History & local legend
Camp Silver Belle operated at the former Mountain Springs Hotel in Ephrata, where medium Ethel Post-Parrish established a spiritualist retreat in 1930. Visitors attended lectures and séances, hoping to communicate with the dead or see her claimed spirit guide, Princess Silver Belle, take visible form.
Photographer Jack Edwards offered another kind of encounter. Customers could sit for a portrait and buy a print showing an additional face floating above or beside them in a cloudlike mist. The images appeared to place a visitor from the spirit world in the photograph.
Years later, historian Peter Seibert examined Edwards’s surviving photography kit. It contained faces cut from nineteenth-century portrait cards, wool batting, and pairs of negatives. One negative showed the sitter alone; its partner included a cutout face and batting. In a 2023 Pennsylvania Heritage article, Seibert described how those materials revealed the construction of the ghostly portraits that camp visitors had taken home.
