“I could not but be impressed by the Christ-spirit of the two friends, whom we had never seen before that short half-hour, and not since. And when I read of men who try to make those two persons appear something detestable I go back in memory to that day when it was our good fortune to meet them and recall their more than kind attitude to two bruised hearts. God bless them, say I.”
With these preliminary remarks I will now lay before the reader a selection of cases which I have taken from Mr. Hope’s record, and I will ask him to read them carefully and see if they can be reconciled with any possible system of fraud. We are, of course, always open to the objection that a man may be perfectly honest fifty times and fraudulent the fifty-first. That is undeniable and constitutes the great difficulty in dealing with isolated cases where no impartial witness was present, and where both the accusation and the defence are equally ex-parte statements. We can only say in rebuttal that previous honesty must predispose us to assume that there is no fraud, and remind our readers that if we can only show one single case, which is absolutely beyond criticism, then we have for ever settled the larger contention, that it is possible in the presence of certain individuals, whom we call mediums, to produce effects which are supernormal and which would appear to indicate separate intelligences acting visibly quite independently of ourselves.
CHAPTER II
SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
I will first give an account of my own visit to Crewe which was in the summer of 1919. I bought my plates in Manchester and then travelled over to keep the appointment which had been made a week before. Arriving at Crewe, I went down to the little house in Market Street, which is so modest and humble that it furnishes an argument in itself against any undue cupidity on the part of its tenant. Two spiritualistic friends, Mr. Oaten, editor of the Two Worlds, and Mr. Walker, were my companions.
Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton were waiting for us, and, after a short religious service, Mr. Hope and I went into the dark room. There I opened the packet of plates, put two into the carrier and marked them then and there. The carrier was then taken into the room and Mr. Hope inserted it into the camera. We three spiritualists sat in front with a rug, or blanket, as a background. The exposure having been made, the carrier was taken back into the dark room where, with my own hands, I took out the plates, developed them and fixed them. So far as I could judge, there was at no stage any possibility of changing the plates.
But this question does not really arise. No changing of plates would account for the effect actually produced. This effect I have shown in Figure 1. There is a hazy cloud covering us of what I will describe as ectoplasm, though my critics are very welcome to call it cotton-wool if it eases their feelings to do so. In one corner appears a partial materialisation of what seems to be the hair and forehead of a young man. Across the plate is scrawled, “Well done, Friend Doyle, I welcome you to Crewe. Greetings to all. T. Colley.”
I have already explained that Archdeacon Colley was the founder of the Crewe Circle, and if, as we believe, we continue our interest after death it would seem not unnatural that he should send a kindly word to a visitor who was working for the cause. How can we determine that the message was really from Archdeacon Colley? The obvious way would be to get a sample of his writing in life and to compare it with that upon the plate. This I have done, as shown in Figure 2. Can anyone deny that the handwriting is the same in both instances, or can anyone suppose that the rough script of Hope could possibly be modified into the scholarly handwriting of the Archdeacon? Whence, then, did this message come? Does anyone imagine that a private forger is retained by Hope and lurks somewhere in that humble abode? It is a problem which calls for an answer, and no talk about conjuring tricks or transposition of plates has the least bearing upon it. It may be remarked incidentally that my own strong desire was to obtain some sign from my son who had passed away the year before. The result seemed to show that our personal wishes do not effect the outcome.
Having failed to get what I desired, I remained at Crewe for the night, and next morning went down to Market Street again. On this occasion I used Hope’s own plates, having left mine at the hotel. He gave me the choice of several packets. The result obtained under all the precautions which I could adopt (it would only weary the reader if I gave every point of detail) was a photograph of the face of a young man beside my own. It was not a good likeness of my son, though it resembled him as he was some eight years before his death. Of the three results which I obtained at Crewe it was the one which impressed me least. On examination with a lens it was noticeable that the countenance was pitted with fine dots, as in the case of process printing. This is to be noticed in a certain proportion, possibly one in ten, of Hope’s results, and occurs in the case of persons whose faces could by no possibility have appeared in newspapers. One can only suppose that it is in some way connected with the psychic process, and some have imagined a reticulated screen upon which the image is built up. I am content to note the fact without attempting to explain it. I have observed the same effect in other psychic photographs.
The third result was the most remarkable of any. I had read that Hope can get images without the use of the camera, but the statement sounded incredible. He now asked me to mark a plate and put it in a carrier, which I did. We then placed our hands on either side of the carrier, Mrs. Buxton and her sister joining in. At the end of about a minute Hope gave a sort of shudder, and intimated that he thought a result had been obtained. On putting the plate into the solution a disc the size of a shilling, perfectly black, sprang up in the centre of it. On development this resolved itself into a luminous circle with the face of a female delicately outlined within it. Under the chin is a disc of white, and two fingers which are pointing to it. The disc is evidently a brooch, and the pointing seemed to indicate that it was meant to be evidential. The face bore a strong resemblance to that of my elder sister, who died some thirty years ago. Upon sending the print to my other sisters they not only confirmed this, but they reminded me that my sister had a very remarkable ivory brooch in her lifetime and that it was just the one object which might best have been chosen as a test. I regret that this picture is so delicate that it will not bear reproduction.
Such were my three results at Crewe, and I should, I hold, have been devoid of reason had I not been deeply impressed by them. Here was a message in Archdeacon Colley’s own handwriting. Here was a test from my own dead sister which seemed to be beyond all possible coincidence, apart from the extraordinary way in which the picture was obtained. Neither sleight-of-hand nor transference of plates could have any bearing upon such results as those. Their full significance was not realised until I had made enquiries, but after that time I felt it impossible to doubt the supernormal nature of the powers which had produced such effects.
It might perhaps be argued that as Archdeacon Colley’s writing was familiar to Hope, he had, in spite of his disabilities, made some special effort to master and reproduce it. As a matter of fact, however, this case does not stand alone, and many evidential writings have been obtained at Crewe, notably those of W. T. Stead and of the late Dr. Crawford. The latter is a recent incident, and I would take it as my next example, since it illustrates this phenomenon of writing, and is again free from the bogey of transposition.
Upon June 30 of this year (1922) three delegates from Belfast, Mr. Skelton, Mr. Gillmour and Mr. Donaldson, were coming over to the London Spiritualists’ Conference. They broke their journey at Crewe in order to have a sitting with Mr. Hope, who was in deep distress at the time on account of the attack made upon him in Mr. Price’s report. It is worth noting that Mrs. Crawford, the widow of Dr. Crawford, had come over with them on the boat, and that Dr. Crawford’s affairs had been under discussion, though Hope had no means of knowing it. Under good fraud-proof conditions, on their own specially-marked plate, the visitors obtained a message in Dr. Crawford’s handwriting, which runs thus, I supplying the punctuation:
“Dear Mr. Hope,
“Needless to say I am with