Rough Draft Week: The Lady In The Water

Here is the concept as it stands in my head right now. I have a feeling this is not really possible, but something close to it might be possible.

The idea is you would have a seance type atmosphere established in a dark room. A subject for the seance to contact would be chosen by the spectator (forced). It might be a dead celebrity or a distant family member or something like that.

At some point in the seance you introduce a square-ish bowl of water.

Perhaps you have some secret way to cause the water to ripple, to indicate the spirit is present or something like that.

Then, at a later point in the ceremony, you pour some of your tea into into the bowl and then, after a little bit, you look in the bowl and amidst the swirling tea, you can see the distorted face of the person you’re trying to contact.

Freaked out, you dump the water into a potted plant nearby.

The next day the plant is dead.

Okay, so that’s the idea. The way I think you could maybe do something like that is if—adhered to the bottom of the bowl—there was actually undeveloped photographic paper with the ghostly image on it. And the “tea” you dump into the water actually contains photo developer. So, what looks like a strange image appearing in the water, is actually the photo being developed. But with the addition of some other type of element coloring and clouding the water, maybe it won’t seem like a photo? That’s my thought at least. Like if your spectator is in a darkened room, and they think they’re just looking into a white porcelain bowl, and you’re swirling the bowl and the cloudy water inside, and as they’re looking into the water a face begins to emerge, that would be scary as shit, right? It is in my imagination, at least. I don’t know if it would work in reality.

Then as you dump the solution out you could secretly remove and ditch the paper so print so the bowl is clean.

Oh, and you’d replace the plant overnight with a duplicate dead plant.

This idea came out of an email correspondence with supporter Sam W.

Here was Sam’s initial idea:

[Here’s a] photography based idea I've been working on [that would work as] more of a seance. 

You'd need to completely black out a room. Then light it with red lights, which would be quite an eerie environment for a seance, especially if you can use candles with a red glass around them (no idea if that works). 

Then in the middle of the table is a tray of water (actually just water), at some point in the seance (maybe the start) you place a piece of photo paper into it. Nothing will happen because it is just water. 
However at an appropriate point in the evening you sneak in a small amount of developer (which you normally mix with water anyway) and after a short period of time an image (which you preexposed onto the paper earlier) will begin to fade into view. 

I've no idea what the image would be, perhaps a photo of the ceiling above the table with something creepy coming out of it? 

The best part is that to develop a photo you also have to use a second chemical to "fix" it into place. 
But that won't happen here, so when they turn the light on at the end, the image will slowly fade away to black, and different shapes/patterns etc will appear along the way. 

I like the idea of leaving behind evidence, but then it fading away over time to create this weird object. 

I like that idea too, but thought it might be cool if we could disguise the fact that it was a photo at all by having the photo paper flush to the bottom of the bowl. And water that is so murky and cloudy with other shit in it that you can’t see exactly where the image is.

Again, I don’t have the technical knowledge to know if anything like this is really possible. But I get the sense that something similar would work, if not exactly how I wrote it up. And it would it be cool and creepy if we could get somewhere near that goal.