Episode 38: Spirit Photography

As R.L. Stein would say, “Say 🧀 and ☠️!” In this episode, it’s more like “The 💀👻 say 🧀!” This episode explores the strange world of spirit photography, a whacky offshoot of early photography that had its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s. Come for the lite sarcasm regarding Spiritualism, stay in spite of the primordial ooze.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's mango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay. Hello. Nice to meet you, slash, uh, welcome back. Uh, and I have my PhD in art history, which I put to good use, uh, if one could call it that, on this podcast, which is my platform for talking about everything and anything related to or not even related to art history. Welcome. Thank you for joining me for episode 38, which is an episode uh I teased in the most recent mini sode that I posted right before I went on vacation. I am back now, and I brought a little souvenir home with me in the form of a cold. You might be able to hear it in my voice. I'm pretty sure I got it from a German dude who was coughing and sneezing on the plane, so I can at least say my germs are European and feel slightly superior about it. I have made the rather bold decision to record the episode in spite of sounding uh a little like I'm wearing one of those nose things people wear in the pool so they don't suck water into their face. I appreciate your ears for putting up with it, and anyone who doesn't want to put up with it, uh, I've got 37 plus other episodes that you can enjoy, so hey. Part of the reason I didn't want to wait for my voice to clear up was the fact that this episode has been a very long time coming. I started writing it a year and a half ago in October of 2022. I then stuck it in the graveyard when I realized I wouldn't be able to post it in time for spooky season 2022. And no, I'm not talking about wedding season, but rather Halloween, which is my favorite holiday, even though I refuse to decorate and or dress up for it. This year, in October, I was like, hey, it'd be a great idea to resurrect that episode. I can post it around Halloween, it'll be great. So I took it out of the graveyard file, where partially written episodes go to die, and I started plugging away at it again, only to realize with mounting dread that I probably had to one, teach myself how early photography worked, which is something I have very successfully avoided doing for about a decade out of sheer intimidation, and two, I would probably have to make a mini sode on how early photography worked and developed, since that's kind of essential to the topic at hand. At first, I very nearly re-graveyarded this topic, because what is the point if it's not spooky season? Then I realize that spooky season is a state of mind, not a time of year. That is attested to by how many yards in my area still have 12-foot skeletons on display despite it being mid-December. Because where the heck are you supposed to store a 12-foot skeleton? That very long and uh possibly, probably definitely a necessary background is what brings us here to mid-December, and the part where I tell you stuff about a ghostly art form and the people and spirits who gave it life. Spirit photography, its believers, its skeptics, and its frauds. Or at least, that's what she said her name was. Mrs. Lindell had arrived at 170 West Springfield Street in Boston, Massachusetts, with one purpose in mind. She wanted her portrait taken. She had traveled all the way from a different Springfield, Springfield, Illinois, a journey that had likely taken a full week to accomplish. There were, of course, plenty of photography studios in the over 1,000 miles that separated Springfield and Boston, any number of which would have happily taken Mrs. Lindell's portrait and her money. But Mrs. Lindell was in the market for something a little more specific. It was not the first time that Mrs. Lindell had sought the services of this particular photographer. She had been to a studio in a different part of town some ten years earlier. That time, she had not been overly impressed by the results of her portrait. This time, she hoped, would be different. The year was 1872, and Mrs. Lindell had gone out of her way to not be recognized. She even wore a thick black veil that she refused to lift until just before her photograph was taken. But she needn't have worried. The photographer never suspected that she was anyone else than who she claimed to be. After all, ten years is quite a long time to remember the face of a stranger. But Mrs. Lindell wasn't a stranger. At least, not really. The portrait session went off without a hitch, and Mrs. Lindell returned to the shop three days later to collect her prints. She was greeted by the photographer's wife, who worked at the studio. The woman handed Mrs. Lindell a package of pictures and watched as the older woman opened it to inspect the prints within. As she did, the otherwise very subdued, dour woman was overcome with emotion, something that was equal parts relief and wonder and great, terrible sadness. As Mrs. Lindell had hoped, she was not alone in the portrait. A pale man stood behind her, his translucent hands resting fondly on her shoulders. The figure was vague, lacking the sharpness and physical presence of Mrs. Lindell herself, but he was there all the same. The photographer's wife asked Mrs. Lindell if she recognized the spirit. The longer she looked at the photograph, the more doubt that Mrs. Lindell felt. In the end, she responded with, maybe. When the photographer's wife next spoke, her voice was strange, as if it weren't her own. Mother, if you cannot recognize father, show the picture to Robert. He will recognize it. Mrs. Lindell looked up from the portrait to the photographer's wife and asked, Who has just spoken? The photographer's wife responded as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Thaddeus, of course. Mrs. Lindell recognized the name at once. How could she not? It was the name of her youngest son, Tad, who had tragically died one year earlier at the age of just 18. He was the third son that Mrs. Lindell had had to bury in her lifetime. Here, in this photographic studio in Boston, Tad was once again speaking to his mother, using the photographer's wife as a mouthpiece. The woman didn't mind. She had spent much of her life as a medium, a conduit for the dead. Tad was no different than the dozens of other ghosts who had inhabited her body and used her voice to speak their final words to the living. Tad assured his mother that she was not seeing things, that the man who appeared behind her in the portrait was indeed Tad's father, Mrs. Lindell's husband, who had met a violent, unexpected, and highly visible death seven years earlier. The loss was as fresh as ever for Mrs. Lindell. A woman who, if one is to believe the rumors, would eventually go mad from her grief. But that day, in 1872, the photographer and his wife had delivered Mrs. Lindell a short reprieve from her ever-present sadness, reuniting her not just with her husband, but also, it seemed, with her son. Mrs. Lindell had always suspected that the dead lived on in our world, but this, this was her confirmation at last. Eventually, Mrs. Lindell took the photographs, gave her final thanks, and left the shop. The photographer's wife watched her go, knowing all along that Mrs. Lindell was not who she had claimed to be. What the photographer's wife did not know, could never know, was that her husband, the photographer, had taken the final photograph ever of the living Mrs. Lindell, a woman who had once been the most photographed woman in America. And if one believed the photographer's great talent for capturing the spirits of the dead with his camera lens, he had also snapped the final photograph of Mrs. Lindell's husband. A man who had been famously dead for some time, having been shot right next to his wife while both were enjoying a play. No, Mrs. Lindell was not Mrs. Lindell at all, nor was her husband just any old ghost. She was none other than former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. And her husband was a man named Abraham. Spooy. The photographic portrait that I just described, featuring Mary Todd Lincoln and her husband, Abraham Lincoln, is among the most famous, if not the most famous, example ever, of something known as spirit photography. As I describe it in Mini Sode 7, I mean you didn't know I was talking about spirit photography, but now you do. Spirit photography is a rather peculiar offshoot of early photography, specifically the development of photographic portraits. Spirit photography had its heyday in the 1860s and 1870s, though the practice would persist well into the 20th century. For this episode, I am mostly going to focus on those two decades in particular, the 60s and 70s, because it was in those years that many people, not all, but definitely more than you might expect, believed that what they were seeing in these photographs was real. So, what were they seeing? The most common type of spirit photography was a spooky twist on traditional portraits. A living, breathing, I hope, human would come into the photography studio and pose for the camera. Say cheese, click. The photographer would then develop the photograph using some of the means and methods I cover in Mini Sode 7. But instead of just showing the portrait of the living, breathing human that had sat for the portrait, the photograph would include an extra figure or figures. Figures that weren't there at the time the portrait was taken. At least not visibly there. When it comes to these figures, they really run the gamut. It's usually pretty clear what kind of figure is there, by which I mean, you know, is it a man, is it a child, is it an older woman, a younger woman? But the details of the figure are almost always very hazy. It's difficult to make out particulars. As we will see later, that was probably by design. That is, if you believe spirit photography was a hoax, which not everyone did. Some people very genuinely believed that photography had advanced to the point where it could capture the invisible alongside the visible. Before we jump into the specifics of spirit photography, I want to first discuss a couple of developments that happened in the early to mid to late 19th century that provided fertile ground for this kind of photography to emerge. The first of those things is, of course, photography itself, which is a topic that I cover in Mini Sode 7. As a refresher, or if you're listening to this first, what you really need to know slash remember is that it was in the 1820s and 1830s that pioneers of photography Nietzsche Four Niepps and Louis Deguerre managed to produce the world's first photographs and establish a process that people could replicate themselves, resulting in the emergence of commercial photography in the late 1830s and 1840s. People like you and me could hypothetically just walk into a photography studio off the street, pay someone, and have them take our picture. That's what I mean by commercial photography. While that all sounds very easy, like pop in, pay a guy, take a picture, woo! But photography, especially early photography, was very, very complicated to produce. There were a few different methods that photographers could use, but most of them involved a device known as a camera obscura, which harnesses and manipulates light, in addition to plates of some kind, be they glass or metal or maybe paper, and a ton of chemicals. Specifically light-sensitive chemicals, but also like a bunch of stuff. It's very complicated. In addition to remembering just how involved the technical process was to make a photograph, it's also important to keep in mind just how new and wild photography was as a technology, full stop. The ability to produce images of quote-unquote reality was pretty bananas. And I say reality, quote unquote, because, one, what is reality? And two, photography is not without its biases. There's always some level of human intervention and perception at play, from how the camera is angled to how the sitter is posed to how the photograph is developed. I have enough trouble comprehending those concepts in the present day, so imagine just how confusing this all must have been in the early decades of photography's existence. Pretty damn confusing. With that said, most people considered photography to be more of a scientific medium rather than an artistic one. They believed photography told the truth. As photography was undergoing this very rapid development, pun very much intended, there was another development also happening. The rise of spiritualism, a belief system that flourished in the US and Europe for several decades, starting in the 1840s. As their name suggests, spiritualists held close the foundational belief that not only do spirits and the afterlife exist, but that it's possible for the living to communicate with the spirit world. Rather critically, these ideas were not thought to stand in opposition to science, but rather used science and scientific developments as the very foundation on which these beliefs were formed. Spiritualism first materialized in upstate New York in 1848. Now, obviously, there's a long history behind the how and the why of this new movement, just like there was in the decades and centuries before the official emergence of photography. These things don't just wham bam, thank you, ma'am, come out of nowhere. But 1848 stands out as the year that spiritualism came a knocking. Quite literally. It was in that year in upstate New York that sisters by the name of Kate and Margaret Fox claimed that they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man who was haunting their house. This ghost man had a very particular way of communicating. His preferred methods were tapping, knocking, or even pounding on the walls. In another day and age, this kind of incident would have been completely written off as the overimaginings of some young girls. Those sisters are weird. Don't make eye contact. Say no to sleepovers. And while these Fox sisters did have their fair share of skeptics and detractors, there were many, many people who were all too willing to accept their experiences as not just fact, but confirmation that the spirits of the dead persisted in our world even after their bodies had been buried. There are all kinds of reasons why people during this period of the late 1840s, 1850s, and several decades beyond, were so open and even desirous of this possibility. In the 1800s, there was a lot of change happening. Technologies were rapidly developing, industry was on the rise, social boundaries were starting to shift and change, and so too were physical boundaries being challenged, often in ways that seemed to defy the very notion of impossibility. For example, in the 1830s, Samuel Morse developed the early versions of the Telegraph, a device that used electromagnetic signals to transmit messages in real time along wires using a rhythmic code between two points that could be miles apart, thereby threatening the job security of carrier pigeons everywhere. To most people at that time, I mean, let's be real, to me still today, that sounds insane. It sounds like it's not a thing, but it very much was a thing. Another thing that was a thing? Photography, which captured people's likenesses, immortalizing them forever by aiming light at chemically treated plates. These are things that a few centuries earlier might have been deemed hocus pocus, but were in fact technological miracles forged through science. For spiritualists, science didn't disprove the existence of an afterlife, but rather reinforced and validated the idea that communication across boundaries is indeed possible. After all, what was the tapping heard by the Fox sisters if not a phantom version of Morse code? While we might think that that is wild, there were hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and Europe who subscribed to this way of thinking. It wasn't a dominant perspective, but hundreds of thousands of people is nothing to sneeze at. The popularity of spiritualism was further reinforced by the relationship that Victorian culture and times had to death. Compared to that of Western cultures today, death was not only much closer and more common, but also way more visible in Victorian times, partly due to higher mortality rates, but also to different mourning customs. This is true of many of the centuries leading up to our present day, but it took on new forms literally in Victorian England, which is roughly defined as the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. While the living clung to the memories of the dead, with the rise of spiritualism, the dead, it seemed, started to reach back, or so some people thought. The most common way to communicate with the dead was not through tapping or knocking, as was the case with the Fox sisters, but rather through seances, which often, if not always, featured a person known as a medium. Mediums were people who could allegedly, allegedly, speak to or channel the dead. Some mediums claimed they could speak to the dead. Others claimed they could be inhabited by the dead. The thing about seances though is that they're fleeting. They're temporary. You go, you participate, you might speak to the dead, and then it's done and you leave. Now obviously you're probably leaving a changed person, but the experience itself was temporary. But you know the old saying, take a picture, it'll last longer? That is exactly what spirit photography allowed people to do. The first known person to produce a photograph featuring a spirit was a man named William H. Mumler. Mumler was living in Boston at the time where he worked at an engraving shop. Just down the street was a photography studio, and Mumler quickly developed an interest. In the craft. Something that had absolutely nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing to do with the enchanting young woman who worked at the shop. Her name was Hannah Green Stewart. The two struck up a friendship. And it was probably Hannah who taught William Mumler how to take a photograph in the first place. She was the niepsa to his de Guerre. Those of you who listened to Mini Sode 7 will know that reference. Like her future husband, Hannah Green Stewart was also a crafty, multi-talented person. In addition to working at the photography studio, Hannah also had two side gigs. The first was hair art. And no, I'm not talking about cosmetology school. People would go to Hannah with locks of their loved ones' hair, be they living or dead, which Hannah would then craft into small mementos, allowing her clients to keep their loved ones close, both emotionally and physically. While perhaps strange to us today, hair art was extremely popular in Victorian England. While Hannah did sometimes work with the hair of the dead, her second gig concerned the dead more directly. Hannah Green Stewart was a medium, which is to say, someone who could commune with the spirits of the dead. Like I said, multi-talented. Hannah was also said to be extremely charismatic, the power of which should not be underestimated. So Mumler meets Hannah, the medium hair artist photography lady. Unfortunately for both Hannah and William, Hannah was married. At the time, though, the Civil War was Civil Warren, and her husband is presumed to have been away during this time fighting in the war, a war he wouldn't come back from, as he died sometime before 1864, which is when Hannah Green Stewart became Hannah Mumler. By that time, William and Hannah had already established a thriving business as spirit photographers. It was the perfect coupling, him being a photographer and her being a medium. If court records are to be believed, yes, dear listener, I said court records, you've got that to look forward to. If court records are to be believed, William Mumler produced his first ever spirit photograph in 1862, completely by accident. As the story goes, he was spending a Saturday in the photography studio, presumably the one where Hannah worked, experimenting a little with this and a little with that, and taking self-portraits to test these tweaks he was making to the photographic process. Imagine his surprise then when he developed one of those portraits only to find that he wasn't the only person in the frame. No, dear listener, Mumler saw himself as he should be, and a white figure in the background that appeared to be made of light, one that bore an uncanny resemblance to his cousin, a young woman who was not only not in Boston, but had been dead for over a decade. Ah, the old dead cousin trick. A classic. According to the story, Mumler didn't see this photograph and immediately think, ah, geez Louise, that's the ghost of my dead cousin. At least that's not how he writes about it in his autobiography. He instead took the photograph to a colleague who suggested that the plate that Mumler used to take this portrait had been insufficiently cleaned. For those of you who listened to Mini Sode 7, you'll know that around this time, glass plates became a popular material to use for photography. The photographer would coat the glass in light-sensitive chemicals, expose the plate in the camera obscura, develop and fix the image in a dark room, producing a negative, light is dark, dark is light, and then the glass plate would be used in conjunction with another chemically treated plate or piece of paper to produce a positive image. As with later film negatives that are still probably inhabiting boxes in our parents' basements all around the world, if you still have the negative, you can create as many prints of an image as you wanted. But unlike film, the glass plates used during this time was essentially a support, on top of which there was the emulsion or chemical mixture that had reacted to light. It was only that coating that changed during the photographic process and the development process. Nothing about the glass plate itself was changed. That meant that once someone had made all of the prints that they desired from this glass plate, the coating could be fully dissolved, making the glass plate good as new and ready for reuse. This was a very common practice in photography studios at the time. In the case of William Mumler, he and his friend first assumed, probably rightly, that the reason his dead cousin was showing up in this image was because he hadn't properly cleaned one of the plates he was experimenting with on that spooky Saturday morning. If that was true, it meant that some of the old coating, and therefore the old image, in this case of his cousin, remained on the plate. So when Mumler took a photograph of himself, his photograph was layered over the top of the previous photograph. This is known as double exposure. Exposure is exactly what was in store for William Mumler, who started to show this photograph to friends and colleagues, one of whom happened to be a spiritualist. According to Mumler, he did this because he thought the photograph was amusing. Hey, look at this weird thing I made. But the reaction of his spiritualist friend was not lighthearted. The guy didn't see this as a fluke. He thought it was the real deal, and that Mumler had managed to capture the visible appearance of a spirit with his camera. Eventually, this guy took the story to a spiritualist newspaper, The Herald of Progress, which I think was distributed in New York. That article, though, was later reprinted in another spiritualist newspaper, The Banner of Light, which was distributed in Boston, the very city that Mumler called home. What started as a fluke quickly turned into a circus. People were flocking to Mumler's studio to have their portraits taken, the hope being that a spirit, specifically of a loved one, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, that a spirit would reveal itself through the photographic process. For now, let's set aside the technical methods that Mumler probably used to create these photographs. I'll touch on those in a minute. Instead, I want to briefly address the visual quality of the spirits that appeared in these photographs, because that will explain a lot about how and why people were duped into believing that these spirits were those of their deceased loved ones. Again, we are going to assume that Mumler was running a scheme, because he almost certainly was. In some of the portraits that Mumler produced, the spirits are very clear and identifiable. Yes, they are typically translucent, gauze, and often a bright white color, but there's not much left up to the imagination. It is clearly such and such person. How is that possible? Quite frankly, I really don't know. But in all likelihood, Mumler had acquired photographs or a photographic plate featuring a specific deceased loved one. Some of Mumler's greatest attractors even claimed that he or his associates were breaking into the houses of their clients to somehow get material that he could use for this purpose. Though to my knowledge, that has never been proven. More often, though, I would even say most often, the spirits who appear in these portraits are pretty indistinct. And that was on purpose. Because the vaguer the spirit, the more likely it was that the figure could be mistaken for any number of people. Now that's obviously quite ironic, but think of it like clouds in the sky. If you look at clouds long enough, you eventually see shapes. The same thing is happening here. It is also critical not to underestimate the psychological power of grief. Grief is not rational, and it is entirely understandable that people would want so badly to see their loved ones again, to get confirmation that they are still there, that they would unknowingly become complicit in this swindle by convincing themselves that they were seeing someone they knew and loved in these vague and hazy forms. There were also many instances in which people went to get a portrait taken only to walk away with some random person in the background. As many spirit photographers made clear, spirits were not guaranteed to appear, and the ones who did are simply those who were drawn to the studio that day. That's what you call a cover your tush move. In the short term, this new and unexpected career move was quite lucrative, as Mumler charged about $10 a pop for these spirit photographs, which was three times the going rate for an average portrait, and by modern standards would equate to a couple hundred bucks. Not too shabby. I mean, predatory? Sure, but shabby? No. However lucrative, the profession of being the world's first spirit photographer was also stressful and rife with controversy. In addition to the hordes of hopeful customers that this news attracted, Mumler's business also attracted a fair few skeptics, many of whom accused him of profiting off of the vulnerability of the grieving. One of the most voracious skeptics and loudest naysayers over the course of Mumler's career was none other than P. T. Barnum, one of the founders of the famous Barnum in Bailey Circus. It's a little bit of a sore subject for me because my parents never took me to the circus as a child. And while I now think circuses are awful, I do hang that fact over my mom's head at any chance I get. Love you, mommy. For younger generations out there, P. T. Barnum, or at least uh a fictionalized version of him, is the character that Hugh Jackman plays in the movie The Greatest Showman. And while I grant you that P. T. Barnum probably wouldn't love being known as the guy Hugh Jackman played in The Greatest Showman, there are worse things to be known by. Because hey, Hugh Jackman is not only very talented, he is also very handsome.

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T. Barnum was a very vocal critic of spirit photography in general and William Mumler in specific. And he wasn't alone. Many of P. T. Barnum's professional peers, whether that's showmen, illusionists, magicians, whatever, were similarly critical of spirit photography and its practitioners. That struck me as very interesting, because these are people who build their professions on deceiving audiences. But unlike Mumler's clients, those audiences were in on the joke. They knew that they were seeing an illusion, even if they couldn't exactly explain how it was being done. You cannot say the same for the people who were seeking out the services of William Mumler and Hannah Stewart. Sure, some of those people likely saw spirit photography as an amusement. But the majority of their clients, at least in the 1860s and 1870s, were grieving individuals who were willing to pay out significant sums of money so long as it meant they were reunited with their loved ones via photography, even if they couldn't see them in person. That is the bee that got under the bonnet of people like P. T. Barnum, who believed that Mumler and Stewart were profiteering off of people's pain. This kind of criticism wasn't just coming from non-spiritualists. There were many spiritualists who denounced Mumler and spirit photography more broadly, including several who initially endorsed him and the craft. In 1863, for instance, a prominent spiritualist named Charles Plum wrote an absolutely scathing article in one of New York's most prominent spiritualist newspapers, The Herald of Progress. In that article, he called out not just Mumler, but specifically Hannah Stewart, for what he called, quote-unquote, nefarious practices. Keep in mind, this was after Plum had endorsed Mumler originally. So what inspired this about Face? Well, let's just say that Plum found some receipts, as the Yewes would say. What Plum discovered was that in one of the spirit photographs produced by Mumler's studio, the spirit in question could actually be traced to a photograph of a living person, one that had been taken at the studio. It's important to remember two things here. One, this is not a Walgreens one-hour photograph situation. When you went in to get your portrait taken, you would be present for the exposure time, the time it takes the light to work its magic on the chemically coated glass plate. It would be several days, if not several weeks, before the photographer would develop that plate and make photographic prints that you could then go and pick up. The second thing to remember is that photographers often kept the glass plate negative. So imagine this. Imagine if I walked into the mummers studio to get my portrait taken. Geez, snap, done. I leave. The mumblers develop my portrait, and they have the negative on a glass plate. What Plum is alleging is that another person came in wanting a spirit photograph, sat for a portrait, cheese, click. And when they received that portrait back with a spirit in the background, that spirit was me. An effect likely created through double exposure, or layering two glass plates one on top of another while they developed a photographic print. It just so happens that someone not only recognized me in the spirit photograph, but they knew I wasn't dead, which is great, and that I had gotten my portrait taken at the Mumlers studio, meaning that they had a negative with my beautiful face on it. Not a great look for the Mummers. Despite these very public and vocal criticisms, William Mumler and Hannah Stewart were able to operate a highly commercially successful photography studio. After seeing how successful Mumler and Stewart were, spirit photographers started cropping up in New York and Boston, as well as further afield in Europe, with some spirit photographers charging hundreds of dollars in 1860s money for a successful spirit portrait, though of course the results were never guaranteed, in which case there was usually a discounted rate. Spirit photographers justified the cost of their photographs by saying it took an enormous amount of effort for mediums to draw the spirits into their vicinity. Also, photographs, unlike, say, a good old-fashioned seance, had far more lasting power, for which people would and did pay. By the late 1860s, after at least five years of a highly successful business and a marriage license later, the mumblers decided that they wanted a change of scenery. This change was in large part due to the fact that they were getting awful tired of people coming to their Boston studio in the hopes of outing them as frauds. For instance, photography professionals and people they would hire would go to their studio in disguises and with pseudonyms and try to figure out how Mumler and Hannah were accomplishing all of this. For these photography professionals, it was never a matter of if but when. And so with each unsuccessful attempt to prove that Mumler was up to no good, the more obsessed they became with proving that he was. With hopes of starting fresh, the Mumlers relocated their photography studio to New York City. Did that work to quiet the accusations of fraud? Nope. No, it did not. And pretty soon, no one less than the mayor of New York had hired someone to investigate their practices. That's what we call an escalation. Again, nothing came from this. That all came to a head in 1869, when Mumler was sued for swindling people out of their money. This charge of fraud was followed by a trial that lasted several weeks, a trial the likes of which New York City had never seen before. The trial was so novel that it earned a front page story in Harper's Weekly, complete with print reproductions of Mumler's portrait, along with several of his spirit photographs. The article began with the following. The charge against Mr. Mumler is that by means of what he terms spiritual photographs, he has swindled many credulous persons, lending them to believe it possible to photograph the immaterial forms of their departed friends. Mumler, of course, defended himself fiercely. He claimed that he did nothing more than photograph what appeared before his camera. If that included spirits, so be it. He also asserted that he did nothing out of the usual with his spirit photographs versus his normal portraits. They were taken with the same method, and the plates were developed using exactly the same process. The prosecution, whose job it was to argue Mumler's guilt, did so by bringing a lineup of professionals to the stand in order to prove that Mummler was, quote, a humbug and a snare. Despite all of these individuals taking the stand, Mumler had his fair share of supporters, including a highly respected judge who just so happened to be a spiritualist. To keep in mind, this judge was not the judge on the trial, but rather took the stand and attested to the fact that Mumler and his work were the real deal. I have read the court transcripts of this guy's testimony, and they're wild. At one point, without any kind of coercion, like no one is making him say this. He is doing it all on his own. He states that he knows for a fact that ghosts are real. How does the judge know this? He has a story. That story goes a little something like this. Once upon a time, this, for whatever reason, highly respected judge was presiding over a case. That case concerned the life insurance policy of a man who had died under questionable circumstances. This judge claims that the spirit of the dead man came to him in ghost form because the man felt so guilty that he had to confess to his sins. Turns out the man had drowned himself, rendering his life insurance policy void, meaning that his wife and child would not see a single penny paid out for his life insurance. The judge used that testimony of the ghost man to determine the outcome of that trial. Excuse me, what? Now you might be thinking, Lindsay, why would a man say this out loud? Well, there's a couple of reasons. Uh people are delusional, is one of them. But also, this judge was attempting to make the case that if a ghost revealed itself to a highly respectable judge, might ghosts not also reveal themselves to the camera? Question mark, question mark, question mark? Now, in a lot of ways, this sounds like a clown court, like a kangaroo court, and to some extent it absolutely was. But there are transcripts of the trial that document how prosecutors question witnesses, including detailed questions about photographic processes and what witnesses and experts who visited Mumler's studio did or did not witness. Prosecutors presented no fewer than nine different ways that Mumler could have fraudulently produced spirit photographs. These methods ranged from various kinds of double exposure, whether in the camera or during the development process, to highly technical alterations to his camera obscura and its lenses. The thing is, of all the photography experts who took the stand, even the ones who had observed his process could not say for certain how Mumler was introducing spirits into these photographs. As of 2023, we are really no closer to proving how Mumler operated his spirit photography business than the prosecution was in 1869. Photography historian Mark Osterman has a few theories, the best of which is that Mumler took his photographs and developed them as any other photographer would. According to Osterman, Mumler likely introduced his trickery when developing photographic prints using a printing frame. This might involve layering two glass plates one over the other to create a composite image. This method would have required Mumler to be very skilled at sleight of hand, especially if someone was watching him do it. It is also highly probable that Mumler varied his methods as necessary. After all, it's harder to get caught if you vary your pattern. And William Mumler proved very, very good at not getting caught. So good, in fact, that after several weeks of trial, he was acquitted of all charges. Now that's not to say he didn't suffer greatly from the media circus surrounding the trial. While P. T. Barnum himself once claimed that there was no such thing as bad publicity, being labeled a fraud on the front page of prominent newspapers turned out to be very bad for Mummers' business. Following the conclusion of his trial, he and Hannah skulked back to Boston, where they sought to collect the pieces of their life and their business. Unfortunately for them, their old photography studio had been rented to someone else. That required the Mumblers to get a little more creative. Mumler ended up doing what any photographer recently acquitted for producing fraudulent photographs might do, and started to exhibit the spirit photographs that had landed him in hot water with the courts in the first place. These exhibitions must have been at least a moderate success because Mumler was eventually able to reopen a studio in his home, where he, with the assistance of Hannah, continued to take spirit photographs. At one point, Mumler and Hannah even devised a mail order business, which has to be among the more unhinged aspects of their very unhinged business model. When I first read the words mail order spirit photography, I had assumed that people would send in photographs or negatives of their own portraits, and that the mumblers would use those portraits to produce spirit photographs that looked like all of the others that they had made. A normal photograph with a spirit lurking in the background. But oh no, no, no, no. The mumlers instead took the portraits that clients sent them, set them up on a table in a nice little frame, or, you know, propped them up on something, and then proceeded to take a photograph of the portrait as if it were part of a still life scene, with the portrait serving as a proxy for the client, who, for whatever reason, couldn't travel to Boston. When Mumler developed these photographs, it was common for spirits to be lurking in the background, just as they might be if the sitter were present. Mumler would then make prints of these photographs and send them back to the client along with the original portrait. Like I said, unhinged. Speaking of unhinged, of all of the people that I've mentioned in this episode, and maybe even on the podcast as a whole, it is Hannah Mummler, not William, who stands out to me as the kookiest of kooksters. At one point in the 1870s, Hannah supplemented their business by becoming what she called a clairvoyant physician. That job title involved her using her connection to the dead to treat the ailments of the living. Hannah claimed to be able to channel the spirits of great Civil War doctors to treat her quote-unquote patients. Those visits would frequently end with Hannah shepherding said patients into the studio to have their portraits taken. At one point, Hannah even took out an ad in the Cambridge Chronicle to advertise her services. There, she attributed her success to her quote-unquote animal magnetism. For all my patronizing talk of Hannah's role as the photographer's wife, Hannah undoubtedly had a very active hand, not just in the photography studio, but in the making of her husband's career. The first person to acknowledge this was William himself, who in his autobiography credits Hannah with much of his success. Mumler, though, is not one to shy away from the spotlight himself. In that same autobiography, he drags his detractors through the mud and fiercely defends his craft as being the real deal. He goes so far as to praise himself as a pioneer of new truths, a chosen one who was tasked with enduring the pain of prosecution and poverty in search of new discoveries. He calls himself a humble instrument of the invisible host, and claims that he was tasked with disseminating the beautiful truth of spirit communion. After giving this impassioned defense of himself and his craft, Mumler goes on to describe some of his greatest clients and greatest photographs, including the one he produced in 1872 of Mary Todd Lincoln embraced by the ghost of her husband, former president Abraham Lincoln. You heard a narrative version of that interaction at the top of the episode, a good deal of which I adapted from Mumler's own recollection. Because of that, you should absolutely take everything he says with a heaping tablespoon, I mean, maybe even a dump truck full of salt. That said, it is a pretty good story. I find it utterly fascinating that Mrs. Lincoln traveled over 1,000 miles to get her portrait taken by a man who just a few years ago was at the center of a well-publicized trial for fraud, though to be fair, he was acquitted of those charges. Perhaps Mrs. Lincoln respected Mumler, whose services she had sought out about 10 years earlier in 1862, when Mumler's abilities were first made known to the world. In that year, it was once again grief that drove Mrs. Lincoln to the Mumler's studio. In February of 1862, one year into Lincoln's presidency, the president and the first lady's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever. It was an absolutely devastating loss for the couple, who had already grieved the death of their son Eddie, who died of tuberculosis in 1850, just one month before his fourth birthday. According to author Peter Mansot, Mumler took Mrs. Lincoln's photograph in 1862. But, instead of the ghostly picture of a young boy, the spirit that revealed itself in that first portrait was that of Mrs. Lincoln's brother, who had recently died during a Civil War battle. Rather unfortunately, Mrs. Lincoln was not overly fond of her brother, who had chosen to fight for the Confederacy. For those of you who aren't super familiar with American Civil War history, those were the bad guys. But can I say I'm a Unionist? Long story short, Mrs. Lincoln left the studio rather disappointed. But according to Mumler, that wasn't something that he could help. After all, Mumler had no control over the spirits. He didn't command them. He simply photographed them. The photograph of Mrs. Lincoln would have undoubtedly fetched enormous publicity for Mumler. She was the highest of high-profile clients, but Mumler never made that information public, at least not in the 1860s. He would later claim that his silence was out of respect for the president, who was already seeking re-election. The public finding out that the first lady dabbled in spirit photography might sully the president's chances. But as time has revealed, Mrs. Lincoln was doing far more than dabbling. By the time she sought out Mumler's services in 1862, she had already attended several seances, and she would go on to host several such seances in the White House itself. All of this was kept very, very mum. When Mrs. Lincoln returned to his studio in 1872, Mumler claims that he had no idea who she was, which, uh, not sure I believe that one. I am also violently skeptical of the idea that Hannah Mumler was able to channel the spirits of the dead, a talent that she used to speak to Mrs. Lincoln with the voice of not just Thaddeus Tad Lincoln, but also that of the former president of the United States, which is what one eyewitness claimed. Reading about this conversation between Hannah and Mrs. Lincoln was the closest that I came through all of my research and writing for this episode to seeing the Mumlers not just as frauds, but as villains. Maybe Hannah was trying to comfort the grieving widow and mother, but pretending, if indeed she was pretending, to channel the voices of Mrs. Lincoln's dead husband and son strikes me not as a kindness, but rather as a cruelty. If Mumler's autobiography is to be believed, it is very clear that Mrs. Lincoln was distressed during that conversation. She asked repeatedly, almost desperately, when would it be her time? When would she be able to cross over and be reunited with Willie, Eddie, Tad, and Abraham? To her limited credit, Hannah Mumler never answered this question. But we today know the sad truth. Mary Todd Lincoln would live another ten years, none of them happy. In the history of spirit photography, I think it's safe to argue that William Mumler is undoubtedly the most famous, or perhaps the most infamous, practitioner of the art form. That makes a lot of sense, given that he basically founded or invented it. There were, however, several other high-profile spirit photographers in the US and Europe, some of whom, like Mummler, were taken to court as frauds. Take, for instance, the French photographer Edouard Bouget, who ran a highly successful commercial spirit photography studio in Paris. That is, until the French police arranged a sting on his studio, where they gathered evidence to use against the man at trial. There was evidence galore of fraud, including pre-exposed plates and props used to create the illusion of spirits. Bouger confessed his guilt almost at once, and he gave detailed explanations of his process in court. Even then, however, there were spiritualists who absolutely refused to believe that Bouger was a fraud. Bouger's fiercest and potentially most deluded champions even claimed that he had been paid or coerced to give a false confession. History repeated itself almost a half century later with an English spirit photographer by the name of William Hope, not to be confused with Henry Philip Hope, the former owner and namesake of the Hope Diamond. Like Bouget, William Hope was thoroughly investigated by a paranormal researcher who proved five ways to Sunday that Hope had been faking his spirit photographs all along. In this instance, one of Hope's staunchest supporters was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a hardcore spiritualist who believed a conspiracy was afoot. It's this kind of polarizing outlook that could make enemies of friends. And it did. Take, for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. A strange friendship, if there ever was one, but hey, I'm not one to judge. Conan Doyle and Houdini famously went from friends to bitter rivals due to the hold that spiritualism had on Conan Doyle and that skepticism had on Houdini. The two never did reconcile, at least not in their lifetimes, though I suppose the verdict is still out on whether or not they have in the afterlife. Despite persisting well into the 1920s, the practice of spirit photography had already started to wane as of the 1870s, when more people started to see it as an amusement rather than evidence of the beyond. But the art form remained at least a little relevant, and it evolved over the years to include more than the standard spirit portrait. For example, photographs of quote-unquote haunted interiors were very popular for a time, many of which were created by having someone enter the frame mid-exposure, linger long enough to register on the plate, and walking out, leaving behind a ghostly impression in something like a bedroom or a sitting room. Other forms of spirit photography were decidedly stranger. In the 1890s and early 1900s, photographs began to emerge of mediums in trance-like states. But that wasn't all that these showed. In these kinds of photographs, the mediums leaked a strange white substance from various orifices. Mouth, nose, ears, and yes, the orifices twixt their knithers. This thick white substance was called ectoplasm, which was believed to be a physical manifestation of spiritual energy. In all likelihood, the material was made using cheesecloth. While I very much dislike looking at these kinds of photographs, they give me the heebie jeebies, I also have a strange fondness for them because this kind of photograph was my introduction to spirit photography as an art form. Once upon a time when I was a junior in college, I saw a graduate student give a presentation about them. Can I remember the substance of that presentation? No. But do I distinctly remember her describing ectoplasm as primordial ooze? Yes. Yes, I do. And I think of the phrase primordial ooze far more than as healthy. As spirit photography started to wane in the 1920s, spiritualist belief in the camera's ability to unveil nature's invisible forces was only growing stronger and arguably weirder. Around 1920, a series of photographs taken by young girls in Cottingley, England also made quite the splash. These photographs showed spirits of a different kind than ghosts. Fairies, which froliced alongside the girls in the portraits. When you look at these photographs with eyes conditioned by the 21st century's many technological marvels, it is almost impossible to believe that thousands of people once beheld them with awestruck wonder, convinced that they were seeing confirmation of life beyond the visible realm. Once again, photography had the spiritualist world in a chokehold. But even the so-called Cottingley fairies were eventually debunked, though it took another 60 years before the girls, by then elderly women, admitted that they had made the fairies by cutting out shapes in cardboard. The sisters and masterminds behind the Coddingley Fairy fraud weren't alone in their decades-delayed confession. In 1888, the Fox sisters confessed that the tapping and knocking they claimed to hear on the walls of their home, the ones that they swore were from a ghost living in their house, were in fact a total hoax. By that time, the Fox sisters had spent 40 years as the poster children, and later poster mediums, poster media? Whatever. For the entire spiritualist movement. They made an entire career, an entire life from a childhood prank that spun out of control. But it's not just that. Because it was that series of events in 1848 that catalyzed the rise of spiritualism, not just in places like New York and Boston, but around the country and around the world. Now that probably would have happened anyway with a different inciting incident, but it certainly begs the question: at what point is it too late to back out of an elaborate scheme, particularly one that can generate money, fame, and maybe even an entire belief system. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, no amount of confessions or scientific evidence in the world would shake the belief of the staunchest of spiritualists. And I don't find that very surprising. No one wants to admit when they have been taken in, duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled, especially not when doing so would unravel not just a person's entire outlook on the afterlife, but life itself. But that door, perhaps like the one to the afterlife, swings both ways. And after all, it's not just spiritualists who felt doubt. On his deathbed, the famous illusionist, militant skeptic, and former friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, allowed the doubt to creep in. He promised his wife that if there were an afterlife, he would find a way to communicate with her. Every year for 10 years, Houdini's wife Bess attempted to contact him in the beyond by hosting a seance, the very thing that Houdini vocally deplored during his lifetime. Unlike Mary Todd Lincoln, after 10 years of silence, Bess stopped trying. Our world has changed in innumerable ways in that century and a half, and we are now more technologically advanced than ever before. If anything, we in Western society may have overcorrected, obsessed as we are with documenting every moment, to the point where we forget what it means to live life uncaptured by the lenses of cameras. While a picture will undoubtedly last longer than the fleeting moment it captures, it's no substitution for experiencing the present. So take the picture, but savor the moment. And always, always remain critical of what you see, because seeing isn't always believing. Sometimes it's simply a trick of the light, a sleight of hand, or the very human impulse to seek out those we love, even in the vaguest of shapes. That is all I have for you today on spirit photography. Woo! That is the culmination of a year and a half's worth of work. Yay! As always, I will post. All sources and pictures related to this episode on the podcast's website, which is stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. I do want to give a special shout out to a couple of different authors. The first is Louis Kaplan, who wrote and edited The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. That book is a collection of essays as well as transcriptions of Mumler-related articles and texts, including a full version of Mumler's own biography. That book is the only place that I managed to find that. So big props to Louis Kaplan. The other author I want to shout out is Peter Mansot, who wrote The Apparitionists, which was hugely helpful in writing the episode. I also consulted a series of articles and book chapters on spirit photography by the likes of Tom Gunning, Simone Natale, Nancy West, Alison Ferris, Carl Schoenover, and Jen Codwalder. Cadwalder. Cadwalder? I don't know. Jen, I'm so sorry, but I do thank you for your service. There are also some great YouTube videos out there that show how someone like William Mumler may have created a spirit photograph. My favorite is the one produced by Vox, which features photography historian Mark Osterman as well as the aforementioned author Peter Mansot. By far the coolest source that I found was on Archive.org, which is one of my favorite websites that I use all of the time. On archive.org, you can find a scrapbook of William Mumler's 1869 trial. Someone cut out all of the articles related to it and pasted them in a scrapbook. The scrapbook itself is now in the library collection at Johns Hopkins, but it has been absolutely beautifully digitized, and you can access it for free at archive.org. I will post links to all of those and more on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. As for Gus Corner, Gus very much enjoyed the holidays. He is obsessed with opening presents, including ones that aren't his. And despite several instances of Gus stealing food from small children over the course of our Christmas celebrations, Santa still decided that he was a very good boy this year, resulting in presents like treats and squeaky toys. As for me, corner, uh, I enjoyed my holidays very much. I'm still at home with Gus, which is great. And I am currently staring at books that I brought home with me to do research for the next episode. But for now, I'm going to go take a nap because woof, this one took a lot out of me. That is what you get for working on an episode over the course of a year and a half and attempting to record it across about 15 days. But I hope you didn't hear any of that in the episode and that you enjoyed it. If so, please consider leaving the podcast a rating and a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to it. I will be back with a new episode at some point. I don't know when.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music featured in the podcast. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto No. The creator's name is Blaze Armani, and the song name is Evil Piano Evil Within. I will leave you once again with good tidings for the new year, and as always, the reminder to look at something beautiful today, tomorrow, whenever.