A Footnote To The Footnote

[poliphilo]

My friendpickwick  points out that Helen Duncan was investigated by the psychic researcher Harry Price, who proved her to be a particularly squalid fraud. Unbelievably the Robinson programme managed to convey the impression that Price had given Duncan a clean bill of health.

Duncan's ectoplasm was regurgitated cheesecloth. It's extraordinary that her effects should ever have fooled anybody (just consider the photographs in Price's article) but they did.

I once attended a seance in the Duncan tradition. The medium sat in a cabinet, under a red light and spoke in the voices of a succession of dead people- none of whom had anything interesting to say. Ailz says her grandfather came through, addressing her by a name only he ever used. There was no cheesecloth, but people said the medium's face changed as the different spirits took control.  I couldn't see it myself.

We gave the medium a lift home afterwards. She was an odd personality-  nervy, vulnerable and confiding- who believed- apparently quite sincerely- that she was some sort of a space alien. Knowing we were pagans, she told us a story about how she'd once had pagan friends to visit and they'd done a ritual in an upstairs room while she stayed in the living room- and she'd looked up from her armchair to see a huge man with horns and goat's feet peering round the door at her- whom she left it to us to identify as the Great God Pan.  

The seance we attended was for free- for her "friends"- but I think she usually charged. Apparently she had a big following in Finland.

Comments

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

I read Price's account and pondered those photographs. It's hard to believe now that anyone could be taken in by such displays, but it might be part of what Stephen King in one of his nonfiction books calls "the state of the art". I'm watching Babylon 5 on DVD for the third or fourth time, and I've noticed that the CGI, fifteen years old, is starting to wear thin for me; I dare not look at it too closely. But the CGI monsters with flaming eyes and tentacles are more convincing to me than the black velour and green bubble-wrap monsters of Old Skool Who. Standards of believability change as the art of special effects does, and perhaps in the right atmosphere, regurgitated cheesecloth does indeed look convincingly spectral.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point.

I've got to a stage where I can immediately spot the use of CGI- except in instances where it's very subtly used- because the textures are never quite right, they're always a little to slick and plasticky- and as soon as you've rumbled that something is fake it might just as well be a rubber monster in front of a painted backdrop. Either something is totally convincing or it's not convincing at all.