Robert Gambia Bolton, born in 1854, was the official photographer of Queen Victoria's

Animals. He was an English anthropologist,

naturalist and photographer of natural history. His photography is still sought after by collectors,

and some of his pictures are on display in the Natural History Museum. He was a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a fellow of the

zoological society. He was also the author of Ghosts in Solid Form, an investigation of a

certain little-known phenomena, materialisations. His book was the result of carrying out a series of experiments over seven years,

which resulted, rather astonishingly, in multiple manifestations of dead people. So it was not without

its dangers. Gambia writes, I've been permitted to examine the sensitive, here he means the medium, at the moment

when an entity clad in a fully formed temporary body was walking amongst the experimenters

and the distorted features, the shrivelled up limbs and contorted trunk of the sensitive,

at that moment, proclaimed the danger connected with the production of this special form of phenomena.

According to Gambia, the medium's body and face had entirely changed, from healthy and

vibrant to shriveled up and distorted, as the materialized spirit took

energy from the body of the medium, leaving him withered and depleted. As is still the case,

Gambia admits that materialization mediums are exceptionally rare, and in fact these days only a handful

across the world seem to genuinely exist.

Of course, there has been fakery by unscrupulous con artists, as there will always be,

and through the ages they've been unceremoniously exposed, and the reputations deservedly ruined.

But Gambier was wise to this possibility, and insists that he rigidly

guarded against this in his experiments by putting in place a number of measures, including checking

for secret hidden doors or mirrors in the rooms that were used. In fact, for Experiment 1,

he went to rather extreme lengths to avoid any possibility of being fooled by conducting the experiment in a caravan in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night.

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