In July 1923, British author Arthur Conan Doyle arrived in Winnipeg to deliver a public lecture, ‘The Proofs of Immortality’, as part of a forty-city North American tour that attracted a sizable audience.
Doyle, now widely known as the writer who created Sherlock Holmes, was also a spiritualist – he was part of circles of people who adhered to the religious belief and research that souls of the dead can communicate with living people.
On Doyle’s first evening in Winnipeg, he and his wife Jean Leckie Doyle were invited to participate in a research séance led by physician Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife and collaborator Lillian Hamilton, a trained nurse.
In Dr.’s darkened séance room. Hamilton, as Doyle would later write, he experienced a luminous table flying into the air.
Hamilton’s estate includes an uncanny trove of pseudoscientific photographs related to his research into paranormal materializations. They are no longer accepted as scientific, but are better analyzed as art.
A new scholarly collection of essays and an art exhibition, The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Winnipeg use an art history lens to contextualize these eerie photographs as visual culture.
The ‘psychic power’
Doyle told how the table rattled again and again all by itself, without the sitter touching it. One moment it was quiet. Than:
“A moment later it was like a restless dog in a kennel, jumping up, tossing, hitting the supports, and finally jumping out at a speed that quickly took me out of the way.”
The Hamiltons and the Doyles agreed that the table was moved by an invisible force, the psychic force, and that it was a message from a disembodied (disembodied) personality that survived death.
Psychic power, as some scientists believed, would emanate from the medium’s body and manifest as an organic plasma known as ectoplasm, which allowed spirits to communicate.
Doyle kept abreast of the Hamiltons’ investigation. According to the Hamiltons and Jean Leckie Doyle, he even manifested as a “transcendental personality” two years after his death, materializing in the fluffy ectoplasm in a photograph Hamilton took in 1932.
Expression of mourning
It was not unusual for North Americans to participate in séances and engage in spiritualism as an expression of mourning after the losses of World War I and the 1919 flu pandemic, as historians Felicity Hamer and Esyllt Jones have outlined.
Interestingly, Hamilton rejected the popular religion of spiritualism and criticized it as a cult. He presented his research as scientific and emphasized his mastery of photographic technology.
From 1923 to 1935, Hamilton attempted to record “psychic power” on glass plates in his laboratory with an extensive set of cameras and lenses.
He published hundreds of photographs of spinning tables and ectoplasmic extrusions of cellular plasma from the bodies of the female mediums.
Photographing the light-sensitive ectoplasm was difficult, and Hamilton’s cropped shots of the mediums surrounded by organically formed material increased his status as a researcher.
Inspired ‘Ghostbusters’
Hamilton’s images were exhibited and widely distributed. They have also been praised by researchers, including two researchers who famously got into a public feud with the magician Houdini after claiming to debunk his magic, and Samuel Aykroyd, the great-grandfather of actor Dan Aykroyd. The younger Aykroyd’s 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters brought ectoplasm into popular culture.
Between the world wars, some scientists were open to the idea of invisible forces (also known as the psychic force or the vital force) and relied on outdated scientific theories including ‘the ethereal universe’ and ‘vitalism’ to support their research. .
Hamilton’s images received a second wave of international recognition after they were digitized in 2001 in the Archives and Special Collections of the University of Manitoba and discovered online by artists intrigued by the grotesque aesthetics of the bodily excretions.
Exhibition ‘Undead Archive’
Hamilton was aware of the despicable nature of his photographs, describing them as ‘monstrously extraordinary’.
But he also saw ectoplasm as an essential molding material that could create endless shapes and forms.
The exhibition, The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03 and the University of Manitoba’s School of Art and Archives and Special Collections, similarly focuses on artistic interpretations of this mysterious substance .
The exhibition, which I curated, features 25 contemporary artists responding to ectoplasm and the Hamilton photographs. Works include stop-motion videos of ectoplasm turning into recognizable shapes, one by Shannon Taggart and one by Grace Williams. Williams animated an old photo of ectoplasm being extruded, while in 2018 Taggart stitched together still images of a contemporary medium (Kai Muegge) extruding ectoplasm.
Hamilton was never able to film ectoplasm due to the low lighting conditions in the séance room, and so these videos give us a chance to feel the theatrics and intrigue of the early 20th century séance.
Unseen, suppressed spiritual work
Some artists take on the role of mediums, mimicking the body language of the trance state. Erika DeFreitas uses crochet doilies in place of ectoplasm, drawing attention to invisible labor media performed to support paranormal investigators.
KC Adams, an Anishinaabe, Ininew and British artist living in Manitoba, researched and created a virtual reality artwork for the exhibition exploring Ininew burial rituals suppressed under the Indian Act.
Pandemics and forgetting
In The Art of Ectoplasm, Jones writes that it wasn’t until March 2020, with COVID-19, that our society started thinking about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic.
In Contagion, Teresa Burrows creates a shrine-like installation of Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, using a rapid antigen test to map this out.
In Burrows’ image, Tam looks upward, as if in a trance, and is surrounded by green beads that imitate the COVID-19 virus. In the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Tam was constantly seen on national television and social media, like a fortune teller issuing warnings.
Winnipeg as ‘psychic centre’
A hundred years ago, as Winnipeggers emerged from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, Doyle offered what seemed like proof of the persistence of life after death.
After serving with the Hamiltons in their séance laboratory, Doyle described Winnipeg as a “psychic center” in a July 5, 1923 letter to Lillian Hamilton, in many ways warning of Winnipeg’s loss of status as “Chicago of the North” and a offered an alternative name. .
The idea of Winnipeg as a supernatural place has been taken up by artists and authors, exemplified by filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, as well as through exhibition art, much of which was created during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
As we emerge from our pandemic, it is interesting to think back to Hamilton’s post-pandemic experimental séances and ask: what form might our grieving take?
Serena Keshavjee, professor of history, University of Winnipeg
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
