Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 12, 2/13 by Estelle Roberts

The anti-Spiritualists scoffed at the bare idea of a spirit picture. Nothing, they asserted, was easier to fake than a photograph. This is undeniably true, but what they conveniently chose to overlook were the test conditions under which the picture was taken. The plates used at the séance were provided by a Fleet Street Photographic agency after having been secretly marked by one of its representatives for identification purposes.

They were loaded into the camera by the same representative. Two representatives of the agency were present the whole time the exposures were made. They personally removed the plates from the camera and took complete charge of their subsequent processing. From beginning to end the spirit photographer had no hand in taking, developing or printing the pictures other than to be present in the room and indicate the moment each picture was to be taken.

The likeness of Edgar Wallace which emerged from these stringent conditions was an excellent one and, because it was like no other photograph of him taken during his lifetime, even the scoffers could not maintain it was a copy of an old print. Fleet Street, and Wallace’s relatives, were challenged to produce a copy. They were never able to do so.

Meanwhile, at my direct-voice séances, Wallace was a thrusting and determined candidate to speak through the trumpet. But at first Red Cloud held him back. “He is not yet ready to speak,” he said. “He does not know how to use the power. We cannot have him harming our medium, however fierce his impatience. He will speak when I say he is ready and not before.”

In the event we had to wait only two weeks. At our next sitting Wallace came through. It was a truculent Wallace, who made it abundantly clear that he did not suffer gladly the fools he had left on earth.

“I wrote the script,” he said. “I sat for the photograph. What more do they want? It is damnably hard to be disbelieved when all you want is to make them understand. They can laugh, they can scoff, but I’ll show them where the truth lies.” He continued in this vein for some minutes, ending his censure of the world’s follies with a pointed reference to his secretary’s denial of the spirit writings.

“Tell Bob Curtis not to be so silly,” he said with disgust. “I’ll give him something to think about. You see if I don’t.”
And Wallace certainly did! He caused a replica of his unmistakable voice to appear on a Dictaphone cylinder for Curtis’ benefit.

Try as Curtis would, and despite the willing assistance of experts of the Dictaphone Company, he could find no other rational explanation of how the voice came there than the straightforward one that Wallace, though dead, had recorded it.

Related posts

Leave a Comment