Psychic Possibilities: Spirit Photography in the 20th Century and Beyond

Photography has failed to prove the existence of ghosts, Bigfoot, or UFOs, yet the camera remains central to their pursuit. Séances, poltergeists, psychic powers: many of the 20th century’s most iconic paranormal cases double as strange photographic episodes. These images, often dismissed as hoaxes or pseudoscience, tend to be relegated to the margins of media history. But they’re more than failed evidence. They reflect a rich, interdisciplinary visual tradition—one that blends belief, performance, technology, and imaginative speculation. Paranormal photographs reveal how the camera serves spiritual, emotional, and artistic functions beyond empirical fact. Their odd aesthetics and metaphysical ambitions invite us to reconsider photography’s role in probing the limits of perception and knowledge.

Revisiting some of the most bewildering moments in supernatural photography from the last 100 years—not as discredited scientific artifacts, but as compelling cultural productions—a new history is made visible. One that is more complex, inexplicable, and—most radical of all—human.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies

Created in 1917 by Frances Griffiths, 9, and Elsie Wright, 16, these exquisitely composed photographs appear to show the young cousins interacting with winged fairies caught mid-flight in the woods behind Elsie’s house in Cottingley, England. The images were accepted by many as genuine—most famously by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a devout Spiritualist. In 1920, he published the photographs in The Strand Magazine, a periodical best known for popularizing Sherlock Holmes, his fictional detective widely regarded as a model of logic and reason. By publicly endorsing the girls as credible witnesses, Conan Doyle made their pictures widely famous and ignited a controversy that lasted decades.

In 1983, Frances and Elsie finally admitted that they had staged the photos using paper cutouts and hatpins. But they insisted that actual fairy encounters had inspired the deception, and Frances would maintain until her death that their final image was genuine.

The photographs, both fake and sincere, challenge the notion of what is “real” by fabricating testimony for a visionary experience. They remain one of the most iconic episodes in photographic history and are among the most popular materials in the collection of the National Science and Media Museum in England.

The Hamilton Archive

Between 1918 and 1935, Winnipeg, Canada, became an unlikely epicenter of supernatural experimentation. In a makeshift home laboratory, physician Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife, nurse Lillian Hamilton, began seeking evidence of survival beyond death. Documenting their efforts through photography, they captured hundreds of striking images of levitating tables, entranced mediums, and ectoplasmic forms. After visiting their séances, notable guest Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declared Winnipeg one of the world’s best sites for “psychic possibilities.” What began as an effort to unite medicine and mysticism would ultimately create a mythic landscape. The Hamilton archive transformed their hometown into “Weird Winnipeg,” forever entwining the city’s story with the paranormal.

The Hamilton archive, now housed in the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Manitoba, forms one of the most extensive visual records of Spiritualist phenomena ever assembled. Over 700 photographs and 1300 pages of séance notes, fully digitized and available online, have inspired responses from academic analysis to surrealist parody.

In the book, The Art of Ectoplasm, art historian Serena Keshavjee explores the influence of the Hamiltons’ work on visual culture. Their confounding images not only modernized spirit photography in the 20th century, but also influenced contemporary artists such as Estelle Chaigne, Lacey Prpić Hedtke, Maria Molteni, Susan MacWilliam, and Winnipeg-born filmmaker Guy Maddin.

Thelma Moss’s Kirlian Experiments

The American parapsychologist Thelma Moss (1918–1997), once a Broadway actress and Hollywood screenwriter, abandoned showbiz for a stranger pursuit: picturing the life force. The inspiration for Moss’s career change began in her own body. Meditation experiences, psychedelic trips, and electroshock therapy sparked her lifelong fascination with nature’s hidden energies.

Moss is best known for popularizing Kirlian photography, a technique that uses high-frequency currents to capture an object’s electromagnetic discharge on photographic material. She sought proof of the life force by applying the Kirlian method to organic material. At UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, she conducted wildly imaginative experiments—electrifying the fingertips of psychics, damaged leaves, a cat’s paw in acupuncture, a rat’s tail post-amputation, a mummy’s hand, and even David Bowie on cocaine.

Among the few color examples of Moss’s work that still exist are those inspired by the theories of Wilhelm Reich, a controversial psychoanalyst and scientist who proposed the existence of “orgone energy,” a cosmic life force he believed animated all living things. Reich described orgone as a universal biological energy, detectable in the body and the atmosphere, which he claimed could be concentrated, stored, and even photographed. Using raw meat, fruit, vegetables, and fungi, Moss produced vivid, bubbling images she interpreted as visual evidence of the orgone force in action.

Moss’s photographs were ultimately dismissed as unscientific, and much of her archive was trashed or lost. Although her results failed to prove the life force as a mechanistic feature of the world, they convinced Moss that living beings are more than matter. Her work stands as a visual record of one woman’s search for the meaning of life.

Ted Serios’s Thoughtography

In the late 1960s, a Chicago bellhop named Ted Serios claimed he could project images directly onto film using only his mind. In studies supervised by the psychiatrist Dr. Jule Eisenbud, Serios produced over 1,000 anomalous photographs. Intoxicated, shouting, sweating, and sometimes weeping, Serios pressed a small tube, or “gizmo,” against the lens of a Polaroid camera, producing murky, dream-like images. These “thoughtographs” depicted blurred or strangely composed pictures of buildings, spacecrafts, religious icons, abstract imagery, or blank exposures. Although skeptics accused Serios of sleight of hand, and professional magicians demonstrated how his effects might be faked, his work has never been entirely explained.

The Serios case is an instance where failed psychic evidence becomes reclaimed as art. In 1992, artist Barbara Ess, known for her use of pinhole cameras to evoke a primitive aesthetic and explore what she described as “psychological or subjective reality,” was the first to present Ted Serios’s photographs within an art-world context. The artist Brian Catling also championed Serios, noting how his primal photographic performances “driven by a pure Dionysian energy” amplified ideas of the camera as “a hutch, an umbered trace nest, an incubation place, closer to the womb than the head.” Catling planned but never completed a movie about Serios with The Fall frontman, Mark E. Smith, a dead ringer for Serios, cast as lead.

More recently, photo historian Beth Saunders and curator Emily Hauver revisited the case in Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye, a book that explores the many dimensions of the Serios phenomenon.

Drawing from the archive at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, their reassessment considers the web of interpersonal relationships, scientific protocols, photographic techniques, military interests, and cultural mythologies surrounding Serios. Rather than seeking definitive truth, the book invites readers to confront the highly strange story themselves.

The Scole Experiment’s Images of the Afterlife

Between 1993 and 1998, two married couples attempted to produce evidence of life after death in the basement of a 17th-century farmhouse. Founders Robin and Sandra Foy, along with trance mediums Alan and Diana Bennett, called their project “The Scole Experiment,” named after their village in Norfolk, England. Soon after forming, the group reported a cascade of phenomena that drew international attention: glowing orbs that passed through flesh, disembodied hands, voices echoing from empty bowls, and full materializations of spirit figures. These séances were eventually investigated during a two-year study led by senior members of the Society for Psychical Research. The group’s findings, carefully documented but ultimately inexplicable, would divide the organization and continue to provoke debate.

The Scole Experiment proposed that ghosts could adapt to new media. The group credited a team of thousands of spirits, including some famous dead scientists, who transmitted voices, images, and designs for interdimensional devices. Cameras were said to levitate and shoot pictures on their own in total darkness, producing faces of the dead as if emerging from bubbling sludge.

Unexposed film unraveled into colorful scrolls of drawn symbols, posthumous poetry by Wordsworth, and the signature of Louis Daguerre beside the cryptic phrase: “Can you see behind the moon?” Video cameras set up to film facing mirrors in the dark shot footage of Technicolor landscapes and alien beings. The Scole Experiment modernized Victorian séance documentation, extending the legacy of spirit photography into grainy black-and-white 35mm, wobbly VHS, and Polaroid color. Their archive of psychic media presents an aesthetic caught among documentation, hallucination, and a David Lynch-like cinema.

Kai Muegge’s Ectoplasm

In 2008, the German medium Kai Muegge rebirthed Spiritualism’s sacred spectacle—ectoplasm. Acting as his own impresario, he depicted himself emitting gauzy wafts of the elusive substance in shocking online posts. Together with his wife, Julia, Muegge has travelled the world, orchestrating an underground revival of the heyday of 19th-century mediumship. His efforts to resurrect a lost phenomenon are loved and hated in equal measure by contemporary Spiritualists. Critics call his séances a regressive hoax; Muegge calls them “Third Millennium Spirituality” for the future.

Muegge describes ectoplasm as the ultimate face of the supernatural. He proposes his séance manifestations as a “super-fine receiver,” acting as screens for projection, or as containers for the ineffable. For Muegge, ectoplasm is not just evidence, it’s a rupture in perception, a provocation, and a visual myth.

His séance performances challenge conventional boundaries between art, ritual, and evidence. The dissemination of ectoplasmic documentation becomes a way to re-enchant the séance, create new excitement about Spiritualism, and open doors in the minds of the audience.

Liz Webb’s Orb Photography

In the early days of the internet, spirit photography rematerialized via pictures of orbs. Online communities, at first, primarily composed of grieving mothers, shared photographs and reports of glowing spheres of light. They claimed that orbs could appear on request, pose meaningfully in the frame, and even transmit telepathic messages. To believers, they are beings of light signaling from other dimensions. Skeptics dismissed them as the result of flash reflections on dust or water, citing dirty sensors, lens aberrations, or digital artifacts. But for practitioners, the technical debate is mostly beside the point. What matters is the image’s emotional resonance and interpretive potential.

Among today’s orb photographers, few are as compelling as Liz Webb, an Australian musician whose images elevate the orb into the realm of art. On Instagram as “amazingorbs” Webb’s thousands of photographs evoke everything from stained glass, abstract paintings, microorganisms, sea life, digital animations, and even ectoplasm. At the core of her practice is a taxonomy, or “butterfly collection,” that recalls the photo grids of artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, but instead of industrial architecture, it’s orbs. Unconcerned by debunkers, Webb states: “You can’t deny the color, the shape, the form. It’s there.” She photographs every night. “The more you do it,” she says, “the more they show you.”

Her work emphasizes how orbs re-enchant the photographic process. Webb depicts a quasi-visible world that appears to respond to attention and intention—blurring the line between accidents and messages, and pushing the boundaries of photographic storytelling.

SORRAT’s Archive of Psychokinetic Media

The Society for Research on Rapport and Telekinesis, or SORRAT, was founded in 1961 by poet John G. Neihardt, best known for his 1932 book Black Elk Speaks, with student researchers from the University of Missouri. SORRAT would endure for five decades, conducting experimental séances that resulted in one of the most prolific and peculiar archives in the history of psychical research.

Their documentation, conducted by founding member and aspiring science fiction writer John Thomas Richards, includes photo albums, negatives, notebooks, spirit writing, audio recordings, and 8mm film, which may represent the first example of “spirit cinema.” SORRAT’s images, often depicting levitating household objects such as TV trays and clown dolls, present a vision of a haunted Midwest American suburbia.

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Why does spirit photography persist? The Enfield Poltergeist remains one of the most thoroughly documented accounts of paranormal activity ever captured on sound and film; yet all this evidence failed to uncover the truth. Investigators reported that the more recordings were made, the more confusion emerged. Spirit photographs, as curator Clément Chéroux has observed, wear two faces. They signify the thing and its opposite. They attest to the unseen, yet simultaneously present it as false. Supernatural pictures deepen the mystery, a trait they share with some of the most lauded and famous fine art.

The case studies surveyed here tap into the intuitive sense that photography might reveal more than the visible world. They remind us that photographs do not merely capture reality; they can also distort, mythologize, animate, and memorialize. Pictures that confront the invisible ask us to reconsider what makes an image “authentic.” This bizarre photographic history stretches the limits of what a photograph can mean and what it can do.▪︎

This is the second in the series Photography and the Invisible that explores the connections between photography, spiritualism, art, and the unseen. Explore more here.

Further Reader

Books

Brottman M., Chéroux C., Durant M.A., Hauver E., Howard E. and Saunders B. (2023) Ted Serios: The Mind’s Eye. Atelier Éditions, Los Angeles.

Chéroux C. (2021) Since 1839: Eleven Essays on Photography. MIT Press / RIC Books, Cambridge, MA & London.

Conan Doyle, A. (1922). The Coming of the Fairies. Hodder & Stoughton.

Foy R. (2008) Witnessing the Impossible. Torcal Publications, Diss.

Keshavjee S. (ed.) (2023) The Art of Ectoplasm: Encounters with Winnipeg’s Ghost Photographs. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg.

Moss T. (1976) The Probability of the Impossible: Scientific Discoveries and Explorations in the Psychic World. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

Moss T. (1979) The Body Electric: A Personal Journey into the Mysteries of Parapsychological Research, Bioenergy and Kirlian Photography. J. P. Tarcher, Los Angeles, CA.

Playfair G. L. (1980) This House Is Haunted: The Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist. Stein & Day, New York.

Solomon G. and Solomon J. (1999) The Scole Experiment: Scientific Evidence for Life After Death. Piatkus, London.

Articles

AmazingOrbs (Liz Webb). (n.d.) Instagram – AmazingOrbs. Instagram. [Online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/amazingorbs/?hl=en [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

Catling B. (n.d.) Mugfaker. [Online] Available at: http://www.normalnull.info/FILES/Catling/CatlingMugfaker.htm [Accessed 18 Sept 2025].

Ess B. (n.d.) “I try to photograph what can’t be photographed—psychological or subjective reality, which seems more real than physical or consensual reality.” PhotoQuotes. [Online] Available at: https://photoquotes.com/quote/i-try-to-photograph-what-can—t-be-photographed– [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

Kaimuegge. (n.d.) Kaimuegge. [Online] Available at: https://kaimuegge.com/ [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

National Science and Media Museum. (2019) Museum acquires final camera in the Cottingley Fairies story. Science and Media Museum. [Online] Available at: https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/about-us/press-office/museum-acquires-final-camera-cottingley-fairies-story [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

The Scole Experiment. (n.d.) The Scole Experiment. [Online] Available at: https://www.thescoleexperiment.com/ [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

Seward K. (1992) Barbara Ess, Curt Marcus. Artforum, Vol. 31, No. 1, September. [Online] Available at: https://www.artforum.com/events/barbara-ess-2-216408/ [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].

University of Manitoba Libraries. (n.d.) Hamilton Family Collection. [Online] Available at: https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3Ahamilton_family [Accessed 26 Sept 2025].