Unsolved Canadian Mysteries · Unsolved Canadian Mysteries

Bonus - T. G. Hamilton's Ectoplasmic Photography

May 13, 2024·37 min·3 clips

White ectoplasm with faces of the dead started coming out of mediums' noses in 1920s Winnipeg.

Kenton and Dylan kick things off with a catch-up and then move into Patreon-exclusive episode talk. They revisit earlier episodes, including the mummy case and the alien-in-the-field story with radiation, and admit they are still a little fuzzy on which one drew the feedback. The conversation then settles on T. G. Hamilton, whose name comes with a pile of 1920s paranormal material and a few experiments from the people around him. They move through the timeline carefully. 1928 is the year the ectoplasmic phenomenon becomes the headline part of the story, and the hosts keep that anchored in the chronology. The episode spends time on how the séances were supposed to work. Automatic writing gets a mention, along with trances, bell ringing, and table tapping. Kenton and Dylan keep checking each other on the details, because the story is part explanation and part "hang on, what exactly was that?" Their back-and-forth gives the episode its rhythm. It is a research walk, but one with interruptions, jokes, and the occasional hard reset when a claim gets too weird to let pass quietly. The ectoplasm itself is the center of the whole thing. In the story it is white, stringy, and said to come out of the medium's nose or mouth. The hosts reach for pop-culture shorthand to make sense of it. Ghostbusters comes up first, then Spider-Man web fluid, which is as close as the episode gets to normalizing the image. What really sticks is the claim that the ectoplasm could contain little faces of the dead. That is the kind of detail the show lets sit there for a second before moving on, because there is not much else to do with it. The show never pretends the source material is clean. Kenton and Dylan openly admit when they do not know a pronunciation, a date, or whether a given detail is straight fact or something that has grown a few extra legs over time. That uncertainty is part of the appeal. It keeps the episode human instead of sealed off and over-explained. The hosts even wander into a quick aside about Mercedes as a name, which is exactly the sort of tangent that tells you they are talking this through in real time rather than reading a polished script. As the episode goes on, the focus broadens from the ectoplasm claim itself to Hamilton's wider output. The hosts wonder whether his interest in the paranormal may have gone along with the later book he wrote, and a Stephen King comparison lands near the end as they try to place that shift in a familiar frame. The whole conversation ends up feeling like a strange local-history séance mixed with pop-culture jokes and a skeptical shrug. It is funny, a little eerie, and happy to sit with something unresolved. The episode does not try to prove the haunting. It just follows the trail and lets the weirdness speak for itself.

As heard by us

A strange Canadian séance story, kept moving by sharp skeptical back-and-forth.

Patreon-exclusive Unsolved Canadian Mysteries takes on T. G. Hamilton's ectoplasm claims, moving from the 1928 medium experiments to the séance routines and the odd idea that white, stringy ectoplasm could carry faces of the dead.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a Canadian séance story where ectoplasm gets compared to Spider-Man webs.

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