Many experiments of like nature followed; on some plates were abnormal appearances, on others none. All this time Mr. D., the medium, during the exposure of the plates, was quite inactive. After one trial, which had proved successful, I asked him how he felt and what he had been thinking of during the exposure. He replied that his thoughts had been mainly concentrated upon his chances of securing a corner seat in a smoking carriage that night from Euston to Glasgow.
If the precautions I took during all of the several experiments, such as those recorded, are by any of you thought to have been imperfect or incomplete, I pray of you to point them out. In some of them I relaxed my conditions to the extent of getting one of those present to lift out from the dark slide the exposed plate and transfer it to the developing dish held by myself, or to lift a plate from the manufacturer’s package into the dark slide held in my own hand, this being done under my own eye, which was upon it all the time; but this did not seem to interfere with the average on-going of the experiments.
The psychic figures behaved badly. Some were in focus, others not so; some were lighted from the right, while the sitter was so from the left; some were comely, as the dame I shall show on the screen, others not so; some monopolised the major portion of the plate, quite obliterating the material sitters; others were as if an atrociously badly vignetted portrait, or one cut oval out of a photograph by a can-opener, or equally badly clipped out, were held up behind the sitter. But here is the point: not one of these figures which came out so strongly in the negative was visible in any form or shape to me during the time of exposure in the camera, and I vouch in the strongest manner for the fact that no one whatever had an opportunity of tampering with any plate anterior to its being placed in the dark slide or immediately preceding development. Pictorially they are vile, but how came they there?
Now, all this time, I imagine you are wondering how the stereoscopic camera was behaving itself as such. It is due to the psychic entities to say that whatever was produced on one half of the stereoscopic plates was reproduced on the other, alike good or bad in definition. But on a careful examination of one which was rather better than the other, and which is now about to be projected on the lantern screen for your examination ([see page 35]), I deduce this fact, that the impressing of the spirit form was not consentaneous with that of the sitter. This I consider an important discovery. I carefully examined one in the stereoscope, and found that, while the two sitters were stereoscopic per se, the psychic figure was absolutely flat. I also found that the psychic figure was at least a millimetre higher up in one than the other. Now, as both had been simultaneously exposed, it follows to demonstration that, although both were correctly placed vertically in relation to the particular sitter behind whom the figure appeared, and not so horizontally, this figure had not only not been impressed on the plate simultaneously with the two gentlemen forming the group, but had not been formed by the lens at all, and that, therefore the psychic image might be produced without a camera. I think this is a fair deduction. But still the question obtrudes, How came these figures there? I again assert that the plates were not tampered with by either myself or any one present. Are they crystallisations of thought? Have lens and light really nothing to do with their formation? The whole subject was mysterious enough on the hypothesis of an invisible spirit, whether a thought projection or an actual spirit, being really there in the vicinity of the sitter, but it is now a thousand times more so. There are plenty of Tycho Brahes capable of supplying details of observations, but who is to be the Kepler that will from such observations evolve a law by which they can be satisfactorily explained?
Abnormal Portrait of Lady
In the foregoing I have confined myself as closely as possible to narrating how I conducted a photographic experiment open to every one to make, avoiding stating any hypothesis or belief of my own on the subject generally, and it only now remains to exhibit the results, bad and fraudulent-looking as they are, on the screen.