THE CASE AGAINST SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHS BY C. VINCENT PATRICK AND W. WHATELY SMITH LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. BROADWAY HOUSE, 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C. 1921 CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY (W. Whately Smith) 5 II. HISTORICAL (C. Vincent Patrick) 7 III. FRAUD (C. Vincent Patrick) A. _General Methods_ 15 B. _Experiments in Fraud_ 21 C. _Internal Evidence of Fraud_ 27 IV. SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHS OBTAINED BY AMATEURS (C. Vincent Patrick) 31 V. THE FAIRY PHOTOGRAPHS (C. Vincent Patrick) 33 VI. THE RELIABILITY OF WITNESSES (W. Whately Smith) 36 VII. THE VALUE OF RECOGNITION (W. Whately Smith) 39 VIII. RECENT LITERATURE (W. Whately Smith) 42 IX. REAL TEST CONDITIONS (W. Whately Smith) 45 THE CASE AGAINST SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHS BY C. VINCENT PATRICK AND W. WHATELY SMITH. I.--INTRODUCTORY (W. WHATELY SMITH) Spirit photographs have long been a source of controversy and discussion, and signs are not lacking that public interest in them is at least as keen as ever. A Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures has, for example, been formed recently, and it is by no means uncommon to meet people who owe much of their belief in Spiritualism to the results they have obtained through photographic mediums. This considerable public interest would alone suffice to make the subject important, but, apart from this, it is clear that if all--or even a fraction--of what is claimed be true the phenomenon must be of unique value from the point of view of strictly scientific research. Photographic phenomena differ from practically all others studied by psychical researchers in being, so to speak, permanently objective. If one could be sure that the results obtained were not due to trickery one would be in a far better position as regards the problems of their origin and so forth than one is in the case of other types of “physical” phenomena. One could collect spirit photographs, compare them with one another, correlate their differences with the varying conditions of their production, and generally study them at leisure--a procedure which is not possible with table-levitations, materialisations, or direct-voice phenomena.[1] The photographic plate would, in fact, be the most powerful of all weapons of research if only we could eliminate all possibility of fraud. This is, as usual, the crux of the whole matter, and, as my collaborator and I hope to show, it is not nearly so easy to do as might appear at first sight.