As a kid, I loved ghost stories, but it wasn’t until I grew up and started watching TV that I began to comprehend how fascinated human beings are with spirits. But long, long before all these “ghost hunting” TV shows became popular, our ancestors were busy trying to capture images of the other side. In the late 1800s, one man rose to prominence in the English spiritualist community with his captivating and eerie photos of people long deceased. As a result of his notoriety, William Hope founded the Crewe Circle, a spiritualist photography group among whose most noted allies was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hope’s photos were called into question time and again by investigators and ghostbusters of the 1800s and 1900s, but he maintained a huge following in the spiritualist community. Looking at many of these photos, if not all, it’s pretty clear they are double exposures, but being a person who believes in the continuation of living energies, maybe he was just creating an image of what actually exists…
Text and photos via the National Media Museum
These photographs of ‘spirits’ are taken from an album of photographs unearthed in a Lancashire second-hand and antiquarian bookshop by one of the our curators. They were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope (1863 – 1933).
Born in 1863 in Crewe, Hope started his working life as a carpenter. In about 1905 he became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend.
He went on to found the Crewe Circle – a group of six spirit photographers led by Hope. When Archbishop Thomas Colley joined the group they began to publicise their work.
Following World War I support for the Crewe Circle grew as the grieving relatives of those lost to the war sought a means of contacting their loved ones.
By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he became a professional medium. The work of the Crewe Circle was investigated on various occasions.
The most famous of these took place in 1922, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Harry Price to investigate the group.
Price collected evidence that Hope was substituting glass plates bearing ghostly images in order to produce his spirit photographs.
Later the same year Price published his findings, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Hope continued to practice, despite his exposure. He died in London on 7 March 1933.
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