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University puts psychic archive on Internet
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 CANADA. An incredible collection of séance images and related material, taken and compiled by Canadian psychical researcher Dr Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife Lillian between 1918 and 1945, 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. On his death, his widow Lillian continued the research for a further 10 years.
 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 that 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.
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Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Category: Parapsychology
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