The Secret of Spirit Photography

If you have ever seen pictures of spirit materializations or of spirit photographs, you've probably had a good laugh.   Some of them are so ridiculous and hokey looking that one wonders how the "trickster" medium could possibly have thought he or she could fool anybody.  Certainly, they could have come up with better and more believable "tricks."

Perhaps a little self-experiment will help you better appreciate the problems involved in both materializations and spirit photography.  Imagine, if you will, that you were once a great athlete. Further imagine that you are sitting at home when you receive a phone call from the director of your sport's Hall of Fame.  He or she tells you that you have been voted into the Hall and will be inducted next month.  Two photographs of you are needed - an action shot and a portrait.  The director tells you that the Hall has the latest in photographic technology.  All you have to do is visualize the two photos you want put on the Hall of Fame wall and transmit those visualizations over the telephone lines.   Those visualizations will be recorded on a special machine and photographs made of them.

Now, visualize the action shot you want to transmit over the telephone wires.   Then, visualize your portrait shot.   If you are a man, it's unlikely that you imagined yourself as you appear looking in the mirror when you shave in the morning, and if you are a woman it's highly unlikely that you imagined yourself as you appear before putting on your makeup in the morning. If you are much over 40, you probably transmitted an image of yourself at a younger age.

The fact is that most of us really have a somewhat distorted image of ourselves.  Often the image is based on photographs, including portraits, of ourselves when we are looking our best, both younger and slimmer.   Moreover, we don't always visualize ourselves from head to foot.  Was the action image you sent a full body shot or just an upper body shot?  When I took this simple test, I focused in on a photograph of myself during the 1977 New York City Marathon, the photograph that now appears on my home page of this blog.  I am crossing a bridge over the East River with the Twin Towers in the background.    Only my upper body is shown.  Although I ran scores of races during my younger years, I cannot really visualize a moment in any one of those races that is not recorded on a photograph; thus, I had to rely on a photograph of myself.  

And so with this little self-experiment we might appreciate the problem spirits had in transmitting photographs of themselves in the phenomenon known as spirit photography.  Many of those old photos were supposedly debunked because they looked very much like photographs or portraits that were taken of the person when he or she was alive.  It was assumed that the photographer somehow got hold of an old photograph of the person,  doctored it a little, and used it to trick his gullible customer.  

Likewise, this appears to have been the problem with the phenomenon known as materialization.   The spirit had to project an image of him- or herself into the ectoplasm being exuded by the medium. The quality of the image was based on the spirit's recollection of what he or she looked like.    Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, reported witnessing a number of partial and full spirit materializations.  In one case, the spirit communicated that he was unable to materialize because he could not remember what he looked like when in the flesh.  Often the materializations appeared doll-like and totally fake, probably due to difficulties in the projection process, including the awareness of the communicating spirit, i.e., how awake the spirit was in the spirit world.   The next time you are dreaming, try to focus in on what you look like.    

After dying in the Titanic disaster of 1912, William T. Stead, a renowned author and social activist, began communicating through several mediums. He explained that there were souls on his side who had the power of sensing people (mediums) who could be used for communication.  One such soul helped him find mediums and showed him how to make his presence known.  It was explained to him that he had to visualize himself among the people in the flesh and imagine that he was standing there in the flesh with a strong light thrown upon himself.  "Hold the visualization very deliberately and in detail, and keep it fixed upon my mind, that at that moment I was there and they were conscious of it."

Stead added that the people at one sitting were able to see only his face because he had seen himself as only a face.  "I imagined the part they would recognize me by."   It was in the same way he was able to get a message through.  He stood by the most sensitive person there, concentrated his mind on a short sentence, and repeated it with much emphasis and deliberation until he could hear part of it spoken by the person.

On March 14, 1874, Alfred Russel Wallace, co-originator with Charles Darwin of the natural selection of evolution theory, visited a professional photographer with Mrs. Guppy, a medium, in hopes of obtaining a spirit photo.  In the first photo, a half-figure of a man holding a sword appeared.  Wallace could not identify the man.  In the second and third photos, Wallace's mother appeared, although it took close examination by both Wallace and his brother to realize it was her.  "How these two figures, with these special peculiarities of a person totally unknown to [the photographer] could appear on his plates, I should be glad to have explained," Wallace wrote.  "Even if he had by some means obtained possession of all the photographs ever taken of my mother, they would not have been of the slightest use to him in the manufacture of these pictures.   I see no escape from the conclusion that some spiritual being acquainted with my mother's various aspects during life, produced these recognizable impressions on the plate.  That she herself still lives and produced these figures may not be proved; but it is a more simple and natural explanation to think that she did so, than to suppose that we are surrounded by beings who carry out an elaborate series of impostures for no apparent purpose than to dupe us into a belief in a continued existence after death."  Wallace added that he was in the dark room when the plates were developed and he saw the images take form.

 Wallace's mother may not have been able to rely on a photograph to remember what she looked like, because she died before photography was in existence.  This might further explain why it took a close examination by both Wallace and his brother to recognize it as their mother.  The best she could do was project an image of herself as she remembered herself. 

The unrecognized man with a sword in the first Wallace photo may have been a person who best remembered himself as a warrior and managed to focus only on his torso in projecting the image.  It could have been an ancestor of Wallace's or a simple "gate crasher," as many communications have indicated that low-level spirits are hanging around the medium waiting to communicate or take part in whatever was going on.  There were also many reports of ‘impostor" spirits - spirits pretending to be famous people or someone known by the sitter.  

 As Wallace and other researchers came to understand them, the spirit photographs were "thought-forms" projected onto the photographic plates by the communicating spirit, not actual images of the spirits in their celestial form.  The quality of the photographs depended upon the ability of the spirit to project his or her image onto the photographic plates. Apparently, such abilities vary widely among spirits, just as artistic ability and the ability to focus or meditate varies widely with humans.   

Skeptics often laugh at the idea that spirits wear clothes.  If you were a spirit and projecting an image of yourself, wouldn't you project that image with clothes on?