Mumler soon went into the photography business full time and opened his first studio on Washington Street in Boston. His wife, Hannah, or an assistant greeted his clients on arrival, and after some preliminary chitchat, when the clients often—and helpfully—discussed the spirits they wished to appear, they went in for the sitting. Hannah had a reputation as a clairvoyant, and she often commented about the spirits that surrounded her husband’s clients. For Mumler’s part, he was as passive as a “vacuum tube,” he explained, that glows when an electrical current is run through it—a force he then channeled into the camera. It was as simple as that.

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His fees were extravagant. At the height of his success, Mumler charged $10 for a dozen photographs, or five times the going rate, with no guarantee that any spirit “extras” would appear. Often they did not, and clients had to make repeated trips to Mumler’s studio before they were blessed with a presence. “The spirits,” Mumler explained by way of justifying his price, “did not like the throng.”

Boston’s other photographers were less enchanted with Mumler the medium. James Black, famous for his aerial views of the city, assumed Mumler cheated, and he thought he knew how. Black bet Mumler $50 that he could catch him at it. He examined Mum­ler’s camera, plate and processing system, and even went into the darkroom with him. In his auto­biography, Mumler described Black’s astounding disbelief when a ghostlike image emerged on the negative. “Mr. B., watching with wonderstricken eyes…exclaimed, ‘My God! Is it possible?’”

The technical question of how Mumler’s pictures were made was the subject of great speculation. In an 1863 essay for Atlantic Monthly , Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself an avid photographer, not only gave step-by-step instructions on how to obtain a double exposure (“An appropriate background for these pictures is a view of the asylum for feeble-minded persons…and possibly, if the penitentiary could be introduced, the hint would be salutary”), but also contemplated the popularity of Mumler’s pictures.

“Mrs. Brown, for instance, has lost her infant, and wishes to have its spirit-portrait taken,” Holmes wrote. “It is enough for the poor mother, whose eyes are blinded with tears, that she sees a print of drapery like an infant’s dress, and a rounded something, like a foggy dumpling, which will stand for a face.”

Holmes, a Bostonian and an intimate of Black, almost certainly had Mumler’s dubious shapes in mind when he penned those lines. While many of Mumler’s spirits indeed fail the “foggy dumpling” test, they are in general less theatrical than the sheet-draped stage spooks that haunt most 19th-century spirit pictures. Instead the apparitions in a Mumler photograph have human features, silky gestures and misty, entwining forms—up to the point where they melt away. They are spirits, not ghosts, and in that gentle difference lay the secret of Mumler’s success. Mumler depicted what spiritualists believed—that the afterlife was a paradise, a “summerland” with its own schools, farms and intimate relationships, exalted and deathless. The spirits in a Mumler picture are just people—if now more radiant—right down to their coiffure, their flowers, their clinginess and their clothes.

Business in Boston fell off for Mumler, however, as his apparitions were called hoaxes. There had been censure, too. Even prominent spiritualists had been stunned to discover that some of Mumler’s photographic spirits were in fact people still very much alive. Letters to newspapers in Boston publicized these double-exposures, and Mumler’s reputation suffered. The spirit photographer confessed nothing, but with business going bad, it was time for him to get out of town.

Mumler relocated to New York in 1868 and found work in one of the many photographic studios clustered on Broadway. “It is now some eight years since I commenced to take these remarkable pictures, and thousands…bear testimony to the truthful likeness of their spirit friends they have received through my mediumistic power,” Mumler rhapsodized in a promotional pamphlet. “What joy to the troubled heart! What balm to the aching breast!…To know that our friends who have passed away can return and give us unmistakeable evidence of a life hereafter.”

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