(Mrs. Jones relates how on two occasions she obtained an excellent likeness of her deceased husband. The second photograph referred to shows a remarkable likeness on comparison with a normal photograph.)
I had a sitting at Crewe, about four years ago, and again this last March. Success attended both sittings. The March sitting took place in my own house; Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton stayed with us a couple of days and we got a photo with three “extras” on one plate. We consider the last one a perfect likeness of my husband just as he was before his last illness. The first was very good, only rather too much like what he was at the time of passing over, so, you see, it was rather painful, but a truthful likeness. My son was with Mr. Hope the whole time he developed the plates. He knows quite a lot about photography, and we used our own plates.
(Signed) Ellen Jones.
Rees Cottage, Kempston, Beds.
From THE REV. G. VALE OWEN
I have had several sittings with Mr. Wm. Hope and Mrs. Buxton at Crewe. I will briefly relate one experience.
In 1910 I was just dropping off to sleep when I saw, in the far corner of the room, a beautiful girl’s face smiling at me. It slowly disappeared sideways behind a screen. I wondered who the owner was. It was slightly oval, radiant with joy, and the eyes were laughing at me with just a touch of roguish enjoyment at my perplexity. There was a certain efflorescence permeating it, a light which did not proceed from an exterior object, but which seemed to be one with the substance of which the face was composed. But it was not a mask. It was a living face.
About eight years later I saw the same face again, this time about six inches from my own. On this second occasion there came into my mind, as if intentionally projected there, the name “Ruby.” Ruby is my daughter who passed away at the age of fifteen months in 1896.
In August, 1917, my wife and I paid a visit to the Crewe Circle. On one of the negatives appeared the face I had already seen clairvoyantly. It was not full-face, as I had seen it on the two previous occasions, but in profile. This disposes of the theory that it might have been a thought-form of my own.
Later on, we were having a talk with this spirit-child of ours in our own home at Orford, and I took the opportunity to ask her if it was she who had managed to get her picture on the plate at Crewe. Her reply was: “I don’t know, daddy. I was there and tried to. I should love to have done it. Did I?” My answer was that I was satisfied that she had done so.