FT262

On the bitterly cold afternoon of 16 December 1890, a Mr JT Thompson entered the premises of the eminent Newcastle-upon-Tyne photographer James Dickinson. Dickinson ran his business from a shop located at 43 Grainger Street, and was well known in the area for his skilled use of the camera.

Thompson asked Dickinson if he would take a photograph of him: “You know… sitting on a chair, that sort of thing.” Dickinson agreed and suggested that if Thompson was agreeable he could take the picture there and then. The customer was duly led to the studio on the first floor, where Dickinson suggested a canvas backdrop of an attractive-looking stained glass window. In front of the canvas stood a bookcase, a rather overgrown potted plant and a beautifully upholstered chair. Thompson took his place, Dickinson adjusted his subject and the picture was taken. To all appearances, Thompson was just another happy customer.


MR THOMPSON RETURNS
On 3 January 1891, a few minutes before 8am, James Dickinson arrived at his shop. It was his first day back at work after the Christmas and New Year break. A male employee was unwell and wouldn’t be able to come in to work that morning, forcing Dickinson to arrive an hour early to open up the premises for business. Had he arrived at his usual hour of nine rather than eight, he would almost cert­ainly have missed his opportun­ity to be a key player in of one of Vict­orian England’s most baffling ghost stories.

As Dickinson busied himself behind the counter, a young employee was taking down the metal grille which was locked in place over the door each night to prevent burglars entering. Suddenly, a young man entered the store, approached the counter and introduced himself.

“Good morning; I’ve called to inquire as to whether my photographs are finished”.

Dickinson recognised the face, but could not recall the customer’s name. “And you are, sir…?”

“Thompson… Mr JT Thompson”.

“Ah, yes; and your address?”

“I live in William Street, Hebburn”.

Dickinson checked his ledger and found a record of Thompson’s order, which he had placed the day the photograph was taken: 16 December the previous year.

7976.
Sat., Dec. 6th, /90.
Mr. J. S. Thompson, xxx William Street, Hebburn Quay.
6 cabinets. 7/- pd. [1]

Dickinson then asked to see the man’s receipt. Thompson said that he didn’t have it with him, but furnished enough details to establish his identity. Satisfied, the photographer asked the chap to call back in an hour when his assistant was in, as he was extremely busy.

Thompson apparently became more than a little irritated at this, saying “Look, I’ve been travelling all night and simply cannot call again”.

One can understand his agitation; after all, how long does it take to look for a photograph in your own shop and hand it over the counter? Dickinson felt sorry for the man, whom he said looked “wretchedly ill”, and was just about to suggest a compromise when Thompson, obviously upset, stormed out of the shop.

Perhaps regretting his dismissive attitude, Dickinson later recalled that he shouted after him, “Can I post what may be done?” He received no answer, and Thompson simply walked off down Grainger Street.

The photographer realised that if he was to keep the man’s custom in future he needed to placate him. He retrieved Thompson’s order slip and wrote upon it “Ao. 7976, Thompson, Post”.

At 9am, Dickinson’s assistant Miss Simon arrived. The photographer lost no time in telling her about his awkward encounter with Thompson, and asked her to see to the order promptly and post it out to him.

Miss Simon seemed puzzled, and said, “Why, an old man called about these photographs just yesterday [Friday], and I told him they could not be ready this week owing to the bad weather, and that we were nearly three weeks behind with our work.”

Now it was Dickinson’s turn to be puzz­led. If someone – presumably a relative of Thompson’s – had been informed the day before that his portrait wasn’t ready, what on earth was the customer himself doing asking for it the following morning? Not to be put off, the proprietor brusquely sugg­ested “that it was quite time Mr Thompson’s pictures were ready”, and inquired of Miss Simon who was printing the order.

“I was told,” he recalled later, “that it was not in print, and, pointing to a pile of negatives, Miss Simon said: ‘Thompson’s is amongst that lot, and they have been waiting quite a fortnight’.”

By now somewhat irritated himself, the photographer asked to see the negative, and the young woman promptly retrieved it from a pile nearby and handed it to him.

“I took it in my hands and looked at it carefully,” Dickinson later said, and added, “Yes, that is it; that is the chap who called this morning.”

Dickinson said that although the man who identified himself as Thompson had been wearing a top hat and coat when he had called, neither of which he’d worn when the photograph was taken, he had no difficulty in recognising that it was the same person. Miss Simon again reiterated that she had told the elderly man who had called the previous day that it would take at least a week to process the negative plate, and further pointed out to Dickinson that she was currently overburdened with work.

Dickinson sighed, and said, “Oh, very well; put this to one side, and I will see to it myself on Monday, and endeavour to hurry it forward.”

Two days later, the photographer was busy in one of the printing rooms upstairs. It was 10.30am, and he had much to do, including finishing off the portrait of the testy Mr Thompson. He decided to get his order out of the way first, and made his way down to the shop to retrieve the negative.

Little did Dickinson know it, but he was about to become embroiled in one of the 19th century’s most intriguing ghost stories – although whether what Dickinson saw truly was a ghost was later hotly debated.


AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY
Dickinson entered the front shop to retrieve the negative so that he could begin work on it, but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, Miss Simon found the batch of negatives they’d examined two days previously, one of which was the portrait shot of Thompson. She dutifully attempted to hand them to her boss, but fumbled and the entire pile fell to the floor.

Blame fate, luck, Sod’s Law or whatever you like, but the only plate to be broken in the fall was the portrait of JT Thompson. The glass negative had cracked in two, right across the sitter’s forehead. Exasperated, the photographer told Miss Simon to write Thompson a letter asking him to come in for another sitting. “And make sure to tell him that we’ll recompense him for his time and trouble,” he added.

On Friday 9 January, Dickinson was again in the printing room upstairs when Miss Simon called for him.

“The gentleman is here to see you about the broken negative”, she said.

Thinking that the “gentleman” was JT Thompson, the photographer shouted “Tell Mr Thompson I am very busy and cannot come down, but you know the terms I offered him; send him up to be taken at once”.

“But he’s dead!” replied Miss Simon.

Dickinson hastened downstairs where he saw an elderly gentleman, who seemed to be greatly troubled. The man was JT Thompson’s father, who confirmed that his son had recently passed away.

“Well, it must have been dreadfully sudden”, the photographer said sympathetically, “because I only saw him last Saturday.”

“No sir,” he replied, “you are mistaken, for he died last Saturday.”

“Nay,” the photographer replied, “I am not mistaken, for I recognised him by the negative.”

The elderly Mr Thompson reiterated that he had been in the shop the previous Friday and had spoken to Miss Simon about his son’s photograph; was that not the incident the photographer was thinking about? But Dickinson knew quite well that it was the son he had seen, and he still had his note in the order book to prove it. Further, he hadn’t actually been in the shop when the old man had called and spoken to Miss Simon, so how could he have mistakenly recalled a conversation he’d never even witnessed? In any event, the discussion was obviously distressing the old man, so Dickinson asked him to come back when he was feeling better.

A week passed by, and then the elderly Mr Thompson returned to Dickinson’s shop. He was still grieving, but appeared to be in a better position to talk. What he had to tell the photographer was extraordinary.

In the week preceding his death, Thompson’s son had taken ill. The record doesn’t testify as to exactly what ailed him, but by Friday 2 January he had become bedridden and delirious. In his fevered state he began to cry out for the photograph Dickinson had taken of him, and he would not be satisfied until he had it. By mid-afternoon, his father decided to go to Dickinson’s shop in Newcastle and retrieve it. It was late when he got there, and Miss Simon had informed him that nothing could be done. Naturally distressed at not being able to fulfil his son’s wish, Mr Thompson returned home empty-handed. At precisely 2pm the following day, his son passed away. His father was adamant that the family had been in constant attendance at the young man’s bedside, and even if he had wanted to he could not have journeyed to Newcastle that day due to his critical condition.

The written records in the store of who had visited and when, combined with the testimony of the witnesses – James Dickinson and the young assistant who had been removing the grille from the door when Thompson had entered – left no doubt that JT Thompson had been in the store that Saturday in an attempt to pick up his photograph. And yet there were multiple witnesses who would also testify that, at the time the man had supposedly visited the shop in Grainger Street, he was actually on his deathbed and passed away just six hours later.


THE THOUGHT BODY
The case eventually came to the attention of the respected writer and journalist Will­iam Thomas Stead, who would later die on the RMS Titanic when it sank in April 1912.

Stead, a man of North Shields extraction who was deeply interested in Spiritualism and the paranormal, thoroughly investigated the incident. After looking at all the circumstances and evidence, he concluded that there was only one rational explan­ation that could, at a stretch, fit the facts: someone must have impersonated the dying JT Thompson.

However, as Stead himself admitted later: “Against this we have the fact that Mr Dickinson… recognised him immediately as soon as he saw the negative of his portrait. Further, if anyone had come from Hebburn on behalf of Thompson, he would not have asserted that he was Thompson himself, knowing, as he would, that he was speaking to a photographer, who, if the photographs had been ready, would at once have compared the photographs with the person standing before him, when the attempted personation would at once have been detected”. [2]

Exhaustive investigat­ion seemed to discount any rational explan­ation for the incident. Finally, even Stead concluded: “We may turn it which way we please, there is no hypo­thesis which will fit the facts except the assumption that there is such a thing as a Thought Body, capable of locomotion and speech, which can transfer itself wherever it pleases, clothing itself with whatever clothes it desires to wear, which are phantasmal like itself.

“Short of that hypothesis, I do not see any explanation possible; and yet, if we admit that hypothesis, what an immense vista of possibilities is opened up to our view!”

What Stead referred to as a “Thought Body” is what we would today usually call a “crisis appar­ition”, that is, the ‘ghost’ of a still-living person who desperately needs to take care of some unfinished business before they move on. If they are physically incapable of doing it themselves, then they might project a ‘psychic double’ or doppelgänger to do their work for them. Well, at least that’s the theory.

To this day, no prosaic explanation for the case has ever been found. Like Stead and others, I’m convinced that the dying JT Thompson projected himself psychically to the photographer’s shop in Newcastle so that he could see the photo­graph of himself before he departed this life forever.

The case does, though, raise some interesting issues. When Thompson – or his doppelgänger – spoke to the photographer that Saturday morning, he claimed to have been “travelling all night”. As the corporeal Thompson was at that time lying on his deathbed in William Street, Hebburn, then we must presume that his “Thought Body” (or whatever one wishes to call it) had actually journeyed from Hebburn to Grainger Street in Newcastle – a journey of 6.5km as the crow flies.

What I find fascinating about this aspect of the case is the suggestion that Thompson does not seem to have simply projected himself instantan­eously from his home to Dickinson’s shop. He travelled over 6km between his home and the store, and it apparently took him “all night” to do so. Did his doppelgänger walk from Hebburn to Newcastle? We know that Thompson’s astral journey ended at precisely 8am on the morning of 3 January 1891. It is a pity that we did not know exactly when it started, as we might also have been able to work out the speed at which he travelled.

As Stead pointed out in his analysis of the case, the idea that someone impersonated Thompson – a position that Stead himself once briefly clung to – simply doesn’t fly. The implication of the theory is that someone who looked near identical to the dying man entered the shop and attempted to take possession of Thompson’s photograph. For reasons Stead makes clear, this would have been virtually impossible, as the photographer and his assistant knew exactly what Thompson looked like. In any case, who on earth would have wanted to do such a thing and what could their motivation have been?

It’s not coincidental, I think, that at the exact time Thompson’s spectral double entered the store and insisted on taking poss­ession of the photograph, the “real” Thompson was lying in bed and pleading with his parents to go to Newcastle and do the very same thing. When his father had returned home on the Friday evening, sans photograph, Thompson was particularly distressed. Not long afterwards, he lapsed into unconsciousness and it was then, I believe, he began his “astral journey” to retrieve the picture himself. His doppel­gänger arrived at the shop the following morning, exhausted, only to be told that he’d have to come back in an hour as the proprietor was “busy”.

Thompson’s doppelgänger, understandably distressed, simply could not wait, and the man died a few short hours afterwards.


THE MYSTERY OF THE BROKEN PLATE
There is one puzzle surrounding this case that I haven’t as yet been able to solve. It is a relatively mundane one when taken in context, and doesn’t trouble me too much, but it niggles.

JT Thompson never did manage to get into the shop for a second portrait sitting. And yet the photograph which appeared in Stead’s book – allegedly the one that was accidentally broken by the photo­grapher and his assistant – shows no signs of damage. It is possible that Dickinson took more than one picture of Thompson when on his first visit to the studio, but if he had a second plate in reserve why did he instruct Miss Simon to ask Thompson to come in for a second sitting? It might be that Dickinson touched up the original photograph and artfully removed all signs of the fracture. If this was the case, then he did a particularly good job. However, the form accompanying Thompson’s order states that the photographer took “6 cabinets”. A “cabinet”, in photographic parlance, was an image measuring 15 by 10cm.

My conclusion is that Dickinson obviously took six photographs, but that the one that was damaged was the only one Thompson was truly happy with. The photo­graph accompanying Stead’s account, is, I suspect, one of the others taken during Thompson’s sitting.

None of this, of course, detracts from the fact that JT Thompson’s doppelgänger made a heroic if unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the picture for his corporeal other self. And I hope that if JT Thompson is watching, the portrait of him accompanying this article makes him smile.




Notes
1 I have omitted the exact door number of the dwelling to prevent any unwelcome publicity for the current owners.
2 WT Stead: Real Ghost Stories, Grant Richards, 1897.