Welcome to our paranormal afterlife.

This is episode 215 of paranormal stories.

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the mediums known as the Bangs Sisters.

Elizabeth Lizzie Snow Bangs and Mary May E. Bangs built their reputation in Chicago at the point

where the late 19th century spiritualism overlapped with portrait culture. Born in 1859 and 1862,

they were introduced in later summaries

as mediums from childhood

who worked in several familiar spiritualist modes,

slate writing, automatic writing,

clairvoyant phenomena, and materialization.

But their most distinctive claim was the production of precipitated spirit portraits,

a practice that became the best-known part of their mediumship beginning in 1894.

In the surviving literature, that term meant a picture said to form without ordinary artistic

intervention by the medium,

rather than a portrait visibly painted step by step in the usual way.

The standard account of how the sisters worked is remarkably consistent across later summaries.

During a sitting, a pair of framed canvases would usually be arranged on a table in front of a window with curtains drawn around them.

Sitters watched as the image gradually appeared.

The review of the book Portraits from Beyond the Mediumship of the Bang Sisters says that features could alter while the sitters were present and that their

eyes might appear to open during the formation of the image. That description places the

Bangs sisters portraits somewhere between seance phenomenon and finished studio object.

These were not presented as rough experiments. They were meant to emerge as complete likenesses,

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