by M. Lamar Keene as told to Allen Spraggett
Copyright ©1997 Ray Hyman

My real contribution to the science and art of mediumship was in creating an original trumpet phenomenon. The standard trumpet sitting takes place in the familiar darkness - sometimes with the red light, sometimes without - and voices heard speaking through the tin megaphone are said to be those of the spirits.

Some mediums just sit or stand in the darkness and talk through the trumpet, but these show little initiative or imagination. Our trumpets had a luminous band so that the sitters could see them whirling around the room, hovering in space, or sometimes swinging back and forth in rhythm with a hymn.

The trick was the old black art business. 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 giving off a considerable glow.

The trumpets, as I’ve mentioned earlier, were made in sections and were extendable to a total length of about four feet. Thus they could be swung around with considerable speed. The sitter, thinking the 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.

Some skeptics, of course, suspected wires or threads, but my special trumpet effect really bamboozled them. It bamboozled everybody and may be justly described as one of the few truly original phenomena in mediumship.

The sitter’s experience was of holding the trumpet in his or her hands and feeling it vibrate with voice sounds. Yet there were no wires, no cords - nothing.

We had one man at Camp Chesterfield who considered himself a skeptic and an expert on mediumistic tricks, but he couldn’t fathom my vibrating trumpet. This man in the darkened seance room lit by the flow of the ruby bulb, took the trumpet which had gently descended into his lap, put his hands on it, shook it, collapsed it, reassembled it, placed it under his chair - and still he could feel the tin quivering.

"My God," he said to his wife, "the voices are still coming out!"

At that, the Indian chief who was speaking through the trumpet boomed from under the chair. "Of course, you damned fool, what did you expect? I’m a spirit!"

Other mediums, including some big names in the spook business, offered me thousands of dollars for the secret. But the secret is so simple it eludes detection. This is how it was done.

I did not talk through the trumpet nestling on the sitter’s knee but through another trumpet, painted black so as to be invisible in the dark. Dressed in my head-to-toe black outfit, I spoke in the dark through the black trumpet which I held a short distance - three or four feet - from the other trumpet in the sitter’s lap. My voice, passing through the black trumpet and striking the other trumpet, caused it to vibrate. Try it for yourself!