University puts psychic archive on Internet
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CANADA. An incredible collection of séance images, taken by Canadian
psychical researcher Dr Thomas Glendenning Hamilton between 1918 and
1935, can now be viewed on the Internet.

Dr Hamilton died of a heart attack on 7 April 1935, at the age of
61. His records and over 700 photographs were donated to the
University of Manitoba Libraries' Elizabeth Dafoe Library, Winnipeg,
by his family in several instalments between 1979 and 1986. The
university has now digitised the images and posted them on its
website.

Among the mediumistic phenomena captured on film by a battery of
cameras in his Winnipeg home are telekinesis, teleplasm, levitation,
trance states and other psychic phenomena. These images are fully
described and searchable through the Libraries' new images database,
giving users unprecedented access to this popular collection.

His psychic experiments began in 1920 with the aim of investigating
rappings, psychokinesis, ectoplasm and materialisations under
scientific conditions that would rule out any possibility of fraud
and minimise any possibility of error. He was well suited to such
research, both by training and temperament.

Dr Thomas Glendenning Hamilton attended Manitoba College in Winnipeg,
graduated from medical school in 1903, completed his internship at
the Winnipeg General Hospital in 1904 and commenced practice in the
district of Elmwood within Winnipeg in 1905. He was president of the
Manitoba Medical Association, served on the Public School Board for
nine years and was elected a member of the provincial legislature
1914-1915.

From 1926 to 1935 he gave 86 lectures and wrote numerous articles
that were published in Canada and abroad. The collection includes
many slides which he used in these presentations, not only of his own
research but of other well-known psychical researchers and mediums.

It has to be said that, like many other séance-room photographs, the
Hamilton images alone will not persuade visitors to the University of
Manitoba's archives that they are anything more than crude fakes.

However, the collection also consists of scrapbooks, seance
attendance records and registers, affidavits, automatic writings,
correspondence, speeches and lectures. Serious researchers who study
these will realize that the lengths to which Dr Hamilton went in
order to rule out fraud make it difficult to dismiss the photographic
evidence so easily.

The online availability of this remarkable collection coincides with
the world premiere of a play about Hamilton's investigations into the
spirit world, The Elmwood Visitation, written by Carolyn Gray and
directed by University of Manitoba English professor George Toles,
which opened on 16 February and runs until the 23rd at the Winnipeg
Contemporary Dancers Studio.

The library which holds the collection continues to selectively
purchase works in parapsychology, Spiritualism and related topics
through the T. Glendenning Hamilton Gift Fund.

To visit the Thomas Glendenning Hamilton Archive, click here.


Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Category: Parapsychology
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