William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper
William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.
The Shroud of Turin
A linen cloth over four metres long bearing the image of a man, kept in the cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin since 1578. Its first documentary appearance is at Lirey in France around 1355, and already then the bishop of Troyes, Henri de Poitiers, wrote to the pope that the artist who made it had confessed. In 1988 a sample was cut from the cloth and divided between three independent laboratories — Oxford, Zurich and Arizona — blind, with control fabrics. All three returned the same interval: 1260 to 1390. The result was published in Nature. The Catholic Church has never declared the shroud a genuine relic and describes it as an icon for veneration.
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