Spirit Photography: How the Victorians Photographed Ghosts

Spirit photography began, like a good deal of the Victorian supernatural, as a business. In 1862 William Mumler, a Boston jewelry engraver who took photographs as a hobby, developed a self-portrait and found a second figure in it: a faint young woman he said was his cousin, twelve years dead. Whether the extra was left on a badly cleaned plate or put there on purpose, Mumler saw what it could earn. The Civil War was in its second year, the casualty lists grew longer every month, and here was a camera that seemed to show the dead standing behind the living. He gave up engraving, set up as a spirit photographer, and the bereaved came to sit for him.

The medium and the machine

Spiritualism had already persuaded a great many people that the dead were within reach, and the séance had one obvious weakness: it left nothing behind. Photography supplied a document. Few customers understood double exposure, but everyone believed in a photograph. The wet-plate process helped. Exposures were long and glass negatives were scraped and used again, so a ghost could get onto a plate by accident or by design with equal ease.

Mumler's most famous picture shows a woman in black mourning, seated, with the pale figure of Abraham Lincoln behind her and his hands on her shoulders. The sitter was Mary Todd Lincoln, who came to the studio under another name; one account gives it as Mrs. Lindall. Mumler himself later dated the sitting to February 1872. Other accounts say the early 1870s, or even 1869.

The trial of the ghosts

Trouble started in Boston, where some of Mumler's spirits turned out to look a lot like living Bostonians who had sat for him earlier. He moved on to New York, and in April 1869 he was charged there with fraud and larceny. The proceeding was a preliminary hearing before a judge, and the testimony ran for seven days. Photographers explained in court how a ghost could be put onto a plate. P. T. Barnum testified against Mumler; he had bought some of Mumler's photographs to show in his museum as examples of humbug. Barnum had hired the New York photographer Abraham Bogardus to make a picture of Barnum himself with the ghost of Lincoln, to show how easily it was done. The judge let Mumler go all the same, reluctantly by most accounts, because the prosecution had not proved that he faked the pictures.

The methods were now public, but the trade carried on for decades in America and Europe. In 1891 Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research published a critical paper on the tricks the spirit photographers used. Business boomed again after the Great War, when a new generation of the bereaved wanted the same thing Mumler's customers had. William Hope of the Crewe Circle found his champion in Arthur Conan Doyle, who published The Case for Spirit Photography in London in 1922. Harry Houdini went the other way. He spent his last years exposing mediums and their methods, and had a picture made of himself reading a book while the ghost of Lincoln looked on.

Why the pictures still unsettle

Look at the surviving prints now and the trick is usually plain within seconds. The sitters are harder to look at. They hold still for the long exposure, often in fresh mourning, having paid for one more picture with a face they had lost.

The fiction of the period kept coming back to the same situation: the message that might be genuine, the face in the picture that might really be hers. The parlor side of the story is told in our history of the Victorian séance, and the stories themselves in the séance roundup.