Perhaps the best illustration is one that Carrington gives in his Personal Experiences, to which I must send the reader for the full story. Two spinster-mediums of Chicago had a great and profitable reputation for spirit-painted photographs. I take it that their general air of ancient virtue and piety disarmed sitters, who are apt to think that a fraudulent medium will betray himself or herself by criminal features. You took a photograph of your dead friend, and asked that the spirits might reproduce it in oils. The medium studied it, and made an appointment with you at a later date. Perhaps the medium then studied it again, and made a further appointment. On the solemn day the medium held a blank canvas up to the window before your eyes, and gradually, first as a dim dawn of colours, then as a precise figure, the picture appeared on the canvas. Carrington suggests that she held up to the window two canvases—a thin blank canvas a few inches in front of the prepared picture. By deftly and slowly bringing these together with her fingers she brought about the illusion; and only a little ordinary sleight of hand was required to get rid of the blank canvas.
These illustrations will suffice to show the reader what subtle and artful trickery is used in this department of Spiritualism. He will know what to think when a Spiritualist friend, who could not detect the simplest conjuring trick, shows him a spirit-photograph and says that he took care there was no fraud. The ordinary members of the Spiritualist movement are as honest as any, but their eagerness—natural as it is—puts them in a frame of mind which is quite unreasonable. The trickery of this class of mediums has been developing for nearly sixty years, and it has to find new forms every few years as the older forms are exposed. The mediums have become expert conjurers and even, in some cases, expert chemists—or they have expert chemists in collusion with them—and it is simply foolish for an ordinary person to think that he can judge if there has been fraud. We must have at least one elementary safeguard. No part of the apparatus employed must belong to the medium or be manipulated by him; and the photograph must not be taken on his premises. Every Spiritualist who approves a photograph taken under other conditions is courting deception and encouraging fraud.
And instead of finding even the leading Spiritualists setting an example of caution in face of the recognized mass of fraud in their movement, we find them exhibiting a bewildering hastiness and lack of critical faculty. Most readers will remember how Sir A. C. Doyle sent to the Daily Mail on December 16, 1919, a photograph of a picture of Christ which had, he said, been "done in a few hours by a lady who has no power of artistic expression when in her normal condition." The picture was, he said, "a masterpiece"; so wonderful, in fact, that "a great painter in Paris" (not named, of course) "fell instantly upon his knees" before such a painting. It was "a supreme example" of a Spiritualist miracle. The sequel is pretty well known. On December 31 the artist's husband wrote a letter to the Daily Mail, of which I need quote only one sentence:—
Mrs. Spencer wishes definitely to state once and for all that her pictures are painted in a perfectly normal manner, that she is disgusted at having "psychic power" attributed to her, and that she does not cherish any ludicrous and mawkish sentiments about helping humanity by her paintings.
FOOTNOTE:
[11] I might add that Mrs. Gladstone is not at all recognized by her own son in Mr. Wynne's photograph. The other figure seems to me certainly a reproduction of a photograph or bad picture of Gladstone.
Chapter V A CHAPTER OF GHOSTLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Spiritualism began in 1848 with the humble and entirely fraudulent phenomena of raps. Within three years there were hundreds of mediums in the United States, and a dollar per sitter was the customary fee for assisting at one of the services of the new religion. It soon became widely known that raps could be produced by very earthly means, and in any case the rivalry of mediums was bound to develop new "phenomena." As in all other professions, originality paid; and as the wonderful discovery was quickly made that darkness favoured the intensity and variety of the phenomena, the spirit power began to break upon humanity in a bewildering variety of forms. In this chapter we will examine a number of these accomplishments which our departed fellows have learned on the Elysian fields.