Crewe Circle

The Crewe Circle was a spiritualist photography group based in Crewe, England in the latter half of the 19th century.^[1] The group was founded by William Hope and its photography was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.^[2] Doyle later went on to write the book The Case for Spirit Photography based on his investigation.^[1] In later years many of the photographs were found to be confirmed as fraudulent double-exposures.^[1][3]

The paranormal investigator Massimo Polidoro wrote that Harry Price and his colleagues in 1922 from the Society for Psychical Research gave William Hope a glass plate they secretly marked with an X-ray. When Price received back the glass plate it no longer had the X-ray on the glass, which led them to claim that Hope had switched the glass slide. Instead of accepting the fraud, the spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle accused Price of framing Hope to discredit him. In 1932 Fred Barlow who had worked with Hope gave a lecture exposing the methods the Crewe Circle used to fake spirit photography. Regarding Conan Doyle and the Crewe Circle, Polidoro wrote it is "practically impossible (and futile) to try to convince someone who wants to believe even in the face of quite convincing contrary evidence."^[4]

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