Pseudoskeptics and debunkers are usually quick to smirk and scoff at reports that spirits wear clothes. Indeed, it even exceeds the boggle threshold of many who believe in a spirit world.      

 "When the soul leaves the body it is at the first moment quite unclothed as at birth," Julia Ames communicated to William T. Stead, the prominent British journalist and automatist who went down with the Titanic, after her physical death.   "I awoke standing by my dead body, thinking I was still alive and in my ordinary physical frame. It was only when I saw the corpse in the bed that I knew that something had happened.  When the thought of nakedness crosses the spirit there comes the clothing which you need.  The idea with us is creative.  We think, and the thing is.  I do not remember putting on any garments.  There is just the sense of need, and the need is supplied."

Julia went on to say that once the spirit has fully awakened and adapted to the new environment, it has the ability to make itself appear in different ways, e.g., to appear as a child to someone who knew the spirit, when in the flesh, only as a child.  "We have no need to do so for our own purposes, but when a newcomer arrives, or when we have to manifest ourselves to you who are still in the body, then we need to use this thought-creation, and body forth the visual tangible appearances with which you are familiar."

In effect, Julia said what many other spirits have communicated: that they project an image of themselves as they remember having looked in the flesh to the newcomer on that side as well as to the person still in the earthly life so that they are recognized. 

Allan Kardec, the pioneering French investigator, asked a spirit if any of them have wings.  "Spirits have not wings," the reply came.  "They do not need them; for, they can, as spirits transport themselves everywhere.  They appear according to the way in which they desire to affect the person to whom they show themselves. Some appear in ordinary costume, others enveloped in draperies; some with wings as attributes of the category of spirits they represent."  However, the spirit added that many spirits are unenlightened and do not really understand the process.   For them, it is more instinctive. 

The communicating spirit went on to say that although the spirit has no corporeal infirmity, he might show himself disabled, lame, humpbacked, wounded, or with scars, whatever necessary for the incarnate person to recognize him.   The spirit also said that spirits can make ethereal matter tangible to the touch, if necessary. 

A spirit calling himself Johannes communicated through medium Hester Travers-Smith to H. Dennis Bradley.  "Now you ask me about clothes and appearance... Every soul has its own form.  It has formed itself during the earth life, and it comes to us as it makes itself.  We seem to each other to be men and women as you are; and as to our garments, we do wear garments which convey the same impression as yours.  There are merely veils for the mental part, something that gives clothing and appearance to the mental form; but you need not believe that when you pass on you live so differently as you expect.  These garments are not made in the market as yours are; the really proceed largely from the idea of the individual.  They help to demonstrate the mind as yours do."

 Rev. C. Drayton Thomas, a psychical researcher as well as a Wesleyan minister, communicated with his deceased sister Etta through the mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard, a renowned trance-voice medium. At one of the sittings, Thomas asked Etta if clothing are simply replicas of those used when on earth or if spirits produce them entirely new. Etta replied:  "In one sense the answer to your question must be ‘both ways.'  Let me use as illustration the fact that on earth an old garment can be unpicked and remade into an apparently new one.  Now, our thought with regard to an object we have appreciated is so strong that it provides the pattern for a duplicate here.  But the actual garment is reproduced by processes unique to this sphere.  Thought plays a very important part in manufacturing here, but ours is not entirely a mental world.  We can make things by other processes than thought, if we choose to do so..."

At a different sitting, Thomas was told that he often visits with deceased relatives when he is sleeping.  His deceased father told him that he could see Drayton's soul leaving the body from his solar plexus during sleep, although at death it would leave from the head. He would watch the soul come out and form a sort of clothing for itself.  "That is because of one's intuitive sense of the need of clothing, the soul naturally seeks to clothe its body (i..e, the spiritual or psychic body)," it was explained.

Communicating through the hand of Elsa Barker, a renowned automatist of the early 20^th Century, David Patterson Hatch, a lawyer and judge when "alive," said it is easy to get the clothes one wants after passing.  "I do not know how I became possessed of the garments which I wore on coming out, but when I began to take notice of such things I found myself dressed as usual.  I am not yet sure whether I brought my clothes with me."

Hatch said that after he had been on that side a short time, he encountered a woman dressed in a Greek costume.  He asked her where got it.  "Why, first I made a pattern in my mind, and then the thing became a garment," she replied.   Hatch then decided to see if he could make a Roman toga for himself, "but for the life of me I could not remember what a Roman toga looked like."

Similarly, a spirit once told Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, that he could not materialize and show himself because he could not remember what he looked like when alive.

The same principle of being able to visualize oneself in the flesh seems to apply to psychic photography.  When a mother asked her discarnate son to explain just how he was able to appear on a photograph, he responded:  "I went home and looked at all my pictures, especially the one in the living room, as I like that best of all.  I tried to fix the image of that picture in my mind so that I might be able to impress it upon the ectoplasm."  The boy went on to say that he followed his mother into the room where she was being photographed and while the photographer was preparing to snap the picture he practiced a hit.  "Of course, I could not see myself but felt sure that I was pretty good.  I was all ready but when the camera man flashed a light bulb I did not expect it and I guess my face slipped a little."

A study of the history of spirit photography shows that many spirit photographs were supposedly debunked because the photographs resembled portraits of the person when alive, including the clothing worn in the photographs. It was assumed that the photographer somehow managed to obtain a portrait of the person.  The possibility that the spirits were using their old portraits to remember what they looked like, focusing on the same clothes worn in the portrait, seems not to have been grasped by the debunkers.

The spirit communicating with Father Johannes Greber, a Catholic priest in Germany, during the 1920s, said that "if a disembodied spirit wants to appear to terrestrial eyes in such a guise that it will be taken for its terrestrial being, it must clothes its spirit-form and all the members thereof with a shell of matter, which it produces by means of the condensation of terrestrial od (ectoplasm).  The spirit went on to say that a complete materialization requires so much od that no one medium is capable of supplying it.  "In such cases, therefore, part of the substance of the medium's corporeal body must be dissolved and used for materializing the spirit.  For this reason, in materializations of this nature, a medium surrenders a great part of his physical weight, which is restored to him in full when the materialization has come to an end."    Experiments conducted by Dr. William J. Crawford in Ireland around 1915 fully confirmed the loss of weight with the medium.   This also explains why so many materializations are of just arms or hands or faces.

A sitter at one of the séances of D. D. Home, the renowned medium of yesteryear, asked Home's spirit control how spirits make themselves visible.  "At times we make passes (augment the field of energy) over the individual to cause him to see us; sometimes we make the actual resemblance of our former clothing appear exactly as we were known to you on earth," came the reply.  "Sometimes we project an image that you see; sometimes you see us as we are with a cloudlike aura of light around us. 

After dying in the Titanic disaster of 1912, William T. Stead (mentioned above) 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 explained the process.

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 medium, concentrated his mind on a short sentence, and repeated it with much emphasis and deliberation until he could hear part of it spoken through the medium.

Father Junipero Serra, the early California missionary, is said to have communicated through the medium Violet Parent of Los Angeles during the early 1900s.  At one sitting, Mrs. Parent asked Father Serra if she could photograph him with her cheap box camera.   He consented. Father Serra apparently decided to pose with his mother.  The photo shows his mother as about half his height, or perhaps three-feet tall.  One's first reaction is to dismiss it as a fake, but applying the thought-image explanation to the photo one came make sense out of it.  That is, Father Serra simply projected an image of himself and his mother, fully dressed, of course, as he remembered her, and he saw himself as much taller than his mother. Moreover, his head is much too small relative to his body.  This may be due to the fact that Serra could more easily visualize his garments than his face.    While the photo resembled the only known painting of Father Serra, there were differences.   Since Father Serra lived before photography and probably didn't have many mirrors around the mission, one wonders if he really knew what he looked like.  Perhaps a reflection in the nearest stream gave him his only image of himself.

Many spirit communicators have stated that spirits tend to move from traditional clothing in the lower realms to robes and gown in the higher realms. After transitioning to the spirit world, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson began communicating through the hand of Anthony Borgia.  He told of being able to visit one of the higher realms. "I observed that most of the people waiting in the gardens were not habited in their earth clothes," he communicated, "and I assumed that most of them had been in spirit for some considerable time.  Such was not necessarily the case, Edwin (their guide) told us. They had the right to wear their spirit robes by virtue of the fact that they were inhabitants of this realm we were now in.  And the robes they wore were eminently suited to both the place and the situation.  It is difficult to describe this costume because so much rests in being able to give some comparison with a particular earthly fabric.   Here we have no such materials, but by the kind and degree of light that is the essence of the spirit robe. Those that we now saw were in ‘flowing' form and of full length, and the colours - blue and pink in varying degrees of intensity - seemed to interweave themselves throughout the whole substance of the robes."

Benson went on to say that he and the two other visitors accompanying him were still in their earthly style of raiment.  Edwin suggested that they might change the natural element in the matter of clothes, but Benson and the others wondered how they were to make the change.

"What did take place was very simply this," Benson continued to communicate.  "Immediately I had expressed the wish to follow Edwin's suggestion of discarding my earthly style of clothes, those very clothes faded away - dissolved - and I was attired in my own particular spirit robe - of the same description as those I could see about me."  However, Benson noted that his robe did not have the same brightness or color as Edwin's robe, apparently due to the fact that Edwin was more advanced than he was.    

This is a continuation of my prior blog post.  Thanks to afterlife cartographer Steve  Beckow for calling my attention to additional references on the subject.  Steve's recently updated website is at

http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/fc/fc-index1.html. 

       Also, one of the very best survival sites on the web is up and running again.  It can be found at http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/

On March 11, 1932, Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished British physicist and educator, had one of his many sittings with Gladys Osborne Leonard, perhaps England's most famous medium.  His son, Raymond, who was killed in France during WWI, communicated and attempted to explain conditions on his side of the veil.  "Father, we are obliged to create conditions, and what you might call things, on our plane," Raymond stated through Mrs. Leonard's voice mechanism.  "They've only got a temporary life.  They are illusions, something to the same extent as a materialization is an illusion.  On your side, you have something material for the time being.  It's something natural in appearance, in feel, apparently in every way it appeals to the senses of this body (touching Sir Oliver).   On our side we are bound to create certain things, houses, clothes, partially for the time being, in order to make a satisfactory harmonious and suitable setting for the soul to live in and work in.  And they become a medium of expression...It's one of the necessary illusions of our life."

When Sir Oliver asked Raymond if he was saying that he lived in a world of illusion, Raymond said that he was in a an extension of the illusory world in which his father was living.  "We are in touch with a world of reality because we are in the outer rim of the world of illusion," he explained to his father.  "We're more sure of the world of reality than you are.  Father, the spirit universe is the world of reality.  Spirit and mind both belong to the world of reality."

Sir Oliver, knighted for his pioneering work in electricity, radio, and the spark plug, pondered the situation in writing:  "I know that its inhabitants say it is extraordinarily like the earth, that they have flowers, and trees and houses, and can get anything they want by merely wishing for it, which seems rather strange, "but I was not prepared to think of it as a world of illusion wherein all such objects of sense were illusory."  In further discussing the matter with Raymond and Frederic W. H. Myers, his old friend, who had died in 1901, and who also communicated through Mrs. Leonard, Lodge concluded that it was a temporary environment for spirits who have recently crossed over and still making adjustments before going on to realms of higher vibration, which become less and less illusory and more and more real as a soul advances in the spirit world. "We are not transported to the full blaze of reality all at once," Lodge surmised, pointing out that a table that feels solid and substantial is really a multitude of whirling electrons with great spaces between them and that when we stand on the floor we are bombarded upwards and supported by a great multitude of little blows delivered by the atoms beneath our feet.  As none of this is apparent to the ordinary senses, it can be considered illusory even though we choose to interpret it in a way that appeals to our coarse-grained sense organs.      

On September 12, 1945, Phillip Gilbert, a sailor in the British navy killed in WWII, communicated with his mother, Alice Gilbert:  "You want me to tell you more of conditions here.  It's not easy to explain how one can be solid and yet not solid.  Still, anyone who knows anything about physics and electrons knows that all earthly matter is just that - seeming solid and yet really a mass of vibrating particles.  We are the same, I think, the body I use now looks to me very like my old one, but there are no organs, as you know.  I think I function through my thought, somehow. I can will myself into any clothes I want. I usually get myself into my tweed coat and flannels...Some people go about seeing themselves in the most fantastic outfits.  They are dressed as their inner nature builds them up. That is why, at first, Grandpa so often showed to mediums in a sort of black cassock, like a clergyman."

Phillip went on to say that people in higher planes become more and more luminous and that Christ is seen as a mass of violet golden light.

At a later sitting Phillip told his mother that he had encountered a young woman who had been a model when alive and still did not realize she was "dead."  "She still went parading up and down to an imaginary audience," he communicated.  "But there were gleams in her of a capacity for service.  When I spoke to her, she at first thought it was the prelude to adventure, so I had to do some little stunts to show her I was not an amorous sailor.  In fact, I managed to wish myself into the garment of an Egyptian priest, for a moment, and then back again as the British navy once more - the poor thing thought she'd had one too many.  However, little by little, I got her to understand that she had been killed by a ‘V2' a year ago.  At first she was rather upset, for she has little power of concentration, but soon, being quite a sensible wench, she got the idea and she perked up. Her first idea was to see herself in a few remarkable garments. She seems to have no relatives or friends here that I can find, but I think she has some intention of finding her family still on earth and parking herself near them for a time.   You see how queer it all is, far different from the easy falling into heaven theories we were brought up on."

At still another sitting, Phillip told his mother that he met a very attractive young woman, or, at least, she had been attractive when in her earthly shell.  In fact, she had been obsessed with her beauty and was a very selfish woman.  However, much of her beauty was due to heavy make-up.  Like the model the woman had yet to realize she was dead. "She had, of course, no  idea how to create for herself, and she hovered miserably around the beauty parlours [on earth in an effort to tidy herself up.]"         

On October 11, 1943, Geraldine Cummins, the renowned Irish automatist, recorded a message from Hilda Gibbes, recently deceased.  "Paradise, Purgatory, and Dante's Inferno, Harold says, are all here, but they are so different from what people on earth imagine.  On earth, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Nobody possesses anything but themselves in this life.  That is Govy's first maxim. It made me think that poor X., who has such a shriveled, mean little self, will be in a state of chronic bankruptcy in this world.  He will wear his ugly city clothes, because he only feels a really respectable and worthy citizen when he is dressed in them.  You see we appear what we imagine ourselves to be.  So he will wear the habit he is in the habit of thinking about.   He can only imagine unlovely things, therefore his appearance will be as unlovely as it was on earth when he makes his debut at the levee for the newcomers from the earth.

Later in the transmission, Hilda Gibbes communicated: "About clothes, I shall write you a fashion article next time. But when I wrote about X, I think I explained that we are our own tailors and dressmakers.  We think of and wish for the kind of clothes locked away in the wardrobes of our memories, and they appear. They are not always as we like them. But that is due to our own shortcomings.  I have pulled out such a lot of pretty things from the drawers and wardrobes that belong to my mind...To a great extent people dress according to the period.  Sometimes, though, they break out in great gaieties of coloring and material.  But we share memories and the newly-dead bring over new ideas about clothes.   So we keep the past generation up-to-date, and some of them look rather sweet in modern dress, when, of course, we have always thought of them in clothes of a past period.  I am losing hold of the pen."

The Rev. G. Vale Owen, a clergyman of the Church of England, developed the ability of ability of automatic writing and received many messages from the spirit world.  "Both the texture and the hue of our garments take their quality from the spiritual state and character of the wearer," his deceased mother explained to him.  "The atmosphere also has an effect on our clothing, and enters into the influence of our own personalities in its effect on texture and colour. So that while, if we were all of the same quality spiritually our clothing would be of the same tint and texture, by reason of the atmospheric influence, this is in fact modified by the degree in which our own characters differ one from another...Also the tint of our robes changes according to the part of the grounds in which we happen to be. It is very interesting and instructive, and also very beautiful, to see them change as one turns down a side walk where different vegetation flourishes, or where the arrangement of the various species of plants is different.

Through another medium and to another person, Frederic Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge's old friend mentioned above, communicated: "We were accustomed to wear clothes that belonged to our particular period. The images of these are deeply marked in our subconscious memory. So our first instinct is to appear to those we love as we were on earth. Our minds, though unconscious of the imaginative act, fashion out of this amazingly plastic ether every thread, every inch of the garments which we habitually wore during our earth life. Naturally, after a while, we come to realize the change in ourselves and, aware at last of the creative powers of imagination, devise strange and lovely coverings for our etheric bodies. But as these fancies are largely drawn from it they are limited by the subconscious memory in character and kind. ..."  Myers went on to say that this applied primarily to souls who had just passed through the gates of death and were still in the lower realms or spheres.

Claude Kelway-Bamber, a British pilot killed during WWI, communicated with his mother through Gladys Osborne-Leonard.  "I dress as I did with you, but some people wear white robes because they think when out of the mortal body it is the correct thing to do," he told her.  "If I chose to wear a tunic and sandals, or a "Beefeater's" getup, no one would laugh and jeer; they would realize it made me happy, and that is reason enough." However, he was later taken by his guides to a higher sphere to see Christ.  "When the appointed time came, my guides provided me with a plain white robe to wear, and we passed through connecting shafts to the Christ-sphere.  My general impression was that of brightness, almost dazzling; the air scintillated like diamonds - it almost crackled, it was so full of electricity; my feet had not a very firm grip of the ground."

In communicating with her husband Steward Edward White, the famous writer of the last century, Betty White explained it this way: "Instead of our having to create clothing mechanically, for instance, we do so by a diversion of frequency.  We can create directly by an impingement of our frequency on a lower degree of frequency.  We use degrees. Color is a manifestation of a certain degree of frequency.  I want it in my clothes.  I don't make the color.  I impinge on that particular frequency, and call it to my frequency."

In a current booklet titled "Afterlife," The Rev. Donald Rose, a Swedenborgian minister living in Bryn Athyn, PA, relates the teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg, the brilliant 18^th Century scientist turned mystic.  He states that most intelligent spirits (i.e., most advanced)  wear clothes that gleam as though aflame, some radiant as though alight, while the less advanced wear pure white and soft white clothes that do not shine, and those even less advanced wear clothes of various colors.  In one of his many writings Swedenborg is quoted: "Once when I was looking abroad in the world of spirits I saw, in a certain meadow, men clothed in garments like those of men in the world, from which I knew that they were lately come from the world." 

Frederick Sculthrorp, a pioneer in astral projection, told of his journeys into the spirit world while still in the flesh.  "Regarding the creative power of unconscious thought, I was once talking to a teacher in spirit, and he asked ‘Where do you get your clothes?'  I tried to remember my tailor's name on earth and could not.  But this was not what he meant.  He said, ‘Look' and pointed to my clothes.  I looked down and saw that I was wearing my every-day clothes, reproduced in every detail, even to a small stain that was on them, the result of a  too vigorously squeezed tube of toothpaste, which I had not been able to completely remove."

The Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a Wesleyan minister and psychical researcher,  carried on detailed conversations with his deceased father and sister through Mrs. Osborne-Leonard.  He wrote that his father wanted him to understand that he now lived in a body which, to him, was as real and substantial as the body he had inhabited on earth. "Instead of the vapourish form which I had imagined to be the dwelling place of the departed soul, he described a replica of his former body, but one which possessed powers of movement, and an extension of the senses, far surpassing anything familiar to earth.  He spoke of being suitably clad in garments, and not, as I had supposed, draped only in a cloud of light."  His father further explained that his spirit body was built up by the character formed while in the flesh.