

Keene's forte, however, was not mental mediumship but the materialization seance, in which the ghostly figures of the departed would appear in the darkened room.

    The lights were turned off except for one large red bulb controlled by a dimmer switch which cast enough glow to illumine the ectoplasm ...

    For materialization sittings I wore black socks and pants which didn't show up at all in the dark. Then, while the sitters were singing [a hymn], I would don my chiffon spirit garb.... When I was ready -- which could be in as little as ten seconds if necessary -- I'd ooze from the cabinet, trailing clouds of ectoplasm ...

    It's amazing what effects can be created in the dark manipulating yards and yards of chiffon and gauze which appears to shimmer in the unearthly glow of the ruby light. What I did was what magicians call "black art." The parts of me not covered by ectoplasm were garbed totally in black and were quite invisible in the dark....

    Standing in the séance room in my invisible outfit I would deftly unroll a ball of chiffon out to the middle of the floor and manipulate it until eventually it enveloped me. What the sitters saw was a phenomenon: A tiny ball of ectoplasm sending out shimmering tendrils which gradually grew or developed into a fully formed materialized spirit.... The ectoplasmic figure could disappear the same way it appeared. I simply unwound the chiffon from my body slowly and dramatically then wadded it back into the original tiny ball. What the sitters saw was the fully formed spirit gradually disintegrate, evaporate into a puff of ectoplasm.

    The variations were endless. By standing in front of the cabinet and pulling the black curtains out and around me and manipulating them I could create the illusion of spirit forms undulating; varying in width from a mere inch to many inches; shooting from two feet to six feet in height ... and then crumpling back to four feet, three, two, one ... and through the floor. A whooshing sound added to the illusion of the form melting into the floorboards ...

    We sometimes permitted infrared photographs to prove the reality of the materialization phenomena. These were snapped only when the spirits gave the signal guaranteeing that only what we wanted was captured on the film....

    With other mediums in black stealthily entering the room we could and at times did produce a host of materialized spirits.... Coat hangers draped in ectoplasm also made a passable spirit, sort of half-materialized.

    To portray a child I got down on my knees in the darkness. Sometimes the sisters were invited to approach the spirit closely to peer directly into its face. I had a variety of face masks of men, women and children for all such occasions ...

    My partner and I, and other confederates if we needed them, wore head-to-toe black outfits which rendered us invisible in the darkness. We could handle the trumpet with impunity even in a good red light and with the luminescent bands [on the trumpet] giving off a considerable glow.

    The trumpets... were made in sections and were expandable to a total length of about four feet. Thus they could be swung around with considerable speed. The sitter, thinking that trumpet was only a foot long and seeing it whizzing around close to the ceiling, assumed that it had gotten up there by defying gravity. [Pp. 95-100]

The intellectual quality of Keene's sitters was not high. Most would accept almost any trickery as real, even the old carnival gimmick of reading letters in sealed envelopes. If Keene was caught in deception, he would brazen his way out by blaming "mischievous spirits." Keene, like his fellow mediums at Camp Chesterfield, plainly despised his clients, whom he characterizes as marks, suckers, dupes, fools ... you get the idea.

Keene would throw his voice to create "direct voice" phenomena. (He has disparaging words for the famed direct voice medium Leslie Flint, whose technique Keene found unimpressive.) He and an accomplice could "levitate" a sitter by simply lifting the sitter's chair in the dark. "Apports" (spontaneous manifestations of physical objects) were created by smuggling the item into the seance room and producing it with sleight of hand, even in good light. The yards of chiffon that stood in for ectoplasm could be crumpled into an amazingly small wad and concealed in the medium's clothing, even in his underpants.

Other mediums were said to swallow and regurgitate cheesecloth. According to a note in the bibliography on p. 171, the medium Helen Duncan could compress two yards of cheesecloth thirty inches wide into a ball tiny enough to be concealed in her mouth.

Some mediums (though not Keene himself, he insists) were even known to have sex with their clients in the dark, after convincing the sitter that his or her deceased lover had materialized and was in need of some sexual healing.

What's most interesting about this, to me, is that some of the precautions taken against fraud even by experienced researchers appear to be inadequate. Dim red light, for instance, turns out to be little better than absolute blackness. Earnest descriptions of apparitions "building up" from the floor and then melting away turn out to be easily explained by the manipulation of yards of chiffon. Sitters' insistence that they looked directly into the face of a loved one are less convincing when we learn that in dim light even a masked medium on his knees can fool the witness.

And then there's the trumpet. Again and again in reports of physical mediumship we hear that the trumpet - a cylinder through which spirit voices allegedly emanate - whizzed around the room at an impossible speed, performing acrobatic gyrations that no human operator could pull off. But now we know the answer: The trumpet is merely expanded to a length of four feet (or more), and can then be easily manipulated. Even a slight motion of the hand at one end of the trumpet will produce a wide, sweeping arc at the far end. The trick is ingenious in its simplicity.

Does this mean that all mediumistic phenomena are phony? Keene seems to think so, though he allows for the existence of ESP in some people. William Rauscher, a psychic researcher who wrote the forward to the book, takes the opposite tack, stating that some mediumship is genuine, and that Keene's debunking efforts should not tar the whole field.

It does seem as if Keene, in his understandable reaction to a lifetime of deception, has overstated the case for fraud. In Chapter 6, "A Short History of Mediumistic Deception," he highlights mainly obvious cases of fakery like the Davenport Brothers and the later seances of Florence Cook, while painting a rather simplistic and, I think, misleading picture of more controversial figures like the Fox sisters and Eusapia Palladino. In particular, his dismissal of Palladino in just a few paragraphs is more like a hit job than a serious analysis. The woman unquestionably cheated, but some of her phenomena appear to be inexplicable by any normal means. (See Deborah Blum's outstanding new book Ghost Hunters for a fair-minded discussion of Palladino and other early mediums.)

It is noteworthy that Keene's "Short History" makes no mention of Leonora Piper, Gladys Leonard, or Eileen Garrett, the three most extensively tested mediums in history, none of whom was ever caught cheating. Nor is there any mention of the "cross correspondences," a series of communications received by mediums on different continents which were shown to cohere in remarkably subtle ways. And while Keene dismisses "spoon bending" as a trick, he was writing before Jack Houck began hosting his hundreds of "PK parties," in which ordinary people bend their own cutlery into corkscrews. In other words, like too many magicians, Keene seems to assume that if some or even most of the phenomena are fake, then they must all be fake. This is a little like saying that if some money is counterfeit, then all money must be counterfeit.

Despite these caveats, The Psychic Mafia is a valuable contribution to this field of study. Sadly, the book is out of print, though used copies can be tracked down online without much difficulty. If you're at all interested in the paranormal, do your best to find Lamar Keene's book. It's not a pretty story, but it's one that more people need to hear.

According to Wikipedia it works like this:

The effect is often worked as follows. Members of the audience write messages on small slips of paper, or billets. The messages can be questions for the deceased, or simply statements that the performer could not know. The billets are then put into individual sealed envelopes, which are collected and given to the performer. The performer then takes one envelope at a time and accurately describes the message inside. After announcing the contents of each envelope, the performer opens it, as if to confirm the reading.

The trick used in billet reading is the one-ahead method. It relies on the performer knowing what is inside one of the envelopes beforehand, and using that knowledge to stay one step ahead of the audience. The performer may do this by having a plant in the audience submit a pre-arranged message as one of the billets, or by secretly opening one envelope. When the performer pretends to read the contents of the first sealed envelope, they are actually reciting the plant’s message or the message from the secretly opened envelope. When opening the first envelope to “check” their answer, they actually read the first billet, which they then pretend to “read” inside the second envelope. This process is repeated down to the final envelope, which is either an empty decoy, or the plant’s envelope, or the secretly opened envelope. It is necessary, of course, that no one but the performer see the billets until the trick is completed and all the billets are out. If the secret-opening variant is used, the performer must use sleight of hand to conceal that the last envelope is already open, or to “extract” the last billet from an empty decoy envelope.

This trick, and exactly how it is carried out, can be seen in the movie A Month by the Lake. Here the performer has his plant write something about mountains. When he receives all the envelopes, he puts the plant’s envelope on the bottom of the stack. He then asks who wrote about mountains, and the plant responds. He opens the top envelope, and “confirms” his reading, but actually reads the next person’s card.