Photo from the next world or retro photoshop: how William Hope shot spirits in the 1920s

In order to bring William to clean water, Price secretly tagged the photographic plates with the Imperial Dry Plate Co. brand logo. Ltd., and then handed them to Hope and asked them to take some photos of the perfumes for him. Soon, the spiritualist photographer returned the materials to the researcher, stating that the attempt was successful and he managed to photograph several spiritual beings invisible to the human eye. The catch was that the images given to Hope did not have the original mark, which meant only one thing: the photographer replaced the photographic plates.

Later, Harry Price unveiled the test results in a work entitled "A Sober Look at the Spiritualistic" Phenomenon "- The Crewe Circle Experiment."

Ten years later, Fred Barlow, an ex-associate of Hope and a fan of his work, together with former Secretary of the Society for the Study of Otherworldly Images, Major Rampling Rose, gave a lecture for the Society for the Study of the Psyche, in which he presented the results of a series of tests and experiments using poltergeist images William Hope. The couple concluded that the "perfume" in the photographs of William appeared to be fraudulent.

Despite all this, Hope was still popular and respected in some circles, retaining an impressive number of followers and fans of his “talent”. Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the proponents of an unscrupulous spiritualist who staunchly rejected any evidence that William was an ordinary charlatan.

Here are just a few chilling examples of how over the years William Hope managed to deceive a lot of people, skillfully playing on the most deep, tragic and intimate moments of their lives.

The clergyman and his wife attended a session in which a voice was heard stating that he belonged to their daughter Rosa, born dead. A voice asked them to sit down and take a picture for extrasensory photography, saying that he would try to appear on it. "Rose" is not very visible in the image. Later, the image of the person in the picture was identified, it turned out to be the long-dead father of the clergyman.

The man is surrounded by "signs of spiritual presence."

Two women with a spirit. The young woman’s face appeared on top of the image of the woman on the right in the photograph. On the back of the picture is written: "Why is the child always ahead?" and "Do we receive messages from higher spirits?"

A couple with a woman's spirit. A female face appears over the pair, identified at the time as the sister of one of the members of the spiritualist church. The cloak on the head of the "spirit" adds a mystical effect.

A man with a feminine spirit.

Spiritualist group session, shot by William Hope around 1920. In the album under this picture it was written that the table was levitating. In fact, the image of the ghostly hand appeared on the photo with the help of double exposure.

A family with two spirits.

The funeral scene that Hope photographed about a hundred years ago. A woman in tears bent over her husband's body, wrapped in sheets and strewn with flowers. Next to the woman is her son. An image of a person’s face was superimposed on top of the original photograph.

Three people with two perfumes.

A man with the spirit of his assistant.

Mrs. Bentley and the spirit of her late sister. Mrs. Bentley was once president of the Union of Spiritualists of Great Britain. An overlaid image of the face of Mrs. Bentley's deceased sister appears in the lower right corner of the photograph.