SPIRIT WORLD MUSEUM

Evening Star, Issue 19002, 25 July 1925, Page 18

SPIRIT WORLD MUSEUM

QUEER FOOLISHNESS

THE ECTOPLASM STORY

[By G. HI Maik, in the ‘ Sunday

Chronicle,’]

The other day I received by post a remarkable note, enclosing a little pamphlet called ‘ Lord Northcliffo’s Message to You.’ It related to alleged messages which were said to have come from the spirit world, and the accompanying informed me that the lady who received these messages had been instructed by Lord Northcliffe to hand them to me.

I am quite frankly a convinced antispiritualist. I believe that with whatever feeling of respect or affection for the dead these things are conducted, they are illusory, foolish, and could easily b© diabolical. When I make my will (which is a precaution one ought to take, I suppose), I shall cretaiuly include in it a clause to this effect: No message purporting to come from mo after my death is to bo believed. And I recommend those law stationers and the like, w r ho print forms for the use of testators, to add to them some such words. SPIRITUALIST BAZAAR. Certainly it will become necessary to do that. The other day I paid a visit to a bazaar and exhibition organised at tho Cuxton Hall by the Loudon i Spiritualistic Alliance. Tho object was | avowedly to collect funds, and every | separate part of tho building was a I bazaar of miscellaneous objects, very j Victorian in appearance, rather like j what we used to call in our youth a j church “ sale of work.” There was a miniature golf course jn j one room, outside which young men | who ought to have known better j endeavored to persuade one to eosne j in and play, and thoi’o was a spiritual-1 istie exhibition consisting _of various j spirit photographs and spirit drawings, | and attended by a number of explana-: tory peqple who were good enough to ; describe to you what tho various things meant. DOUBLE PORTRAITS. Until I saw this I had no idea that spirit photography was so old. There were rows and rows of photographs of old silver prints, with the slight fading which happens to silver prints when they are not properly fixed, of a shaggy-bearded gentleman in whoso neighborhood was irrelevantly superimposed an obviously doubly-produced portrait of some such person as Dickons, Ruskin, or the like, always enveloped in a white sheet. Nobody who has ever dabbled in amateur photography could have any possible doubt as to how these things were produced, and they were accompanied in each case by little neatlywritten cards, one of _ which was attached to a grotesque picture of Mr Ruskin wrapped up in a kind of bath towel, called your attention to the fact that no was pointing to a_ Gothic window, and that it recalled his book ‘ Tho Stones of Venice.’ plearly the photographer of tho spirit had never read ‘ The Stones of Venice,’ which has nothing to do with Gothic art at all. “ APPORTS.” Then there was a curious picture of Charles Dickons, in an obviously socrjlod “studio portrait,” irrelevantly obtruding himself into tho presence of the same shaggy gentleman. The catalogue had the grace to say that tho portrait did bear a remarkable resemblance to one which had appeared in the 1 Illustrated London News.’ It certainly did. To mo, however, tho most interesting thing in the exhibition was a collection "of what are called “apports.” An apport is some object which lias been mysteriously and, to the’mundane mind, capriciously moved from one place'to another. . NOT IMPRESSED. They were all very neatly mounted on largo cards, fastened down by little strips of tape, and they were being described by an elderly gentleman of a pleasantly rubicund expression with a white moustache. Groups of earnest seekers after truth, nearly all of them ladies, and with a curious resemblance to each other which I observed when I. went to tho last spiritualist meeting at tho Queen’s Hall, were listening to what lie said, I confess that tho stories did not greatly interest me. If a man is writing with a steel pen and it disappears from tho penholder and is afterwards found in a cracked on tho mantelpiece the circumstance is no doubt unusual, but there are lots of other explanations that have to bo exhausted, before one comes to the conclusion that some extra-human agency took the pen out of the holder and put it in the said cracked vase. SLIGHTLY PATHETIC BOSH. It may, of course, be true. _ Tho man may have beew writing' rubbish at tho time, and a benign Providence may have thought this the simplest way of stopping him. On tho other hand, of course, Tt may bo just slightly pathetic bosh, and that is what 1 am inclined to think it was. For the other apports shown were the kind of that children make up* a museum with in the nursery—pairs of scissors, a pincushion, safety pins, stumps of pencils, a golf ball, which when caught was found to be warm—though what that proves I could not quite understand—and, oddest of all, two lumps of sugar which bore evidence of either having been sucked by someone or-else retrieved with rapidity from some innocent teacup before dissolution had taken place. Ah, well. In another corner a man who by his accent seemed to mo to come from my native country was explaining how lunacy was really possession by devils. NOT FAIR GAME. Elsewhere you could see moulds of hands which had been made by ectoplasm. Another explanation of them is quite possible, but tho demonstrator obviously believed in tho validity of his account. Anyhow, there were no spirits, no trumpets, no ectoplasm—nothing. If ectoplasm is tho substance which can make the mould of a hand, it can bo preserved. There are photographs purporting tb show it, but as far as I am aware nobody'has ever touched it or smelt it, and those processes of organic chemistry which are used in every kind of physiological investigation have never been applied to it. It would be easy to say harsh things about all this business, but a number of experiences in relation to the spiritualist matter have convinced me that the spiritualists are not fair game. I think wo shall leave it at that.