Fantom du Laos translates to Ghost of Laos. You might try looking under that name. I found one description of it at Amishland: "Old variety originating from Laos, large fruits white-yellowish slightly flattened. Very vigorous and very productive plant (it is most productive which we cultivated this year!). Excellent resistance to the diseases. Sweet flavour. There is a strange legend about this variety: the nights of full moon, the villagers deposit it on the edges of the windows and if the tomato becomes fluorescent, a ghost is not far!" I love this ghostly apparition tale . The Asians, however think of the souls of their dearly departed as ghosts, in a good way. This story is really about how a dead relative comes back to visit. It is not about haunting as you might think. The tomato itself had so much to recommend it besides this cool legend. It was my earliest tomato this season, even beating out my Ukrainian and Russian plants! It was a full 2 weeks earlier to ripen than any tomato in my garden. And it was huge, and had a really unbelievable coloration. It literally was an opalescent white and truly seemed to glow! It was impossible to photograph that quality of light coming from the fruit. They are the most gorgeous white tomatoes I have ever grown with not one bit of pink on them ,all pure ivory white. They tended to put out double fruits as well. And it kept on sending out these lovely orbs of light all season long. It lasted until light frost. Great, sweet, mild flavor and virtually no acid." Doesn't sound particularly flavorful, lol, just pretty.

The spirit image is placed onto the photo in the darkroom using a process of 'dodging'. First, mask is made with a cut out roughly matching the outline of the little picture to be dubbed in. The photo paper is exposed with the little picture while the mask is moved about slightly to blur the sharp edge. Next the mask is removed and a handheld 'dodge' with a shape slightly larger than the little photo is held above the first image and the main exposure is done. The little dodging mask is dithered, moved about a bit, so that its edges are not sharp and to blur the shadow of the wire holder. I've seen cotton balls used for dodges. This is where the expert part of the photo-finisher come into play. After the final exposure, the photo paper is developed in the normal way and there should be the small image floating on the larger one. Often, the photofinisher has to make several tries to get it right. If this picture was made for a commercial card, the original would be used as a master and duplicated with photo techniques. To print many copies, a printing plate would be made. I have several greeting and birthday cards that were sold in Illinois ca 1900 through 1920 and a German card company is imprinted on these. Your picture appears to be an original print and possible by an amatuer, maybe someone in the family. From 1880 through 1930, there were many self taught photographers in the central US. My uncle was one of these. They made a few extra dollars by applying their hobby to grammer school pictures and family gatherings. For example, my uncle moved to Noxon, MT in 1918 and was the only photographer in the area, so it was he who did several school group shots in that period. Your photo is most definitely posed. The table, chair and floor are real, but the backdrop is a scene on paper or cloth. The floor pattern seems real enough, but a nice floor could also be simulated by laying down a piece of linonleum over an otherwise rough floor. The table may have been a necessary prop, literaly a prop to help steady the subject. Exposure time may have been realtive slow, about 1/25 sec. Require exposure time in early photography, (daguaerrotpye [tin type]) was slow until better lenses were developed. Sometimes, unseen was a support rod in back of the person to hold their upper torso still. The subject pressed themselves against this rod and held a facial expression that they thought they could hold for a couple of seconds. This may explain the dour expressions seen in many early photos plus the fact that many people did not like to be photographed. One item that helps to date a photo is shoe styles. If her shoes have button and hook fasteners, this is an indicator. I can't bring to mind when shoe laces became the norm, but shoe laces did replace button and hook fasterners in a relatively short time. Her hair style says 1920s to me. In tin types, the image is reversed from left to right. Thus a right handed person will appear as left handed. For many years, it was assummed that Billy the Kid was left handed based on the side he wore and held his gun until it was realized that the image was reversed left to right. Therefore, expect to see wedding bands on seeming the right hand. When a print is made from a negative, the right and left sides are righted again (this is, if the photofinisher did not make a mistake on which side was up on the negative). One thing to remember: There was no photography before 1840. The patent for the daguerrotype was filed that year. Also, about that time, an English astronomer developed a camera lense with better light gathering power and photography advanced beyond the "pin hole" era. The wet glass plate was developed ca 1950 followed shortly by the dry glass plate. Kodak developed emulsion on paper in the 1880s and the first of these were primitive indeed. Kodak soon improved this technique with a transparent film on an opaque paper backing and photography was off and running. However, large format studio cameras used frames loaded with film with a dark slide in front of it. The frame was inserted into the back of the camera and the dark slide pulled out before an exposure was made. After the exposure, the dark slide was put back into place so that the frame could be removed and transported to the dark room for developing. Many techniques were found and employed after 1890 to produce picture post cards and novelty photos. So if someone hands you a photo and says it was made in 1830, be very skeptical.

To answer the question - it never even dawned on me to think about what arsenic did to teeth, but that dream was SO startling and I'm not 100% sure it was a "dream" - per se. I was in that almost-but-not-quite asleep place when I was startled by Addie rushing up to me and as she got VERY close, she bared her teeth and she said - urgently - LOOK AT MY TEETH and I did and that was the end of the dream. However, it sure woke me up! I do feel strongly connected to Addie and I am not sure I can even articulate why. For decades, I've carried ONE old photo around with me from house to house (and marriage to marriage...) and it's the picture of Anna Hoyt Whitmore - Addie's older sister. One day I walked downstairs and into my dining room (where this picture hangs) and I feel like I heard someone say, "You're on the right track. Don't give up. Keep going forward with this." I really do feel almost a calling to see where this leads. If I had the money, I'd have her exhumed, but it's not just the cost of exhumation, but also the legal fees. An exhumation would have to be court ordered at this point, and that's where the serious dough will come in. Down deep in my bones, I know that Addie will rest in peace when the truth is revealed. And that furniture of my father's - oh boy - that's another story but now we're learning that there's a better than 50% chance it came from Enoch's HOUSE!!!! Can you believe it? We always heard from Father that it was an exhibition piece and I wasn't even sure what that meant. We also knew it was made in the mid-1890s. We also knew that it came into my Father's life when he was 13 or 14 (about 1933 or 1934). Two weeks ago, I was talking with the owner of The Fargo Mansion (B&B) and he said that Enoch Fargo would tell anyone who'd listen that all his furnishings were "exhibition pieces" from the 1893 World's Fair (in Chicago). That perked up my ears. And then the B&B owner said, "In the 1930s, Mattie Hoyt Fargo (Wife #3) decided to sell the house (Enoch died in 1921) and she invited the Hoyt family into the house to take whatever they wanted out of the house. We understand that Mattie's sister and cousins pretty well cleaned the place out." Well, my father's grandmother was Anna Hoyt (cousin of Mattie Hoyt) and that was like the missing puzzle piece! So now I *suspect* that my father's furniture might have come from the Fargo mansion. Rose

The most famous English writer of ghost stories for Christmas was possibly M R James. Many have been read on the radio or adapted for TV. I think the 1920 -30's popular 'who dunnits' often had a winter/Christmas theme as it was easy to put a group of house-guests or miscellaneous strangers on a journey in a cold wintery setting and have scary/horrible things happen to them. I recently picked up a very cheap copy of Mystery in White by Jefferson Farjeon, a writer who the blurb tells me was very popular pre WWII. Trapped train passengers find an empty house left á la Marie Celeste . . . what will happen to them? I had better read it to find out. M R James narrated by Christopher Lee