Vintage Photo — one of the more fascinating and esoteric of the dusty vintage photo blogs on the Internet, focused more on weird yesteryear arcana than Polaroids of Gammy in a miniskirt — has posted a fantastic gallery of photographs of early century spiritual mediums, snapped at the precise moment when they spit up a thick lungful of ectoplasm.
What's so fabulous about these photographs is the fact that, from a modern perspective, they are so self-evidently fake. These mediums were just cheesy hucksters cashing in on their victims' grief with the most obvious methods of cold reading. To prove their actual connection to the beyond? They'd excrete some "ectoplasm".... which was usually just a long piece of cotton or a handkerchief with one end stuffed up the nostril.
It's obvious flim-flammery now but it's surprising how many people fell for this stuff back in the day. Sadly, while my instinct is to be smug about the foolish suckers of yesteryear, it's not exactly as if this sort of bogus fakery has gone away in the last hundred years. It's just become better marketed.
Psychic phenomena [Vintage Photo]
