By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
Ortonville— Since she was 3-years-old, Kristy Robinett has heard and seen dead people.
Though she prefers to call them those on the other side.
“I was about 3 or 4 years old when a spirit came through to me, a woman, and told me to tell my parents that my grandmother was going to pass away,” said Robinett. “So I did. I got the first and only spanking from my mother after that.  And then, a few weeks later, my grandmother did unexpectedly pass away. It was scary, for my parents and for me. I thought that everything I thought was going to be bad, it wasn’t something I thought I would be when I grew up.”
Today, Robinett works as a professional psychic medium. She also, on a volunteer basis, assists law enforcement as a psychic detective, and has for the last 20 years.
From 6:30-7:30 p.m., on Oct. 17, Robinett will be at the Brandon Township Public Library, 304 South St., Ortonville, for her presentation, A Vision of Murder.
“When I was a child, I had an attempted kidnapping, and my grandfather who had recently passed saved me from the other side,” she said. “After I had this attempted kidnapping, I started reading books about true crime and began to train myself as a kid, unbeknownst to me, about those feelings. Do I feel like I’m drowning, do I feel like I’m lost in the woods, do I feel like I’m alive?”
The program focuses on the psychic and paranormal aspects of a cold case, and the group will attempt to obtain information in a sensitive manner to challenge my intuitive abilities.
“About 25 years ago, I was working at a metaphysical center near a police department, and on their lunch the officers would come by and throw cases at me, some solved, some cold cases,” she said. “They sort of tested me. And I ended up being a pretty good tool for them. Word spread, and other agencies began to contact me. Since every avenue and lead had been spent, they figured what was there to lose.”
Assisting law enforcement has been strictly on a volunteer basis, and Robinett doesn’t discuss active cases she works on.
She does, however, help others to train them with their intuitiveness.
“I believe everybody has some sort of intuitive gift,” she said. “I never want you play the stump the psychic game. As long as they come in with an open mind, that’s all I ask of people.”
Robinett says as a child, she did not try and train her own abilities, and wanted to get rid of them.
“I just couldn’t stop. They were all coming at me from the other side,” she said. “I went to my Lutheran poster hoping he could exercise it out of me or something, and I ended up giving my first real reading. And he said everyone has a gift, be it music or art or something, and that if this is my gift, I should talk to somebody. He gave a card for another medium who was also a pastor, and I was sort of mentored by both of them to help other people.”
Robinett says she especially has a passion for helping in cases involving kids.
“I see thousands of people a year, and every person has their own special story,” she said. “I did work on the Ashley Holly case, she was a Michigan girl who went missing in Ohio. And she kept coming to me and bothering me and said that I needed to help find her body to give her family closure. That was a case that police did work with me on, and I ended up finding her body. It did take a couple years, but she is someone who is very special to me. Anything having to do with kids, I have obviously a soft spot. Those cases are very motivational to me.”
And while Robinett says she can’t turn off the spirits, she can turn them down.
“I say I have office hours,” she said. “It took me a while to do, but I don’t just go around telling people in the grocery store about spirits. I always say, it’s not like dentists just go walking around looking in everyone’s mouth and suggesting what they should do.”
To join Robinett for her program on her psychic detective work, A Vision of Murder on Oct. 17, register at brandonlibrary.org or call 248-627-1460.