SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3052, 24 November 1908, Page 3

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHS.

CURIOUS EXHIBITION BY AN ARCHDEACON. Archdeacon Colley, rector of -Stockton, Warwickshire,,at the'close of a sermon on Spiritualism at Manchester recently, exhibited a series •of what he called spirit photographs, , states a London paper. One of them, taken in March last, • outside his residence, showed the archdeacon's mother, who died fifty years ago, and his father, who died in 1891, aged eighty-one. The mother was never photographed during life, but her likeness had been recognised by hundreds in Leamriington. In a second photograph, taken half -a minute afterwards, the father and mother had changed places, and the archdeacon deduces from this a double parental blessing on what he calls his anti-Sadducee work.

"Seventeen years in the higher life," said the archdeacon, "appear to work for making my father in the spirit photograph look somewhat younger than in the negative I took of-him three years before he departed this life." Another print shown looked, as the archdeacon said, like a psychic rfog, but in the midst of the black blotch could be clearly deciphered some archaic Greek characters, and around them in ten concentric lines some microscopical writing which, the archdeacon said, contained a message from a friend who had been dead for twenty-five years. The Greek characters, interpreted by Sir Oliver Lodge, were a quotation from St. Luke, ch. xvii., v., 4 and 5, but seven words were missing. "This photograph, or, rather, psvchograph, was taken," said the archdeacon, "without a camera. I went to a friend's house and took out three plates avid put them into envelopes. I initialled them, sealed them, and retained posession of them in my hands, and no soul touched them. I took one plate between the palms of my hands, my friend clasped my hands, and a lady placed her hands above and below his. My friend went into a trance. In a short time, he said, 'They are writing.' "