Spirit produced these pictures at two of Bill English’s precipitation séances. Bill had arranged chairs in a circle for each attendee. Once seated, he handed each sitter a piece of polyester cloth. When mediums first developed this technique, they used pieces of silk cloth. However, due to the cost of silk cloth, polyester is now used.

Then Bill opened a bottle of India Ink and left it on a table. Then Bill shut off the light, because the séance needed to be held in a pitch-dark room. Bill instructed us to keep our cloths in our hands stretched tight during the séance. Then Bill proceeded to give each of us a message from Spirit.

At the conclusion of the messages, these portraits were on the cloth. The images are initially fragile and sensitive to light. Then Bill went around the circle, holding a flashlight that had a red filter over it, so it produced red light. Like photographic film, red light would not destroy the images as white light would. This allowed us to see the images on our pieces of cloth. Then Bill gave us a piece of construction paper and a rubber band. We each put our cloth on the paper and rolled it up like a scroll. Then we fastened the rubber band around the scroll. After 24 hours, we could remove the cloth from the paper scroll, and the images would be resistant to light.

Unfortunately, I did not recognize any of these faces. However, other attendees did recognize the faces on their cloths.

Some of these silks were made in 1985. Forty years later, these images are still visible on the cloth.

Several years later, Bill updated his technique by using India Ink in colors other than black. This resulted in colored images on the cloth.