As my friend Admiral Usborne Moore observes in a letter received from him as I write these words: "We are dealing with a great mystery here." He is himself one of those who by persevering effort is helping us to solve the mystery.
It is certainly the branch of psychic science which promises the best results from an evidential point of view, but it must be a case of "each man his own photographer."
There is always a tendency in human nature to be over-credulous as to our own achievements, and over-sceptical as to those of our neighbours.
So for many years probably, we shall only accept our "very own" psychic photographs as quite genuine; but when a sufficient number of people are convinced by their personal experiences in this line of research, there will be some hope that the subject will go through the usual stages—(1) Impossible and absurd; (2) Possible, but very improbable; (3) Possible, and not even abnormal; (4) Finally, normal, and "Just what we knew all about from the first!"
Meanwhile some of us have been experimenting, with professional assistance, and in these cases the question is not "Can such photographs be faked?" We all know nowadays that faking photographs is the easiest of all possible frauds. I have spent many a half hour doing the faking myself, with an amateur photographer, by sitting for so many seconds in a chair and then vacating it in favour of some other "spook"!
No, the whole question at present must be determined by our recognition or non-recognition of the photographs produced.
If Mr Boursnell or any other photographer can produce (as he has done) my old nurse, who died twenty-three years ago, and was never photographed in her life, then we must find some other suggestion than that of "common or garden faking" as a solution of the mystery. There she sits, as in life, with a little knitted shawl round her shoulders and the head of a tiny child upon her lap. The eyes are closed, and give a dead look to the face, yet the features are to me quite unmistakable, and no one knew the dear old woman so well as I did.
Again, I have in my little picture gallery, an old and very well-known Oxford professor, in whose house I stayed many times.
Quite unexpectedly he appeared on one of Mr Boursnell's plates last summer, and although this special photograph is fainter than the one just described, the likeness can only be denied by someone more anxious to be sceptical than truthful. I compared the photograph with an engraving of the professor in much earlier life—which is to be found in the Life published since he passed away—with an artist friend (who had not known him). We went over the features one by one, and my friend said she noticed only one small difference, the exact length of the upper lip, and this, she considered, would be amply accounted for by the lapse of time between the two pictures and the slight lengthening of the upper lip owing to loss of teeth. The professor passed away as an old man; the picture engraved in the Life represents him as he was at least twenty years before his death.
But the most interesting point to me in this photograph, is the appearance on his lap of a much loved dog, a rather large fox terrier named "Bob." I had not noticed Bob until a daughter of the professor pointed him out to me, and now I cannot understand having missed him at first.