Skip to content

Cafe Scientifique: Reflections on William Hope and the Crewe Circle Spirit Photographs

Date and time
Thursday 27 January 2022, 18:30 GMT to 20:00 GMT
Attendance and participation
This is an online only event.
Audience listening at a Cafe Scientifique event

About this webinar

During the opening decades of the 20th century, William Hope was a well-respected medium among the spiritualist community in Britain, with positive endorsements from major scientific figures such as the chemist William Crookes and the author and physician Arthur Conan Doyle. He was often seen as one of the few mediums to be able to produce authentic spirit photographs.

However, all that changed in late February 1922 when a team of investigators led by the famous British psychical researcher Harry Price claimed to have caught Hope cheating during one of his sittings and discovered that he was swapping blank photographic plates with ones containing existing images that appeared to be depictions of spirit entities. Hope was publicly exposed as a fraud, and what ensued was a major debate between believers and sceptics over the legitimacy of the medium’s alleged spirit photography.

Using surviving materials from the Senate House Library and Science Museum Group collections, including photographs, private correspondence, published sources and camera technologies, this talk will explore this story, and reflect on what makes for trustworthy evidence in investigations of extraordinary phenomena.

This will be a ‘hybrid’ event, taking place both at the National Science and Media Museum and online—the talk will be given live in the Café and will also be broadcast on Zoom. When you book free tickets, you will be able to choose which version of the event you would like to attend.