Desperate to believe that the spirit of her father was still with her, one woman decided to dedicate her entire home to ghosts who wished to commune with living psychics.
The House That Is to Be Dedicated to Ghosts
It Is the Haunted London Home of the Late W.T. Stead to Which, His Daughter Says, Her Dead Father Frequently Returns.
ACCORDING to the dictionary, a haunted house is a place subjected to visitations from the world of spirits. In the popular imagination it is a ramshackle wooden structure, shrinking behind dusty hedge rows, with broken windows invaded by the branches of trees through the tops of which the wind soughs in melancholy manner, or a dilapidated brick structure, stern and forbidding, with cold marble floors and metal banisters clammy and terrible to the visitors’ touch.
But over in London, which seems to be just now the mecca of those who have been caught in the war inspired interest in spirits and psychic manifestations, they have a different conception of a dwelling inhabited by the souls of those who have separated from the fleshy envelope called the body. They have neither terror nor curiosity for such a habitation. In fact, they have given ghosts a headquarters. The 200 year old residence in old Smith Square of Miss Estelle Stead, daughter of W.T. Stead, has been turned over to ghosts and this winter it is to be dedicated with formal ceremonies.
Thus the invisible, save to the psychic, denizens of the world beyond the veil have been given a headquarters where they may meet and hold converse with those in the flesh. The spirit of the departed owner of the mansion will preside when the spirits hold a meeting. That he has never left the dwelling is the statement of his beautiful daughter. And to prove this assertion she has the photograph showing the presence of her father’s spirit in the library of his late residence when the spirit photographer snapped him.
This library also has been turned over to the ghosts. It is here that Miss Stead and her friends who believe in ghosts hold their seances. Around its walls are book shelves holding a thousand volumes on the subject of spiritualism. All of these are offered as a sort of a public library on things ghostly.
“Believers” Are Conservative
The members of Miss Stead’s circle are professional, business and wealthy folk who will give you sincere and very convincing testimony testimony to the truth of their statements that ghosts are ghosts and can and do make themselves visible and communicative at the proper time and place. What they have done, they’ll inform you, is merely to give their incorporeal friends the proper place and appointed times when they may so manifest themselves. They speak of the coming visit to headquarters of this or that ghost in the tone of voice that one who doesn’t believe in spirits might announce the coming of a cousin by marriage. They become wroth only when “double exposure” or “double negatives” is suggested as an explanation of the weird “spirit” photographs, two of which are printed on this page.
But, as the “spirit photograph” at the top of this page bears witness, belief in ghosts has almost as much strength here as in England. Many of the most conservative thinkers and persons known as unbelievers have been convinced that there is “something to it.” Among those are the witnesses to the taking of the aforementioned “spirit photograph” of the late Prof. Hyslop, produced in the course of an investigation conducted by Dr. Walter F. Prince, Chief Investigator of the Psychical Research Society.
When they exhibit this photograph they will remind you, with a pardonable ring of triumph in their voices, that Prof. Hyslop is the same psychologist and spiritualist who promised he would return after death and disclose himself to those who have faith. They will also recall to your mind the report that a week after his death he appeared at a banquet held in his honor and gave an automatic message through one of the psychic guests.
The circumstances attendant on the spirit photograph of the late professor are enough to give even the most incredulous pause. It was taken in the home of Dr. Edward F. Bowers. Those present included Dr. Bowers, Miss Marie Havilland, a trained nurse, whose hypnotized mind conjured the supposed ghost; Mrs. Robert T. Scott, who didn’t believe in spirits; Miss Eleanor Ramos, editor of “Saucy Stories,” a magazine which doesn’t publish spirit literature, and Walter A. Roberts, President of the Writers’ Club and editor of the “National Pictorial Monthly.”
The photographer, William M. Van Der Weyde, who took the picture, was a wholly disinterested party to the act. He was called in because he was known to be an expert in his line and he was given the plates for the exposure five minutes before he actually took the picture. He declares that after he made the exposure the plates were taken from him by the committee to be locked up overnight. In the morning they were brought to him in his studio, where he developed them in the presence of the committee, and disclosed the “ghost.”
But, in order to prove once and for all that spirits can be “caught” by a sensitized photographic plate, Miss Stead, in addition to throwing open her library of 1000 books on spirits, will, this winter, open to the public a private studio she is having constructed at some expense in the old garden to the rear of her home in which every facility for photographing spirits will be installed and every possible loophole for trickery will be eliminated.
Unlike the great majority of those who are enthusiastic in the post war psychic phenomena, Miss Stead and her late father entertained ghosts long before the death of millions in the war accelerated the spiritist movement to its present unprecedented popularity. She says she has received numerous visits from the other side.
Visits from a Ghost
“My experiences with ghosts have been very agreeable,” she says. “The first one who called on me was a poet named Gordon Knight, who lived in the house 200 years ago. He called shortly after we moved in. I was awakened in the night by the violent slamming of a door. Then I heard someone or rather, felt someone, enter the room. I sat up in bed, As I looked I saw the figure of a man garbed in the style of another period, a huge soft hat and a black cloak being the outstanding features of his dress, walk into the beam of moonlight which streamed in through the French windows. He walked to my writing desk and began to write. For twenty minutes I watched him, transfixed. I was not terrified. I was deeply interested. Finally he arose and vanished. In the morning I told my father of the occurrence, Three nights later he appeared to me and my father in the library and then told us who he was. After that he made many visits. We looked him up and discovered that he had lived in the house just when he said and we also found some of his verses, which are quite good.”
Miss Stead also tells of a visit paid her father by Li Hung Chang, the famous Chinese statesman.
“While Father was dining out one evening a Chinaman, whose appearance convinced me he was Li Hung Chang, called on me. I asked him if he were Li Hung Chang. He bowed and smiled and said he wanted to communicate with me father. I told him Father would be home later. He went away. I retired without seeing my father. But in the morning my father informed me that the first to write an automatic message through his hand that evening before was the spirit of the Chinese statesman.”
Miss Stead declares that her father visits her regularly and that he is dictating to her the chapters of a book she will name “The Blue Island,” which recounts the experiences her late parent is having on the other side of the veil.
But, convincing as are these photographs and the statements of witnesses who saw them taken, there are those who claim that the so called “spirit” pictures are faked either by double exposure of the plate by means of an X-ray or by the old trick of the double negative. By the latter device the expert photographer is enabled to present pictorial “proof” of New York with water filled streets and to make possible the visual paradox of some star in the motion pictures simultaneously playing three roles.
The Scientific American, October issue, contains an “exposure” of spirit photographing. James Black, the writer, is unsparing in his criticism of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has espoused the research movement into “spirit” photography. He cites how William Hope, the “leading psychic photographer of Great Britain,” whom Sir Arthur sponsored and vouched for was “exposed.” A mr. Marriott, a London photographic expert, challenged Hope to a test sitting, but never got it. But another investigator did, however, arrange for a fake picture. This is how Black describes what happened:
“Mr. Edward Bush, a member of the S.P.R. (British), arranged a seance with Hope and sent him a photograph of a man Hope presumed to be dead. At the first sitting a spirit message came through, the second produced a spirit picture of the subject of this photograph. This is doubly remarkable; the subject was the son-in-law of Mr. Bush, who was alive and well! The message received was in the same handwriting as that of numerous other messages received, through the same agency, and carried the same error in spelling, too. This message has been admitted to be a forgery; but Hope and his adherents still insist that the picture is quite genuine.”
Source: The Morning Tulsa Daily World. Newspaper. November 12, 1922.
