[1] As a young man Hope was employed as a carpenter, but he quickly came to prominence in paranormal circles after claiming to be able to capture images of spirits on camera.

Oliver Lodge revealed there had been obvious signs of double exposure – the picture of Lady Crookes had been copied from a wedding anniversary photograph.

The psychical researcher Whately Carington wrote regarding the exposure "any reasonable person will say that Mr Bush had proved his case.

Price wrote in his report "William Hope has been found guilty of deliberately substituting his own plates for those of a sitter...

[9] Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from his laboratory and claimed if he persisted to write "sewage" about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini.

"[12] Fred Barlow, a former friend and supporter of Hope's work and also the former Secretary of the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, along with Major W. Rampling-Rose, gave a joint lecture to the Society for Psychical Research to present findings gleaned from an extensive series of tests on the methods Hope used to produce his spirit photographs.

According to Paul Tabori: In 1933 the widow of the proprietor of the British College for Psychic Science (where Price's séance with Hope took place) admitted in an article that after the sitting her husband went through Hope's luggage and "found in a suitcase a flash lamp with a bulb attached, some cut-out photographic heads and some hair".

On one side of his character was an alert, witty and patently honest North- countryman, whilst on the other hand there was the bogus medium who used prayers and psalm-singing as a cloak for his fraudulent operations.