Spooky secrets

into the life to come...

THE human subjects of Billy Hope's photographs are ordinary folk. They stare into his lens, often wearing the grim expression of one forced to sit motionless for an age as the image was exposed. They wear clothes typical of their time - the 1930s.

So it is not the foreground that make Hope's pictures so hypnotic. It is the backdrop, all swirling ether from which looms the near transparent, disembodied features of another human face. Spooky.

"They are spooky - to use an Americanism," agrees Gerald O'Hara.

When he was elected secretary of the York Spiritualist Centre five years ago, Mr O'Hara came into possession of an album containing 98 of these photos. Now the pictures and his research into them are to be featured on a Channel 4 documentary, Revealing Secrets, on Monday afternoon.

All the subjects of the photographs were members of York Spiritualist Centre, although it was then known as the Spen Lane Spiritualist Church. The pictures were taken in York by Hope on two visits, in 1930 and 1932.

Among those pictured were small businessmen, widows, the retired. "Some were quite poor. They crossed quite a social spectrum of York society," said Mr O'Hara.

A visit by William 'Billy' Hope, the travelling medium from Crewe, and his assistant Mrs Buxton was eagerly awaited.

"The members would have paid five shillings to sit for Billy Hope, which was quite a sum.

"They would have provided their own glass plates, and would have been shown how to load the plates in his camera.

"All he did was press the button and operate the flash that took the photograph."

Somehow, Billy's very presence was enough to summon up the ghostly image seen on the photograph.

As well as providing their own glass plates, members were each accompanied to the darkroom by Billy and shown how to develop their prints. All this was done to counter accusations of fraud.

From the notes on the back of the pictures, Mr O'Hara calculated that 53 per cent of the sitters for the photographs recognised the faces that appeared behind them as "people they had known".

The faces that went unrecognised were said to be the spirit guide of the person in the photograph.

Faces appear at different angles on different pictures, Mr O'Hara said. "Some are upside down. Some are diagonal to the sitter.

"There are quite a variety of images. Some appear out of a cloud; some appear to be held in drapes."

The cloud or the drape is the energy field. It takes so much energy to summon up the images from the other world that the face is all that can be seen in detail - or so the theory goes.

But couldn't Hope have been a technically-gifted swindler? Mr O'Hara thinks not. "The evidence is there: 53 per cent of the 98 photographs were recognised by the people at the time as people that they know."

And Billy Hope was, he believes, a genuine person. Among his sitters were Sherlock Holmes' creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and several eminent scientists of the day.

Such 'photographic spiritualism' developed out of the growing interest in photography in the 19th century, and all but fizzled out after the Second World War.

Mr O'Hara is not aware of anyone who still carries out the procedure. Today's camera equipment is no good anyway.

"Modern shutter releases are so fast, its inimical to that form of mediumship."

Old cameras, made with materials such as mahogany, leather and crystal glass were far more conducive to the Billy Hope technique.

Today, other mediums are using modern technology to communicate with the other world, including electronic voice recognition.

Spirit photography may have faded away, but spiritualism itself is going strong. People looking for spiritual development away from the doctrine and dogma of orthodox religions are drawn to it, Mr O'Hara said.

His grandmother used to sit with mediums, and he was always aware of his own aptitude for the spiritual. "These impressions are at the back of your mind, and can come to the fore on certain stressful occasions.

"You might hear voices or see something that attracts you to certain situations."

Pressed to give examples, he recalls how his niece had two children and was adamant she was not having any more. "It came into my mind that she would be pregnant, and would have a boy. Sure enough, these things came to pass.

"More important is the perception that people who have lived in this world have survived into the next.

"You are aware that people have moved on into a different dimension of being, into the next world."

He talked, too, of the capacity to reconcile people in this world and the next. "My own father died when I was 12. I got to know him, in a certain sense, from this continued relationship that happened after he died.

"I discovered he died from an illness quite different to what I thought.

"I'm aware of his guidance and his being around me on certain occasions. There's a certain amount of comfort in that."

York makes much of its ghosts. There's a whole spectral industry.

"Ghost walk people are entertainers, earning a living, and good luck to them," says Mr O'Hara. "I am sure that an ancient city of York is full of ghosts.

"I believe ghosts exist. But we are a religious church and everything we exist to promote, philosophically and personally, is spiritualism as a religion, highly focused on the development of the individual."

Ghosts, he says, are "people who are trapped between two worlds. They may not realise that they have actually passed on into another world.

"Or they may want to reject that world and stay in this world."

Because the other world is timeless, they might stay in this state of limbo for hundreds of years without realising it.

"Another idea is that material objects retain vibrations." That would explain ghostly sightings, such as the group of Roman soldiers marching through the Treasurer's House in York witnessed in the 1950s.

"The Roman soldiers seen in the Treasurer's House basement were exposed to the rocks around them. They actually recorded in a primitive form the movement of the soldiers.

"When disturbed by the excavations they released these vibrations and played it back."

So what can we expect from the next world? "From my experience, it's a world of existence free of doctrine, free of dogma. It's fundamentally very similar to this world and fundamentally quite different. It's morally different and personally different.

"It's timeless. You don't have to earn a living or pay the bills. There are quite subtle differences."

Sounds like heaven. And Billy Hope's photos may have given us a glimpse of it.

Mr O'Hara is looking for funding for his book about York spiritualism and Billy Hope. Anyone interested should contact him via the York Spiritualist Centre, Wilton Rise, York

Revealing Secrets is screened on Channel 4 on Monday at 3.30pm

Updated: 11:40 Wednesday, April 18, 2001