The Ghost and Mr. Mumler

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A woman of dark mystery appeared at William Mumler’s Boston studio in 1871 to have her photograph taken. Attired in mourning, she gave the well-known photographer a false name and kept her faced concealed behind a black veil. “I requested her to be seated, went into my darkroom and coated a plate,” Mumler said four years later in his autobiography. “When I came out I found her seated with her veil still over her face. I asked if she intended to have her picture taken with her veil. She replied, ‘When you are ready, I will remove it.’ ” She was used to dealing with mediums and knew how to prevent their tricks. Her dead husband had appeared to her at a séance while she was in Boston , and now she wanted her picture with him. Mumler would later claim that he did not recognize her until the negative had been developed, which revealed Mary Todd Lincoln embraced by the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

Shattered by her husband’s assassination and the loss of three of her four sons, dead before their 18th birthdays, Mary Lincoln cleaved to spiritualism, the belief that spirits of the dead can be contacted through mediums. She must have been satisfied, even consoled by the image, but to the objective eye, this photograph of Mary Lincoln is a touching, if sadly preposterous, fake. Nonetheless, it was Mumler’s most famous portrait.

Mumler began his career in Boston peddling his expertise as a “medium for taking spirit photographs,” part of the growing phenomenon of spiritual manifestations introduced in 1848 by the Fox sisters of Hydesville, N.Y. Their séances, with attendant spirit rappings and table tippings, caused a sensation that had spread across the country. Boston, combining traditions of intellectual dissent with enthusiasm for transcendental philosophies, became a quasi-capital for the movement, and was attracting spiritualists from all over to the mysterious world of the “higher plane.” Coming as it did with the new era of scientific technology—the camera and photography, as well as electricity and the telegraph—people were seeing and hearing the unexplainable.

America in the 1860s was a mournful country, immersed in civil war and disease. Death leeched into everything: the filthy water, the consumptive air, the blood-soaked battlefields of the South. Cameramen such as Mathew Brady were on the battlefields, too, recording sadness and loss in black and white. Heartbroken survivors, desperate for tokens of enduring life, clutched at any straw of hope. And a spirit photograph was that straw painted to a fine, bright shine.

William Mumler’s spirit photographs stand out as one of the grand hoaxes of the period. His misguided craft—the pretended ability to capture the shadows of the dead on photographic negatives—puts him in the same “Barnum’s circus” arena as the other tricksters, hucksters and confidence men of mid-19th-century America. Over nearly three decades, Mumler’s occult artistry made him wealthy and famous, and, as is the destiny of these affairs, it nearly destroyed him.

Like many hoaxes, the story of spirit photography begins with an accident and a joke. In 1861 Mumler was a 29-year-old jewelry engraver living in Boston who enjoyed experimenting with the nascent science of photography. In his autobiography, The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography , Mumler explained that one day, while developing a self-portrait, he noticed the mysterious form of a young girl on the negative. Mumler printed this curiosity and showed it around to friends, telling them it looked like a dead cousin. Being of “a jovial disposition, always ready for a joke,” Mumler said, he decided to jest with a spiritualist friend and pretend that his picture was a genuine impression from the world beyond. The friend fell for the gag. Soon cartes de visite of Mumler and his spirit “extra” circulated through the city, while news that the first spirit photograph had been taken appeared in The Banner of Light and other spiritualist newspapers. The spirit cousin in all likelihood was no more than the residue of an earlier negative made with the same plate, but it quickly ripened into a revelation, with Mumler, the mischievous jeweler, heralded as the oracle of the camera.

Tags: 19th Century, American History, Historical Figures

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