Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  Hidden slide projectors, chemicals secretly dripped through the ceiling on to developing trays, walls painted with fluorescent paints invisible to the naked eye but which could be illuminated for the camera with ultra-violet lights, even radium plates and X-ray machines were all used by the unscrupulous tricksters. So many 'spirit photos' were taken at the height of the craze that the methods of some of the charlatans have only recently been exposed.

  One of the most colourful and successful of the British 'psychographers' was Dr T. d'Aute Hooper, a one-legged faith-healer and medium from Birmingham - a man, according to his supporters, who was 'far above trickery and any sordid dealing'. One day, one of Hooper's patients, who happened to be staying with him, returned from a walk and said, 'Doctor, I feel so queer, I feel as if there is someone with me; will you get your camera and take a snap-shot of me?' Hooper wrote:

  I got the camera and before I exposed the plate I told him I saw a beautiful child with him. I put a dark table-cloth over the door in the drawing-room to form a background and then exposed the plate. The gentleman himself took the plate to the dark room and developed it; and there appeared the beautiful spirit form of a little girl with a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a roll of paper in the other. The exclamation of the gentleman was, 'Good heavens! It's my daughter, who died thirty years ago.'

  Dr Hooper, who obviously regarded this picture as a first-class advertisement for his powers, kept a copy, and it was published in 1919. Over the next sixty years it reappeared frequently in books and articles, and was often cited as proof that spirits could be photographed.

  In the 1980s, however, one of the periodic flurries of interest in psychic photography coincided with the reprinting (for greeting cards and a poster) of a picture called 'For You' by Charles T. Garland. Painted in 1879, it had been used to advertise Pears soap around the turn of the century.

  When they saw the reproductions in the shops, several researchers realized that the little girl in Garland's picture was identical to the 'spirit' which had appeared in Hooper's photograph. Wrote one: 'The clairvoyant photograph is, I think, just a clever double-exposure. Another ghost "laid" I fear.'

  So how was it that Hooper's patient recognized the girl in the picture as his dead daughter? Perhaps, in his grief, he had been clutching at straws, a victim of understandable self-delusion. As one expert on psychic photographs wrote scathingly in 1875: 'Some people would recognize anything. A broom and a sheet are quite enough to make up a grandmother for some wild enthusiasts who ... see what they wish to see.' It was a wish that the 'spirit photographers' exploited to the full.

  'Ghost' Photographs

  Frances and Elsie, and 'spirit photographers' like Mumler and Dr Hooper, claimed to be able to produce psychic pictures on demand, but some of the weirdest images of all have simply turned up on photographs taken by people who later claim to have seen nothing extraordinary through their view finder at the time of pressing the button. Many can simply be explained away as double-exposures. One example is the famous 'Raynham Hall ghost'.

  The picture was taken in September 1936 by a fashionable London photographer who claimed to have seen 'an ethereal, veiled form coming slowly down the stairs' of the great house. The resulting picture was indeed eerie, yet at least one modern expert is unconvinced, pointing to the number of double images that can be made out of it. For example, there is a pale line above each stair-tread, indicating that one picture has been imprecisely super-imposed over the other; a patch of reflected light at the top of the right-hand banister appears twice.

  Other 'ghost' photographs have proved more difficult to explain, and in 1984 some of the most puzzling examples were analyzed by two experts, Dr Steve Gull and his colleague, Tim Newton. They used a computer programme designed to enhance photographic images and bring out hidden detail. One of the pictures subjected to their rigorous scrutiny was taken by a solicitor in a church in Arundel in the south of England in 1940. It shows a strange luminous figure in front of the altar.

  The computer quickly revealed the truth. The picture was in fact not one but a whole series of images. The experts' attention had been caught by the weird bright streak to the left of the figure. The computer showed that it was made up of a series of 'bumps', ending up at one of the altar candles. Significantly, when they measured the intervals between the 'bumps', Gull and Newton found they corresponded to the height of each step. Further investigations revealed that the figure had legs and was wearing a skirt.

  The answer was then obvious: the Arundel solicitor had managed to compress a whole sequence of events into one picture. What it showed was a woman walking up the altar steps carrying a taper which she had then used to light the altar candles.

  In July 1964 Gordon Carroll, a clerk at a shoe factory in Northampton, spent his summer holiday touring local villages and photographing the scenery and architecture. One afternoon he set up his Ilford Sportsman Rangefinder camera on a tripod in St Mary's Church, in the village of Woodford, and took a photograph of the east window, the altar and choir stalls. Months later, when he was going through his slides, he noticed that there appeared to be a transparent figure kneeling on the altar steps. And yet he was sure the church had been empty when he had taken the picture.

  He considered the other possibilities. A double-exposure was unlikely, for the camera had a device to prevent this. Could it have been a trick of the light? Was the 'figure' just a reflection from a window? This again was hardly possible: the angle of the sun would not have produced one in the right place at that time of the afternoon. Gordon Carroll concluded that only one chilling possibility remained: had he photographed a ghost?

  The forensic computer's analysis produced a more mundane explanation. It revealed that Gordon Carroll's picture, like that of the Arundel solicitor, contained a whole sequence of images. When these had been separated, Dr Gull announced that the 'ghost' seemed to be a cleaning lady brushing the altar steps with a dustpan beside her. 'What seems to have happened here is that somebody in a very long exposure picture in a very dark church has been cleaning the step and moved several times during the course of the exposure.'

  Gordon Carroll, it must be said, vigorously disputes this suggestion. On learning of the computer's findings, he said:

  I was the only person in the church and there is no way a cleaner could have rushed in and out again without me noticing. At the time I even went up to the altar to the point where the figure showed up on the photograph, and took another picture of the other end of the church. There was definitely no one else there.

  Finally, the computer examined a celebrated 'ghost' photograph taken in 1959 by a Suffolk woman, Mrs Mabel Chinery. It shows her husband Jim sitting in the driving seat of his car. Behind him, in the back, there appears to be an old lady wearing glasses and a scarf. According to Mrs Chinery, the lady looks just like her mother. Yet Mrs Chinery's mother had died before the picture was taken: in fact, it was the last frame of a film on which Mabel had photographed the old lady's grave.

  Mabel was certain that only Jim had been in the car: 'When I looked through the viewfinder all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snapped it and that was that.' So when the pictures had been processed and she recognized the distinctive features of her mother, Mabel was shocked: 'I felt dreadful, I really did. I had to have a week off work. I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it.'

  As they pondered the mystery, Jim recalled his mother-in-law's words to him on the night before she died. Now they seemed eerily prophetic. 'The last thing she said to me when I went out of the room was, "Jim," she said, "you'll never come to any harm." She said, "I shall still be with you."'

  The computer, however, had only the internal evidence of the photograph to work on, and it discerned several unusual features surrounding the mysterious old lady. Firstly, the light on the figure seemed to be coming from a different direction to that which illuminated the rest of the picture. Furthermore, her spectacles appeared to reflect more light than would have been avai
lable inside the car. Thirdly, the old lady did not seem to fit properly into the vehicle.

  For example, her shoulder could be seen to stretch beyond the pillar between the two windows, making her unnaturally broad. The experts therefore concluded that the picture was an accidental double-exposure, made up of the snapshot of Jim in his car and another very short exposure of Mabel's mother taken earlier.

  Of course computers, like cameras, can lie, but the sad fact is that, although strange images on a few photographs are difficult to explain, not a single picture taken in 150 years of photography offers convincing proof of the existence of supernatural beings. The charming saga of the Cottingley fairies hoax and the more sinister exploits of the 'spirit' photographers tell us much about human credulity. The absence of unequivocal evidence from the millions upon millions of photographs taken since the invention of the camera may tell us even more about the nature of ghosts.

  Arthur C. Clarke comments:

  Photography has been one of my major hobbies for more than fifty years; indeed, I lost my amateur status a long time ago, as half a dozen of my books have been illustrated by photographs I've taken above and below water. So the subject of this chapter is of particular interest to me. Though I've never captured a ghost on film, I have faked UFOs for a television programme, just to show how easily it can be done. And, by a coincidence so extraordinary I can still hardly believe it, I have two unfaked images on successive frames of 35-millimetre film of a most convincing UFO -hovering above the Apollo 11 launch vehicle on the morning of 16 July 1969!

  I've never bothered to have them analyzed because it seemed unlikely that my camera alone, out of the several hundred thousand focused on that piece of Florida skyline, would have captured an inquisitive alien - though one would have been well-advised to keep an eye on humanity at that particular moment. (The images are almost certainly lens 'flares' caused by reflections from the sea of cars in the foreground.)

  The story of the 'Cottingley fairies' is a tragi-comedy which, very conveniently, was resolved just in time for this book. The comic elements speak for themselves; the tragedy is that a man of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's talents could so combine genius and utter stupidity, wasting time on an obvious hoax when he should have been more usefully employed in Baker Street. And the story proves once again the truth of the old saying: 'Cameras can't lie - but liars can photograph.'

  ~~~~~~~

  8 - Mysteries from East and West

  This chapter is about three mysteries which have long fascinated us. Two of them, Spontaneous Human Combustion and the ability of eastern fakirs and pilgrims to withstand the pain of hooks and knives skewered into their flesh, are mentioned in our earlier books, but only briefly. We felt there was little new to say about them, and so, reluctantly, we moved on to consider phenomena upon which researchers had shed new light.

  Later, we found that we had been mistaken. A letter from an English doctor convinced us that we should reopen our investigations into Spontaneous Human Combustion; while the answer to the hook hanging mystery lay virtually under our noses.

  It came - long after the Strange Powers book had gone to press but fortunately in time for the television series - from a distinguished professor of physiology who had conducted his experiments no more than a mile from Arthur C. Clarke's home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

  He also had much to tell us about firewalking. A set of extraordinary photographs brought back from the Arctic in 1984 reminded us of the third mystery. Perhaps someone, somewhere, will write to explain it, too.

  But first we must travel to the East ...

  Sri Lankan Superstition

  When it comes to investigating the supernatural, the West now has no monopoly. The East, from whence so many mysteries have been reported by generations of marvelling travellers, has begun to produce its own psychical researchers. Few have been more assiduous or successful than two sceptics from Sri Lanka: one an outspoken maverick who devoted his life to the banishment of superstition; the other a respected professor of physiology who believes he can explain the most puzzling feats of the Oriental yogis - the ability to walk on fire and to hang from hooks without suffering serious injury.

  On the morning of 13 May 1965 a terrified family gathered amidst the palm trees at the garden gate of a house at Karainagar near Jaffna, the northernmost town of Sri Lanka. They had come to greet a visitor from Colombo (far to the south) in the hope that he would rid them of a poltergeist which, they believed, had been turning their home and lives upside down for almost three months.

  They had been bombarded with stones which seemed to materialize inside the house, bruised by flying bottles and tins, and nauseated by the sand and dirt which used to appear suddenly in their rice at mealtimes. Money and possessions had gone missing, including keys, a leather bag and even a pair of false teeth left briefly on a stone by a well while their owner was having a wash. The family had also been plagued with illness since the onset of the sinister events.

  The visitor was Dr Abraham Kovoor, then Sri Lanka's foremost psychical researcher, who had come to investigate. First, he walked round the outside of the house, pausing to admire the ornate satin-wood doors and peering into the outhouse at the back where agricultural implements were stored. Then, Poirot-like, Kovoor set up his headquarters in the shed and turned his attention to the family: an elderly couple, their son and daughter, and the daughter's three girls, Devanayaki (thirteen), Sukirtham (eight) and four-year-old Selvamalar.

  The adults were each questioned and their stories duly noted in Kovoor's casebook, but these interrogations were a formality: the psychic sleuth had already spotted the culprit. He wrote later:

  The fifth person to be questioned was the 13-year-old Devanayaki. Unlike the others who were questioned earlier, I adopted a different technique in dealing with her. I started with the assurance that I was in the know of what had happened in the house, and that I knew who was responsible for them. Without any hesitation, and with a smile on her face, Devanayaki explained to me in answer to my questions all that she had done during the previous two-and-a-half months.

  The teenager had been responsible for all the 'poltergeist manifestations', with two exceptions: the disappearance of the false teeth, which had probably been snatched from the edge of the well by a passing crow, and the family illnesses, which were put down to coincidence. Dr Kovoor had simply used his powers of observation to crack the case. 'When I met all the members of the family as I stepped into the house first,' he said, 'I could spot out the poltergeist because Devanayaki's facial expressions betrayed her.'

  He had also noticed that the 'poltergeist' was never active between 9 A.M. and 2 P.M., the hours when Devanayaki was at school. Devanayaki, it turned out, had been jealous of her younger sister and, piqued by the lack of attention paid to her, had invented the 'poltergeist' to annoy the grown-ups. Dr Kovoor prescribed a course of deep hypnosis for the unhappy teenager and instructed her family to treat her with extra love and kindness.

  The result was that the poltergeist never reappeared. Devanayaki's family was rewarded with good marks from a model schoolgirl, and Dr Kovoor with a large Christmas hamper.

  For Abraham Kovoor, however, it was simply another victory in his campaign against the superstitions which, he believed, reached right to the heart of life in Sri Lanka. Fortune-tellers still flourish throughout the island, even in the Fort of Colombo, the city's business district.

  Under the shady colonnade outside the Colombo Apothecaries store, for example, queues form early in the day at the stall of astrologer and palmist Miss Kosala Guneratna, who thoughtfully provides newspapers for her waiting clients to read. Near by, at 66 1/3 Chatham Street, another astrologer, Mr B. Wettasinghe, uses a pocket calculator to compute the future. Throughout the Pettah, the city's teeming market area, more exotic seers ply their trade. In Jamahattha Street, Mrs P. Thiyagarajah gives 'light readings' by holding up a soot-blackened saucer to the sunlight and interpreting the patterns made on the surface by the dancing
rays. Strangest of all, perhaps, are Rajah and Ranee, the psychic parrots, who hold their consultations on the pavement outside a Hindu temple.

  Upon payment of 1 rupee, the parrots' keeper fans out a pack of cards on the pavement in front of their wicker cage. Then he releases one of the birds, which scurries out and pecks one of the cards. On it, according to the parrot-keeper, his client's fate is written. Many Sri Lankans consult astrologers before making important decisions. Patients have been known to postpone operations because the stars seem unfavourably aligned, and the horoscopes of prospective marriage partners are minutely compared to ensure compatibility.

  An ill-starred future can even mean the cancellation of marriage plans. Often, the times of important events are ordained according to the planetary conjunctions - even the opening ceremony of the futuristic Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies was carried out to a precise astrological schedule.

  In the country districts, belief in demons is widespread, and Kattadiyas, the local variety of witch doctor, are hired to impose or exorcize curses. In one elaborate ceremony, regularly performed in the villages, the Kattadiya entices the evil demon from a 'possessed' person and, after a colourful wrestling ritual, traps it in an empty bottle which is then consigned to the depths of the Indian Ocean, out of harm's way.