Deane, Ada Emma (ca. 1930)

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Deane, Ada Emma (ca. 1930)

Well-known British exponent of spirit photography. In June 1920 an extra face was discovered on a photograph taken by her. Her subsequent psychic career was the subject of much criticism and suspicion because of her strange habit of keeping the plates for "magnetising." This objection lessened as the years passed, and after November 1924 Deane—in her sittings at the W. T. Stead Borderland Library —never had the plates in her possession or handled them in any way before the sitting. It was, however, discovered even before that if the plates were exchanged without her knowledge the supernormal effects still appeared.

The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) reported in 1921 a remarkable sitting that Dr. Allerton Cushman, director of the National Laboratories of Washington, had with Deane. He obtained on his own plate a striking portrait of his daughter, who had died the previous year.

In the following year the Occult Committee of the Magic Circle published a report in which they claimed to have caught Deane in fraud. Wide publicity was given in the Daily Press to Deane's experiment in taking a photograph on November 11, 1922, during the two-minute Armistice silence at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London. She was assisted by Estelle Stead. Many spirit faces appeared on the plate. The experiment was repeated during three successive years. In several cases people claimed to recognize the faces.

A remarkable communication was received by H. Dennis Bradley, apparently from the spirit of his brother-in-law, W. A., regarding the Armistice photograph taken in 1923. As told in Bradley's book Towards the Stars (1924), the communicator said in the direct voice that he was in the right-hand side of the photograph, near the top. On the following day Bradley obtained a copy of the photograph. To his astonishment, among the 50 spirit heads visible in the picture, he found one in the position described, which, under a magnifying glass, looked surprisingly like W. A.

The 1924 picture drew extraordinary revelations. The Topical Press Agency declared that "the spirit extras" were reproductions of the agency's well-known photographs of living sportsmen. The alleged exposure was published in the newspaper Daily Sketch, but the story was never fully told. In Proceedings of the SPR (vol. 41, 1933), Fred Barlow, in a report on psychic photography, also charged Deane with fraud.

Stead, in her booklet Faces of the Living Dead, printed some unpublished documents, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's letter to the editor of the Daily Sketch. In it he states that he submitted the two sets of faces published in the Daily Sketch to Sir Arthur Keith, the greatest authority on anthropometric matters. Keith replied, "Not one of the photographs reproduced by the Daily Sketch is identical with any of the representations or photos reproduced in the spirit photographs." Stead give the following testimony in her booklet:

"I have known Mrs. Deane and worked with her for the last four years and have the highest regard for her honesty and integrity of purpose. I know her cameras well, both inside and out, having examined them so often—also the dark slides used for these sittings. Both cameras and slides are continually left in my studio for days together, and I and others have plenty of opportunities to examine them at our leisure. The plates are always developed in my darkroom, and I can assure those doughty champions who explain so glibly how these are 'faked' that there are no developing dishes with transparent xylonite bases let into the dark room table, nor any concealed electric lights in my dark room. We use porcelain dishes, which are washed out after every sitting."

Hereward Carrington writes in the Journal of the ASPR (May 1925) of his experiences with Deane on September 5, 1921:

"Upon six of my plates curious marks appeared. On two plates these marks are mere smudges, which are not evidential, though I think curious. On the next plate, however, the result is quite striking. I had silently willed that a shaft of white light should emerge from my right shoulder, and appear on the plate. Sure enough, upon development, a column of white light, surmounted by a sort of psychic cabbage, was distinctly visible. It will be remembered that this was upon my own plate, placed in the camera, and afterwards removed and developed by myself. The odd thing to my mind is why I should have willed so curious a thing: what prompted me to wish for it? Was it a pure thought photograph? Or did some external intelligence first of all impress upon my mind this idea, and afterwards produce the image upon the plate? A very similar result was obtained by a friend of mine, Miss M., the following year at a sitting with Mrs. Deane. She was looking intently at her own hand and thinking about it, during the exposure of the plate (thinking of her new ring, as a matter of fact, which had just been given to her) and when the plate was developed, a hand appeared on the sitter's head, surrounded by an ectoplasmic cloud. The resemblance to her own hand is quite striking, and it is certainly a feminine hand."

The following year Carrington obtained further curious results, peculiar cometlike lights and a woman's face on his own plates. They were secretly marked by X-rays, but since Deane had kept them for some time, he did not accept the pictures as evidential. However, he notes:

"Nevertheless, I am inclined to regard these results with considerable interest for two reasons. In the first place, if these plates had been 'doctored' by Mrs. Deane in her own home, before the sitting, she would almost certainly have imprinted faces upon the plates instead of these bizarre lights, it seems to me. Further, knowing that Cushman was to have a sitting, and knowing of her own brilliant success in producing, at a previous séance, under excellent conditions, a psychic extra recognised by Cushman and members of his family as his daughter Agnes (the case is a celebrated one) she would, I submit, have seen to it that Agnes appeared. Again, these lights are intrinsically striking, interesting, when studied closely."