Jack Webber was born in 1907 in Wales and worked as a miner. It wasn’t until he married, and his wife developed an interest in Spiritualism, that he discovered his mediumistic abilities.  At a local home circle, he engaged in table tipping, eventually developing as a trance medium. He began levitating trumpets and objects, healing, and bringing forth voices and materializations.  Even when not in a circle, he was accompanied by noises, object movements and voices. His presence also affected electrical equipment.

Webber toured the countryside, leading home circles and holding public demonstrations with as many as five hundred people. Unlike other mediums at the time, he didn’t use a cabinet to avoid accusations of fraud. He also insisted on being restrained. Webber had eight spirit guides, including Black Cloud of the Mohawk tribe, Paddy, a young boy, and Reuben, a South American school teacher.

Between November 1938 to February 1940, Webber participated in recording a comprehensive series of seance photographs. In order to avoid full-light exposure, which can affect ecoplasm formation and the appearance of apports, infra-red light was used. A powerful flashbulb that generated from 100,000 to 150,000 watts was fitted with an infra-red filter. A box-type camera, loaded with infra-red sensitive plates, was used to take the photographs.

Photos were taken by official press photographers from London newspapers and the process was observed by English psychical research societies. The resulting images included photographs of an astral body, the appearance of apports from ectoplasm, the levitation of a heavy table, and the removal of a sewn-up coat from Webber’s bound body.

Thousands of people attended Webber’s seances. These included Maurice Barbanell, trance medium and author, who witnessed the coat removal, journalist Bernard Gray who saw trumpets “shooting about the room,” Linda Williams who heard voices speaking to attendees in various languages, and skeptical investigator, Colin Evans, who saw the materialization of a child.

During the years before his passing, Webber was holding up to two hundred demonstrations per year. He was struck with a short illness at the age of thirty-three and died in 1940. Even though his body was gone, his spirit was not. He communicated with several mediums, including Bertha Harris, Harold Evans and Harold Sharp. Harry Edwards was so impressed with Webber’s abilities that he wrote a book about the medium

Additional Reading:

Barbanell, Maurice (1959) This is Spiritualism. Spiritualist Press, London

Edwards, Harry (1940) The Mediumship of Jack Webber. Rider and Co., London

Gaddis, Vincent H. “The Webber Seances” In The Round Robin, Vol 2, No 5. Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, Eureka, CA

Williamson, Linda (1992) Mediums and the Afterlife. Robert Hale, London

The Mediumship of Jack Webber https://www.snppbooks.com/

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