A person can show his or her face instead of his arm or the false limb, and something rather laughable than terrifying is recommended for such experiments to a juvenile auditory.
THE GHOST ILLUSION.
In The Secret Out the explanation of “The Witch of Endor” trick showed how spectres may be made to appear by aid of the magic lantern.
Fig. 142.
In the Middle Ages phantoms were called up by that means or by reflectors, but the inability to procure apparatus in perfection seems to have delayed the complete achievement of a success.
In 1847 M. Robin, the Parisian prestidigitateur, startled Lutetia with his presentation of ghosts, almost solid forms, through which, nevertheless, swords were passed, to prove their intangibility.
Robertson had attempted the same, but with a complication of mirrors, plane and convex, which were hardly workable.
But, in seeking simplicity, the later inventor left a difficulty unavoided. In the front of a stage, below it, he places the personator of the ghost, illumined with a powerful light. A part of the stage is open, over which leans, at an angle of forty-five degree, a very smoothly polished plate of glass, as large as the stage from the “flies” to the boards, and its edges hidden from the audience by trees, &c.
The reflected figure appears on the stage as far behind the glass as its cause is before it.