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Welcome to this, the second Séance 25 update newsletter for the Harryprice.co.uk website.  It is now three months since the site was established & things are beginning to take shape.  The major changes and additions are all covered below with links to the relevant sections.  In time I hope these newsletters will be more substantial but for the moment this is the state of play.  As always, contributions, comments and anything Harry Price-related are most welcomed for inclusion on the site.

Harry Price's frustration with continuously finding fraud rather than the genuine article with the many mediums he investigated in the early years of the National Laboratory is probably matched at the moment with my own about the illusiveness of getting this site listed on Google!  Unfortunately we are no further forward in this department than last month, not for lack of trying I may add.  My thanks go to Andrew Clarke of the Foxearth & District Local History Society for adding a link to HarryPrice.co.uk on his website and also to Rosemary Pardoe who runs the M.R. James-orientated Ghosts & Scholars website for doing the same with Eddie Brazil's new gallery (more about this below).  Hopefully Google's 'spiders' will be crawling over the site in the not too distant future.

New Website Image

If you've not checked out the website since the first Séance25 newsletter then you will notice that the appearance of the pages has altered greatly.  This is in part due to my growing confidence with Microsoft FrontPage but in the main to Thomas Jones of the International Survivalist Society.  Thomas kindly made several constructive comments and suggestions to the layout and appearance of the site which I have gladly taken on board and which have improved greatly on the overall image & usability of the pages, as well as redesigning the homepage which looks very smart.  Thomas, along with David Duffield, is the co-founder of the ISS which was established in April 2002 to publish articles, books and photographs relating to survival after death & psychical research.  The ISS website is well worth checking out as it contains an incredible amount of information, both original as well as previously published material now very difficult to obtain.  The Harry Price section has a short biography as well as some full length extracts of Price's own writings reproduced from Fifty Years of Psychical Research.

Eddie Brazil Photograph Gallery

I am very pleased to have added to HarryPrice.co.uk a website dedicated to the work of Eddie Brazil.  As well as being a veteran enthusiast of the Borley Rectory case and a life-long devotee of the supernatural, Eddie is also a superb photographer and artist and this site displays several of the many photographs he has taken which illustrate haunted and mysterious places around the British Isles.  All of Eddie's work is available to buy individually and the details can be found on the site.  Eddie is also a huge fan of M.R. James and he has in preparation a book of photographs inspired by James' stories entitled effectively The Ghosts of M.R. James and Other Photographs. 

Harry Price Online Library Underway

A major on-going project on this website is the creation of an online library of Harry Price's writings.  The focus here is on Price's published articles, papers and essays which, unlike his major books which can be obtained quite readily, these are now virtually impossible to find.  Price's books will be included in time, the earlier and rarer titles taking precedent over those later volumes which were aimed at the popular market.  Price's report into the first series of sittings he had with the English medium Stella C which was published in the May 1924 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research is now available as a transcribed online article including scans of all the original plates.  More titles will follow in the coming months.  I am at the moment working on Price's 1922 Cold Light on Spiritualistic "Phenomena" exposure of the spirit photographer William Hope which will be added soon.

New Photographic Essays Added

As reported in the first edition of the newsletter, Eddie Brazil and I visited Borley at the back end of January to take photographs for an article for the website which shows the site of Harry Price's most famous case as it is today.  This is now online and is a kind of virtual tour of the former site of Borley Rectory showing several of the historical views of the building and its grounds with their modern equivalents, all taken by Eddie.  I have added two new maps of the Rectory site - a modern one based on the current Ordnance Survey Map together with a version based on the 1933 Edition which was reproduced as part of the 'Borley Report' in 1956.  These show all the photograph positions in context.

The Trail of Harry Price section is also underway with a visit to the site of one of Price's famous cases, the Battersea Poltergeist House.  Unlike Borley Rectory, this is still standing today and has changed little from the time that Price visited it in the late 1920s, a supernatural fact in itself!

Senate House Visit

On Friday 18th February, I went to the University of London Library at the Senate House to look over some of the photographs from the Harry Price Collection.  I had arranged to meet Eddie Brazil there but at the eleventh hour he had to cancel, however we intend to make the trip again in the not too distant future.  I looked through the entire collection of photographs of Borley together with those from the Rudi Schneider séances that Price undertook at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research.  Many of the pictures and prints were marked up with comments and notes by Price which were great to see and handle.

My thanks go to Stefan Dickers, the Assistant Archivist at the Senate House Library, who made me very welcome and invited me backstage where we watched a silent film made by C.E.M. Joad of a trip to Germany in 1932 which culminated with the notorious Brocken Experiment in the Harz Mountains.  This showed Harry in action reading the lines from the Blocksberg Tryst and ultimately getting newspaper headlines all over the world.  Stefan, with his colleague Gillian Murphy, has just finished the complete cataloguing of the entire contents of the Harry Price Collection which is an astonishing achievement - the printed-out list comprises a stack of paper about five inches thick!

That's about all for this update for Harryprice.co.uk.  The general e-mail address for the website is mailbox@harryprice.co.uk.  The next issue will hopefully be out early in April.

Cheers for now.

Paul Adams

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