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| How can an old-fashioned plate camera
capture images of the so-called 'dead', or even the thought-images of people who are still
alive? We'll look at these questions later - but first:
The best
known British photographic medium of the twentieth-century is probably William Hope, who
worked in Crewe in England.
When
conducting a photographic sitting, Mr Hope took several stringent precautions to rule out
any type of fraud.
He always
used a plate camera, and his sitters had to provide their own plates, which they brought
into the seance-room still sealed. They would then be invited to carefully examine the
plate camera - a rather simple mechanism in which it would prove difficult to hide
anything.
Investigators
were also required to sign or initial their newly-opened plates so that their signatures
would appear on them.
Then they
personally placed their own plates in the camera, and they also removed them after the
picture had been taken; after this, they accompanied William Hope into his darkroom and
stayed with him while he developed the plates, so that they could be certain that at no
time could any substitution take place.
Through
William Hope's mediumistic gift, hundreds of likenesses of his sitters' dead relatives and
friends were obtained, a high percentage of which were subsequently verified as accurate
by living family members. Even the images of animals were captured on film.
On occasion, pictures of people who were still alive (but who were quite a distance away from the seance-room) would appear on the plates; but the explanation for this may be contained in the opposite column - it would seem that Thought is the key to producing many or all of these paranormally-obtained images. Interestingly enough, when the famous medium, Lilian Bailey, was starting her investigations into life after death, she sat with William and was desperately hoping to receive a picture of her recently-deceased mother, but she got a big surprise. The image caught on the plate was a stranger to her (then), but it turned out to be her spirit guide, a First World War soldier called William Hedley Wootton, who appeared complete with a dark shaded area over his temple where an enemy bullet had killed him.
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Below is a twentieth-century spirit photograph taken by William Hope with
a plate camera, and it shows a woman's face in the top right corner.
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