Mumler applied a lot of balm. By early 1869, he was the best-known practitioner of spirit photography in New York. He had taken roughly 500 photographs and bought a studio at 630 Broadway. It was there that he photographed a Wall Street financier named Charles Livermore.

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Livermore, himself a spiritualist, had been sent by the New York Sun as part of a team of investigators preparing a report on the photographer. Looking for the trick, he sat as still as a statue before the camera lens while Mumler counted off the seconds on his watch. With a flourish, Mumler replaced the lens cap and delicately retrieved the glass negative. In his dark closet, he floated the negative in a toxic bath to develop and fix the image.

Livermore observed as his features slivered in black traces through the white collodion that waxed the negative. Then, wondrously, another form etched into the glass, this one behind him, embracing him. He had been skeptical at first, but now, as he watched Mumler’s every move, he believed. Out of the emptiness, his dead wife returned to him. Her spirit seized him. Here, for all the critics and the skeptics, was the picture, here was the proof.

On March 16, 1869, another gentleman entered No. 630 Broadway. He introduced himself as William Bowditch and asked Mumler for a portrait with a dead relative. When he paid for his photograph but failed to see the spirit promised him, Bowditch pulled off his own act of revelation: He was, in fact, Joseph Tooker, New York City marshal, working undercover—the sharp end of an elaborate police sting being run against Mumler, courtesy of the office of the mayor, A. Oakey Hall.

Earlier in the month, a science editor at World newspaper had approached Mayor Hall with complaints against Mumler made by members of the Photographic Section of the American Institute of the City of New York (PSAI), a society of reputable photographers dedicated to advancing the science of photography. Seeking to keep the medium truthful, and realizing the medium’s power, the society had expressed outrage against Mumler and demanded action.

Tooker’s men arrested Mumler on April 12 for “swindling credulous persons by what he called spirit photographs,” and, in a cruel stroke of irony for the world’s first spirit photographer, Mumler was incarcerated in New York’s most infamous prison: the Tombs.

“Spiritualism in Court,” “A Stupendous Fraud,” “The Alleged Spirit Photograph Swindle”—the New York papers swarmed over the news of Mumler’s arrest, their sensational headlines blaring like trumpets. “The intensity of the interest manifested by the public in this case has perhaps never been surpassed in reference to any criminal investigation in this city,” exclaimed the New York Daily Tribune . On April 21, Judge Joseph Dowling opened the Court of Special Sessions, the police court for the Tombs, with a preliminary hearing into Mumler’s case. He would listen to counsel for both sides, weigh up the evidence and, if the facts warranted, put the case to the grand jury.

No members of the public displayed greater interest in the trial than the many spiritualists who filled the courtroom in support of Mumler. Newspapers had a field day describing their odd demeanor and appearances. The New York Times jibed that the women, “worn down” in their study of “ethereal essences,” and the men “with sickly sentimental eyes, and cavernous, lantern-jawed physiognomies,” seemed to “fill the room with a cold and clammy atmosphere.” For the press, as for the prosecution, William Mumler would be only a symbol of the trial’s real accused: the modern spiritualist movement.

As the spectators settled into their places, prosecutor Elbridge T. Gerry rose and opened the trial by calling Marshal Tooker to the stand. Tooker deftly related his experience purchasing spirit photographs from Mumler, and then, apparently satisfied that Tooker’s statement was definitive for the purposes of an indictment, Gerry rested for the prosecution.

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