Sunlounger

Background to the sittings

The following is from my transcript of my Grandfather's journal:

"Much has been written and spoken about 'Billy' Hope. He has been laughed at, reviled, slandered, criticised - and loved. He has been the means of bringing comfort to thousands. It was my privilege to know him well during the last years of his life and I truly came to regard him with deep affection. I do not know whether Billy ever faked a photograph or not. It is impossible to make a definite statement that any medium has always, on every occasion, produced nothing but genuine phenomena."

"I have been taking photographs ever since I was ten years old and can claim some skill in the art, particularly in regard to faking supernormal photographs. I have studied carefully the methods adopted by the fakers in the faked photographs which have come into my hands. I can produce 'faked extras' by any of those means and will go further and undertake to produce a faked written 'spirit' message, under conditions where the sitter may bring his own camera and plates, which I will not handle at all. The sitter may develop and print his own plates, the only stipulation I make is being that the sitter brings his plates in an unopened packet as sold by the chemist, and that I am present at all operations. This will, I hope, show, without going into more detail, that I am not entirely unqualified to express an opinion on these experiments which, as far as the great majority are concerned, took place in my own house, under my own direction and observation, where I had every opportunity of examining carefully the whole of Hope's equipment time and time again and of studying his demeanour both 'on' and 'off' duty. During the whole of this time I never found the slightest evidence of fraud of any kind. Every test I made was successfully passed and some of the cases, which I shall describe later, do, I confidently assert, prove beyond doubt the existence of supernormal markings, to say the least."

"I may add here that I treated Billy Hope as I treat all mediums, with the greatest consideration and courtesy, so that he gave me his full confidence and allowed me to treat his possessions as if they were my own, so that I frequently found excuses for looking through even his suitcase and never once have I found anything which caused the slightest suspicion. Later when I knew him really well I occasionally substituted for the plates he was using, some of my own previously placed in my pocket. It made not the slightest difference; the 'extras' were always there. I shall enlarge on this and make some observations on this later."

"Finally, I obtained markings on the films of a camera, which he did not know was exposed or even in the room. In some of these tests I put up I am conscious that my actions have in some measure overstepped the bounds of, shall we say, 'good taste'. In these actions, however, which I only did after we had become close friends, I was actuated by two motives, one to forestall the critics who will raise unnecessarily unwieldy explanations to explain away phenomena and the other to experimentally try out various ideas about which I will talk later. Further, while this did not in any way interfere with the strictness with which I conducted these unofficial 'tests', I was by this time, by my own observations, quite sure that Hope would emerge triumphantly from them as he always did. I can only apologise to him for the liberties I took with him and his belongings."