We will give twenty-five dollars to any Los Angeles photographer who by trick or skill will produce similar results under similar conditions.
(Signed)-Julian McCrae, P. C. Campbell, J. W. Mackie, W. N. Slocum, John Henley.
David Duguid (1832-1907), the well-known medium for automatic writing and painting, had the benefit of careful investigation of his spirit photo graphs by Mr. J. Traill Taylor, editor of the BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY, who in the course of a paper read by him before the London and Provincial Photographic Association on March 9, 1893, gave an account of recent test sittings with this medium. He says:
My conditions were exceedingly simple. They were, that I for the nonce would assume them all to be tricksters, and to guard against fraud, should use my own camera and unopened packages of dry plates purchased from dealers of repute, and that I should be excused from allowing a plate to go out of my own hand till after development, unless I felt otherwise disposed; but that, as I was to treat them as under suspicion, so they must treat me, and that every act I performed must be in the presence of two witnesses, nay, that I would set a watch upon my own camera in the guise of a duplicate one of the same focus-in other words, I would use a binocular stereoscopic camera and dictate all the conditions of operation.
After giving details of the procedure adopted, he records the appearance on the plates of extra figures, and continues:
Some were in focus, others not so; some were lighted from the right, while the sitter was so from the leftsome monopolized 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?
Other well-known sitters have described remarkable evidential results obtained with Duguid.*
* James Coates, "Photographing the Invisible" (1921), and Andrew Glendinning, "The Veil Lifted" (1894).
Mr. Stainton Moses, in the concluding chapter of his valuable series on Spirit Photography, discusses the theory that the extra forms photographed are moulded from ectoplasm (he speaks of it as the "fluidic substance") by the invisible operators, and makes important comparisons between the results obtained by different photographic mediums.
Mr. John Beattie's "valuable and conclusive experiments," as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace calls them, can only be referred to briefly. Mr. Beattie, of Clifton, Bristol, who was a retired photographer of twenty years' standing, felt very doubtful about the genuineness of many of the alleged spirit photographs which had been shown to him, and determined to investigate for himself. Without any professional medium, but in the presence of an intimate friend who was a trance sensitive, he and his friend Dr. G. S. Thomson, of Edinburgh, conducted a series of experiments in 1872 and obtained on the plates first patches of light and, later on, entire extra figures. They found that the extra forms and markings showed up on the plate during development much in advance of the sitter a peculiarity often observed by other operators. Mr. Beattie's thorough honesty is vouched for by the editor of the BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY. Mr. Stainton Moses* and others supply details of the above experiments.
* HUMAN NATURE, Vols. VIII. and IX., 1874-5. HUMAN NATURE, Vol. VIII., 1874, p. 390 ET SEQ.
The LONDON DAILY MAIL in 1908 appointed a Commission to make "an inquiry into the genuineness or otherwise of what are called spirit photographs," but it came to naught.