Part 13 (1/2)
A conviction of fraud having entered the minds of the sceptically inclined, the exposure of a certain Parisian photographer, Buguet, shook the faith of the credulous. Buguet enjoyed in London an extraordinary success. Many leading people sat to him and obtained ”spirit photographs,” by them clearly recognisable, of their deceased relations. No less than forty out of one hundred and twenty photographs examined by Stainton Moses were p.r.o.nounced by the sitters to be genuine likenesses of spirits, and baffled the scrutiny of the sceptics.
Nevertheless Buguet was arrested and charged by the French Government for fraudulent production of spirit photographs. At his trial Buguet disconcerted the whole spiritualistic world by confessing, he said that the whole of his spirit photographs were obtained by means of double exposure. To begin with, he employed three or four a.s.sistants to play the part of ghost. Nevertheless, in spite of his confession, in spite of the trick apparatus confiscated by the police, at Buguet's trial witness after witness, people high in the social and professional world, came forward to testify that they had not been deceived, that the spirit photographs were genuine. They refused to doubt the evidence of their own eyesight. One M. Dessenon, a picture dealer, had obtained a spirit portrait of his wife; he had been instantly struck with the likeness, and had shown it to the lady's relatives, who exclaimed at once on its exactness. The judge asked Buguet for an explanation. The prisoner replied that it was pure chance. ”I had,” he said, ”no photograph of Madame Dessenon.” ”But,” cried the witness, ”my children, like myself, thought the likeness perfect. When I showed them the picture, they cried, 'It is mamma!' I have seen all M. Buguet's properties and pictures, and there is nothing in the least like the picture I have obtained. I am convinced it is my wife.” As a result, many spiritualists, including Stainton Moses and William Howitt, refused to consider the case one of fraud. They regarded Buguet as a genuine medium who had been bound to confess to imaginary trickery. Yet after this spirit photography as a profession has not flourished in this country.
There is one professional who is responsible for many ghost pictures.
But in his productions appear unmistakable signs of double exposures.
You see the pattern of the carpet and the curtain of the study visible through the sitter's body and clothes. In one instance at all events, where the ghost represents a well-known statesman, the head has obviously been cut from the photograph and the contour draped to hide the cut edges. But the phenomena of spirit photography are abundant enough in private circles.
I have before me as I write a number of reputed spirit photographs obtained by private persons both with and without the aid of a professional medium. In one sent me by a gentleman resident at Finsbury Park, which is a very impressive specimen of its kind, the fact of a double exposure is obvious to the least experienced in dark-room matters. Notwithstanding, the photographer has apparently made a speciality of this kind of work.
”In my collection [he writes] of over two thousand specimens are portraits of Atlantean priests, who flourished about 12,000 years ago, Biblical patriarchs, poets, Royalties, clerics, scientists, literary men, etc., pioneer spiritualists, like Emma H. Britten, Luther Marsh, Wallace, and John Lamont. The latest additions are, I am happy to say, my kind old friend Mrs Glendinning, and a worthy quartette of earnest workers in Dr Younger, Mr Thomas Everitt, Mr C. Lacey, and David Duguid.”
One of the most curious instances of a ghost photograph occurred in the summer of 1892. Six months previously a lady had taken a photograph of the library at D---- Hall. She kept the plate a long time before developing it, and when developed it showed the faint but clearly recognisable figure of a man sitting in a large arm-chair. A print from the photograph was obtained and shown, when the image was immediately recognised as the likeness of the late Lord D----, the owner of D---- Hall. What was more, it was ascertained that Lord D---- had actually been buried on the day the photograph was taken. A copy of the photograph was sent to Professor Barrett, who examined it and reported (1) that the image is too faint and blurred for any likeness to be substantiated; (2) that the plate had been exposed in the camera for an hour and the room left unguarded; (3) that actual experiments show that an appearance such as that on the plate could have been produced if a man--there were four men in the house--had sat in the chair for a few seconds during the exposure, moving his head and limbs the while.
Another ghost picture described by Mr Podmore was probably caused in a similar way. A chapel was photographed, and when the plate was developed a face was faintly seen in a panel of the woodwork, which the photographer recognised as a young acquaintance who had not long since met with a tragic death. ”In fact,” writes Mr Podmore, ”when he told me the story and showed me the picture, I could easily see the faint but well-marked features of a handsome melancholy lad of eighteen. A colleague, however, to whom I showed the photograph without relating the story, at once identified the face as that of a woman of thirty. The outlines are in reality so indistinct as to leave ample room for the imagination to work on; and there is no reason to doubt that, as in the ghost of the library, the camera had merely preserved faint traces of some intruder who, during prolonged exposure, stood for a few seconds in front of it.”
In spite of all the damaging _exposes_ and these discouraging explanations many intelligent persons the world over will still go on believing in the genuineness of spirit photography. Let me give a few examples of their testimony. M. Reichel, to whom allusion has already been made, states that at one of Miller's _seances_ in America, held on 29th October 1905, those present suddenly heard a great number of voices behind the curtain:
”Betsy told us that sometimes there are Egyptian women and sometimes Indians who come in a crowd to produce their phenomena. On October 29th and again on November 2nd I sent for a San Francisco photographer, Mr Edward Wyllie, to see what impression would be made on a photographic plate by the beings who appeared. Some remarkable pictures were taken by flashlight. Besides the fully materialised forms, there were shown on the photographs several spirits who could not be seen by the physical eyes.
”In one of the latter figures I instantly recognised an uncle of mine, whom I had made acquainted with spiritualism about twelve years previously, through the a.s.sistance of another medium.”
A correspondent sends me an interesting account of investigating materialised spirits in daylight:
”Miss Fairlamb (afterwards Mrs Mellon) was the medium, and the photographs of 'Geordie' and others taken in the garden in broad daylight were quite successful. The conditions must have been most harmonious, as 'Geordie' afterwards, when twilight came on, walked about the lawn, and even ventured into the house, returning to the tent, which served as a cabinet, with an umbrella and ha.s.sock in his hands.”
Dr Theodore Hausmann, one of the oldest physicians in Was.h.i.+ngton, U.S.A., has devoted many years to this particular phase of mediums.h.i.+p.
He places himself before his camera in the study and photographs his spirit visitors, who have included his father, son, and President Lincoln. The opening paragraph in an article he wrote is as follows:--
”Grieving parents, the bereaved widow and mother, will only be too happy if they can see the pictures of those again who were so dear to their hearts, and whose image gradually will vanish if nothing is left to renew their memories.”
There have been many touching letters from relatives of grateful thanks, who imagine themselves in this way to have received portraits of their dear ones who have pa.s.sed away.
In a work which I have come across in which spiritualism is by no means supported Mr J. G. Raupert acknowledges:
”That as regards spirit photographs, he 'obtained many striking pictures of this character, under good test conditions, and attended by circ.u.mstances yielding unique and exceptionally valuable evidence.... The evidence in favour of some of these psychic pictures is as good as it is ever likely to be, and, respecting some of these obtained by the present writer, expert photographic authorities have expressed their verdict. Sir William Crookes has obtained them in his own house under personally imposed conditions, and many private experimenters in different parts of the world have been equally successful.”
This from an avowed opponent is striking testimony to some kind of manifestation which is not, in intent, at least, fraudulent.
CHAPTER XIII
CLAIRVOYANCE
It was natural that out of all these mystic practices--those I have already indicated and the others I am about to indicate--a cult or religion should have been moulded. To this cult has been given the name of spiritualism (or spiritism, as some of the newer devotees prefer to call it). Its great outstanding feature and essential mystery is, of course, physical mediums.h.i.+p. The creed of the believer in disembodied spirits is that the medium acts as the pa.s.sive agent for certain physical and intellectual manifestations which do not belong to the role of the visible, tangible world in which we live. One of the forms of those manifestations is clairvoyance; others are materialisation--_i.e._ the actual incarnation of spiritual forms--physical manifestations such as table rapping, levitation, slate writing, etc., trance utterances and spirit photography.
From the physical phenomena to the intellectual phenomena of clairvoyance.
Clairvoyance literally means clear seeing; but in spiritualism it has a technical meaning, and may be either objective or subjective. In the terminology of the cult, objective clairvoyance is described as ”that psychic power or function of seeing, objectively, by and through the spiritualism sensorium of sight which pervades the physical mechanism of vision, spiritual beings and things. A few persons are born with this power; in some it is developed, and in others it has but a casual quickening. Its extent is governed by the rate of vibration under which it operates; thus, one clairvoyant may see spiritual things which to another may be invisible because of the degree of difference in the intensity of the powers.”
Further, ”subjective clairvoyance is that psychic condition of a person which enables spirit intelligences to impress or photograph upon the brain of that person, at will, pictures and images which are seen as visions by that person, without the aid of the physical eye. These pictures and images may be of things spiritual or material, past or present, remote or near, hidden or uncovered, or they may have their existence simply in the conception or imagination of the spirit communicating them.”