How
can an old-fashioned plate camera capture images
of the so-called 'dead', or even the
thought-images of people who are still alive?
The
best known British photographic medium of the
twentieth-century is probably William Hope, who
worked in Crewe, England.
When
conducting a photographic sitting, Mr Hope took
several precautions to rule out any type of
fraud.
He
used a plate camera and his sitters provided
their own new and sealed photographic plates,
which they brought with them into the
seance-room. They were then invited to examine
the plate camera - a rather simple mechanism in
which it would prove difficult to hide anything.
Investigators
were required to sign or initial their
newly-opened plates so that their signatures
would appear on them.
Then
they personally placed their own plates in the
camera, and they also removed them after the
picture had been taken; after this, they
accompanied William Hope into his darkroom and
stayed with him while he developed the plates, so
that they could be certain that at no time could
any substitution take place.
Through
William Hope's mediumistic gift, hundreds of
likenesses of his sitters' dead relatives and
friends were obtained, a high percentage of which
were subsequently verified as accurate likenesses
by living family members. Even the images of
animals were captured on film.
On
occasion, pictures of people who were still alive
(but who were quite a distance away from the
seance-room) would appear on the plates; but
the explanation for this may be contained in the
opposite column - it would seem that Thought is
the key to producing many or all of these
paranormally-obtained images.
Interestingly
enough, when the famous medium, Lilian Bailey, was starting her
investigations into life after death, she sat
with William and was desperately hoping to
receive a picture of her recently-deceased
mother, but she got a big surprise.
The
image caught on the plate was a stranger to her
(then), but it turned out to be her spirit guide,
a First World War soldier called William Hedley
Wootton, whose image appeared complete with a
shaded area over his temple where an enemy bullet
had killed him.
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Below is a
twentieth-century spirit photograph taken with a
plate camera by William Hope, and it shows a
woman's face in the top right corner.
(The man seated in the middle of this group is a
youthful Maurice Barbanell, founder
editor of Psychic News and of Two
Worlds Magazine.)
How Does
Spirit Photography Work?
It
seems that the communicating spirit has a lot to
do with achieving photographic success, together
with the physical mediumistic power provided by
the medium and the sitters.
It
is now widely believed by many researchers that
spirit images are 'impressed' on sensitive
photographic plates by a sheer act of mental
will, by a thought-process which makes each
picture a kind of 'thought-o-gram' - and the
spirit people affirm that thought-waves can
travel faster than light: they say they are
instantaneous.
Such
subtle thought-processes at work might explain
why many spirit extras sometimes appear as rather
flat, simple representations of two-dimensional
images.
In
recent years, modern psychics have experimented
with 'thought-o-grams' and have been able to
prove that mentally-projected images can be
captured on photo-sensitive material.
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