Eldred, Charles (ca. 1906)
Eldred, Charles (ca. 1906)
Notorious false materialization medium of Nottingham, England, during the early years of the twentieth century. He came into public notice when the journal Light (September 2, 1905) published a description of one of his early séances. The following year Eldred was unmasked at a séance in London by Abraham Wallace. A cavity was found in the back part of the chair on which he was sitting and in it was discovered, after the séance, a collapsible dummy head of stockinette with a flesh-colored mask, six pieces of white Chinese silk measuring 13 yards in all, and other "properties" of fake mediumship. Eldred had claimed that this chair was "highly magnetized," enabling spirit entities to manifest readily.
According to a friend of Eldred's, the unmasked medium asserted that the first phenomena of materialization that he produced were quite authentic but that afterward he could not satisfy the demands made upon him but by simulation. Even if this was true, the carefully premeditated fraud of Eldred's "magnetized" traveling chair completely negated any claim to genuine mediumship on his part.
Sources:
"Exposure of Mr. Eldred." Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 12: 242-52.
Letort, Ellen. "The Frauds of Mediums." Annals of Psychic Science 3, no. 6 (1906).