ARTICLES BROUGHT TO YOU FROM SPIRITUAL NEWS

SPIRIT CAUGHT ON CAMERA

When medium and healer Clara Lord Whitehead sat with her friend Mrs Shaw for a photograph in the late 1930’s, she didn’t know it was going to provide the proof of survival that she worked so hard to prove every day of her life.

Neither could she have known that even after the photo was developed its impact would reverberate into the 21st century reaching a far wider audience than  the small circle of friends and family she had shown it to eighty years before!

Clara was married to fellow Spiritualist medium and healer, Frank Whithead. They had five children. Three boys; Albert, Edward and Frank; and two girls, Edna and Doris – although none of them followed their parents’ spiritual work pathway.

Doris had a daughter herself in 1937, and it was this daughter, Eileen, who was to be instrumental in bringing not only the sterling work of her grandparents to public notice, but that very special photograph too.
Eileen is a committee member of Bangor Christian Spiritualist Church that meets every Thursday at 7 pm in the Quaker Meeting House, Dean Street, for a service.

“I was told by my mother that the baby in the picture is my cousin Donald, my Uncle Frank’s son, who passed to spirit at the age of two before I was born,” Eileen said.

“My grandmother was a very forceful and powerful woman.

I remember receiving healing from her when I was a child. She didn’t speak to me very much about Spiritualism, but I recall her talking to my mother particularly about Harry Edwards who she met at Colwyn Bay during his 1948 tour.”

Clara would have had a great deal to talk about with over three decades of experience to draw on.
It was in Colwyn Bay at ‘Arcadia’ that a local newspaper reported: ‘It had to be seen to be believed, that amazing scene ate Arcadia, Colwyn Bay, when on Sunday afternoon, dozens of persons were healed from their infirmities through the ministrations of Mr Harry Edwards.

Sufferers from arthritis, scarcely able to crawl to the platform, with the aid of St John Ambulance men who lent their ready aid, stood up after a few touches of Mr Edwards’ healing hands, bent their knees, lifted arms which had been powerless for years, and walked (albeit shakily) from the platform. Some descended the steps unaided. On several occasions there were bursts of applause, spontaneous and natural, throughout of place, for the atmosphere should have been that of wonder and thankfulness. The amazed looks of delight on the faces of some patients restored after suffering for twelve or more yeas, spoke eloquently of the power of healing, which can only be termed miraculous’.

The photographs reproduced here are of Clara and her colleagues