Medium William Eglinton
Click here to return to Mediums of the Past List or > Lifetime Business > Meditation Oneness > Home Page > Tapes & CDs >
Click here to return
William Eglinton Medium
William Eglinton (England, b. 1857)
Mary Burchett with Spirit of her School-Master
Inscribed on the reverse in Mary Burchett's own handwriting:
“Taken in my room with my own camera and plates by Mr. Eglinton and
developed directly afterward in my presence Dec. 9th 1886. Mary Burchett”
with the added inscription below in pencil, “I believe this to be a likeness
of my old school master Mr. Wyand.”
William
Eglinton was Britain’s most prominent Medium of the 20th century.
He turned to spiritualism around 1874 and by 1876 he was sitting in Circle
and was seen many times to levitated
himself during a seance. Not only did he levitate, William produced many spirit
slate writings in chalk on closed slates, at times it was said while he was
in a trance state even
managed to transport himself through the ceiling of a house and was apported into the
room above. Prime Minister Gladstone who attended a few of his seances was among his believers, and
on occasions held a sequence of seances for the Czar of Russia.
The strange black dot on the Spirit man’s head in this photograph may look like a bullet hole, but in fact is a spot on the paper.
That the sitter provided plates and camera, and she was present for the
development of the negative suggest that this was an early test of the
veracity of spirit photography. Such tests became more rigorous by the
1920s, when the illusionist Harry Houdini the illusionist and professional
skeptic of the time investigated spirit mediums in the
U.S. and Europe.